Making chabon (charcoal)

I'm sensitive to smell when I'm sleeping. I remember when I was growing up, being awakened by the smell of my father's supper cooking at night, especially if it was fish :) Sometimes he arrived home after we had gone to bed and he usually ate supper very late.

The last few nights I've been awakened by a strong smoke smell in my room. I was getting annoyed because I thought that the night security shift was burning the garbage after dark. The thought of breathing in burning plastic all night was enough to keep me from being able to go back to sleep.

It is very still here at night so that means that the smoke is close to the ground and lingers.

Last night we could smell it before any of us had gone to bed. We found out from security that it wasn't them at all - one of our neighbours is in the middle of make chabon, or charcoal.

Chabon is the main cooking fuel in Haiti, and the dependence on it is the reason that the country has become deforested. This has led to many environmental problems. Deforested mountains don't hold the rain when it falls resulting in flooding and mud slides.

In rural areas, sometimes making chabon is the only source of income for families. Sometimes it is the only way to put food on the table.

When you drive through our region you will frequently see mounds of dirt with smoke coming from holes in the top. The wood has been buried, covered in leaves and then covered with soil. Depending on the size of the chabon pit, it can take 1-3 weeks for the charcoal to be ready. If the pit is very large, they will start removing the chabon from the outer edges and recovering the rest while it continues to burn.



The chabon is sorted by the size of the piece and bagged. Most of the chabon produced in the rural areas is sent to the city for sale there. A large sack here in Fond des Blancs costs $70 HT, or about $8.75 US.

I haven't seen how big our neighbour's chabon pit is, but I'm hoping that we don't have too many more nights before it is finished.

Giving birth is fraught with danger in Haiti

To echo Tara, this is an important issue all over Haiti. Even with the services that St. Boniface is able to provide in our catchment area, much more needs to be done.

Giving birth is fraught with danger in Haiti

By JONATHAN M. KATZ – Mar 15, 2009

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — The pain was different from before — deeper, sharper. Everyone else was sleeping in the banana grove shack, but Yslande Aristide could not bear it. She stood on the dirt floor and started to scream.

In rushed her sisters with candles and water. Then came the midwife, who made tea from a leaf called ti-zan and told the howling 23-year-old to drink it.

Then she looked under her patient and saw the baby's foot. Aristide's fifth child was breech, a life-threatening birth position that under normal medical care would require a Cesarean section.

Read the rest here

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NYT: Living in a Sea of Mud, and Drowning in Dread

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
Published: March 23, 2009

GONAÏVES, Haiti — Even now, well before hurricane season, Jean Hubert tries to tamp down the panic that wells up in his chest whenever dark clouds mass overhead.

More than 30 inches of rain fell in one night in Gonaïves. His unease multiplies if even stray raindrops splatter through his corrugated roof. Its seemingly robust support boards snapped like matchsticks in the cascading floodwaters last year, puncturing random holes in the flimsy tin.

Continue reading here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/world/americas/24haiti.html

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How true

I heard someone say this the other day:

If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.

When I think back about where I expected to be at this point in my life, I know how true this phrase is. I am very thankful that although I did not envision my life the way it is now, I am happy to be where I am.

God blesses us in very different ways. My prayer is that He allows all of you to see where in your life He is blessing you - sometimes it's difficult to see.

More Random Photos

Losandier

These were taken in Losandier, a village on the beach where we have done a housing project in partnership with Food for the Poor. The people there were wonderfully gracious and friendly.

Observing

We are in the hospitality business.

The visitor's residence is also the residence that I live in. I have a single room and the luxury of my own bathroom, but all of the other common rooms are shared. Most of what we provide would be considered family-style. The rooms are dorms. We have cooks for the noon meal, but everything else is "serve-yourself and do your own dishes."

At times we have a lot of people here - sometimes large groups of Americans, sometimes teams of Haitians who come to educate, support and monitor our programs for the agencies that fund us. At times we have both.

There are frustrations with having the house full, but this is not the place for me to complain. I am fortunate to have such great accomodations and I know it.

I'm an introvert. I stand back and watch. One of the things I like to do is observe how people interact and how they behave in the setting of the residence. The Americans are fun and usually predictable, but occasionally there's an outlier in the group who stirs things up a little. Our Haitian visitors can be fun too, however, observing them has opened my eyes to the diversity of the culture.

For example, I watch how the men in the group treat their female co-workers. I notice who leaves their dirty dishes sitting for someone else to wash. I notice who washes the dishes for the others. I hear the requests and see who is accepting and who is demanding with a sense of entitlement. I watch how they treat our staff, and how our staff respond to them. It's very different from what I've been able to observe in local households.

I'm thankful that I live with a couple of people who have been in Haiti for a long time. They can sometimes explain why our Haitian visitors behave the way they do. They point out the differences in their backgrounds and professions, and help me see so that I am not judging people with my Canadian, middle-class eyes.

