Mwen Pa Konnen

This post is titled "I don't know" in Haitian Creole.  Not just because I said that phrase so many times over the five weeks I spent in Haiti - to the children, to the local staff, in English to the project director - but because ultimately it's the best phrase I can come up with to summarize my experience.  I know perhaps more than I did before I went, but even more sharply I understand there are many things I don't know.

But I supposed I should first finished the story I began way back here and continued earlier this week.

After spending a week and a half planning out how to get Julio an x-ray and an ultrasound, checking the costs, planning how to get to the lab, etc.  We finally had a plan.  Except we didn't go.  

Not because of the costs, although of course everything is ultimately about the cost/benefit ratio, but because over that period of time it became increasingly clear that there was nothing really wrong with our little friend.  If asked, he complains of vague stomach pain that comes and goes every couple of days.  But in the same hour he'll launch himself into a hug with me that betrays no such pain, even with some surreptitious (and then less surreptitious, building up to a rib-cracking hug me tighter contest) taps and squeezes in the area of this "pain."

I don't doubt that he still has a long struggle ahead - he'll still have kidney stones, and have to manage that for probably the rest of his life.  But at least for now we're no longer worried about an acute problem.  I know this doesn't make a perfect story - I'm telling it partly because I hope you might be curious to know how Julio's path continued, but mostly because I feel like it's a great way for me to convey that my time in Haiti didn't particularly make a perfect story.  Didn't fit into boxes, didn't end with a particular bang or a denouement.  The work continues.  The children scramble on, managing health problems, learning deficiencies, developmental delays, and behavioral trails - just as they have for years now.  Sometimes we had great days:  Little Kevens, 7 years old but no bigger than a 5 year old and very learning delayed thanks to severe malnutrition, can tie his sneakers all on his own now.  Somewhere in the madness of driving to the doctor's office, I taught Julio how to subtract bigger numbers.  Leyla can successful identify the color green (and a handful more, if she's focused that second).  I talked with Mica in Creole, made jokes, made her laugh, encouraged her to stand up to the driver, maybe even taught her how to do the accounting work she's supposed to be doing for the garden project.  None of that is glorious.  None of it makes a great finale, but in the end it's that work that I'm the most proud of.  

I spent close to five weeks in Haiti.  I still don't speak Haitian Creole perfectly, and I still don't understand the country at all.  Mwen pa konnen, mwen pa comprann.  I don't know, I don't understand.  But I'm glad I went.  

The End of the Julio's Story

If you're confused what this is continuing, click here to read the beginning of the story.  


To bring you all up to date, Julio’s immediate problems were resolved by a short hospital stay, but the urologist never came to see him (although he did come to the hospital) and none of the prescribed lab tests were even run: several blood tests, a urine culture, and an ultrasound.   Instead he went home with mysterious white pills and a course of antibiotics to deal with the lingering infection. 

About a week later, after dinner in the evening, we found Julio had silently curled himself into a fetal position in the laundry pile.  With considerable effort we were able to get out of him that it hurt.  A lot.  It looked like he was passing another stone.  It was at this point I went on a quest through the unreliable and slow internet to identify the white pills they sent home with him – wanting to know what exactly they were before dosing him with other painkillers.  Turns out I was glad I took the trouble, since they WERE painkillers.  So we let him huddle in the corner for a while with a hot compress on his back while the other kids went up to bed, until eventually he fell asleep.  This launched me on a several day crusade to figure out home treatment for kidney stones - ultimately a futile quest.  One website described it quiet well, noting that one treatment "doesn't actually seem to do anything, but will give your loved ones something to do besides handing you the ibuprofen."  Watching some one, especially a child (even this stoic child), pass a kidney stones is an exercise is feeling useless.  We sat there with him, holding the hot compress, as he lay down and ignored us entirely.  But watching the crisis was a strong reminder that we weren't sure all the loose ends were tied up - was this just about managing kidney stones, or was there something more still wrong?   He was still complaining about back and side pain. . . 

