kids in the Nativity Village
little trouble makers
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Sunday, November 7, 2010
return to Haiti and the DR
Hi Friends,
We just returned from a whirlwind tour of current and prospective Seeds of Self Reliance projects in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. This was supposed to be a longer trip but was cut short by Tropical Storm/Hurricane Tomas, hence the whirlwind. Accompanying us was our friend and colleague, the SoSR director, John Hayden.
We arrived in Santiago, D.R. last Thursday afternoon and spent the night at our usual, el Hotel Colonial. Friday morning we were off to Batay Libertad, a mostly Haitian community in the agricultural Cibao Valley, where we spent two weeks last October. Batay Libertad was the original SoSR community garden in the D.R. It was great to see our friends and many more familiar faces, especially our young friend Cok, who during our stay in the Batay last year left to live with his Grandmother in Port au Prince, and we had heard no news of him since the earthquake. The garden here, which is 4 years old and made up of 14 family plots, looks more productive every time we visit it. The gardeners here grow staple crops: sweet potatoes, congo bean, corn, and cassava to supplement their families’ diets. Papito, a community leader, oversees an area of plantains which is irrigated from the creek which used to be choked with garbage but is now lush with rice almost ready to be harvested.
In the Batay we met up with two new friends who we would be traveling with for the next couple days ... Mercedes is a Dominican American from Mass. who runs the non-profit Emancipation Project in Santo Domingo, which works with poor schools to help lift Dominican children out of poverty, and Kenyatta is an entrepreneur from New York who has adapted a pre-colombian Dominican rum drink made with the bark and roots of native forest plants to make a vitality tea, “Palo Mama Juana”, which he is now selling in NY. Kenyatta is looking to collaborate with SoSR on a project to give back to the country where he developed the recipe and buys his ingredients, and our imported local guide Mercedes had an idea of a place to start. We headed north and up into the mountains above Joba Ariba, which overlook the Atlantic ocean, where Mercedes’ Tio (uncle) Antonio and countless cousins live. Tio Tony is an artist and restores art for a living, and so he is looking for something to do with two beautiful tracts of edible diverse forest, because he is not interested in farming it and his niece, Mercedes, has persuaded him not to cut it down to graze cattle. We met with a group of local campesinos who are interested in farming his land. We talked with them about forming a cooperative and farming the forest without cutting it down. We are now in the process of brainstorming markets for tropical fruits and vegetables, cacao, and coffee. In the mountains here we were really treated to true Dominican hospitality - our first real immersion in the culture of the Dominican countryside. We felt engulfed in this huge family as we went on caravan trips to the river, a pig roast, and late night dancing at the local pool hall.
We came down from the mountains on Sunday and said goodbye to our new friends as they dropped us off in Montellano. Here Dominicans and Haitians alike struggle in the shadow of a sugar cane factory which has been shut down for years. Much of the work here now is in the nearby tourist towns of Sosua and Cabarete: working in (or building) hotels, restaurants, and gated ex-pat communities, braiding hair and selling trinkets on the beaches, or at worse, prostitution. Saman is a Haitian neighborhood in Montellano of about 100 families. Peraulta is a middle aged Haitian Dominican man who learned community organizing working with Papito in Batay Libertad. He saw the community garden in Libertad a few years ago and approached John about starting a garden in Saman. This smaller seven family garden is really starting to produce now, and the harvest from the plantain trees is spread around to the whole community. We were also happy to meet Joe, a volunteer from Virginia who has been living in the Saman community center for the past 3 months. He has done some excellent work installing rainwater collection systems to provide a cleaner back-up to city water. Joe also built a small chicken coop and has been keeping chickens and ducks and selling the eggs locally to raise money for a fund to helping families with medical bills or other crisis. The birds have become the coolest thing around as Joe has a flock of children to help him collect eggs everyday. After spending a night in Saman we helped Joe with his English class, and met with Caitlin who is the director of Project Esperanza. Project Esperanza works with Haitian street kids in Puerta Plata by providing them housing, school, and other support such as a soccer team. We discussed helping the boys in their residential program with urban gardening.