Kalbas

These trees and the gourds fascinate me.

This is the kalbas (calabash) tree. In times past - not too long ago actually - the kalbas gourds were used to carry water. There are different varieties, some round, some oblong. The gourds were dried, a hole put in the top and a corn cob was used as a stopper. Some times they are used to make bowls, but the only ones I've seen are decorative ones in the shops.

This kalbas tree seems to be particularly productive. The falls litter the ground. The gourds grow from the branches but also the trunk. These ones are as large as 14" in diameter.

This one is a new growth, and about the size of an avocado.

My brain is being re-wired

I've been noticing lately how learning Kreyol has impacted my English.

Today I was writing to our program manager, and in one email used the words "commence" and "recommence" three times. I would not have chosen these slightly pretentious words in my pre-Kreyol days, but they happen to be the words you use in Kreyol to say "start" and "restart" so they are at the forefront of my mind in English. Weird...

Heavy Heart

I don't tend to write too much about the bad things that happen here. It's mostly because there's a risk in doing it. I don't like that I can't tell the whole story about my experience, but there are things that are not my business to tell, and to be honest, things that could put me or people around me at risk if I was to just blithely write about them.

But I will write about this as it is not an unusual story here, and one that I have invested personally in a little more than usual.

A baby girl was born here about three weeks ago. She was very small and she had a birth defect where her rectum and vagina were in the same opening. It's easily correctable in the US or Canada. She seemed to have some kind of reflux or secretion problem too, and so was unable to be fed. We sent her to Port au Prince to see a pediatric surgeon there. He would not operate as she was too high risk. We didn't get a detailed report about his concerns.

Our visiting surgeons looked at her xray and saw that she had another birth defect where her esophagus was not connected to her stomach and this was why she had such terrible secretions - her saliva had nowhere to go.

Little baby S. had been almost two weeks without being fed. She was small and malnourished. She was at high risk of dying if surgery was done, she was at 100% risk of dying if nothing was done. We learned that the USNS Comfort was coming to Haiti next month and they would have a pediatric surgeon. We contacted them, and then placed a feeding tube so that we could nourish her and replenish her in anticipation of surgery later to correct her birth defects.

We were arranging with the pediatric surgeon on the Comfort to take her to Port au Prince for surgery next month, but she didn't make it. She died today.

This is heartbreaking for her family. Her mother has been attentive and caring for her baby very well. The whole family has been very supportive and pulling together, not something you always see here.

Photos from Kapen

My friends

I just posted about this on the St. Boniface blog and thought I'd put it here too.

I put some of the photos from our fun visit with my elderly friends at Lakay Granmoun in my gallery. You can see them here.

It was a really special day.

The run down

I've not posted in so long that I had to think twice about my password to log on, so I decided to just do the run down of some things that have been going on.

• We had a surgical team here from Gainesville and Jacksonville. They were doing general surgery and worked some long, hard days. They were a great group of people.

• I got some continuing education credits for attending a clinical education session by the visiting pediatric gastroenterologist on Probiotics. It has been so long since I've done anything related to clinical nutrition. Thank you Dr. Joel!

• We had a fun visit with the elderly at Lakay Granmoun. They are sponsored by Queen of Peace Parish in Gainsville and some gifts were sent down with a parish member on the surgical team. They were so happy! They each got some new items of clothing and slippers. We did some dancing with the ladies in their new dresses. Even Rosita, who is blind, got up to model her new dress and took a quick spin with Leones.

• I've been having a painful problem with one of my feet (probably related to the beautiful flip-flops I asked for for Christmas, Gwen). I haven't been able to walk very far. To Lakay Granmoun and back is just over two miles. Sr. Ellen has been letting me drive her red Rhino to visit and see the employees. It's a fun vehicle to drive and I get a lot of stares. They don't see very many women driving out here. The fastest I get it up to is 12 mph, and the most fun is driving through the stream at the base of the hill. It has four wheel drive and can go almost anywhere.

• We DROVE to Kapen the other day (not in the Rhino) to see the site of the new school. I first went to Kapen shortly after I got here last spring, and we had to walk up the mountain to get there as the road had been washed out at the base. Now there is a completely new road from another direction, built courtesy of USAID and our Food for Work program. It was amazing how easy it was to get up there. Apparently the cost of land has increased since the road went through, and there are economic spin-offs too. The people there are now able to get their produce to market. It can't be said often enough how important road improvements are to the future of this country.

• I've been learning a lot about cultural norms as they pertain to work. Some of my greatest stress recently has been dealing with some discipline issues with a couple of the workers at Lakay Granmoun. It's difficult because of the language barrier. I want to be fair to everyone and support the supervisor, so it's important that I understand everyone's side exactly. Besides not understanding the words coming out of people's mouths, you never get a straightforward answer to a question. Anyway, everything is okay for now and I love the job.