Haiti

On coming back from Haiti, my response to everyone's query of "How was it?"was "Intense." It wasn't just me though; other classmates on the same trip also used "intense" to describe their experience. In my case, I think this reflects the fact that I still haven't quite processed the country and our work there even after two and a half months.

As part of a class on sustainable development, forestry and public health, we went to Haiti to work on short-term discrete projects in coordination with Hopital Albert Schweitzer in the community of Deschappelles. According to their very own website, "Hôpital Albert Schweitzer Haiti (HAS) serves as a referral hospital for more than 345,000 impoverished people in the Artibonite Valley of central Haiti. In addition, HAS provides community-based primary medical care and development programs. An integrated rural health system, HAS is a model for health care facilities in developing countries around the world." Interestingly it was also founded by the Mellon family (yes those Mellons). In 1956, Larry Mellon and his family opened the doors to the hospital in an abandoned Standard Fruit banana plantation.  They named it after Albert Schweitzer who "considered his work as a medical missionary in Africa to be his response to Jesus' call to become "fishers of men" but also as a small recompense for the historic guilt of European colonizers" (or so Wikipedia says). During the whole trip I struggled with these ideas of development theory and neocolonialism and the very specific and painful history of Haiti in regards to these issues so the funding, location, and naming of the hospital just added a whole new layer of irony to this discomfort.

I hesitate to discuss this too too much because this is a public forum, as a white Yalie visiting Haiti I most definitely fell into this paradigm of voluntourism, and we were invited guests of the hospital. Despite any personal philosophical conflict that I may have, the hospital does wonderful work in the community. They have a prosthetics clinic that designed a knee specifically for the hilly Haitian terrain, they support community health workers and staff rural clinics, build wells and most importantly (to me) plant trees!

My small part in this work was to observe the reforestation program, interview stakeholders (technicians, staff, community members) and help the administration evaluate their program, its goals and their progress towards those goals.  So here comes ten days of walking, talking, sweating, eating, waiting, and wondering why the hell my ankles are swollen...

Things I still love, hate, and am amused by in Bolivia.

Once upon a time I wrote a list about all the things I loved and hated and was amused by in Bolivia. Upon my recent return I was struck by things I had forgotten about, never wrote about, or was glad to see still exasperated me. I wrote the list on the back of a receipt but the waiter took it.

So #1 is receipts. I had forgotten that everything requires a receipt. Bolivians put their name and tax id so that later they can pay sales tax. I can only imagine the accounting required for such a system. Do you have to save your receipts for an entire year? I already forgot to save my boarding passes for research funding! Or are the restaurants responsible for collating all this data? They can't even serve me an overpriced Huari in under a half an hour!
2. Tight pants. For some reason, despite living in NYC where Latinos abound, I forgot about the importance of tight pants and hair gel. I'm staying in a hostel for now so I went out to dinner with a Brasileno staying there. After I noted that I was underdressed, he mentioned that women can't even enter a club in Sao Paulo without significant surgery. (He was commiserating so I'm pretty sure I'm not offended.)
3. During the same outing I commented wistfully, "There's never any pepper in this country."
4. Mokochinchi! OMG I am super excited about dehydrated peaches soaked in water with at least a kilo of sugar! All street foods really! And soup!
5. But I forgot how gross the rice is. And that there is nothing vegetarian.
6. The constant need for spare change. Boy do I miss metro cards....and  public transportation in general because
7. I forgot how confusing the micros are, and how personal space and courtesy do not exist on them. Yesterday I was basically told to push my way through to the door (by people I was pushing through).
8. And although it rains almost every day everyone seems surprised and no one has an umbrella.

So anyway I'm back in the Oblivs, working with an organization to measure carbon stocks in a Guarani community that is struggling to make money off of sportfishing and which may eventually be flooded by dam construction rendering all my work moot. I've already lost one of my favorite earrings, my Spanish is back at a level of "suck," and my heels aren't high enough but I still find myself smiling broadly to back in this weird and wonderful country.