Monday afternoon came the activity we’d all been secretly waiting for: jumping in the warm Atlantic surf of Cabarete to bodysurf and wash the travel grime off us. We used our little repose in this tourist town to replan our trip around Tropical Storm Tomas, which was strengthening and aimed to directly hit Port au Prince the day we were supposed to arrive there. We decided we would have to leave for Haiti the next day to have time to get back to the DR and fly out ahead of Tomas. The next morning we met with Tricia, the director of the Mariposa DR Foundation, who partners with public and private schools in Caberete to improve education for local kids, but mostly is focusing on supporting girls and young women to finish school and become strong community leaders, and maybe even professional kite borders. Tricia is a powerhouse of ideas and energy and since we first met last October has gone from compost ignorant to the compost queen of Cabarete. We are so excited to work with her schools and young women to help nurture a new generation of environmentally literate leaders. Squashed under our bags and wedged between fellow bus riders we slowly then made our way to Dajabon, the border town, where we would spend the night before crossing into Haiti the next morning.
The border of the DR and Haiti is the Massacre River which flows between the towns of Dajabon and Ouanaminthe. This border has been a place of conflict at least since 1937, when the Dominican dictator Trujillo ordered the killing of 20,000 - 30,000 Haitians and and Dominicans of Haitian descent. Recently their have been riots at the border because it has been closed to trade due to the recent cholera outbreak, causing prices of food such as eggs and meat to rise in Haiti. We crossed the border Wednesday morning and took a bus to Terrier Rouge, where we lived last year. We had a very warm welcome from all of our friends and co-workers there, even though they were shocked to hear we were there for only two days. We visited the clinic where Meredith worked last year and saw it was doing well with two new employees. We also visited Jaden Florence, the youth gardening program that SoSR helped to re-start this year after it lost funding. They had just had the garden plowed and were about to start the program with 15 teenagers who would be growing vegetables to sell to local schools and markets while learning about agriculture.
We were also very happy to see lots of progress at the IDDH experimental farm. IDDH is the group of local agronomists and agriculture technicians who volunteer to run a school garden program in 5 schools. The objective of the farm is to try out new techniques and crops and to raise money for the school garden program. Since we had been they had planted a reforestation demonstration and citrus orchard using the compost Peter had made. They also continued to make compost the same way, by paying local kids to collect cow manure. They also built a small house for a guardian and his family to live in so he could provide security and weed the trees. We next visited The Nativity Village where we started the Rabbit Project. We were really encourage to see the members (Andre, Willa, and Christian) were taking really good care of the rabbits and they had no food shortages during the dry seasons. They had had some trouble breeding the rabbits so far with only one successful litter of 3, but they did not seem discouraged. We had an idea to try to raise laying hens underneath the rabbits to get twice the use from our rabbit structure, we think we may be able to feed chickens from the Black Soldier Fly larvae which grow in the rabbit manure. Developing a low grain input layer system is something we want to focus on when we return in January.
After our whirlwind tour we are feeling more excited than ever to return to Haiti and the DR this winter. The focus will be on strengthening our existing rabbit and gardening programs as well as starting to add in the chicken project. There is also a group of midwives coming to TR in January that Meredith will collaborate and work with, the clinic is in the process of planning and developing a new prenatal initiative to get women to seek consistent care during their pregnancy and Meredith hopes to focus on this during her time. We also plan to get to Port Au Prince to meet up with the Vermont Haiti Project since that portion of this trip was cut short, and our goal is to get out to Douchity (in the mountains on the southern peninsula) where there is a plan to start a vocational training school and some agriculture collaboration opportunities.
We hope to arrive in the DR after the holidays and then on to Haiti after that. We want to thank everyone who has contributed to Seeds of Self Reliance, you all are making these projects possible, thank you!! Stay tuned!
!
We just returned from a whirlwind tour of current and prospective Seeds of Self Reliance projects in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. This was supposed to be a longer trip but was cut short by Tropical Storm/Hurricane Tomas, hence the whirlwind. Accompanying us was our friend and colleague, the SoSR director, John Hayden.
We arrived in Santiago, D.R. last Thursday afternoon and spent the night at our usual, el Hotel Colonial. Friday morning we were off to Batay Libertad, a mostly Haitian community in the agricultural Cibao Valley, where we spent two weeks last October. Batay Libertad was the original SoSR community garden in the D.R. It was great to see our friends and many more familiar faces, especially our young friend Cok, who during our stay in the Batay last year left to live with his Grandmother in Port au Prince, and we had heard no news of him since the earthquake. The garden here, which is 4 years old and made up of 14 family plots, looks more productive every time we visit it. The gardeners here grow staple crops: sweet potatoes, congo bean, corn, and cassava to supplement their families’ diets. Papito, a community leader, oversees an area of plantains which is irrigated from the creek which used to be choked with garbage but is now lush with rice almost ready to be harvested.
