Konbit Pou Ayiti

Another beautiful day in Haiti. We woke early with the baby, when the sun began to shine into the house. For a few hours we gathered our things together for the day, made a plan, organized the funds we have in-hand and drank akason, a drink made from very fine cornmeal with milk and sugar, with bread and peanut butter.

Now I am working at the hotel because the internet in our home office hasn’t been connected yet. I am listening to the sea crashing on the rocks below the open-air dining room where I can get wireless internet, and I am drinking coffee filled with sugar and milk. Joe and Guypson have a dozen errands to run in town (including seeing the guy about our internet) and they have taken Baby Kaya with them so I can have a couple of hours to work without interruption. The internet here is barely functioning though, so my productivity is limited. With a list of people to email and connect with it’s frustrating to be here and unable to do much. My frustration is mitigated by my lovely surroundings, the sounds from the ocean, the buzz of caffeine and sugar that is slowly rising in my head, and – above all – the knowledge that I am here in Haiti.

The pace of life in Haiti is unique. There is the heat and the sun, natural obstacles to rushing around. Then there is the lack of infrastructure, the bad roads and missing bridges that inevitably lead to unplanned delays for flat tires, disconnected mufflers, and a variety of other car-related problems. You can also have a perfect plan to stop at three or four places to buy phone cards, drinking water, rice and oil, and then arrive in town and find that three out of the four places are inexplicably closed, even on a Monday morning.

In other words, you cannot plan well enough in Haiti, and this might make other people decide to stop planning altogether, but I am just not that kind of person. Instead I plan and re-plan, I put together lists of things to do on post-it notes and check things off as we go. I come to the hotel bright and early with my emails written and order my coffee. Then I wait for an hour to send them out. Such is life in Haiti!

Since we arrived on December 29th we have had very little down time, yet I feel like we haven’t gotten enough done either. Some close friends were here when we arrived, and we spent a few lovely days at the beach and by the sea with them. We also hosted a teacher from Coconut Creek High School in Florida who is heading up a new pen pal partnership program between his students and the Youth for the Development of Cyvadier (JDS). When these folks departed on January 2nd we picked up a friend from New York who is here to learn Creole and explore the culture, and Joe’s niece who is visiting on vacation. It is her first visit back to Jacmel after living in New York for the last ten years – I have been interested to hear her reflect on how things have changed since she was last here.

Our house was in great disarray when we arrived, much to my surprise (although really, you have to be prepared for anything!). I knew we were planning to finish some construction on our kitchen (we’ve never really had one before) but I didn’t truly comprehend the size of the project. For the first week I couldn’t even process what was happening – all I could see were the piles of sand and rocks, and the mess my home had become. But as the boss and his crew have added the windows and door, the space has taken form and I am already starting to love it – and thank god, too, because it’s a done deal! Kaya will surely enjoy the big space once the boss has a chance to pour the concrete floor and smooth it out.

The kitchen is going to be nice, with high ceilings to hang the pots from. We need a decent space because in additional to ourselves, we cook for the forty members of JDS every Saturday. Even more exciting is the dining room, which is now large enough to host a meeting and will soon house a long desk with donated computers for the JDS youth and our partner artists to use. We will set everyone up with email accounts and start some basic training on typing, emailing and internet.

Thirty minutes into my work time and still not one message has downloaded into my email… I am starting to get impatient but I know if I try to read them online I will only lengthen the time it takes them to download. There is so much to be done! I am glad that Joe will return from town with a cell phone for me along with a no-limit card so I can begin calling people and connecting with everyone we’ve been out of touch with these past few months in the United States.

We are extremely excited to truly begin the work of promoting and building the new Haitian National Coalition for the Environment. It is a huge task, a major undertaking – but we have such amazing colleagues and partners involved already. Our main funders, Alternative Gifts International’s Venture Philanthropy program and the American Jewish World Service, are making it possible for us to dedicate almost all of our time to the task of outreach and grassroots organizing, making connections, building capacity, and uniting people around common goals. 2008 will be an amazing year!

Next week we will spend several days in Port-au-Prince. We’ll have a meeting of the volunteer coordinating committee of the new coalition, where hopefully we can make some decisions about the fundamentals points of the coalition. This will make it possible for us to promote and do outreach, as well as make the website (www.haitienvironment.org) more complete.

Stay tuned for a report on our trip and more on life in Haiti…