Back in Terrier Rouge

It is hard to sum up the feeling of Haiti right now. When we returned back to Terrier Rouge last Sunday there was a definite sadness in the air. The whole town felt a little different. Every family in the whole country has a member living in Port Au Prince, or at least friends or distant relatives. Everyone has a story to tell about how the earthquake has affected them personally. Everyday T.R seems to grow a little bit more as family households fill with people leaving Port Au Prince. Obed, a man Meredith works with now has 16 people living in his house and more want to come. It is difficult to imagine how one city really does affect the whole country. There is a woman here who was in a building in Port Au Prince during the earth quake and was the only survivor in her family, she was pulled out of the rubble and saw that her sister, mother and son did not make it. She was so distraught she was just screaming and crying and saying how she was afraid to go to sleep. Another young girl rode all the way from PAP in a bus with a broken pelvis up to T.R. One of our friends lost both of her sisters and another friend lost her cousin who was in medical school there … and those are just a few of the stories.

Meredith has been very busy with the clinic, due to such an increased population. She has also been doing home visits and follow-ups with Berry Rice, the RN from the states who founded this clinic. Berry’s NGO received some relief money so we are able to treat those coming from PAP for free and offer them free medication – since the only thing they came with was the clothing on there back. One woman was in the hospital during the earthquake and was able to get out before the whole building collapsed, she returned to her home in City Soleil to find it completely destroyed, she has a new baby not even a month old and a 10 year old daughter, they came to TR to live with her sister. She came to the clinic with a 104 temperature after arriving the previous night by bus, her older daughter had cuts on her face from the falling rubble.

On a lighter note, we bought rabbits this week! John, our fearless leader, returned to Haiti with us after we said goodbye to the UVM class at the Santiago airport. He’s a little obsessed with rabbits (so is Peter now too). So we now have two does with four kits to start a little rabbit project here. Peter has been spending the rest of his time this week getting his garden back in shape and building a compost pile at the IDDH farm.

We know some of you at home may be a little concerned about our safety here, probably due to the cable news reports of people looting Port Au Prince and starving refugees pouring into the rest of the country to search for food. People we’ve heard from in the Capital say that it is one of the most horrible things they’ve ever seen; however, they also say that reports of looting are very over exaggerated and they are struck by how calm everyone is and how much people are working together. The resiliency of the Haitian people is unbelievable.

That is all for now, thank you everyone for all your thoughts.

Earthquake in Port Au Prince

As most of you have probably heard, a 7 point earthquake hit Port Au Prince yesterday afternoon. We are thankfully in the Dominican Republic right now, and the quake we felt here, while significant, did little damage. Our home, Terrier Rouge, is far from Port Au Prince, but as all phone lines in Haiti are down, we do not yet know how Terrier Rouge or our friends in Port Au Prince have been affected. The magnitude of this tragedy has yet to settle on us. There are likely more than 100,000 people dead, and the services, infrastructure, and homes of a city already living on the edge of survival have been flattened. Our hearts go out to the people of Port Au Prince, and all of their family and friends.

The Vermont Haiti Project has set up a special disaster relief fund, which we will link to here: www.vermonthaitiproject.org

Please give all you can.

We will be returning to Terrier Rouge on Sunday and will update you with our future plans as soon as we can. We appreciate all of your concerns. Thank you Hillary for spreading the word that we're safe.

Lots of love,

Peter and Meredith

Rain!