In the Batay we met up with two new friends who we would be traveling with for the next couple days ... Mercedes is a Dominican American from Mass. who runs the non-profit Emancipation Project in Santo Domingo, which works with poor schools to help lift Dominican children out of poverty, and Kenyatta is an entrepreneur from New York who has adapted a pre-colombian Dominican rum drink made with the bark and roots of native forest plants to make a vitality tea, “Palo Mama Juana”, which he is now selling in NY. Kenyatta is looking to collaborate with SoSR on a project to give back to the country where he developed the recipe and buys his ingredients, and our imported local guide Mercedes had an idea of a place to start. We headed north and up into the mountains above Joba Ariba, which overlook the Atlantic ocean, where Mercedes’ Tio (uncle) Antonio and countless cousins live. Tio Tony is an artist and restores art for a living, and so he is looking for something to do with two beautiful tracts of edible diverse forest, because he is not interested in farming it and his niece, Mercedes, has persuaded him not to cut it down to graze cattle. We met with a group of local campesinos who are interested in farming his land. We talked with them about forming a cooperative and farming the forest without cutting it down. We are now in the process of brainstorming markets for tropical fruits and vegetables, cacao, and coffee. In the mountains here we were really treated to true Dominican hospitality - our first real immersion in the culture of the Dominican countryside. We felt engulfed in this huge family as we went on caravan trips to the river, a pig roast, and late night dancing at the local pool hall.
We came down from the mountains on Sunday and said goodbye to our new friends as they dropped us off in Montellano. Here Dominicans and Haitians alike struggle in the shadow of a sugar cane factory which has been shut down for years. Much of the work here now is in the nearby tourist towns of Sosua and Cabarete: working in (or building) hotels, restaurants, and gated ex-pat communities, braiding hair and selling trinkets on the beaches, or at worse, prostitution. Saman is a Haitian neighborhood in Montellano of about 100 families. Peraulta is a middle aged Haitian Dominican man who learned community organizing working with Papito in Batay Libertad. He saw the community garden in Libertad a few years ago and approached John about starting a garden in Saman. This smaller seven family garden is really starting to produce now, and the harvest from the plantain trees is spread around to the whole community. We were also happy to meet Joe, a volunteer from Virginia who has been living in the Saman community center for the past 3 months. He has done some excellent work installing rainwater collection systems to provide a cleaner back-up to city water. Joe also built a small chicken coop and has been keeping chickens and ducks and selling the eggs locally to raise money for a fund to helping families with medical bills or other crisis. The birds have become the coolest thing around as Joe has a flock of children to help him collect eggs everyday. After spending a night in Saman we helped Joe with his English class, and met with Caitlin who is the director of Project Esperanza. Project Esperanza works with Haitian street kids in Puerta Plata by providing them housing, school, and other support such as a soccer team. We discussed helping the boys in their residential program with urban gardening.
Monday afternoon came the activity we’d all been secretly waiting for: jumping in the warm Atlantic surf of Cabarete to bodysurf and wash the travel grime off us. We used our little repose in this tourist town to replan our trip around Tropical Storm Tomas, which was strengthening and aimed to directly hit Port au Prince the day we were supposed to arrive there. We decided we would have to leave for Haiti the next day to have time to get back to the DR and fly out ahead of Tomas. The next morning we met with Tricia, the director of the Mariposa DR Foundation, who partners with public and private schools in Caberete to improve education for local kids, but mostly is focusing on supporting girls and young women to finish school and become strong community leaders, and maybe even professional kite borders. Tricia is a powerhouse of ideas and energy and since we first met last October has gone from compost ignorant to the compost queen of Cabarete. We are so excited to work with her schools and young women to help nurture a new generation of environmentally literate leaders. Squashed under our bags and wedged between fellow bus riders we slowly then made our way to Dajabon, the border town, where we would spend the night before crossing into Haiti the next morning.
