Ma and Pa Lopez just had their first visit to Haiti!

My mum cooking an Indian food feast for friends.  How many chilies?

I have been asked by so many people here what I had planned for them and then what we ended up doing.  It wasn't a doing kind of holiday.  We went through a stack of Bon Appetit magazines, drank coffee, bought plants, went to a couple of art galleries, took a drive up the mountain for lunch, had birthday dinner for my mum, worked on the the jigsaw puzzle and spent a lot of time sitting around and reading.  It was, for me, perfect.  I'm looking forward to their next visit but not to the inevitable scolding I receive when they see that half my plants are dead.

My dad at a gallery.  Not sure he's impressed.

My dad and Maite telling stories.

Before they arrived, I didn't really think much about what my parents' reaction would be to Haiti.  They have lived in and visited some pretty underdeveloped places (the town I was born in is no paradise) and it's not like I live in a tent camp here.  Nevertheless, my parents visited the Dominican Republic a couple of years ago, and though I can see the border from my terrace, the DR is a lot more developed than Haiti.  I meant to tell them that, but I don't remember if I did.

In any case, the recent visits by The Santas; my old friend, Pete, who was working in another town for a couple of weeks and spent a few days with me on his way out; and now my parents, has made me realize how blind I am to much of the Port-au-Prince scenery.  On our way out of the airport, my dad was taken aback by the tent camp that surrounded us.  I don't even see it any more.  Perhaps that sounds callus, but without becoming somewhat inured to the tent camps, the markets atop heaps of rotting rubbish, the drainage canals choked with styrofoam containers, and the collapsed piles of rubble, I would be completely dysfunctional here.  I see it.  But it doesn't affect me anymore.

(cringe) I know how that must sound.

Traffic in the city is not great.  You have to be assertive on the road or you'll never move.  But aside from the inconvenience of how long it takes to get anywhere, there's something almost satisfying about driving here.  You have to be creative, bold, clever, and skillful.  I can't say I'm often challenged like that in many other facets of my life.  So traffic is not great, I know that.  Nevertheless, I was startled to hear my father tell a friend in Brazil just how awful it is here.  Is it really that much worse than my hometown in Brazil?  And is the badness of it that much of a surprise?

I'm curious to hear what my parents have been telling people about their impressions of Port-au-Prince.  I suspect that their comments may echo a lot of what The Santas mentioned: it's dusty and dirty and the poverty is ubiquitous.  There are armed UN troops on the road and rubble on the street sides.  But people are pretty and care about how they look, even if they are living on a pile of rubbish.

My pretty apartment on the 6th floor of a building in the largely functional part of town gives me some buffer from the less picturesque sides of Port-au-Prince.  Even unaffected as I might be, I'm grateful for this buffer every single day.

On Governments and Donors

After another silly and large set-back related to donor bureaucracy, I have finally realized that representatives of government donors will always be overly cautious and slow in granting permission for us to do our work.  This is because they will be taken to task if we spend too much money on the wrong thing or create a splash that offends the wrong person, but the consequences of overly conservative, slow, and unimaginative work will fall on our shoulders.

Beer! Beer! Beer!

I've been wanting to brew beer for a long time.  I love beer, but hot weather countries tend to specialize in unremarkable, highly carbonated lagers that are best enjoyed very cold as a way of replacing electrolytes lost to heavy perspiration.  Or in the ocean.  That's always nice.

Despite having had all the equipment and ingredients for making beer for many months, and despite having finally collected enough empty beer bottles, I hesitated to do it.  It's intimidating.  There are many steps.  Sanitation is emphasized again and again.  Haiti is not known for sanitation.  I had organic chemistry flashbacks and that was not a class I excelled in.

I took advantage of The Santas' visit to enlist free labor for the brewing process.  This was not as glamorous as you might think.  In fact, Stacey, [who despite working on some of the most important research in HIV prevention, still giggles at the word "vagina"] kept making references to diarrhea.   She's not very mature.

There were lots of different steps and timing and temperature needs and I was grateful to have The Santas there to help out.

