Summer 2007

Hey all,

Another week has passed here.  I have been collecting half-finished reflections for this blog, and now I have finished them and am dumping them all at once so that those of you following along can read at your leisure.  I posted the most recent stuff most recently, which means the latest events are at the top of this slew of posts.  I trust that you have figured out how this thing works by now so I decided to keep things consistent.

I also hope to post some pictures soon, which tell parts of the stories that words can not.   Thanks for your messages and prayers, and I hope you enjoy!

Michael

This morning was our second attempt to get four of us out to Mont Bayard.  Despite the change of plans yesterday, I had taken the opportunity while all of the interviewers and moto drivers were there to do a little better planning for the trek.  They said that it would be best to leave at 6AM to beat the heat.  So that’s what we did.

The morning started off on a great note.  While we were waiting for the interviewers at the bottom of the hill, I realized I forgot something and ran back up the hill to get it.  Before I returned I was met by Mireille (one of the interviewers).  Previously she has only tried out her English a handful of times with a few short phrases.  However, she explained to me, completely in English, that there had been a mistake yesterday: Sony let me give them too much money for where they were going.  She and Masline talked about this and decided that they couldn’t take the money.  So she returned the extra.  Rather than do all of this through Sony, she had rehearsed the whole explanation in English and had met me privately to do it.  I congratulated her on her honesty.  It was a breath of fresh air from the events of the past day and restored my faith in the value of honesty around here.

Things got better from there.  Our team consisted of Sony, Mireille and Masline (the two younger girls who are our best interviewers), and I along with our four motorbike drivers.  Two of the drivers have been giving rides to Sony and I since we started the project, but the other two were hired specially for the trip to Mont Bayard.

Obstacle numero uno was the muddy river that was mentioned in an earlier post.  You can’t get to Mont Bayard if you don’t cross the river, so we went to one of the most popular spots to cross.  The first step in the procedure for crossing the river is taking off any article of clothing you don’t want to get wet.  Since the water was more than knee deep, this meant taking off shoes, socks, and pants for some of the moto drivers.  I opted to leave my hiking sandals on and join the group that rolled up our shorts so that we looked like we were wearing diapers. 

I think they were concerned that the blan would be afraid of the river, so one of the guys held my hand as I got in.  I said I was ok, but he insisted on walking me all the way to the other side. 

The next step in the procedure was carrying the motos across the river.  I felt kind of silly while all four moto drivers carried each moto one at a time as I waited on the other side with the girls.  I determined that I would help on the return trip. 

The final step was getting Sony across.  After trying to cross part of the way with his lame leg, one of the moto drivers carried Sony on his back the rest of the way across.  Everyone redressed and we were ready to go.  Mile 1 down, four more to go.

The rest of the way consisted of lots of rocks and mountains, and the path is only traveled by walkers, motos, and animals.  I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking.  What was not captured was the occasional goat, sheep, and horse crossing, the several times that we had to cross streams, and the group of cross little dogs whose attempted attack was skillfully thwarted by my driver kicking some rocks in their direction and speeding away.

They had me ride with one of the new drivers, one which Madame Evelyn said was a really good driver.  Translated this meant that he could navigate his way through rocks and hills with much more ease than the others.  Or let’s just say we were the pace car going out and coming back.

I was told that the trip was possible only by moto and on foot.  This means that when going uphill, the driver gives it as much gas as possible until you’re no longer gaining ground.  Then the rider jumps off and hikes and/or pushes until the next straight-away.  And then you get back on and do it again.

After a little over 2 hours of this, we reached our destination.  The bustling metropolis of Mont Bayard, which you can view in the pictures.  We stopped at a church to ask where we could find all of the people on our list to interview.  A wave of panic came over me as the first crowd with which we talked didn’t even recognize the majority of names on our list.  Sony and I didn’t have many leads for the people we wanted to interview, but the girls actually did pretty well, getting directions to 7 out of 8 of their interviewees.