The border of the DR and Haiti is the Massacre River which flows between the towns of Dajabon and Ouanaminthe. This border has been a place of conflict at least since 1937, when the Dominican dictator Trujillo ordered the killing of 20,000 - 30,000 Haitians and and Dominicans of Haitian descent. Recently their have been riots at the border because it has been closed to trade due to the recent cholera outbreak, causing prices of food such as eggs and meat to rise in Haiti. We crossed the border Wednesday morning and took a bus to Terrier Rouge, where we lived last year. We had a very warm welcome from all of our friends and co-workers there, even though they were shocked to hear we were there for only two days. We visited the clinic where Meredith worked last year and saw it was doing well with two new employees. We also visited Jaden Florence, the youth gardening program that SoSR helped to re-start this year after it lost funding. They had just had the garden plowed and were about to start the program with 15 teenagers who would be growing vegetables to sell to local schools and markets while learning about agriculture.
We were also very happy to see lots of progress at the IDDH experimental farm. IDDH is the group of local agronomists and agriculture technicians who volunteer to run a school garden program in 5 schools. The objective of the farm is to try out new techniques and crops and to raise money for the school garden program. Since we had been they had planted a reforestation demonstration and citrus orchard using the compost Peter had made. They also continued to make compost the same way, by paying local kids to collect cow manure. They also built a small house for a guardian and his family to live in so he could provide security and weed the trees. We next visited The Nativity Village where we started the Rabbit Project. We were really encourage to see the members (Andre, Willa, and Christian) were taking really good care of the rabbits and they had no food shortages during the dry seasons. They had had some trouble breeding the rabbits so far with only one successful litter of 3, but they did not seem discouraged. We had an idea to try to raise laying hens underneath the rabbits to get twice the use from our rabbit structure, we think we may be able to feed chickens from the Black Soldier Fly larvae which grow in the rabbit manure. Developing a low grain input layer system is something we want to focus on when we return in January.
After our whirlwind tour we are feeling more excited than ever to return to Haiti and the DR this winter. The focus will be on strengthening our existing rabbit and gardening programs as well as starting to add in the chicken project. There is also a group of midwives coming to TR in January that Meredith will collaborate and work with, the clinic is in the process of planning and developing a new prenatal initiative to get women to seek consistent care during their pregnancy and Meredith hopes to focus on this during her time. We also plan to get to Port Au Prince to meet up with the Vermont Haiti Project since that portion of this trip was cut short, and our goal is to get out to Douchity (in the mountains on the southern peninsula) where there is a plan to start a vocational training school and some agriculture collaboration opportunities.
We hope to arrive in the DR after the holidays and then on to Haiti after that. We want to thank everyone who has contributed to Seeds of Self Reliance, you all are making these projects possible, thank you!! Stay tuned!
!
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Back from port Au Prince
Hi Everyone,
We are back from Port Au Prince! We had a great trip along side Kimball and Donna and the VT Haiti Project gang. It was wonderful to connect and see our friends in the city but also a very challenging time as the situation there is still a mess. One of the biggest problems right now is that so many people are still living in tent camps and underneath tarps. These tent camps are all over and people are living like refugees in their own city. Some camps get water dropped off and some get food too, but there are still many that get little to no aid. Some do not have toilet facilities at all which creates a huge long term health concern. We got to team up with one of the Vermont Haiti Relief teams and work in a community hospital. As we entered the hospital there were people crowding around the doors to get in, but the hospital limited only 100 visits inside and 100 visits at the outside tent clinic. This hospital still had Haitian staff but was also being supported by a lot of groups coming from over seas. The biggest issue we see now in Port Au Prince is planning and action for the future. We got to start a small roof top garden and some urban composting as well. We are hoping to continue some urban agriculture efforts there and make it back to Port Au Prince later this year.
It was nice to get back to Terrier Rouge and see our friends here. These last few weeks we are trying to get of our projects organized before we head out. Meredith continues to work with her midwife friend, Madame William Pierre, they have been busy with laboring patients and post-partum check ups. We have many exciting updates about the Rabbit Project. Before going to Port Au Prince we carried our rabbits down to Jaden Florence, the youth collective garden which we are working with in Terrier Rouge which will be raising rabbit to complement their vegetable production. The Nativity Village finished their rabbit house last Wednesday and Makouti came with 5 rabbits to give the initial training. In addition to the five families who are starting the project, many other interested people attended, including our friend Onel, a monitor at Jaden Florence, and one of his most interested students, Stephanie aka Agronom LaLa. The training covered rabbit biology, management, and slaughter. We are very excited to have these projects up and running. We want to thank everyone who has donated so far, we truly appreciate your support and involvement, this work would not be possible without you!!!
