Buying a Chicken in the Village

Our 2 main running biodigesters are within the city. That means that getting the cow dung requires planning and logistics from a countryside farm into town. Luckily AIDG Haiti has made a few buddies with  small dairy farms and the farms are pretty much in what you would  call suburbia, though that description is a bit of a stretch in an informal urban  sprawl. 

The evening before we have to deliver about 8 buckets, with lids, for the farmer to load them up (with you know what) the following morning for us to pick them up. On one of the occasions that I tagged along we walked into an opening with a cluster of houses, a dairy farm in the back and an enormous US Army tent, apparently donated to a tailoring co-op. If that wasn't bizarre, as I was walking into the compound with Isnido, trying to be as cool and local as I can, I didn't realise that an old lady was trying to talk to me in Creole. My cover was blown, so to speak, and I had to unleash my broken and battered franco-creole.

The savvy granny had her radar on and knew when a potential sale was apparent. She decided that she wanted to sell me one of her chickens. I hesitated then I asked Isnido to open negotiations. She started at 75 Haitian dollars (H$) but Isnido skillfully brought it down to H$ 50. This is the equivalent of about US$6. Now at this point I have to warn you about the currency conversation smokescreen in Haiti, a joy to the street trader, a curse to the gullible foreigner. For starters, the Haitian dollar does not exist.

Before you start thinking about cowry shells and trading with salt, the H$ is a dead currency but a common point of reference, even on restaurant bills. The main currency is the  Haitian Gourde, which is five times the value of the fictitious H$. Therefore the Gourde to US$ is 40:1. It takes a while to grasp 3 currency exchanges at once, whilst coming to terms with the value of things (and this varies a lot depending on whether the item is imported or made locally), and doing mental arithmetic at the same time.

So when Isnido told me the chicken costed H$50 I thought he meant 50 Gourdes which would be 5 times lower than the selling price. In my confusion I assumed that a chicken would be worth the value of a ball of chewing gum. To my embarassment as I whipped out just a 50 Gourde note, everybody looked at me funny. Isnido whispered to me that its in H$, as he returned the note. Doh!

So I removed a note that I thought was a 50 Gourde and continued to rummage for more but Isnido told me to stop. I had just handed him a 250 Gourde note.  The  colour and size of the 50 and 250 Gourde note are similar, and when they are marked (in Haiti, most marked notes are at the point of vapourisation, from overcirculation) even more so. More blushes.

To save face I insisted on examining the chicken, which was a spring chicken by the way. So in addition to handing over the shit buckets, half the village was chasing after the chicken for a whie. After it  was caught, I gave it a good look over. Apart from some feathers missing, it was in good condition.

Now any village scene has a United Nations of domestic animals roaming  around. Well this one had goats, chickens, dogs, cats, ducks, even guinea fowls (otherwise it was one hell of a wierd looking chicken). There was this really poorly looking puppy lying there. Miserable, drowsy, infested with sores and no doubt infections, and circled with flies. I started talking about it but savvy granny was already shoving the poor pup aside and wanted to sell me a healther looking but mangy dog. I'm not sure where my morbid expression was intepreted as another potential business opportunity. Non mesi (no thanks in Creole), madame!

K.

Lost in Translation

The AIDG office is in the centre of the tightly gridded city. All roads parallel to the coastline are lettered and roads going towards the coastline are numbered. The story goes that the French colonialists had them named in words after they were built, but during the American occupation after the 1st World War, the yankee doodle dandy solders couldn't pronounce the damn names and being all military in attitude, decided to codify all the roads in numbers and letters (this is not the last time in my blogs that the US will be blamed for everything!).

View from 2nd floor balcony. The lady is walking down Rue H. The car is going down Rue 25.

The building, taking up 3 floors has the office space on the ground floor, Isnido's family on the 1st floor and visitors and interns on the 2nd floor. But 1st and 2nd floors have balconies, which are great for escaping the inside stuffiness and absorbing the breeze from the sea and hills. Also great for just watching the hustle and bustle below. The photocopy shop next shop every now and then blast music, and Ive recently noticed, giving certain songs to much airtime. All the music here is great by the way, they mainly play Haitian music of all sorts of variety, I think the only genre I wouldn't expect being played here is heavy metal. There is a roof terrace for doing the laundry. It has great views of the centre-ville and the port.

