Lifes good-Lobsters better (+ this titles expired)
Trip Start
Unknown
1
10
18
Trip End
Ongoing
Jean-Rabel, Nord-Ouest, Haiti
Saturday, March 5, 2011
February 27th, 2011 (and so is this date...)
~***Brief prelude to today's (/February's) entry:
Kindly, and without judgement, mind the
dates hovering the various, slightly disconnected, yet -all things
considered- somewhat fluent, paragraphs/subsections of this entry.
Please notice the fact that I have finally, at long last,
rediscovered my muse (the peace and inspiration partially derived
from the depth of abruptly absorbed presence of thought that comes
from a Sunday afternoon off after 8 consecutive 80+ hr work weeks,
and partially from the unspoken power of my Rwandan hammock I have
just now been able to set up on the balcony of my new bedroom) that
has allowed me to say, “NO, anxious, over-promised and
under-delivered friends and family, I will not let an entire calendar
month (albeit, by far, the shortest of the year*) pass, while working
in the most impacting setting/situation/circumstances of my life,
without sharing a single convoluted thought through an excessively
wordy, abstract, round-about, yet still, overly concise, blog
entry!!!” During my sporadically dated attempts at continuing with
my entry draft, paragraphs were brought to precipitous endings
through a variety of unforeseen, yet perfectly inevitably timed
mini-emergencies: from having to gather some of my warehouse staff to
help re-set the tents, in which we have 2-week volunteer teams sleep,
atop our office/warehouse before they blew ENTIRELY off the roof...
to calling an off-duty driver to dispatch a pick-up truck at 11pm to
carry a cadaver from the rural health center where the cholera
patient did not make it, because a newly-hired, and promptly-fired,
ambulance driver refused to provide transportation... to simply
falling asleep on the keyboard. That being said, please disregard
this fragmented entry, as I have done my best to bring it all
together. ~***
February 3rd, 2011
Big development here in Haiti for the
Cholera Response Team: Yes the numbers of cases are dropping and
hospitals are running smoothly, but to my more immediate excitement,
we've recently discovered what I would deem my newfound worldwide
meal of choice – Les Cayes International Restaurant's Cashewnut
Lobster Plate: 50 Haitian Dollars (aka. 250 Haitian Gourdes [aka.
6.25 USD])! If there is one culinary cultural mesh I have not yet to
indulge, it is in a Latin cook's Haitian interpretation of
Americanized Chinese seafood. And as compared to my favorite
Congolese-field-site-meal-of-choice (well, beans, rice and sometimes
goat... meal-of-“choice” may have been a poor choice of words
being that there never really was another), I am beginning to
recognize that I've made the transition from landlocked Africa to
coastal Caribbean *February, 7th, 2011* – although the
distinction remains much less transparent than the travel magazines
are likely to promote (and old James Bond movies are likely to
highlight).
February 10th, 2011
After losing 10 lbs. in the first 3
weeks of my contract here in Haiti – most likely due to the
overwhelming number of hours spent sorting out logistical chaos at
poo and vomit filled Cholera Treatment Centers and my subsequent lack
of appetite – I, at long last, sit here, full-stomached, satisfied
and momentary void of responsibility on this beautiful Sunday
afternoon, ready to put my stories, and obscure tangential
commentary, into writing. However, given that I drafted the first
paragraph of this entry on the 3rd of February, and am now
just getting a chance to continue, one can never be certain that my
stories will ever actually effectively make it through the layered
blockades of constant logistical emergencies that have quite
effectively kept me on my toes enough to prevent me from getting
through any two consecutive paragraphs without interruption.
*February, 11th, 2011* Perhaps, rather than rambling on
about not being able to find the time to write about notable
experiences, when I actually get the chance to write, it might be a
decent idea to consider ACTually writing about notable experiences.
Yet, here I continue to drool mundane, self-diagnostic vernacular
onto the keyboard, prescribing the medication of getting to the point
while apparently neglecting to take my pills, further sinking myself,
and my increasingly vexed readers in a pool of unrevealing,
irony-spiked saliva so far away from the point, that we've all quite
frankly found ourselves blatantly off the map.
February 12th, 2011
Because I have recently taken up the
hobby of contemporary cartography, – I've been training our
Community Healthcare Teams during lunches on how to use GPS to plot
Cholera-related data throughout uncharted rural Haiti (a process
probably something similar to any one of them trying to teach me how
to distinguish malaria from dengue fever) – and now that we have
effectively marked our Waypoint and (incoherent) data in the
unmarked, uncharted region of Writer's Procrastinationville, I am
going to do my best to move our direction back towards the rough
vicinity of the point we have found ourselves so far detached from
thus far by first stepping back onto the map.