The beer smelled best during the addition of the malts but the hops were pungent and less appealing.  They could double as smelling salts.  We made wort, cooled it fast-like, added yeast, and put the beer aside to ferment for a couple of weeks.

The Santas left and I lured another group of willing assistants for the bottling phase.  I had already invested a lot of elbow grease to scrub all the old Prestige bottles, take of the labels and glue, and sanitize them (I underestimated how laborious and messy this step is).  

 

The bottling process was a lot of fun!  We didn't finish until about 11 pm, but by the end, we had 38 bottles of beer neatly stacked to bottle condition for 2 weeks.

The nest morning, I sat bolt upright with the realization that I had forgotten to add the sugar solution to the beer, without which the yeast can't carbonate the beer.  Skype call to my dad, frantic combing on internet home brewing sites later, I was uncapping all my bottles and adding sugar to each individual bottle.  Which, with a freshly sanitized spoon and home-made funnel, resulted in a lot of clumpy, suggary messiness.  Had this been an organic chemistry lab exercise, I would have gotten an F.

Two weeks later, I opened the beer: Haitian Vacation Petite Saison.

Aside from variable carbonation from bottle to bottle, the beer is good!  It's floral on the nose, but dry and refreshing.  Very drinkable, not too hoppy, and decidedly better than Prestige.

Thanks, Santas and other helpers!

Early Life Crisis Part II

Remember your mid-20s?  When you sat around wondering:  what am I doing with my life vs what should I be doing with my life?  What’s the next step at work?  Stick it out or find a new job?  Should I go to grad school and if so, for what? 

I rather naively assumed that after overcoming that crisis, I was home free until my mid-life crisis – and I’m not even sure on when that’s scheduled and what it involves.

Not so, it seems.  The visit from The Santas made me realize that many of us are going through something similar once again.  Late night conversations over several glasses of wine didn’t really help answer the nagging question of: what’s next?  The discussions continued after The Santas went back to the US.  It is a relief to know that that many of us are mulling over this question regardless of job satisfaction, marital status, number of children, location, mortgages, or ambition.  

The Santas

"Come visit me in Haiti" is kind of like saying "I want a pony for my birthday".

So imagine my surprise when two of my [++heart++] friends informed me that they were coming.  To visit me.  In Haiti!  Yaaaaaay!  I was so excited, I couldn't sleep the two nights before they arrived.  I haven't been that excited since Christmas Eve circa 1991.

Stacey and Laura arrived with an air of good humor and enthusiasm for loafing and it was so so strange to see them in my house, sitting on my sofa, getting a drink from the fridge as if it were totally normal to be in Haiti.  To visit me. 

Katharine indoctrinating Laura to the good life in Haiti.

Stacey accepts Haitian seafood into her heart.

They hung out by the pool and drove around town with a six-fingered man while I counted down the minutes to my work day.  We went on a HASH and listened to RAM at the Oloffson and brewed beer.  It was AwESomE.

Happy Haitian Anniversary!

Today is my first anniversary in Haiti.  Happy Haiti to me!

Last week I was in Guatemala where our big boss asked me point-blank if I planned on extending my contract past my June 16, 2012 end date.  I'd been trying not to think about that, so I dissembled.

In truth, there are some wonderful things about living and working here, but they have been overshadowed by two things:

1) The few good friends I have here are all (ALL) on their way out.  Yes, I know this happens everywhere to everyone and we all bounce back.  But my life in Haiti moves in very tight circles and it's really hard to meet new friend candidates.  I'm doggedly pursuing any and every friend possibility.  I can't afford not to.

2) My work is plagued by one combative, aggressive, defensive, difficult co-worker.  Walking on eggshells around her, triple editing e-mails to ensure they are sanitized of any words that could [even when read in reverse and in Ancient Greek] give offense, and mimicking the reasonable and calm tones of TV hostage negotiators for the past year is exhausting.  Exhausting.


But then, on the eve of my first year in Haiti, guess what happened?  She resigned!  She resiiiiiiiiiiiigned!!  I wish I could say it had something to do with me, but she has been widely advertising her displeasure with PSI since 2009.  I am so, so relieved.

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

Haiti Year Two starts today!