View from rooftop of surrounding hills

On the 2nd day, I was given a tour of the ongoing biodigester installations, one at school and another at a seminary. In a nutshell, for all you regular folks, cow dung powers the generation of biogas for use, in the case of the current projects, for cooking. A mixture of fresh dung and water is poured into an airtight arrangement of modified plastic tanks (and/or or brick basin), creating a nice atmosphere for good bacteria to grow and generate the gas. Pathogenic bacteria are killed in the process and the effluent that is created can be used as fertiliser.

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The seminary biodigester was built as part of a training session for the local winners and runners-up of a business plan competition in Cap Haitien organised by AIDG earlier in the year. The winners are more commercially oriented i.e. more focussed on bringing "widgets to market then taking over the world" and the runners-up are technicians in general, and will need support to get a good business model. The business plan competition was not without its politics and confrontations as you will learn in later blogs. I was lucky to arrive when the dust was just settling.

The seminary Biodigester

On the third day, our voluntary translator, Emmanuel arrived in Cap Haitien. He is a Haitian based in the US, with an excellent knack of flipping between English-French-Creole-Spanish mid-sentence. He did the written and oral translations during some introductory technical training for the business plan competition winners, given by the AIDG programme manager from Guatemala. At a press conference organised by the 1st prize winners, Coopen (Cooperation pour l'exploitation de la nature.....exploitation of a green kind, of course!....multiple meaning in Creole-French!), I learnt that translation can be a headache here because after a Haitian stands up (whether its the press or Joe Public) to ask a question, he will make a long statement turning it into an observation complete with several reasons, inadvertently answering the question. Other times, it will be a speech and the translator has to interrupt.

Steve Lee talks about AIDG at the Coopen Press Conference

The Road to Kap

Some of you may or may not know that I am in Haiti on a renewable energy internship with a small NGO called AIDG (check out www.aidg.org). I got here in Cap Haitien last week and I hope to do the internship for upto 7 months.

Well, the jury is out on what Haiti is like and where the nation is going. But I can tell you there are more signs of a recovering country than a failed state. Infrastructure is pretty poor and so I couldn't just fly into Cap Haitien, though its international airport (the smallest international airport I've ever seen by the way) gets some light aircraft from Florida, the Bahamas and Turks & Caicos Islands.

After short stay in New York (getting there from London), I took a horrifically early flight at 7 a.m. to Santiago, a fertile economic hub to the north west of the Dominican Republic. Thank God the JFK T8 food court was open at 5 am because all American Airlines were going to give me was very very cold water. And while I'm on that topic, what's with the USA and excess air conditioning! The plane was a massive tubular icebox, and the irony was that most of the passengers who were Dominicans (from the Republic that is) were happily sat without a need for blankets. I clutched mine like Charlie Brown, sleep deprived and cranky in a pressurised, freezing, bumpy and dry environment (and the movie selections were crap) of a barely solvent (financially that is, wouldn't be surprised if it was solvent in the rain!) half painted A.A. aircraft.

The arrival in Santiago was smooth (the customs official barely looked at me), though I wouldn't say the same about the  bag carousel that after an eternal wait spewed baggage like dodgy dinner. Santiago has a lot of vehicle dealerships, mainly for SUVs and agri/industrial related vehicles, considering that it is just the 2nd largest city of a country with 10 million people. "Santiago de las Treinta Caballeros" (Santiago of the 30 Gentlemen) is the full name of the  city. Didn't see the gentlemen but on approaching the centre I saw on the top of a hill a phallic "Monument to Heroes of the Restoration", formally known as the "Monument to the Peace of Trujillo" until the assassination of the vainglorious and not so gentlemanly dictator, Raphael Trujillo.

