Parting thoughts and images

Women parading, singing and dancing down mainstreet Anse-a-Pitres on the International Day of the Woman

RESPECT THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN, THEY ARE WHO GIVE LIFE

Carnival street demons

Flapping papillon

Each pair of papillon would fight with these pirates, doing kung fu type moves

Carnival princesses

Arriving at Grand Gosier

Catholic church high on a peak overlooking the beach at Grand Gosier

Local department of justice

Large, pristine clinic in GG,  waiting for several years for doctors, electricity and plumbing

We did a "shake and bake" clinic in the facility, seeing 40 patients in 2 hours

A little cutie looking unconvinced even though I assure her "mwen pa gen piki," I don't have a shot!!

My colleagues in AAP my last day in the clinic.  Dr.  LaMartine is holding a brand new Dell laptop that Kathy Brieger from Hudson River Healthcare, my employer, donated, which will hopefully connect them to teleconferencing and many other functions

This will be my last entry for this year, as I had to leave abruptly because of the death of my dear 97 year old father on March 4th.  I am writing this from my desk overlooking the ridge of the southern Taconics, getting back home late last night.  I want to thank you all for following me and supporting me and I will certainly be back next year, God willing.  I feel like this place perfectly fuses my interests and abilities with their needs and future plans.

Last week was packed with adventure.  Tuesday was both MartiGras and the International Day of the Woman and AAP was bubbling, as you can see from the above pictures.  It was particularly moving to march and sing along with the women throughout the community, since I have personally seen and treated the sad results of so much violence against women in my short time there.  These proud, brave and capable women of all ages sang out this song, call and response style for several hours.  It's telling all the men; husbands, sons, president, deputies, senators to wake up to the abuses of women:

Fanm oooo  k'ap pase mize
Rele fanm ooo  k'ap pase mize
Misiye yo pa konnen si fanm ap pase mize
Menm gason nan kayla pa konnen se fanm ap pase mize
Prizidon pa konnen
Senate yo pa konnen
Depite yo pa konnen
Majistra yo pa konnen

Both Nicolette, who went to Benin with me when she was 13, and I were struck by how absolutely African their voices, song and styles of movement.  It is a long hard fight.

The Papillon troupe was a kick, they had these wonderful hinged wings made of wood which were ingeniously attached to their elbows with rebar so that they could flap them back and forth, making a scarey racket.  They marched through the street and then staged battles, 2 by 2 with a handful of rogues, all rather theatrical.

The next day, on the urging of Dr Alexandre, we rented a boat to go to Grand Gosier, an isolated community about half way down the coast to Jacmel, to do a clinic.  The place is rustic and beautiful, I fell in love with it right away.  Apparently there are about 10,000 people within reach of the place by burrow, boat or foot.  It is quite unaccesible by car, only really by dirtbike, but has a clinic larger than ours that was built by the Haitian gov't years ago and then recently given a big facelift by some NGO.  However it is still not up and running with a doctor, or regular care.  There is an axillary nurse, with the equivalent training here of an LPN, who does all the consults, suturing, delivering of babies, etc.  The evidence of melted candle wax on the windowsill of the room where I was seeing pts was a telltale sign that she does all this at night without electricity.  I left my headlamp for her with a dozen AAA batteries!!  Although the place is plumbed out with 5 or 6 toilets, showers, sinks, there is no running water either. There is enough room here for a whole operating room, lab, inpatient rooms, dorms for personnel, but the place is totally vacant.  Haiti seems rife with these kind of frustrating ironies.  The president of Batey Relief Alliance, the organization I work with which has taken over the administration of my clinic, has expressed  interest in taking this clinic over in the future.

I leave with many of the same unanswered questions I had when I arrived; is there really any hope for Haiti?  does a volunteer like me give more than she takes?  is what I do adding or subtracting to sustainability?  is this culturally right?  Yet the beauty, simplicity and grace of the people uplift you in this cloud of confident expectation that your doubts can't deflate.  I'll be back.