So we went on a an adventure to a urologist in Pètionville – a wealthy suburb of Port-au-Prince.  We frequent Pètionville for shopping and nice lunch breaks from the kids.  It’s relatively easy to get down there and there are lots of things available to buy.  Expatriates of all kinds frequent the area, hearing French and English is not uncommon and foreign faces are a staple of the restaurant businesses.  So.  We set off at 8:30, a mere half hour later than I asked the driver to come get us, but still with plenty of time to wind our way down the single road to the town in the inevitable stop and go traffic.  The driver managed to find us the right street, but we ran into a little trouble with the numbering.  First we stopped outside 75 – we’re looking for 57.  Then we drove along looking for it, and the numbers were going down so I thought we were fine.  But no, the driver spotted a nice-looking clinic on the other side of the street and insisted that was it.  It didn’t appear to have a number, and after all I know nothing about street numbering here so it might well be that things are organized some funny way that 57 is across the street.  But I doubt it, so then he asks someone.  I didn’t understand the whole conversation, but I gathered that he got some directions.  Following these, we blaze down the next block, barely catching a glimpse that there’s another clinic on the corner, and turn around, coming back to the nice-looking place.  The driver stops and encourages us to get out and ask.  So I do, Julio silently following, but it quickly becomes clear that’s not the place we’re looking for so back into the car we go (were I properly Haitian I suppose I would have waited for the front desk attendant to come back to actually ask.  But waiting for things like that can be a long business, just to confirm what I was already confident of).  There was more, but eventually I insisted the driver continue down to the next block, to that clinic we flashed by so quickly, which he did over vocal objections.  Of course that was it.  

The actual medical visit didn't accomplish much of anything - we spoke with the urologist, who couldn't help us without imaging, which he didn't do in his office.  It was comforting, in a way, to talk through the management of the problem with him  - drink lots of water, giving pain killers at a crisis.  But really left us no further ahead.  I then embarked on a several weeks long effort of deciding how, where, and if to get this imaging done. All the phone numbers for the labs were out of date, so each time I wanted to call and get a sense of whether the lab could do the work, and if so, for how much, it was a multiple step process.  Each time I thought I had a plan, I'd talk to some one about it and several reasonable objections would occur, destroying said plan.  Hindering all of this was the fact that the power went out for four days, leaving me with no way to charge the phone I was using.  After much searching, it became clear that the only option was to go all the way down into Port-au-Prince (a much longer and trickier business than sticking to Petionville) to the lab the doc had originally recommended to us (read: we went back to plan #1).

I'll stop there for today - this is getting long.  Check back this weekend for the ending, and a healthy helping of my introspection of my time in Haiti.  

Haiti Books

So as is pretty evident from my blog these past weeks, I'm in Haiti.  Both before going and while there I've been doing a lot of reading.  I'd previously read both "Aids and Accusations" by Paul Farmer and the book about his work by Tracy Kidder, "Mountains Beyond Mountains."  Which spend a little bit of time going into the history of the nation, although they are pretty narrowly focused on the countryside and on health care.  So I wanted to get a little bit of a different story.  I started with "The Serpent and the Rainbow" by Wade Davis.  Davis is an ethnobotanist from Harvard who travels to Haiti in the early eighties on the trail of the truth behind zombis and vodoun.  His account is interesting (but slow getting started, beware: for first you must sit through a long exposition of how he got the gig and why he's an Awesome Explorer) and great if what you're looking for is a somewhat anthropological exploration of vodoun ritual and the science behind zombification.  Both of these things can be fascinating, but portray a very narrow slice of Haiti.  Unmentioned in his entire book is that it takes place in the political context of Jean-Claude "Baby doc" Duvalier's failing regime.  In fact, as Davis waxes eloquent on the brilliance of combining the administration from the goverment and religious divisions of the country in the person of the "Chef de Section" who is often also the local Vodoun priest, he is ignoring that this administration makes sense only in the context of the Duvalier years, in which vodoun was for the first time explicitly permitted, and in fact used as a tool to uphold the dictatorship.