We only have a few weeks left in Terrier Rouge and the computer we were using is now in Port Au Prince so we have limited internet access. We are not sure but perhaps our next post may be coming from the United States... This is an exciting yet sad thought, we have had such an incredible experience here it is challenging to put into words. We will be sad to leave but we know we will be back, we are already planning a return trip, so Haiti will always be apart of us. But with that said family and whole wheat bread with raw vegetables awaits us!
We are back from Port Au Prince! We had a great trip along side Kimball and Donna and the VT Haiti Project gang. It was wonderful to connect and see our friends in the city but also a very challenging time as the situation there is still a mess. One of the biggest problems right now is that so many people are still living in tent camps and underneath tarps. These tent camps are all over and people are living like refugees in their own city. Some camps get water dropped off and some get food too, but there are still many that get little to no aid. Some do not have toilet facilities at all which creates a huge long term health concern. We got to team up with one of the Vermont Haiti Relief teams and work in a community hospital. As we entered the hospital there were people crowding around the doors to get in, but the hospital limited only 100 visits inside and 100 visits at the outside tent clinic. This hospital still had Haitian staff but was also being supported by a lot of groups coming from over seas. The biggest issue we see now in Port Au Prince is planning and action for the future. We got to start a small roof top garden and some urban composting as well. We are hoping to continue some urban agriculture efforts there and make it back to Port Au Prince later this year.
It was nice to get back to Terrier Rouge and see our friends here. These last few weeks we are trying to get of our projects organized before we head out. Meredith continues to work with her midwife friend, Madame William Pierre, they have been busy with laboring patients and post-partum check ups. We have many exciting updates about the Rabbit Project. Before going to Port Au Prince we carried our rabbits down to Jaden Florence, the youth collective garden which we are working with in Terrier Rouge which will be raising rabbit to complement their vegetable production. The Nativity Village finished their rabbit house last Wednesday and Makouti came with 5 rabbits to give the initial training. In addition to the five families who are starting the project, many other interested people attended, including our friend Onel, a monitor at Jaden Florence, and one of his most interested students, Stephanie aka Agronom LaLa. The training covered rabbit biology, management, and slaughter. We are very excited to have these projects up and running. We want to thank everyone who has donated so far, we truly appreciate your support and involvement, this work would not be possible without you!!!
We only have a few weeks left in Terrier Rouge and the computer we were using is now in Port Au Prince so we have limited internet access. We are not sure but perhaps our next post may be coming from the United States... This is an exciting yet sad thought, we have had such an incredible experience here it is challenging to put into words. We will be sad to leave but we know we will be back, we are already planning a return trip, so Haiti will always be apart of us. But with that said family and whole wheat bread with raw vegetables awaits us!
Friday, March 26, 2010
New Photos!
We hope you enjoy a few photos (and silly videos at the end!)
Meredith and Nounoush at the Baptist Church clinic on Saturday morning. Shelly (right) received two stitches in the head - and didn't make a peep!
Norm's Place! Pete checking out the scene from the water taxi
Au Cap on the way home
Peter in the garden at Raboure
The not so famous latrine... Hill taking her first bucket shower!
Pete and Mere making egg sandwiches Yum!!! (PS- get the Klinger's bread ready!)
Meredith making a home visit
Royal Caribbean... docking for the afternoon Peter and Meredith at Norm's Place!
Au Cap on the way home
Peter in the garden at Raboure
Patricia! Mere and Hill outside Esperance et Vie
Making the trek out to the Nativity Village - you can see Berry's car in the background
Meredith and Hillary talking with the community about their health, nutrition, water, etc.
More from the Nativity Village
Pete's solar dryer The famous roof!
More from the Nativity Village
Pete's solar dryer The famous roof!
The not so famous latrine... Hill taking her first bucket shower!
Pete and Mere making egg sandwiches Yum!!! (PS- get the Klinger's bread ready!)
Meredith making a home visit
Peter and the rabbits!
**It's not too late to make a donation to the Rabbit Project!! Tax deductible donation can be mailed to Seeds of Self Reliance, 3727 RT 15Jeffersonville, VT, 05464, and write “rabbit” on your check. Thank you so much.
A few silly videos:
A few silly videos:
Saturday, March 20, 2010
Hillary visits Haiti: Brings Dunkin' Donuts!
