Part II
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.