We split up, and Sony and I drove around to find someone who knew where the rest of the people in the program lived.  We came upon a guy who directed us to a house in the program and then followed us there to see if he could spend the day taking us from house to house for a little money.  We agreed, and he joined our half of the moto parade and did a pretty good job of finding the people on the list.

We interviewed someone who was probably the sweetest guy I’ve met since I’ve been here.  He is a pastor, a director of a school, and clearly a champion for Gadyen Dlo in Mont Bayard.  He got really excited when talking about how he encourages people to treat their water and how he gives out free trial bottles to anyone who asks.  He sees it as his calling to serve people in this way and bring them “from darkness to light” in a number of different ways, physically and spiritually.  I enjoyed his analogies (and will probably be even more grateful when analyzing and writing up the qualitative portion of this study).  He spoke about how some people are like doubting Thomas in that they don’t believe in treating their water until they can see its effects.  I told him how much I was inspired by him and he thanked me so much for coming out and encouraging them.

On our way home, we stopped by the house of the reseller for Mont Bayard.  He lives less than a mile away from “downtown.”  Trying to reconcile this with the major complaint of the program participants (“it’s too far to go to get the product”) gave me a glimpse at how difficult it is to establish an effective water program in rural Haiti (and how this one is doing a pretty darn good job).

The trip home was much quicker.  When we reached the river, I made my way into the group to carry the first moto across.  When I started walking back to the other side to help with the second, they all told me to stay there.  I felt a little left out, but I realized that the whole thing really might not have had anything to do with whether or not they thought I had what it takes to help.  This time there was some random guy who was waiting by the river and insisted on helping carry the motos across just so that we would pay him.  The moto drivers were already doing all they could to avoid paying that guy, and I’m pretty sure they were a little afraid that I would take something out of their pay if I helped carry the motos.

All in all, the trip involved:

• Traveling 4 miles from home as the crow flies, which was really 5 miles on moto/foot
• Conducting 3 qualitative interviews, some of the best yet
• Facilitating 1 focus group, unplanned but orchestrated by the Gadyen Dlo champion who spontaneously rallied a group of four people in the program in a matter of minutes
• Completing 7 surveys (everyone on our list)
• …All the while never really feeling like we were “working”

I haven’t written much about the challenges of the project itself, but things haven’t been smooth sailing the whole way through.  The interviewers aren’t used to working 8 hour days (some aren’t used to working much at all), so it has been a challenge to motivate them to do what we told them they would expected to do.  Sony hasn’t been happy with the way his salary is being handled, and I’ve had to deal with the complaints even though his salary wasn’t my decision.  And every morning we have “discussions” about how much money the interviewers need for transportation for the day.  I made the mistake of counting on Sony to give me honest answers about how much they need.  However, my major means of communication with the interviewers has chosen instead to egg them on to ask for far more than they need.

You can pray that all of those things improve, but as I write this looking back on Wednesday, I realize that all of those things have improved significantly since then.  However, the path to get there was somewhat painful.

I thought that one way to solve several of the problems at once was to embark on a journey with a team of interviewers for a day.  Rather than spending a few hours with them at the close locations, I would go with them to a really remote community.  This would give me a realistic picture of the difficulties of the job as well as the amount of money necessary to make a trip such as this.  Hopefully it would also prove to be a bonding experience and break down some of the barriers between me and them.  And I have to say I was a little pumped about the opportunity to make a trek to somewhere that’s even more out in the middle of nowhere than what I have been calling home. 

So we decided on Mont Bayard, one of the furthest places on the list.  Madame Evelyn recruited two moto drivers especially for the trip and made sure everyone was there an hour early.  In the morning everyone was talking about the rain from the night before and the fact that we might not be able to cross the river, but all of the moto drivers said that we could go ahead and try.  Sony, on the other hand, claimed that he wouldn’t be able to cross the river and that we would have to cancel the trip. 