Hello Everyone,
For the past 10 days we have had our friend Hillary here visiting us in Terrier Rouge and getting a little glimpse of what our life is like here. She is helping us write this post and here are some stories from the past week…
Last Saturday was her first full day in Haiti and we started the day off with doing some laundry, peeling mangoes and sipping coffee of the roof- a true Haitian morning. Peter has been working on a solar dryer in hopes to perfect the drying of mangoes here, we peeled a bunch and let them dry throughout the day. Then we were off to the clinic with Nounouche, a Haitian nurse that Meredith has started to work with on Saturdays who runs a community clinic at the Baptist Church. We saw an array of patients from a motorcycle accident, malnourished toddler with diarrhea and a young girl who needed stitches in her head from a rock injury (no local anesthesia and she did not make a peep!). And we got to do a prenatal check up on a 24 weeks pregnant woman. After clinic we were off to see one of the garden projects. Garden Florence is where Peter and Seeds of Self Reliance is working to re-start garden for youth to work and learn- but it is not directly related to one of the schools.
Meredith and Peter’s Haitian mom, Lizmani turned 20 last week. (By “Haitian mom” we mean that she cooks lunch every day for Mere and Pete). To celebrate, she threw a birthday party on Saturday night. By golly, we had no idea what we were in for! Because Lizmani was preparing for her party all day, we skipped lunch and were just planning on eating at the party. The party was scheduled to start at 7pm, so we arrived around 7:30 – only to find that we were the first to arrive and nothing was ready. Probably an hour later, the generator got going, the lights came on, and the music started. The whole time we were wondering when the eating would begin. To our dismay (and growling tummies), we learned that dancing comes first and eating comes much later. It is important to note that from 8:00-11:00pm, massive platters of food were out and ready, but completely untouched. Finally, we had to awkwardly ask for a plate of food at 11:15pm and left at 11:30pm. Overall, the night was an interesting lesson – and we got to drink, dance, and eat.
We were able to sneak away to the beach for a night (our first time going to the beach in Haiti). Sunday morning, we woke up bright and early to start the trek – starting by jumping of the back of a tap-tap. We made it as far as Trou du Nord, where we boarded a school bus and waited an hour before it filled up. Then we arrived in Cap Haitian, took a taxi to the other side of town, and then boarded another tap-tap that was heading to Labadee. This was a beautiful scenic drive along a twisting road overlooking the ocean. Our last bit of transportation was a boat taxi (so cool!) which dropped us off on the beach steps in front of Norm’s Place. The bed and breakfast is an old French fort owned by an American-Haitian family. The stone house and rooms are tucked into a quiet cove along the north shore of Haiti. We arrived around noon – just in time for a long swim in the ocean (we looked like sea otters) and steaming mugs of coffee with magical cream. We spent the rest of the day lounging in hammocks and reading. It was a well-deserved and needed reprieve for us all. Monday we awoke to the blasting of a horn; opening our front window we were saddened by the sight of the “Navigator of the Seas,” a Royal-Caribbean cruise liner pulling up to Labadee beach around the corner from Norm’s Place. The cruise ship comes in three days a week, but never stays overnight. They have their own port with a razor-wire fenced in beach and play area (zip line, sky walk, inflatable toys in the water). It was nice to be staying at Norm’s quiet little family-run place, but it was a huge culture shock to see the Royal Caribbean bubble down the road from such poverty.
After our night at Norm’s it was back to business as usual in Terrier Rouge. Some of our other highlights from the week included a trip out to Raboure to see the garden, we picked tomatoes which we had later that night with lettuce we grew on the roof…yum! Hill and Meredith did some walking around the town to show the market and to see some of the different areas of Terrier Rouge. They also got some home visits in, including Clesia who is healing well and looking great, a young boy with cerebral palsy with vomiting and diarrhea, and a blood pressure and counseling visits to a woman with chronic hypertension.
We have started the process of doing an informal health assessment at the Nativity village to get a sense of the overall health and needs of the community before the rabbits get introduced there. Meredith and Hill set up some chairs and met with individuals, asking some overall questions as well as taking blood pressure, heights and weights. At first the group was very organized, patiently waiting in chairs, but as afternoon turned into early evening, the meetings were surrounded by a tight communal circle. It seems that in Haiti, a person’s health is everyone’s business. During the meetings, Peter spent time surveying the status of the rabbit house which is coming along nicely!
