Summer 2007

I’ve been drinking a lot less water since I’ve been here in Port-de-Paix without access to my cooler of Gadyen-Dlo-treated water. I’ve been feeling a little dehydrated, so today I decided to do something about that.

I suppose knowing things about water in Haiti helped the situation, but in some ways it made things more difficult. For the first day, Blond and I just purchased bottled water at the restaurant on the ground floor of the hotel. But the clean water economist in me couldn’t help but think, “you know, if I wanted to supply an average-sized Haitian family with safe water, buying individual bottles of water for all of their drinking needs could cost me over $10,000 in a year.” (Which, ironically, would probably exceed my average annual income as a graduate student by a greater amount than it would for a lot of families living around the city here). Even though each bottle still cost around $0.40, that is still much more expensive than other options which still provide safe water, so it just didn’t make sense to me keep doing this. (Kind of like purchasing bottled water in the US instead of drinking tap water…but anyways…).

I suppose that one of my other options would have been to chlorinate water like I have been doing most of the summer. But this would have required breaking into the samples of various chlorine-based water treatment products that I have been collecting this trip with the intent of bringing them back home in good condition to keep and/or test. And the microbiologist in me couldn’t help but think about the microorganisms that chlorine does not kill, much more so when the water I would treat comes from the municipal system of the city of Port-de-Paix rather than from the sky.

So I went looking to buy some Culligan water (or Koo-lee-gun as they say here). The first two shops in which I stopped only sold individual bottles rather than the 5-gallon tanks for which I was looking. As soon as I turned back, thinking that I would just ask the Alexanders rather than go on a moto ride in search of water, I saw a big Culligan truck in the middle of the street that I had just walked down. I must have walked right past it but I’m not sure how.

It looked like they were collecting people’s empty tanks to refill at the factory and bring back, but I asked if they had any full tanks I could buy. The first guy said yes but quoted me a price that I took to be much higher than the figures I had collected for 5-gallon Culligan tanks. The clean water economist in me wouldn’t let me accept the price so I asked him if he could give it to me for less.

He went to get the “boss.” When the boss returned the first question he asked was whether I spoke Kreyol. Feeling more confident talking about water and prices of water than other subjects in Kreyol and hoping that speaking Kreyol would increase my chances of successful haggling, I went with “yes.” The boss immediately quoted me nearly half of what the first guy had quoted me. The new price was roughly $5 for a 5-gallon tank, so I agreed and walked back to the hotel with my purchase in hands (not on my head, so I can’t claim to have gotten the full urban Haitian water experience).

It turns out that my memory of the price of a 5-gallon Culligan container wasn’t quite accurate, and the first guy’s price was actually pretty reasonable. So either Culligan is cheaper here than it is in the other places I’ve asked or they give price breaks to blans who speak Kreyol, which I find rather hard to believe.

I have had to make some decisions about sanitation too. The hotel rooms have flush toilets, but the tank on mine wasn’t refilling after a flush. After some investigation I realized I had two options. The first was just to open the valve that allowed water into the tank, but the downside of this option (and probably the reason it was shut off when I arrived) is that it leaks water onto the floor when it is open. The other option was to fill up the garbage can with water from the shower to pour into the tank. I have normally been going with option 2, unless I’m not willing to wait for the bucket to fill up but know that I’ll be around to shut off the valve when the tank is full.

The water supply to the shower intrigued me too. Every place I’ve stayed in Haiti has hot and cold knobs at the sinks and showers, but this is the first place I’ve stayed where they actually do different things when you open them. The two types of water that come out of the 1/2 inch PVC pipe that sticks out of the wall are probably better labeled “slightly-warmer-than-lukewarm” and “slightly-cooler-than-lukewarm” rather than “hot” and “cold,” but nonetheless I was surprised to find a difference. Given the rest of this hotel, I find it hard to believe that they invested in a hot water heater or a water cooler. My suspicion is that the two knobs are hooked up to different tanks, one in the shade and one in the sun, but I’m not really sure. I kind of want to test my hypothesis by taking showers at different times in the day and comparing the relative temperatures of the “hot” and “cold” water.

Here starts the second journey of my summer in Haiti. Or through Haiti, I should say.

The first stop is Les Cayes where we are starting a program to help students start water treatment businesses. I remember coming here in January and thinking that the accommodations and everything were pretty decent for working in Haiti. Now that I have another Haiti experience with which to compare, I feel like the conditions are luxurious. I have electricity whenever I want it, three fans in my bedroom, and ice in drinks that can be consumed without waiting 30 minutes for the chlorine to take effect. At least these things make me feel better about the money I’m spending to stay here.

At breakfast the owner of the guest house told me about the upcoming party in Les Cayes. Apparently Haitians from all over the country and the US come here for a huge beach festival. I’m just going to miss it as the festivities don’t officially start until this weekend, when I’ll be heading to the north. The owner explained all of this and then said that Christians shouldn’t go there because of the things that people do there.

So I went this afternoon. Bernard, my translator who works for World Concern, our partner Christian organization, kept asking me if I wanted him to take me the beach to see the preparations for the party. He seemed to really want to go, so after awhile of having him work overtime and drive me around to track down water treatment products, I agreed to go.

There were lots of people preparing shops and building makeshift restaurants on or near the beach in preparation for the weekend. The beach was quite tropical looking if you ignored the grey skies and grey water. As I headed out into the water, a couple people kept asking me the same question which I didn’t understand. I could tell they were semi-joking but sensed that it probably wasn’t a wholesome question, so I just kind of nodded no. When Bernard came out he explained that they were asking if I wanted a girl to take out to the ocean with me. This made sense as I actually had noticed that I was just about the only male in the water who wasn’t clinging to a girl. Bernard was good enough to explain this to me but his presence didn’t do anything to help the mathematics of the situation as he even had a girl to cling to, albeit his 5-year old daughter that he had brought along for the trip.

One of the other big differences that I noticed from my experience during the first half of the summer was the temperature, which had to have been in the 70s. It felt even cooler when the breeze was hitting you while riding a moto at speeds that the drivers in the north only dream of given the lack of paved roads and large bikes.

After eating dinner by myself, the other guest at the guest house returned and sat down to talk. He is a Venezuelan missionary who works in a number of countries, one of them being Haiti. We ended up talking for nearly 2 hours. My ears and brain felt like it was a lot more than that and he thought that I understood a lot more than I actually did, but I enjoyed every minute of it. Our conversation ranged from prices of gas in our respective countries to what we want to be when we grow up to what public health is.

Eventually our conversation turned to baseball, one of the easiest things for me to talk about in Spanish (and English for that matter). How could I not talk beisbol with someone who is returning in several days to San Pedro de Macoris, the City of Shortstops? (Something which I must say made me slightly jealous). We traded stories about how his favorite team is from my hometown and mine is not. Apparently Dave Parker, an old Pirate, played in the Venezuelan league, which turned him into a Pirates fan for life. I followed this with the story of what turned me away from being a Pirate fan for life when I was 2 years old. We each pulled out names from back in the day, mine being favorite Mets and his being favorite Venezuelans. We found common ground in our love of Omar Vizquel and our sadness that Barry Bonds was the one to break the homerun record.