On a Field Trip to Gonaive

We have a big team in the field right now, travelling from town to town, walking into little shops and pharmacies, trying to understand where our health products are and are not.  I joined them yesterday in Gonaive, three hours up the coast from Port-au-Prince.  The road was sealed and in good condition but the farms and towns along the way were…messy.  Disorganized-looking, brown, crumbling.  There was one long market along the road with a huge number of charcoal sellers on one end…the reason why there are no trees anywhere to be seen on this island.

I only realized we were passing rice fields when I started seeing grains drying in the sun haphazardly along the side of the road.  There was a shocking absence of right angles in the paddies or in the amoeba-shaped smears of drying rice.  The area looked nothing like the rice paddies of southeast Asia.  I’m sure looking at those fields and the roadside coops makes World Bank agro-economists and development workers itchy all over.  The Haitian rice market got hit very hard by the earthquake: specifically by the bags and bags of free American rice that flooded the market and undercut all the local sellers. 

Gonaive is the dusty capital of Artibonite.  The hills behind it look exactly like the Nevada desert.  The town itself is drab cinderblock and dirt roads.  There is absolutely nothing charming about the place.  We split up into teams and walked from shop front to barbershop to pharmacy, looking for our point-of-sale materials, checking on the visibility of our products, asking barbers if they would be willing to sell our products.  One tiny little shop (covered in dust) was about 6ft x 6ft and in addition to condensed milk, tomato sauce, batteries, and vegetable shortening was a lone bottle of Manischewitz.  You know – only the staples.

The hotel we’re in is good but…basic.  The room I’m in is big, oddly proportioned, with one bare bulb and exposed wiring. The furniture all looks like it was made in a rush by a guy in his garage down the street.  I deliberately don’t look too closely into the dark corners.  The toilet paper resembles the paper marché I made in third grade.  The soap is…Origins!  Origins brand soap!!  Whaaaa?

What else?

•  The 12inch TV in the room has three channels…I turned it on to see Flight of the Conchords singing the Boom!  Boom! song.  Heh. (if you don't know what I'm talking about - YouTube it)
• The restaurant we went to last night has one of those fridges with drinks by the door, but instead of drinks, it was filled with red apples.  Red apples!
• I had my first Guinness in Haiti last night.  I can only find it in, uhm, not-nice places because it’s not considered a beer, remember?  It’s an energy drink.  I can report that while the bottle is a legitimate Guinness, the contents elicited none of the warm, fuzzy feelings (or creamy head) I associate with a pint of Guinness.
• We stopped selling our birth control for a while because people were reselling it in the DR where it is used as fertilizer for marijuana and applied to ladies’ hair to encourage growth.  

Seriously.  I can’t make this stuff up.