3

Hi

I though you might need some bedtime reading - assuming you have insomnia, and you have already read all the cans of bug spray - so I thought I'd send you another of what my colleague has dubbed "Mac's Missives from Haiti".

Enjoy - or delete now while you still have a chance . . .

Keep your head down

Mac

A Trip to the Beach

What could be more fun than a relaxing trip to the beach? A little sun to soak up and refreshing seawater to soak in, snorkeling or kayaking on a calm sea. Tropical breezes and waiters to fetch your drink while you lounge in a reclining chair; reading, watching the women in their bikinis - mostly IN their bikinis - or strolling the beach while a band plays local music . . .

Yes that was my Sunday at the Beach in Haiti - tranquil, picaresque, sublime. Now, that was AT the beach. Getting to the beach, well . . .

Like with all things in Haiti for the official Americans, a trip to the beach is first and foremost an exercise in security. And for travel, that means convoys. Originally we were supposed to be scattered among the APC's (armored personnel carriers mounting .30 and .50 caliber machine guns) of MINUSTAH (the UN troops here) who go regularly to the beach - which some critics say explains there inability to make progress with their mission. I say young people need to frolic once in awhile - especially the Brazilians: they are serious frolickers. I mean the Marines partied when they were here (you risk serious injury if you describe Marines as “frolicking”) - they also kicked butt, but they partied. We just have to get the kids from MINUSTAH to come to grips with the “kick butt” part of the equation . . . By the by the Haitian word for UN troops loosely translates as "little boys with big rifles who are good for nothing but chasing after grown women with little guns . . ."

I'm not sure what that means . . .

Anyway, at the last minute MINUSTAH cancelled because of some shooting - which they needed to respond to, or go back to their barracks because of, I'm not sure which. So we were guarded by our own security for the trip and that meant LAVs (light armored vehicles) and a chase car with armed guards. So many people signed up for the trip (something to do with five months stranded in the capital . . . ) however, that they had to allow people to bring their own vehicles, because there weren't enough LAVs. Which makes me wonder why we needed any . . . Well, I sat in the front of the lead LAV and so I was “point”, and after forming up at the CG's house we headed off.”- YO!

Sorry. The beach is twenty miles north of PAP and it took us just over two hours to get there. The first hour was getting out of PAP . . .

Port Au Prince is a city of narrow roads filled with drivers who think they are on boulevards. The concept of lanes does not exist and the idea that driving in the oncoming lane is bad is still in its infancy. There are one or two roads - the Airport road especially - that have dividers down the middle to separate the oncoming traffic from the outgoing. These dividers are - for the most part -respected. The Airport road always gives the newcomer three or four minutes of false hope: “Oh this isn't so bad; it's not that different from - OH MY GOD!” You get used to these elements fairly quickly, as well as the lack of stop signs, traffic lights, breakdown lanes (people always repair their cars where they stopped - literally in the middle of the road - last month there was a hearse on blocks in the middle of the street in front of the Consular Section for three days while they waited for parts, mostly because as they replaced one part, they would discover that someone else had stolen another part during the night . . . ).

It takes a little longer to get used to the intersections here. The word for intersection in French is “carrefour” which I would always get confused in French class at FSI with “couchemar” which means nightmare - now I know why. If you have no stop signs, traffic lights or traffic cops, an intersection is just a demolition derby without the prize money. The only right of way that is practiced here is “MY” right of way. Not an exercise for the timid - or for the sane for that matter - negotiating a PAP intersection should qualify you for combat pay. Surviving it should qualify you for a pension. To add to the fun, PAP has several intersections that are what we in New England call “rotaries” and the Brits call “roundabouts”, and in DC they are called “circles”. Here they are bad acid trips without the security violation. And like all good acid trips you have color, terror and euphoria. Colors range from the stark white of UN vehicles forcing there way through as if they were the only important people on the road - well they DO have the biggest guns, to the jet black of the HNP (Haitian National Police), riding in armored jeeps - sirens wailing - with M16's and sporting ski masks, sunglasses and Kevlar body armor and helmets (on their way to an arrest - hopefully not in one of the slums - funny thing how many of those arrests lead to the death of the prisoner), to the psychedelic paint schemes of the Tap-Taps (our local buses - converted pickups). Terror comes in the form of the driving itself: In a normal intersection you have people coming at you from four directions: right, left, front, and behind. In one of these babies they come from all points of the compass - I swear they sometimes drop from the sky. And that's just the cars. Having no sidewalks, the roads are also the thoroughfares for pedestrians, animals - both driven and wandering, bicyclists, vendors pushing carts and pounding on your window to get you to buy, and the beggars - many horribly maimed (can you be prettily maimed?) pounding on your window demanding alms. In addition to those without limbs, etc, there are the elephantiasis victims - an unusually high rate here.

Then there are the roads themselves. It is a myth that there are no paved roads in Haiti. There are many paved roads. What there is not is more than _ mile of uninterrupted paving. And that is in the countryside. In PAP it only lasts for a few blocks. For some reason, there are holes in the road here. There are also collapsed bridges, piles of stone in the middle of streets and the occasional burning tire protest - usually the tire is not around someone's neck, usually - local color with its own unique odor. But I digress. Holes. Little holes, big holes, round holes, square holes. Not caused by natural phenomena, these holes are purposeful. Whether as a means to slow traffic, or to obtain free building materials, they appear in unlikely places forcing you to slow (or screech) to a halt and gently roll around (or through) them if there is traffic or slalom around them on an empty stretch. Sometimes there is no warning that there is a hole, and sometimes there is a little Haitian Traffic Cone to warn you of impending danger. By Haitian Traffic Cone I mean a piece of the undercarriage of a vehicle (universal joint, exhaust system, etc.) - presumably the last one NOT to see the hole . . . Once out of PAP, in addition to the holes, there are also periodic speed bumps also occasionally sporting warnings. Some of these are close to habitation and were built to protect the villages from speeders. Some are in the middle of nowhere and seem mostly a job-security device for the auto repair shops.

