Oh, How I am Blessed

Sunday, January 08, 2006

People are often surprised when they hear me talk about Haiti in a positive light. Yes, there are many things to like around here, which is one reason why Haiti was a popular tourist destination for a large part of the last century. Still, there are some things that just suck. Like transportation.

Getting to Haiti’s Central Plateau, where UNIF has several students doing internships, really shouldn’t be that hard. It’s about 30 minutes by plane and not even that mountainous by Haitian standards. Yet to get to the station that takes you there requires an hour and a half tap-tap trip to Croix-des-Bouquets. From there it’s anywhere from a 5-hour to an all-day trip; I caught the all-day truck. Me, Dan, Vital and Amenold arrived at the station at 7:30 in the morning, but then had to wait until after MIDDAY for the truck to fill up. After breaking down twice (for several hours on one occasion) along the way, we finally pulled into the Hinche bus station at 9:30. It was then that I learned that Vital didn’t really know where we were going, he just expected to find the house of his friend that he knew 4 years ago in Cuba who lives somewhere in town. To my amazement (and great relief) we managed to find the house by asking directions along the way, and would you know it Vital’s friend was around. Oh, how I am blessed.

We were able to visit four students the next day. They are working with two religious communities in Hinche that have extensive programs in reforestation and agricultural production. We biked through the streets of one of Haiti’s driest areas the entire day, which served as an introduction to the dustiest weekend of my life.

Thursday was world AIDS day; it was commemorated in Hinche with a large concert put on by several local and international NGOs. The bulk of the performance consisted of rap groups performing with an accompaniment of scantily-clad girls dancing in a fashion that could conservatively be called provocative. As Dan mentioned, it was probably a questionable method to lowering HIV transmission, but everyone had a great time.

The next day Vital and Amenold went on two other visits, while Dan and I headed out for Pignon to visit Haiti Outreach (which has its US headquarters in Minneapolis). We had to sit in the open bed of the tap-tap truck, so we ended up more zombie than human at the end of the hour-long trip down a small dirt road. We were fortunate enough to run into Neil Van Dine, the Haiti Director of Haiti Outreach, who invited us to stay with him for the night (thank goodness—we didn’t have a backup plan!) Neil is originally from upstate New York, but has lived in Haiti for the past 16 years. His job is to help organized communities carry out water projects—he’s known as Neil Dlo, dlo meaning water. It is life-saving work, and he does it with uncommon dedication and humility. You can learn more at www.haitioutreach.org.

Neil is a man of many talents; he studied math and physics in college, but has become part engineer, part executive, and part community organizer. Now he can add trusted travel agent to the list. Dan had gotten pretty sick over our dusty weekend, and he didn’t know if he could handle the all-day bus on the way back. Neil asked, “why don’t you fly?” FLY?!?! We can do that??? A couple of hours later we were on a flight to Port-au-Prince via La Gonave (a large island in the Bay of Port-au-Prince.) The whole trip took an hour and a half, the same time as the tap-tap from Port-au-Prince to the bus station. Thank you Mission Aviation Fellowship!