Before departing, Willa, a community leader requested that Meredith visit a sick elderly man who could not walk. Upon entering the dimly lit house, Meredith could tell that he was showing signs of heart failure and faced with a dilemma, how do you help someone with a complicated health disease that has no money and lives so far from care? In the end the family really wanted him to come to the clinic to see if there was anything that could be done. They were able to find a motorcycle and get him to the clinic the next morning and he was started on a diuretic to help with the excess fluid. We will just have to wait and see how things go with him… Our time at the Nativity village was very difficult- in that people there live in such poverty and it can be draining hearing over and over again how little people have and how their lives are filled with constant struggle with such limited access to resources, but on a positive note we are so excited about the development of the rabbit project and what it will bring to the community. We are hoping to continue this relationship and find other ways to support this community.
Meredith’s work at Esperance et Vie continues to be a learning experience – and full of chaos! Hill was able to see the inner workings of the clinic, ranging from triage, determining which patients are exonerated, how much to charge for drugs, meeting with the new pharmacist, and running labs for malaria, typhoid, CBC, etc. Hillary got to really experience things first hand and was very fortunate to shadow Meredith for two days.
Days in Terrier Rouge are simple. Hill has had a small glimpse into daily life here – and there’s a lot to report back. Meredith and Peter live in a concrete house (very open), with special accommodations including a latrine, bucket showers, mosquito nets, and a pee bucket for night time urges. The best part of the house is the roof. Hill remembers Mere’s phone calls from “the roof”, but it is completely different than expected. About 20x50 ft, the roof is a huge open space with a clothes line, Pete’s solar dryer, and plenty of space for plants. Many evenings have been spent on the roof, eating dinner, singing songs, and looking at the stars. Entertainment has included Pete’s new Skittles(thanks to Hill for brining a pack of skittles down!) tasting/guessing game, and many good discussions about improving the public/community “unhealth” in Terrier Rouge. Pete and Mere are better than ever (if that’s possible) – it is hard not to join in their crazy songs (they could easily write a musical about rain and patés-their morning breakfast food which is fried bread with cabbage and salami) and laughter! Meredith and Peter are very modest about their impact –it is truly inspiring to see the relationships and trust that they have built in Terrier Rouge. “They are becoming Haitian!”
For the past 10 days we have had our friend Hillary here visiting us in Terrier Rouge and getting a little glimpse of what our life is like here. She is helping us write this post and here are some stories from the past week…
Last Saturday was her first full day in Haiti and we started the day off with doing some laundry, peeling mangoes and sipping coffee of the roof- a true Haitian morning. Peter has been working on a solar dryer in hopes to perfect the drying of mangoes here, we peeled a bunch and let them dry throughout the day. Then we were off to the clinic with Nounouche, a Haitian nurse that Meredith has started to work with on Saturdays who runs a community clinic at the Baptist Church. We saw an array of patients from a motorcycle accident, malnourished toddler with diarrhea and a young girl who needed stitches in her head from a rock injury (no local anesthesia and she did not make a peep!). And we got to do a prenatal check up on a 24 weeks pregnant woman. After clinic we were off to see one of the garden projects. Garden Florence is where Peter and Seeds of Self Reliance is working to re-start garden for youth to work and learn- but it is not directly related to one of the schools.
Meredith and Peter’s Haitian mom, Lizmani turned 20 last week. (By “Haitian mom” we mean that she cooks lunch every day for Mere and Pete). To celebrate, she threw a birthday party on Saturday night. By golly, we had no idea what we were in for! Because Lizmani was preparing for her party all day, we skipped lunch and were just planning on eating at the party. The party was scheduled to start at 7pm, so we arrived around 7:30 – only to find that we were the first to arrive and nothing was ready. Probably an hour later, the generator got going, the lights came on, and the music started. The whole time we were wondering when the eating would begin. To our dismay (and growling tummies), we learned that dancing comes first and eating comes much later. It is important to note that from 8:00-11:00pm, massive platters of food were out and ready, but completely untouched. Finally, we had to awkwardly ask for a plate of food at 11:15pm and left at 11:30pm. Overall, the night was an interesting lesson – and we got to drink, dance, and eat.