We entered the city limits and the taxi driver put his seatbelt on (hmm). I was dropped off at the Hotel Colonial (in commemoration of the Christopher Columbus landing or the hundreds of years of civilisation, looting and pillage?) where I was to stay for just 1 night, in a room with a view of the other building's wall but at least with air con (the sun wasablazin!) and cable TV. If you went to Spanish school anywhere else in the world, just leave your phrasebook at home. Republican (Dominican, that is) words stick together like blue tack and accelerate like pinballs. You never know whether the shopkeeper is telling you something or is asking you for something. At least the lady at the eatery across the road was friendly and demonstrated the differences between the puzzlingly similar Dominican (Republic, that is...OK, lets call it DM!) Peso, unlike the pharmacist who couldn't understand my request for iodine tablets and rehydration salts as if water-borne disease is as rare as smallpox. Maybe if I said something nice about baseball I would probably communicate better as they as baseball nuts here. A lot of DMs become major leaguers in the US. But in Haiti, baseball is as uninteresting as rugby to most Indians.

I only spent 1 day in DM, and I got the feel of a chilled out and friendly people despite a history of dodgy authoritarian politics, international intervention, confused national identity and a love/hate relationship with Haiti. I was to take a 4 hour coach ride across the northern border to Cap Haitien. You are probably picturing a humid, rickety and noisy Leyland, sat at the back of the bus next to a fat smelly lady, clucking chickens and getting kicked by a billy goat. But oh, no. You just pay some money at the Caribe Bus Tour office and they stick you on an air-conditioned coach with fully reclining comfy seats, and hot food served by a hostess. Border fees all paid for in the fare so you don't even have to come out of the coach.

Another surprise, the whole road to Kap (Cap Haitien) was pretty smooth though the countryside contrasts were stark when we crossed the frontier. The crossing was eternal as a couple of Haitians were importing a lot of goods, and both DM and Haitian officials needed a bit of sweetening to smooth out the passage of the aforementioned goods. It was like a pantomime as I watched the scene from inside the bus of the Haitian gesticulating with his hands and the pot-bellied border official looking passive and emotionless. Meanwhile the hostess is catching up with old pals at the border, with the shoe shine boys playing sign language with the foreign looking passengers, looking for business. Finally the hostess distributed water bottles amongst the officials and the pantomime was over.

My first sight in Haiti was Styrofoam. Styrofoam boxes all over the river bed, where many were washing their clothes and bathing. The same Styrofoam in which my lunch was contained. Styrofoam is cheaper than a calabash, porcelain, clay plate or banana leaf but unfortunately doesn't germinate into a Styrofoam tree! Another Haitian passenger on the bus who has clearly been away for a while was tisking audibly every time we saw open sewers, random dump sites and clusters of shacks. However, as we edged away from Ouanaminthe, the border town, the scene got more country but the rice fields were in smaller plots than in DM, a marker of more subsistence farming than farming at an industrial scale. Houses were wooden, some thatched and a couple of stone buildings. The land seemed quite fertile but there were bits where it seems the land dried out, perhaps from over farming or deforestation.

I saw the first MINUSTAH (the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti. check out: http://minustah.org/) base, and a couple more followed upto the city, with mainly Uruguayan and Chilean troops. We didn't see the sea until arrival at Kap, as Haiti is more vast than I thought. The plains are interrupted by mountain ranges before hitting the sea but the main road was flat all the way. The outskirts were random arrays of shacks of breeze block, timber and metal tightly packed, some stacked on top of each other, developing country style, with the steel rebars exposed at the top. This area of informal settlement, is just outside the colonially designed gridded downtown end but they line part of the coastline including all the plastic waste and raw sewage seeping out of the slums and the defunct USAID storm drains. The city was heaving with activity at 4pm, with the "tap-tap" public transport modified pick-ups whizzing by, traders balancing their whole shop of their heads,scooters, 4wDs etc. The ocean drive, known as the Boulevard, starts of with the smelly port and ends with a couple of nice bars and restaurants (but this isn't no Miami Beach, don't get me wrong!).

I was received by Roudelin and Isnido, the Haitian AIDG staff and Steve, the Director of Operations who is around for a month to help steer the AIDG projects. I'm playing catchup with this blog and I shall do my best to do an entry a day to keep y'all tantalised. So, welcome to the nation that whooped the Napoleonic army in 1804, still widely respected by many Africans for that feat and its initial enlightened period but the butt of "poor country jokes" elsewhere. Bonswa, en Creole Haitien!

K.