Shifting from his vision of Haiti to Amy Wilentz's "The Rainy Season" is like shifting from a sepia-toned discovery channel special to some kind of MSNBC special report.  A journalist who lived and wrote from Port-au-Prince in the years following Baby Doc's leaving the country, her work is far more urban and political in nature.  Wilentz became quite close to Aristide in the eighties, when he was a persecuted enemy of both the state and the Catholic church hierarchy itself, so her work is peppered with interviews with the man who would later become a massively popular elected president in Haiti.  What's surreal at times about her work read directly after Davis' is that they come from nearly the same timeframe, but feature dramatically differing visions of the same Haiti, sometimes even the same people.  It's from Wilentz that I gleaned that Dulvalier's approach to the Chefs de Section was entirely new, for example.  And both feature the character  Max Beauvoir.  To Davis, he was a well-education Haitian who knew all the secrets of voudoun and set himself up as benevolent guide.  To Wilentz he's a disenfranchised, but still wealthy, member of the elite cadre of Duvalierists who consistently attempts to feed her false stories about Aristide's seditious, at times communist activities.  These stories are usually repeated almost verbatim from another source: Baptist pastor Wally Turnbull, who founded and for many many years ran the Baptist mission at Fermathe.  Yes, the hospital we took Julio to in my first post on Haiti.  Dr. Turnbull is also the author of the Creole course recommended to volunteers here: "Creole Made Easy."  It's a great little course book - a really simple introduction to Creole, which I wish I'd used at home instead of trying to work with the one I had which is much more complex.  Although more complete, that textbook was near impossible for me to get through by myself with no grounding in the language.  But now, knowing a little more background, the Creole Made Easy course seems somehow more suspect. . . or at least limited.

I guess this is less a post about books to read when coming to Haiti (although I would recommend "The Rainy Season" to anyone interested) and more a swirling commentary on how surreal it is to come across so many different visions of the same place, the same people.  This is even more true of the history of the country.  Together with the another volunteer here, I took a little trip to the National Museum.  It's a small place, with a nice collection giving a broad overview of Haitian history, and celebrating the country's four big independence heros:  L'Overture, Christophe, Pètion, and Dessalines.  To look at the museum and hear our guide tell the story is to see these four men as venerated, universally admired pioneers of independence.  All the other books I've read (and the history I'm reading now) tend to depict them as priveledged elites who were less interested in democracy and economic equality and more interested in being the elites who controlled the plantations instead of the whites.

Now, the authors of the books I'm reading are American, and to give him his due I don't think our guide could adequately express himself in English to give a nuanced version of history.  And there is no doubt that we also tend to have an overly venerating attitude towards our founding fathers (an added note of irony for those keeping track:  my visit to the museum took place on July 4th).  But I can't help but notice the conflicting visions which, together with the evidence of stark contrasts in living situations, and the divisiveness and enbattlement of the country's history all lead me to see this country as somehow split.  Both wealthy and poor.  Both extremely well educated and worldly and entirely provincial.  Both modern and stuck in history.

"École Tètè" and other misunderstandings

So all the children here at Kay Grace are out of school for the summer.  This is lovely for them, but could be potentially cray for us, and one of the goals of the project is to help them make up for lost time by giving them some formal structure and education even when not in school.  So Barb has asked us, the two volunteers, to do a kind of small summer camp with them: art projects, organized games both in- and outdoors, and maybe some one-on-one time to work intensively with each child on areas of weakness. We wanted to indicate to the kids that this was something different, and more fun, than regular school - but that it still retained a formality of structure.  That they need to attend, need to listen to us and be prepared to live within rules while there.  So we called it "summer school" or, in my serviceable but not always correct French "L'École d'Été."

Unfortunately, one of the children is called Tètè, and the combination of the indefinite French article and the word for summer slur together in the children's pronunciations so that Summer School becomes Tètè's School: L'École Tètè.  Not a genuine excuse not to come to school, but nonetheless another excuse for them to try on.

While the children delight in teaching us Creole, when they fell like it, and I have come to recently realize that they consistently modify their Creole for us, they also seem to deeply enjoy mocking our language skills.  One of the older boys has a long running joke with me - well it's a joke for him anyway, and after about the millionth repetition I've given in and decided it's a joke for me, too.  He'll wait until I call something bizarre, a not uncommon occurrence given my limited vocabulary of French adjectives.  The i in the French form is long, like pizza rather than like business.  Or rather, like "visa."  So the game goes like this.  I say "C'est bizarre" and he says "Se pa visa, se passport."  If I dare to continue to insist that in fact I said bizarre, with a b, he'll continue to insist that in fact he meant passport.

Just a couple of the small day-to-day challenges dealing with a house full of six children who don't happen to speak your language.  At least they understand me - mostly.