We were able to sneak away to the beach for a night (our first time going to the beach in Haiti). Sunday morning, we woke up bright and early to start the trek – starting by jumping of the back of a tap-tap. We made it as far as Trou du Nord, where we boarded a school bus and waited an hour before it filled up. Then we arrived in Cap Haitian, took a taxi to the other side of town, and then boarded another tap-tap that was heading to Labadee. This was a beautiful scenic drive along a twisting road overlooking the ocean. Our last bit of transportation was a boat taxi (so cool!) which dropped us off on the beach steps in front of Norm’s Place. The bed and breakfast is an old French fort owned by an American-Haitian family. The stone house and rooms are tucked into a quiet cove along the north shore of Haiti. We arrived around noon – just in time for a long swim in the ocean (we looked like sea otters) and steaming mugs of coffee with magical cream. We spent the rest of the day lounging in hammocks and reading. It was a well-deserved and needed reprieve for us all. Monday we awoke to the blasting of a horn; opening our front window we were saddened by the sight of the “Navigator of the Seas,” a Royal-Caribbean cruise liner pulling up to Labadee beach around the corner from Norm’s Place. The cruise ship comes in three days a week, but never stays overnight. They have their own port with a razor-wire fenced in beach and play area (zip line, sky walk, inflatable toys in the water). It was nice to be staying at Norm’s quiet little family-run place, but it was a huge culture shock to see the Royal Caribbean bubble down the road from such poverty.
After our night at Norm’s it was back to business as usual in Terrier Rouge. Some of our other highlights from the week included a trip out to Raboure to see the garden, we picked tomatoes which we had later that night with lettuce we grew on the roof…yum! Hill and Meredith did some walking around the town to show the market and to see some of the different areas of Terrier Rouge. They also got some home visits in, including Clesia who is healing well and looking great, a young boy with cerebral palsy with vomiting and diarrhea, and a blood pressure and counseling visits to a woman with chronic hypertension.
We have started the process of doing an informal health assessment at the Nativity village to get a sense of the overall health and needs of the community before the rabbits get introduced there. Meredith and Hill set up some chairs and met with individuals, asking some overall questions as well as taking blood pressure, heights and weights. At first the group was very organized, patiently waiting in chairs, but as afternoon turned into early evening, the meetings were surrounded by a tight communal circle. It seems that in Haiti, a person’s health is everyone’s business. During the meetings, Peter spent time surveying the status of the rabbit house which is coming along nicely!
Before departing, Willa, a community leader requested that Meredith visit a sick elderly man who could not walk. Upon entering the dimly lit house, Meredith could tell that he was showing signs of heart failure and faced with a dilemma, how do you help someone with a complicated health disease that has no money and lives so far from care? In the end the family really wanted him to come to the clinic to see if there was anything that could be done. They were able to find a motorcycle and get him to the clinic the next morning and he was started on a diuretic to help with the excess fluid. We will just have to wait and see how things go with him… Our time at the Nativity village was very difficult- in that people there live in such poverty and it can be draining hearing over and over again how little people have and how their lives are filled with constant struggle with such limited access to resources, but on a positive note we are so excited about the development of the rabbit project and what it will bring to the community. We are hoping to continue this relationship and find other ways to support this community.
Meredith’s work at Esperance et Vie continues to be a learning experience – and full of chaos! Hill was able to see the inner workings of the clinic, ranging from triage, determining which patients are exonerated, how much to charge for drugs, meeting with the new pharmacist, and running labs for malaria, typhoid, CBC, etc. Hillary got to really experience things first hand and was very fortunate to shadow Meredith for two days.
Days in Terrier Rouge are simple. Hill has had a small glimpse into daily life here – and there’s a lot to report back. Meredith and Peter live in a concrete house (very open), with special accommodations including a latrine, bucket showers, mosquito nets, and a pee bucket for night time urges. The best part of the house is the roof. Hill remembers Mere’s phone calls from “the roof”, but it is completely different than expected. About 20x50 ft, the roof is a huge open space with a clothes line, Pete’s solar dryer, and plenty of space for plants. Many evenings have been spent on the roof, eating dinner, singing songs, and looking at the stars. Entertainment has included Pete’s new Skittles(thanks to Hill for brining a pack of skittles down!) tasting/guessing game, and many good discussions about improving the public/community “unhealth” in Terrier Rouge. Pete and Mere are better than ever (if that’s possible) – it is hard not to join in their crazy songs (they could easily write a musical about rain and patés-their morning breakfast food which is fried bread with cabbage and salami) and laughter! Meredith and Peter are very modest about their impact –it is truly inspiring to see the relationships and trust that they have built in Terrier Rouge. “They are becoming Haitian!”
Monday, March 15, 2010
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