Update on the Gods

I´ve been waiting to write this desciption of the Haitian pantheon until I knew a little more, gathered more information from varied sources, but I keep hearing the same stories, so I guess I will just relate what I have heard so far.   There are many wonderful books on the subject that go into fine detail which I will leave up to you to search out if you are so inclined.  Maybe because I work in the line of blood and injury, I am told repeatedly that accidents happen because the Lwa, the Haitian gods, are hungry for flesh or thirsty for blood.  So some motorcyclist doesn´t mangle your leg because he was carrying 100 pounds of coconuts and a few stalks of platanos at 40 mph and you happened to be in his way, but because the Gods are constantly looking to feed themselves, and you did not feed them daily with prayer and libation.   There´s also the possibility that someone out there wants to get back at you, so they paid a Gan Gan or Mambo, male or female voudoo priest, to get the gods pissed off at you and pay you  a visit.  One of the most feared goddesses is LOUGAROU who flies around at night in the form of a turkey and looks for newborn babies.  One guy I met could hear her on the roof of his house, making noise in the middle of the night when his daughter was a baby and had to put a bwa pini or wooden cross at the door with a bag of tobacco seeds attached to it.  My translator told me that Lougarou visited his little brother the other night who sleeps next to him.  He saw him in a dream trying to pursue his brother but woke just in time to scare her away.  He feels he has special protection because he belives iin Jesus who makes you impermiable to the Lwa.  Other male and female flesh eating and bloodthirsty Lwa are Bizango, Sanprel, Zobop, Dambala.  People do not go out late at night in Anse a Pitres because this is the time when these Lwa are out on the prowl and it is very, very dangerous to walk around.  I didn´t know this but I somehow survived when I went out dancing and walked back through town, which has no electricity, at about 11:30.  It seemed serene to me, sky packed with stars, streets silent, but as the Haitian proverb goes, "what you don´t know is bigger than you."

Besides all these bloodsuckers, there are a few colorful superstars, and they are not all bad.  There are at least two female goddesses named Erzuli; Erzuli Frida is the black goddess of love, she is capable of giving you love, riches, power and a break in life.  Her day of the week is Tuesday and her favorite color is pink.  You can see altars set up for her with bright pink satin, perfume and lipstick., sweets and cakes in different shades of pink and of course,  lots of hearts.  Erzli Danto is her white counterpart, her day is Saturday.  There are a handful of saints - Miguel and Rafael that are good spirits that protect you from these bad spirits as do Oganbatagi, a warrior that bears a sword and Ogon je rory,  who protects the whole family from bad spirits.

One of the most famous characters is Baron Samedi.  BS is chief of the graveyard, and if you want to get someone out of their grave to turn them into a zombie, you have to get clearance from him.  He is kind of a sexy trickster, smoking a cigar, wearing a top hat, tails, sun glasses, and a bare chest.  Apparently Papa Doc and his tontons macoute, or henchmen,  used to imitate his likeness to get their point across. 

I´ll leave it at that, not being any expert.  Things at the clinic truck along, now my wonderful buddy Julia is here, another nurse practitioner from New Mexico who I met years ago here in the DR.  She is adapting brilliantly...The woman with the hideous eye is recovering well from surgery and soon will be fitted for a glass one.  We found out that her husband is a curandero, or folk medicine man of questionable rank, and put some drops of chlorox in her eye which might have explained its bizarre condition.  The woman who got her hand machete-d is also doing amazingly well except that she lost so much blood that she has a hemoglobin of 5.7!  We are seeing her everyday to change her bandage, give her painkillers and iron.  She can move her fingers! Her story also changed - the guy who went after her with the machete was actually going for her neck and she put up her hand to protect herself.  He apparently was bothered by something she and his wife were talking about.

My daughter Nicolette is arriving in Santo Domingo to join me for a week.  I am leaving tommorrow on the 5 am bus, trying to buy some meds and medical supplies while I am there.  Can´t wait to give her a big squeeze and turn her on to this wild world.

A few more closing favorite words in kreyol:

Dodo   sweetheart
plop plop   quickly
roket      hiccup
bouche flobop  toothless              I have a long list and could go on.......