Sunday

She is out here again, the old woman in her blue kerchief, stooping and gathering. The sound of her harvest snicking, like grass cropped by a horse. Pull and break, pull and break. In fact, it looks like grass, thick blades of it and she fills her arms and then moves down the red path to the next hunch of foliage, drops her bundle of leaves and begins again. This time I see great roots come up with the leaves, like potato or yam. I need to find out – but I do not speak Creole and I am way up here on my roof and she is already disappearing along the path in that steady Haitian tempo.



A swaybacked donkey with white brows and watery dark eyes, croaks in the field below. He has seen me on the roof or he is talking to the two goats tethered nearby or he his lamenting the meager shrubbery he is forced to graze. In the distance, men are yelling at each other and I cannot tell if it is an argument or just lively conversation. Next time…next time, I will have learned some Creole!


Today we go to church, which is a long affair here. Prayer begins at eight and the service begins at nine. I am loathe to leave.


All around me roosters crow, birds offer their melodies, squeak and talk as though in competition. This air is unbelievably still and humid but the mango leaves on the ground are always rustling.


Because it is Sunday, the women do not sweep the dirt in the campus. They arrive at church in their very best clothes and you would not know how poor they are except for an odd assemblage of their apparel or the worn evidence on their outdated shoes. Most of the young men and women are stylishly dressed in what was may be just last year’s style. I still cannot get over how they do this in their dirty environment. I look woefully at my smudgy trousers and bespattered blouse. I am down right atrocious in comparison.


I have yet to go for a run here. I did not really think that I would be able to but hope springs eternal. It is very hot and there is little time, however. I have entertained the idea of running up and down the path from the back of the property to the front but the security guards and the men working on the wall would think me daft. They already do I fear, stopping their work to watch me quizzically as I take pictures of the nails in their buckets, a hammer on a bench, a dilapidated desk holding rain water in the bowl of it’s warped laminate.


Later I did finally succumb to the desire to run, because it was Sunday we were blessed with free time but mine was only filled with melancholy. I felt so discouraged that I would never be able to convey the magnitude of the situation here. I convinced Jessie that we should run down to the beach where some of the medical team was swimming. It was quite hot but she agreed. I cannot tell you the surprise that flashed across the faces of those we came upon. They shouted many things and I found I could run faster. Suddenly we were going past our goat farm property where some very poor families live and where we also host a tent city, and yelling and laughing children surrounded us. They grabbed at us and jeered at us, I think Jessie was quite anxious, but I assured her that they just wanted to play, they wanted to run with us. Therefore, I motioned for them and they did, laughing and grabbing. I wanted to draw them all into my arms and make promises about tomorrow but I just wooped and giggled with them and gave them the thumbs up for their lively, athletic effort.


It was so fabulous to run. Heavenly. Up until then I had had to satisfy the need to exercise with sit-ups, push-ups and running repeats on the stairs to the roof. Once on the roof I did squats and lifts with a cinder block. I can only imagine what the passing Haitians thought of the crazy white woman on the roof.


Right now, I have only early morning critters as company. A massive hunched up rat is scuttling and leaping in the thin light around the cinder blocks below me. I hate rats. The spider the size of my hand that we found in our room last night does not bother me the way this rat does. I am trying to remember exactly where it was that the shotguns we purchased after the earthquake for security (and have not had to use) are stored. 


That is another issue that I have not been able to sort out yet. Security does not seem worse in that we have more freedom to go into town than last time I was here but the general sense inside the walls holds uncertainty. Not that I feel I am in danger but perhaps it’s the lingering disarray since the earthquake, that nothing seems linear or certain and that something “mal” could happen at any moment. Walking through the town, through the penetrating eyes, you are never really certain who hates us, who sees our presence as good and who are just indifferent.