I haven’t mentioned that he has a lame leg, but he later admitted that my suspicion was correct that he was just using this as an excuse to air some of his complaints.  Essentially he went on strike at the most inopportune time possible.  This forced me to send the moto drivers home unhappily and change where we were sending two of the interviewers for the day, all in front of a crowd at the clinic.  In the middle of this, I didn’t have time for the usual “discussions” about money for transportation and just gave out what Sony said, which I later learned was even more inflated than usual.

After that Sony and I talked one-on-one for awhile.  I’ll leave the details out, but it was a pretty trying experience.  The one bright spot occurred when I returned to the guest house and the two ladies that take care of me asked why I was back and not going to Mont Bayard.  I responded “Don’t ask” in Creole which they thought was pretty funny.  I spent the next hour or so praying and contemplating if and how to fire someone twice my age.  Carline and Christiana spent the next hour repeating “Don’t ask” in Creole to each other and rolling in laughter.

I’ll conclude by saying that things with Sony are much better now.  We settled the issues, put a lot of things out on the table which needed to be discussed, put what we discussed into a written contract, and have moved on.  I have actually noticed a marked change in Sony’s attitude already.  You can ask me about what I learned from it all later, but for now I’ll say it was a difficult but great learning experience.

(Preface:  While I promise this round will be a little more light-hearted than my previous philosophizing, I did a half-decent job at convincing myself this is true and there’s a part of me that wants to write a paper on it.  Let me know if you think I’m on to something.)

Many a scholar has tried to identify the root causes of poverty, and the island of Hispaniola provides a unique opportunity to put those theories to the test.  If we understand the differences between the DR and Haiti, perhaps we could understand what causes some countries to experience more economic development than others. 

One of the most noticeable differences is that Dominicans like baseball and Haitians like soccer.  One might conclude that it is the love of soccer that entraps people in poverty, while countries which adopt baseball progress more rapidly.

First, let us consider why playing baseball might allow a country to progress.  I would argue that the game of baseball teaches valuable life lessons about overcoming adversity that are difficult to encounter in any other sport.  Like a poor man who faces grim odds of working his way out of poverty, a batter must deal with the fact that he will only succeed about 30% of the time, if he is good.  He must learn to accept that he will not be rewarded often for his toil but that he must persevere and maintain his hunger to overcome.  A young boy who learns this lesson on the diamond will surely take it into anything he does.  After all, if one can hit a baseball, which has been called the hardest thing to do in any sport, one can surely work his way out of poverty.  Sometimes the two are tied together not just figuratively but also literally.  Remember the words of Slammin Sammy who said, “Beisbol has been bery bery good to me.”

But what about soccer; on what basis can we conclude that the love of soccer traps people in poverty?  Consider the economics of sports on Hispaniola.  I recently discovered that the price of a good soccer ball in Haiti is $50.  What bothered me was not so much the fact that I had to shell out this amount but rather trying to reconcile this with what I know about this island and sports.  The ball was clearly imported from the US (probably after being imported from some other country), all of which led to what I consider to be an extremely high price for a country in which everything else is extremely inexpensive, relatively speaking. 

However, every day as soccer balls are shipped into Haiti and poor Haitian communities pool their money for weeks so that they can play soccer, Haiti exports more baseballs than any other country.  The Dominicans on the other side of the island know this, and they have discovered that sports equipment that can be found locally is the way to go.  So they grab a hold of a lot of those baseballs before they leave the island and they improvise the rest, such as using milk cartons for gloves and bottle caps and cane sticks to practice hitting.

We can see that playing baseball on the island of Hispaniola is cheaper than playing soccer.  We can also see that the side of the island which has discovered this fact is more economically developed than the side which has not.  Perhaps this is not just a coincidence.

