Brittany For Midwives For Haiti: Yes, I'm a Tourist

The kittens wreaked havoc and we sent them all
home with loving parents -- one went to Davide,
one to our instructor, Roselise, and another to
Mirline's family in Port-Au-Prince

Last week, my parents visited. For Sunday through Wednesday, we stayed in Hinche. We visited the boys' orphanage, the girls' orphanage, the feeding center, etc. Then they came around to some of my basic errands -- exchanging cash, making photocopies, dropping off supplies at the hospital. With no volunteers, my work was mostly at my computer and around town.

Nadene and Steve, the Co-Directors of MFH, came the same day as my parents, and it's always busy when they're around. Between all of the planned and unplanned meetings, the dinners, the hand-churned ice cream, the freshly baked bread, and the troubleshooting, the house is a busy place. I'm lucky to have bosses who are not only passionate and hardworking, but also know how to enjoy life -- especially in Haiti. The house transforms when they're here. Not only does the staff do a deep clean to prepare, but the mood is much more... open. Nadene and Steve troubleshoot aloud. They love volunteer input, they are entirely transparent with the staff and volunteers, and they really do have Haiti's women's best interests at heart.

On Thursday of that week, after most of the initial Nadene-and-Steve-craziness had dulled down, my parents and I took a private plane to Jacmel, Haiti, which is the art capital of the country. If you haven't been, there is a dirt air strip in the middle of Hinche -- and it's a major landmark in the city. To fly out, you first have to text message the American pilot, Roger, your flight time, locations, and how many people will be with you. When he arrives, you first have to chase off all the goats so you can take off. But it was a super easy flight, and gorgeous. We cruised at an altitude of 1200 feet so we were pretty close to the mountains. Haiti has incredible mountain ranges separating the lower altitude parts of the country from my home region, the Central Plateau.

Jacmel (Jakmel in Creole) is kind of like the New Orleans of Haiti. They have a yearly event called Carnival (Kaneval), where artists make huge animal and devil masks that they wear. Every artist prepares for months, and lots of artisans had old Carnival masks in the back rooms of their shops. Jacmel was also hit pretty hard by the 2010 earthquake (tremblement in French), so the rubble is very much still present. Since Hinche was hardly affected in terms of physical damage, the earthquake damage was easy to spot out from the usual Haiti neglect rubble. (Most of the effect was in the craziness that ensued when everyone fled earthquake-ridden areas to come to the Central Plateau; Hospital Ste. Thérèse, where we work, is the main hospital for the region, so MFH was also very much affected). However, because of its proximity to the water and road quality, it's been accessible for a much longer time than Hinche, which was much more difficult to get to before the road here was paved (which only happened in the past few years). Therefore, Jacmel has a lot more history than Hinche, it seems.

Our hotel was an old factory (along with the rest of the buildings lining our street), where every room was different, and the whole place was full of antique mahogany floors and furniture (Haiti used to have a booming mahogany industry, but they exported it all and the market has since been depleted). To get to our rooms, we had to walk down some brick steps through a canopy of flowered vines. Our rooms were side-by-side and were the only two not in the main building. We were the only visitors. Each room had huge archway doors that locked by means of huge metal poles with hooks at the end that you had to hook into a metal loop on the inside. The outside locked with a padlock. I had my own room with a mahogany king-sized bed. The room was lit by lamps.

Guess who??

We spent most of our time shopping for art. I ended up buying a burlap purse, a hand-painted paper mâché vase, and a hand-painted mobile with hummingbirds. I also got a really gorgeous painting of some Haitian women dancing. We bought 3 other paintings that are unreal. I'm so excited to see where they end up in my house!

We spent an afternoon at the beach, too, but it wasn't too impressive. To get there, we rode in a tap tap, the Haitian form of public transportation. Tap taps are super gawdily-painted trucks/vans that haul way too many Haitians and way too much stuff at once. I can't believe I haven't seen one topple over yet. You pay 25 Gds to get pretty much anywhere within a city (it's 250 Gourdes, or about $6 to get to Port-Au-Prince from Hinche, which is a 2 1/2-3-hour drive). On the way back, though, we got caught in the rain. We were all soaked, there was a woman practically coughing up her lung, a man was hanging off the back, and then the roads flooded about a foot and a half. Haiti...

Terrifying devil mask...

The next day, we went to a waterfall called Bassin Bleu (bleu = blue). We rode in the bed of a pick-up truck through a major river and up a huge mountain to the top, where we got out and hiked for ~20 minutes, each of us with at least one guide holding our arms. Then we repelled down a rope to the waterfall, where we had to swim through pool to pool and rock formation to rock formation to get to the big waterfall. The place is known for its blue water, but it was brown the day we were there because of all the rain the day before. We spent the afternoon at a resort's pool (because our hotel's pool was empty...?) overlooking the ocean.

We flew back to Port-Au-Prince in the morning, where my parents picked up their flight back home and I caught a ride with the Midwives for Haiti pink jeep that drives back and forth every Saturday to transport volunteers. What a week!