Actually, to be fair, at this very moment the rain isn't falling. However, earlier this evening and last night I, and the rest of Port-au-Prince, experienced two veritable downpours complete with an impressive and alarming lightning show. According to the National Hurricane Center, this is not a hurricane or even a tropical storm. This is just one day of the rainy season that everyone has been expecting for the past six months. Unfortunately, it seems almost inevitable that at least one big storm will make its way here by the end of the year.
I can't imagine what it's like to be living through these downpours in a tent. And I once spent four months in a tent through all sorts of bad weather. It was a challenging and fun adventure that was absolutely voluntarily and I knew that I could stop any day and go back home to my warm bed and waterproof house. Here, on the other hand, there is no end in sight for the great majority of people living in tents. Each and every day, for the indefinite future, starts and ends under the same piece of plastic.
When I was a Peace Corps Volunteer, I did my best to live like others in my community. I liked living in my little wooden, tin-roofed shack in the mountains. I weirdly enjoyed sharing a latrine with my neighbors. I thought it was funny when it would rain and I have to ford a waist-high river to get home.
Here, as I said, I can't even imagine what it's like. I travel from my waterproof office to my waterproof house in my waterproof car. The whole thing is really hard for me to wrap my head around sometimes. Let's keep hoping for a solution.
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I flew into Port-au-Prince three days ago. I wish I would have had an aisle seat. I had a truly excellent time in Minnesota these past couple of weeks, and my view from a few thousand feet over Haiti's capital made me miss home as much as I ever have. Steph, a.k.a. The Stranger, does a good job of explaining part of what I was feeling here, but I think that snapshot from the airplane had more to do with my missing home than anything. Port-au-Prince, and Haiti in general, can be absolutely overwhelming. What made me miss home was not actually home, it was the feeling that I was going to be absolutely helpless in the place at which I was arriving. I flew over a giant mass of humanity, collapsed buildings, and tent cities, and I all of a sudden felt very small.
But, I did my usual routine of pretending not to be terrified of flying and casually drying off my drenched palms with the little air vent that are conveniently placed over your head and, as luck would have it, my plane did indeed land and deposit me at the airport. If you've never experienced the nightmare of baggage claim at PAP airport, then you might never have experienced the palliative effects of fighting through two hundred people in a space made for about fifty to get to your bags. By the time I was ready to get outrageously overcharged by a taxi driver, I had forgotten all about my existential crisis at 5,000 feet and was ready to get to my home in the city. Problem solved!
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I liked this commentary about how most reporting is done in Haiti these days.
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Here are some pictures to round out the post a little bit:
The first three are a couple pictures from the top of a mountain in the central plateau and the crew of us who arrived at the top to meet with potential clients.
After that are photos I took from a couple of the Participatory Wealth Rankings that I explained in my previous post.
Finally, Wender, my 13-year-old unofficial Kreyòl teacher. He speaks more slowly and is more patient than just about any other Haitian I know. It's an age old secret for new-language learners - talk to kids!
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