Where to begin… it seems like a lot has happened since our last post. Christmas week we had our first real rain, which lasted three full days, was very needed! We headed into Cap Haitian on the 23^rd despite the threatening sky – Peter wanted to pick up parts for a drip irrigation system he is wants to experiment with at two of the school gardens and in his vegetable plot. We traveled to Cap Haitian in the back of a truck, it is about a 40 minute trip. We counted 14 people in the truck at one point. The trip was just fine except when the rain started to pour and we all got soaked, the fellow lady riders were very helpful though when Meredith attempted to wrap her hair back in a bandana, they all jumped to show her how to do it. Then we had to walk to the bank in Cap Haitian and our shoes were soaked through within minuets. We did have the pleasure of getting a little holiday shopping done, we purchased a few candy bars and cookies at a little grocery store. We headed out of town to Balan to meet the Agronomist who has the irrigation parts. It was very beautiful there and the only downside was all the mud! When it rains here the mud afterwards is unbelievable. We went to the market after the rain last Thursday and people just end up taking off there shoes and wading around in the mud because there is no way to avoid getting dirty, it is a total mess. Everyone gets a real kick at seeing us walking around in the mud and everyone asks us if we are afraid of it.

We enjoyed our Christmas at Marieva’s (the Canadian nun we recently met) home up in Grand Basen. We went up with another nun who lives here in Terrier Rouge. There was a handful of Haitians there as well so it was quite the fun crowd: Americans, Canadians and Haitians. The afternoon consisted of good food (even stuffing!), good drink, a few fun games and even Christmas music, we felt right at home, except it was in the 80s and sunny. Christmas here is definitely more of a party; people eat and drink a lot, but there is not really any gift giving involved. Everyone cleans there houses and sees family and cooks a lot of meat. Our landlord had his family home for the holidays and they skinned and cooked a whole goat Christmas day, we had the pleasure of eating goat head stew!

On our way back down from Grand Basen we stopped at a soccer match and watched for a bit. There were two groups of men playing drums, maracas, and a wind instrument made from bamboo. It’s the music that we sometimes here in the middle of the night or early morning. This was one of those experiences that cannot be described in words, but the music reverberates in the center of your bones and chest. It’s the type of music played at voodoo ceremonies, and it came from West Africa, and has existed for God knows how many years before that. It was not just hard to keep ourselves from dancing, but I could’ve danced like I was in a trance or possessed by a spirit. But then I remembered that it is not my music to dance to like that, and try to feel grateful enough to have heard it.

After Christmas we spent the next few days in Terrier Rouge getting things organized before we went to the Dominican Republic for our real Christmas gift, a two week visit from Kathryn (Meredith’s sister). We headed to the DR this past Tuesday and picked up Kathryn from the airport Wednesday. Then we all headed up the coast to Rio San Juan for a little beach time before Haiti. The goal of these three nights at the beach was to enjoy the toilet, running water and to fatten Peter up. I think the trip was very successful and Peter ate bacon every morning. Rio San Juan is a pretty quiet little town that does not see many tourists but it was a perfect place to be right on the ocean and read a book, which is exactly what we were looking for. We spent New Years Day at a beautiful beach and Meredith finally got her pina colada, made with and served in a fresh pineapple. Saturday we started to make our way back to Haiti, but because it’s a long trip we spent the night in a town called Monte Cristi and crossed the border Sunday morning.

Kathryn was welcomed to Haiti with a nice little stomach bug and got well acquainted with our latrine – all in the name of understanding our life here better of course. The rain fell Monday making it a good day to rest and recover. Today we toured some of the school gardening projects and showed Kathryn around Terrier Rouge. We will be on the move again Thursday back over to the Dominican Republic, we are meeting up with John Hayden’s class trip (Peter did this trip two years ago, and Kathryn went on it last year). Every year he brings a group of UVM students to the DR for a service-learning class centered around community gardening. We are excited to get back to Batey Libertad and Batey Saman to see some friends from our time there in October. We will travel with them until the 17^th and then return to Haiti. Kathryn will travel too until the 14^th. It has been wonderful having Kathryn here to see our Haitian home, but she was a little scared when she saw the goats tied up and hanging off the back of a truck.

If we get time we will try to post at some point in the DR but more than likely we will update you all when we get back. Happy January everyone, lots of love to you all!

Meredith and Peter and Kathryn too!!

Merry Christmas, photos from Terrier Rouge

Students from a 5th grade class in their school garden


Collecting manure out at the IDDH farm


Tilou and Loudwidge, hanging out at our house, Tilou was chilly so Peter gave him a sheet and his sister thought it was hilarious!