Now, remember we did this in a convoy. Navigating one car in such conditions is tricky. Keeping in formation was - as driving goes - Nobel Prize-esque (No self-serving here - I was a passenger, I doubt I could have done it in my Jeep - I'd have killed somebody . . . ). Did I mention that for the first five miles of “National Highway #1” - our route to the beach from the airport onwards - they were “widening and repaving” it. So far, they have only stripped off the old paving and pushed a few houses and shops off their foundations. Presumably they are waiting for funds to finish the job. Think dust. This is the dry season, and it is the driest on record. Couple that with driving on crushed stone - the only road-building material until the final coat - and we had a hard enough time seeing each other let alone avoiding the interlopers who repeatedly tried (and often succeeded) to break us up.

I once road an old mining trail in California in a buckboard wagon with wooden springs for suspension. I always attributed the fact that only one of my kidneys developed to that little excursion. This was worse. I have good teeth, excellent teeth. I open beer bottles with my teeth without problems. After that bit of road, my teeth hurt for the first time since someone hit me in the mouth with a chair. When I commented to our driver that the road was a little rough, he said: “It's good for the digestion.” I guess he was right, when we reached our destination everyone had to go to the bathroom. Well, almost everyone, two colleagues brought their toddlers along and they took care of that DURING the ride. I'm glad I was sitting up front . . .

As for euphoria, that came when we exited our last bit of “under reconstruction,” and finally reached the paving north of PAP, miraculously still in formation. The rest of the trip was relatively uneventful. Having to slow down every _ mile was not fun. But the traffic was almost nonexistent outside the capital. The only ironic thing was after surviving all the challenges of driving out of PAP; we had a little incident almost at the end of our journey. There was a little speed bump (little means six inches high), but the complicating factor was it was right in front of the Jordanian MINUSTAH barracks. Evidently the Armed Guards in the chase car must have been rubbernecking the Jordanians because they slammed into one of my colleague's car as he was slowed to handle the speed bump, causing HIM to smack into the car of an NGO, two of whose members decided to accompany us. Nobody was hurt, but it made me feel good to know how alert our “security” was. It also provided the Jordanians some entertainment - so it wasn't all bad.

The scenery was worth all the difficulties of the trip. Having the chance to see a part of Haiti OTHER than PAP was worth almost anything for me. Having said that, it was a very sobering ride. I know I have used this reference before, but my language skills are insufficient to do justice to what I saw other than to say that: Yeats said of Ireland that, because of its history and the impact of that history on its land and people that it had “a terrible beauty”. That is my reaction to Haiti in a nutshell. Naked mountains of white and grey rock, brown and yellow grass interspersed with brown bushes rose up on our right. The highway ran along the flat at the foot of these mountains. We were between a few hundred yards and a mile from the sea that begins as a milky turquoise and slowly becomes almost sapphire-blue. The mountains seemed to be recovering from a volcanic eruption, nuclear blast or other disaster. The sea seemed out of place - such color next to such defeated drabness. Here, the term “deforestation” stops being a policy item. The phonetic similarity between deforestation, devastation, and desolation is almost a cruel joke as you drive along and see emptiness. Actually it is worse than that - you don't see emptiness like a wilderness preserved as a desert biosphere; you see abandoned farmhouses every few hundred yards. Or inhabited ones with people who, if not for assistance from the UN, would be literally starving to death because they cannot grow anything. Most of the others have fled to PAP looking for work - which is why that city has gone from 250,000 in 1990 to 2.5 million today.

Because of the juxtaposition of barren mountains and the sea, I was reminded of Baja in Mexico. The difference of course is that Baja has always been dry. Haiti's arid, skeletal hills are man made. This place used to be an Eden of green and wet. Columbus described it as the most beautiful island he'd seen. Every so often, during our trip, we would come to a glimpse of the old, lush, verdant Haiti. We would approach a settlement and it would be completely green with rice, sugar cane, and mango, banana, and plantain trees. Palm trees, cacti, aloe and various other growth would be everywhere, yet it would only last for a mile or less. Each of these little oases was fed by a little stream that even though there has been no rain since Christmas, was still running down from the barren mountains. If it was too far to carry the water from the stream, there would be no growth and the brown and yellow of un-irrigated land would return. It was obvious that any attempt to reverse THIS ecological damage would be massive and long term. I realized no one would pay for that, even if it could be done.

So with such heavy thoughts cheering me up, we reached our destination and it was everything any tropical resort is supposed to be: beautiful, restful, almost sinfully luxurious. And except for the waiters who tried to cheat us - after we over-tipped them, and the “all-inclusive” deal that wasn't, and the “sandy” beach that was only sandy OUT of the water, rock and dead coral IN the water, and the local artisans that mobbed us as we were leaving, and the terrible sunburn I got (my fault entirely), except for those little things, it was sublime. Did I mention the bikinis?

P.S. One of our MD's was kidnapped today (he's on our panel that determines the medical status of IV applicants). The fun just keeps on coming!

Mac