February, 13th, 2011
If no one minds, I'd like to begin our
journey back from the psychological wilderness with a quick jaunt
from Absolutely Nowhere to one of our Cholera Response Oral
Rehydration Points in Saint Jean de Sud - a small, quaint Creole
island village perched just up from the rocky,
vibrantly-colored-trash-covered southern Haitian coast. I spent the
first half of this beautiful Sunday responding to a few logistical
(and some entirely unrelated to my job description) nightmares at the
ORP, the details of which, for the sake of maintaining the positive
tone of today's entry, I will choose to omit for the time being.
However, I will say that the issues were mentally demanding enough to
provoke me to allow my driver to abandon his guarding post by the
truck to help, without assuring that the doors were locked... with my
Canon DSLR camera, new lens, and 8gb sd card half-full of ALL of my
photos since arriving in Haiti 5 weeks prior sitting exposed outside
of my bag on the passenger seat. Now, given that my camera was
inevitably stolen, I hadn't quite been able to settle my thoughts to
recognize its absence until nearly a half hour after completing the
unsaid tasks and leaving the ORP in search of a beach to comb.
With my toes sufficiently buried in,
and my mind properly massaged by, the 10 meters of soft white sand
beach standing quarantined from garbage and rocks, I was quickly able
to clear my head and recognize that I was standing
responsibility-free, not 2 minutes down the shore from a number of
perfectly aesthetic, probably entirely dysfunctional, unoccupied
carved-out, makeshift sailboats. And more importantly, the sailboats
were sitting fisherman/captain-free, not 1 mile from a small, 1 acre,
sand-and-palm-tree-covered, vacant Caribbean island. Naturally, my
first inclination was to quickly gather my always-keen misadventure
companion and colleague, whom I was working with at the ORP that
afternoon, Heather, and innocently analyze the practicality of
borrowing a sailboat to venture at least halfway to the island before
it sank, with the intent of swimming the remaining gap and seeking
eternal solitude from the stress and demands of our current work; the
work that drives us to the brink of insanity, while we're both just
crazy enough to know that, from this point, nothing less will
probably ever been fulfilling. So, with immediate approval and
sufficiently rousing enthusiasm from my equally cuckoo partner in
crime (quite literally, if our initial plan panned out), we set down
the beach to take a look. To my disappointment at the time (and
relief in hindsight), the curious/quite rationally angered owner came
running down the beach to politely ask us what the hell we're doing.
After a moment of fragmented explanation in our neutrally foreign and
spotty kinda-second language of French, I was able to reconcile the
situation and kindly arrange for us round-trip transportation to the
island, two beers upon our return and unlimited coconuts during our
stay for 15USD. Not bad. After a few minutes of being assured that
our new plan was feasible, one of sailing the entire distance without
sinking, I decided to run back to the car to grab my camera. To my
dismay, it was, of course, gone. I quickly searched the truck and
went by the ORP to see if it was for some reason left behind. After
all the stress of the last month and a half, I've learned how
hopeless and detrimental it is to waste more than a moment worrying
about any situation that had found itself outside of my control. So,
we walked away from the truck, got onboard and 5 minutes later, lost
in awe at the bamboo engineering of the flotation device that somehow
transformed itself into a legitimate sailboat, my camera was
forgotten. It was such a breathtaking experience, recognizing the
contrast that had taken place so far that day, and the condensed dose
of life I had walked away with, both positive and negative.
February 20th, 2011
Alright, long rest of the story short,
what a uniquely almost-perfect day. However common over the last year
of my life, its not every day that one can fall asleep (after starlit
hookah on the roof), entirely satisfied at having lived a full,
thorough and memorable day. After a day like today, losing my camera
and the 4GBs of unique memories from my entire stay here in Haiti
doesn't seem as morbid as it might in isolation; I can't explain how
satisfied I am with the life i've indulged during my time here, and
with or without a camera, no photo could ever justify or outweigh the
experiences themselves, and these can never be stolen from me.
February 27th, 2011
Mmmmk, on that heartfelt inspirational
note, this has dragged on long enough.
Stay tuned for my next entry:
*Hopping around south Haiti.
*Routine check up with the neighborhood
Voodoo Witch Doctor (and the valuable life lessons we can all take
home).
*Moving from my site in the South to
the entirely undeveloped, wild Northwest (on two days notice).
*And other inevitable convoluted
tangents.
Comments
Thanks for filling in your underinformed family - I love reading about your adventures and realizations, and amazing thoughts!! Love you so - keep writing!!