Skeptics may doubt this math and argue that the average soccer ball lasts through many more games than the average baseball.  While this is certainly true in the big leagues, I take this to be irrelevant in developing countries.  In my experience on the island of Hispaniola, lost balls are rarely a reality.  Whether it’s soccer or baseball, there is a group of young boys at every pick-up game whose sole responsibility is to fetch the balls that go out of play.  And whether this involves hunting through sugar cane fields for foul balls or wading out into the river downstream of an approaching soccer ball, the muchachos and ti moun have an uncanny ability to return the balls. 

I’m not sure that this can be applied to all countries, but I can say that if Haitians would just trade soccer for baseball, they could save a lot of money and would probably be better off.  Maybe I should give up trying to solve the water problem and introduce them to baseball.

Blaud came back today.  With money for the project and a soccer ball.  Bato (I’m really not sure how you spell his name, but he’s the guy who lives on the compound and comes to get me every day when it’s time to play soccer) told me that Blaud had bought a ball.  I’m not sure why, but I just assumed that the ball was already in someone’s possession who would take it to the field, especially since Bato was heading straight to the field like every other day.  However, we arrived to the scene of a small group playing with a ball half-full of air.  Obviously the new ball hadn’t arrived, but the news that there was a new ball in the neighborhood had arrived at the field.  Which meant that a few of the guys shot rapid fire questions at Bato and I wondering where the ball was.  I explained that I misunderstood and didn’t know we were supposed to bring the ball.  They told us to hurry back.

A few of the little boys looking on from the road were quick to hand off their bikes to us so that we could get back to the clinic faster.  Bato got the bike that was too small for him, and I got the one that didn’t shift gears.  I’m not exactly an all-star bike rider, so I got some snickers for my difficulty in navigating through the bumps, but I made it back. 

I ran up to see Blaud and explained that there was a lot we needed to discuss, but right now I just needed the ball to get back to the field.  He handed over the shiny new blue ball and the bill, and Bato and I headed back with the ball.  Bato agreed that he would keep it at his house every day, and he took it down to the field.  Apparently Blaud did a good job at picking out a ball because they seemed to be happy. 

All in all, I was happy with this resolution to the story.  I’m grateful that God let me give in a personal way, and at least so far it hasn’t seemed to create a surge of requests.  However, there is still one thing bothering me from the whole transaction, so if you’ll forgive me, I’d like to do a bit more online philosophizing about poverty.  Since I ended up getting a little carried away, I’ll leave it for the next post. 

The cook for the guest house doesn’t come in on Sunday morning, so the last two weekends we just made our own scrambled eggs and “just add water” pancakes over the gas stove.  This was my first weekend on my own at the guest house.  I don’t know if Madame Evelyn didn’t trust my ability to add water to the pancake mix or if she’s just a pretty cool lady, but she invited me over for Sunday morning breakfast at her house.  It was pretty sweet.  She sent someone to come get me and lead me down to her house because although it is just down the hill, I had never been there before.  We had Haitian coffee and Haitian soup and talked in Spanish.  A good way to start the morning.

We went to a different church this week in a small town.  Both of Christophe’s kids came this week, which occupied Christophe such that he couldn’t really translate much for me.  So I zoned out during the sermon and did two things.  The first was being entertained as Ti Kris and his younger sidekick terrorized the surrounding area.  They would just walk around taking ladies’ purses and bring them to Christophe who would return them with a “Sorry” and a smile.  Over and over and over.  It got a little old for the people sitting around us, but never for the little ones.

I also read around in Matthew which was where the verse for the sermon came.  This led me to a closer look at the “Ask, seek, knock” verse.  I also read another passage which provided some more food for thought following last week’s reflections.  Jesus says that God will separate us into sheep and goats based on whether we feed the hungry and clothe the sick.  Then he will invite those who have fed the hungry and clothed the sick to inherit the kingdom that has been prepared for them.  Pretty enlightening on last week’s topic for philosophizing, and pretty sobering when I reflect on my own life.