Mangoes and Manure

Bonswa tout moun,

We think maybe winter is actually arriving in Haiti after all. It gets really windy here in the afternoon and that seems to bring cooler air in the evening, it is so wonderful! A few nights ago we sat up on the roof and for the first time we were actually chilly! Yes chilly in Haiti, we thought this day would never come. But chilly to us means about 75 degrees in the evening. We normally shower before bed to cool off, but that is now not as enjoyable, it is a bit more of a task working up the courage to dump the bucket of water over your head in the dark. The thing we are missing the most lately is fresh air. There seems to be an excess of trash burning lately. In preparation for the holidays people clean up their yards and homes and this results in a lot of fires. The thick nauseating smell of plastic burning seems to be nonstop since that is the only way to dispose of waste here.

We had a chance to explore two new villages this week, Paulette and Phaeton, out on the coast. One of the Canadian Nuns, Marieva, who has worked here for twenty years brought us. She has set up a great kindergarten / early ed. program in each town, and a health clinic too. As you drive out there it is like driving to the end of the earth. It is so dry the only thing that grows is a small thorny bush. The cows just roam around searching for something to eat, and a huge cloud of dust follows the truck. These are some of the poorest villages in this region. In Paulette pregnant women were coming to the clinic for food rations donated by the World Food Program. Meredith is hoping to start coming to this clinic every week. She is excited to learn from Sister Marieva because she is quite impressive and also happens to be a nurse.

One highlight from the week was eating a beautiful papaya. Mondays and Thursdays are market days in Terrier Rouge so people come from all around to buy and sell goods. Women walk down from the villages in the mountains with basins full of mangoes, charcoal and oranges, of course carrying them in typical Haitian fashion, on their heads. There are a lot of material goods, like shoes, clothes, household items, but there are also vegetables and fruits you can’t get at the market on a typical day. Meredith did some bargaining and purchased 12 grapefruits and 1 huge papaya for 50 gourdes, or about $1.25 USD.

IDDH has an experimental farm a couple miles outside of town. It’s next to a small man-made lake which we use for irrigation. Also situated next to this lake is an interesting new community called the Nativity Village. It’s made up of about thirty or forty small well built light blue concrete houses. The whole village was built out of nothing by a large charitable organization, and funded by a church in the U.S. The people who live there now were given the housing because they previously did not have any. The town looks like something out of a science fiction book, a lunar colony that’s even equipped with a solar street lamp. The charitable organization is trying to provide some kind of employment opportunities but right now there ain’t much.

Peter was visiting the farm Friday and was invited to go for a walk to gather mangoes with some boys from this village. The mango trees only grow in groves on land that is too far away for people to cultivate crops, but when it is too dry to grow anything else, mangoes still give fruit. So they walked 3 or 4 hours. The boys were pretty good at getting all the ripe fruit from each tree – sometimes by throwing sticks or sometimes climbing up a branch and shaking it hard. It was one of Pete’s favorite days in Haiti.

Today, Saturday, is the day the IDDH members work collectively on the research farm. We seeded carrots, set up irrigation, watered the tree nursery, and fixed the fence. Today we also started the process to make compost. There are a lot of cow pies around the farm and Nativity Village because the animals come to drink at the lake. We started paying village kids, today it started with the mango boys, to collect the manure around the area in sacks and pile it up in the compost site. A good start.

We are sending warm thoughts up North as we heard VT now has snow on the ground.

Love,

Peter and Meredith

ps- Happy Holidays to all !