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 !

Jacques, the president of cooperative Raboure, plowing with his oxen



Meredith watering the garden

Hello Everyone,

Things continue to go well here in T.R. We seem to really be getting in the swing of things. Meredith had a little bout of illness and a visit to the clinic, but we are happy to report we currently BOTH are feeling healthy and are very thankful for that. Peter continues to work on his garden and in the schools with the school garden program. He is currently working to set up a partnership between two schools here in T.R and a school in Cambridge VT. Meredith has been busy with clinic related activities as the founder of the clinic from the US was here this past week. She also had the opportunity to work with a midwife. The midwife did some healing work on a pregnant woman (this consisted of rubbing some oil on her belly, and tying pieces of cloth around it). Meredith was not really sure what was going on most of the time, but it was an interesting experience to be a part of. They also worked together supporting another woman through early labor, but she ended up having to go to the hospital to deliver because of a complicated previous delivery. It was nice though to get a little more hands on with the midwifery community. We thought it might be nice just to talk about life here a little since we do not have too many exciting updates to provide, we both just seem to be plugging along with our respective projects and enjoying our work here. We are continuously learning here, in everything we do.

We have discovered here that the month of December means that everyone morning around 5:30am, before the sunrises, youth from the Baptist church hit the streets banging drums and playing various instruments, yelling and singing in preparation for Christmas. A little different than the Christmas carols we are used to at home. The first time I heard this parade I thought it was some sort of riot, and Peter thought it was a voodoo ceremony. But now I am used to the sound waking me up, right along with the church bells from our neighbors the Catholic Church. They ring every morning at 5:30, 5:45 and 6am – but surprisingly we haven’t made it to mass yet.

This morning (Sunday December 6^th) we headed to Raboure to water Peter’s garden. Peter has a bike here that a friend loaned him to fix up. We also put a little seat on the back. So once a week we’ll ride out to the garden together (a long dirt road up towards the mountains) Peter does all the work and Meredith gets to ride along. Everyone gets a real kick at us two ‘blans’ riding along on our bike. The ride out there is beautiful. There is a lot of agricultural land towards the mountains and we pass cows, horses, and donkeys along the road. Pickup trucks drive by every now and then with as many as twenty five people standing in the back, it is so weighed down the truck sags with the weight – just like the bike.

Even though it is December the sun gets real hot here after 8am, and today seemed hotter than usual. After watering we walked/biked back to town to make a delicious breakfast of French toast (thanks for the syrup Mom!) it is quite the luxury. There is an outdoor market here where we do some of our shopping – but we have yet to do a lot of heavy cooking. Normally we buy bread, eggs, peanut butter, and fruit. There are at least two bakeries in town that make a pretty good white bread. Meredith got a tour the other day – it’s pretty much like Klingers expect the bakers don’t have to wear shirt or shoes. They roll up little balls of dough and squeeze them onto a big pan. Each little piece costs 1 Goud, about 2.5 American pennies.

There are also some vendors that hang out on the main road selling snacks (horse meat is the local favorite) to people in the taptaps and trucks that pass. The main road connects Dajabon to Cap Haitien so it is very well traveled. We often just buy oranges or bread right here too. Later on this afternoon we washed out sheets, and then washed our feet in the rinse water with an old toothbrush. Not a bad way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

It is 8pm right now as we write this and 89 degrees in our bedroom. Luckily we have electricity in the evening to power a fan and one light. We are really looking forward to January when everyone says it cools off here. We’ll believe it when Meredith’s upper lip stops sweating constantly. Until then, N’ap boule nan Ayiti! We’re burning in Haiti It means we’re chillen – but nobody really chills here.

Lots of love,

Meredith and Peter

Picture success...finally

Members of IDDH and VT-Haiti project meet at the office in Terrier Rouge


The hike up to the Citadel


Home sweet home, this is the entrace to our house here

Peter and I on top on the Citadel