Some quick sketches - Haitian Old Year

and Haitian New Year...

MERRY CHRISTMAS

Fotos

Those Haitian smiles look out from my photo album

On mule-back, next to thatched huts, coming down steep banks where there are no roads,

Wearing bright school uniforms or T-shirts with strange slogans (who knows, donated by Minnesotans...)

Stirring coffee beans in an old tin over the fire, planting yams with a heavy hoe and machete,

Walking with huge baskets on heads, half-naked children trotting behind...

Under the breadfruit trees or over the bare heights with white rocks like the bones of dinosaurs.

The school with its field of maize and beans

Queues at the school, the clinic, at the churches,

Crowds at the bus stop, the market, wherever anything new happens -

And I remember (here in my house full of books,

lights that turn on all day and night,

running water from six different taps,

an oven that could feed half a village) -

how those smiles are always there without any of this -

even when the child's belly cramps from hunger

and the morning mist chills with no breakfast

and the houses are damp from three days constant rain

and there are no dry clothes, no spare clothes at all,

while the bean seedlings wash away in the fields

and despair hovers barely out of sight

maybe as close as next week.

There are no books to distract you there

How few could even read them.

There is no power for lights, no money to buy a stove

Water comes from a gully or a spring

Laboriously by bucket - gutters are rare and cisterns too...

Food is whatever your family grew -

Eat when you can, whenever there is any...

Going to school is a privilege and an honor, easily lost -

A clinic is a miracle Heaven-sent,

though it may have no medicine to give this month or next -

The city is as almost as far away as America.

Finally!

The Omega VI Mill is in Timo's hands (and out of Customs)... so trials can begin and it's off to the village soon! Seemed like a long long time from here... but at one point I was trying to raise enough money by Xmas so at least we beat that! Well and truly!

Update - November

We're still waiting for the shipment of the Omega VI Mill to Port au Prince from Miami, bumped twice for medical priority shipments and now lost in transit, a second one is en route ...  but that gives time to finish translating the documents for it's use and maintenance, and to collect the materials to build the pedal-powered framework (much more efficient than the hand-crank)... 
Here in the "West" or First World it's hard to appreciate how very long it can take to get things done in Haiti - apart from getting things delivered there in the first place! Imagine if you had a mobile telephone that works most days, but no fixed phones in most of your country, almost all paperwork is done by hand in ledgers (but any official form must be typed and have stamps, seals, multiple signatures, often photos - and requires a 4 or 5 hour trip to make, and then file, in a town half-way to the capital city if not in the city!). You go there by bus or riding on top of a truck, because there are only two or three private vehicles in your district. If you are lucky the market town is in walking distance and has motor-bike taxis and a public notary and maybe a shop selling basic stationery... 
Then if you need any kind of permit or license your papers may or may not be accepted, you may or may not get a receipt for them, you travel home again and wait... you have lost several days work by now and  had to stay with relatives or ride all night in a truck... pay bribes, kowtow for hours, live in hope! And you need to be one of the less than 30% of the population who can read and write... or you'll have to trust someone else to do it!
When something is donated it causes immense joy - and a great deal of extra work for a few people who are charged with implementing the donation... and it will take months before we see how it works out, have some photos of it in situ, find out if we need another or a bigger version, etc. We're just seeing the very edges of the struggle that is life in Haiti.

Vévé profile (L)
6 x 6, clayboard
$190-

Vévé face (below)

6 x 6, clayboard

$190-

Sunset
8 x 8"
watercolor on clayboard
$240-

Stovetec

Just received the new Stovetec 2 door charcoal / wood burning rocket stove ( see one door version in my stove slide show) to test! Stovetec has given it to me free in exchange for my translation of their manuals into French, and then into Haitian creole with a great deal of help from Timo and friends in Haiti!
It will be really interesting to do some cooking with the dead branches that are all over my land here in STX and local charcoal similar to that made in Haiti. Then on my next trip I can demo it there like the first one, and hope it will also inspire people to use rocket stove principles -like in the school and cob stoves we've built, saving time & fuel, and causing much less pollution, danger, ill-health from smoke, and deforestation!

Mandy's Cards - receive 2 with $25 or more donation to Haiti fund.

Omega VI Mill.

I'm currently raising money to send a BURR MILL to Au Centre Village in November! This is a kind of grinder that can be used to husk coffee, grind coffee, grind maize, make flour from dried breadfruit and other crops, and make peanut butter and other pastes! It is hand powered and I am also sending the metal parts for a pedal-powered mounting that can be built in the village (it could even be generator powered in  the future).

The villagers are walking an hour each way to the market town to have their crops milled, carried in sacks on their heads, and of course they have to pay the miller. The Burr Mill will save them the journey and the percentage of the crop they give to the mill will go to feed the 170 schoolchildren their lunches (often their only proper meal), and to purchase additional schoolbooks.
The mill is made by a small non-profit specializing in compatible technologies for the Third World, is very simple and robust, in use in 20 countries, and costs $350. The pedal kit and shipping to Miami will cost another $100, and the normally very difficult and expensive shipping from there to Port au Prince, Haiti, is partly donated by a humanitarian pilot! Customs fees and transportation to the village are also being donated. 
IF YOU CAN HELP, PLEASE CONTACT ME - THIS DEVICE CAN SAVE LIVES, INCREASE SELF SUFFICIENCY AND FAMILY INCOMES, AND HELP Haiti Community Support's LA RENAISSANCE SCHOOL!
Donors of over $25 will receive a set of Mandy's beautiful West Indian watercolor portrait cards. 
100% raised today (22 OCT 09)! Next one ALREADY 50%  FUNDED... then maybe a solar pump?

Vévé Dream - watercolor 12 x 18 $700

Poem on leaving

Long before the red mud staining the soles of my feet is gone,

Days before I've eaten the last great flat circle of cassava bread you gave me,

Even while I still have that sweet ache inside -

I'm back in the concrete jungle.

Nobody here says hello in the street

No smell of coffee roasting and burnt sugar tablette.

No hibiscus hedges along footpaths

No chickens underfoot.

No tidy schoolchildren hurry past in neat gingham uniforms

All the children here, so few compared to Haiti, are captive in cars,

Whisked away, out of sight into a life of alien electronics.

There is no trash here, no crowding,

If there are slums they are far away

No music in the streets, no-one dances going by.

Almost everyone has enough or too much of everything

Taking no joy in it - we don't enjoy plenty if we never knew the lack.

I'll keep you alive in my mind, and Haiti -

So that I don't forget how little I need,

How much I can give from the surplus

Not only material things but what  I gain

In knowing the broader world but seeking the simpler.

Ti Reve (watercolour/ink on clayboard) 10 x 10 $400-

Vévé Girl 12 x 14 ink $250

All sketches available - 25% of price supplies needed equipment in Haiti. 

Endless turned earth where the yams are planted each to its own dip in the red ground, each with it's supporting pole like a soldier, there is strength in numbers but also the voracity of locusts.

Subsistence - kay where the reddish children, hair in twists yellowing at the tips, stand bunched in doorways, one for each year of a farmer's married life.

Patience - the mule hobbled in another century.

Nothing here was made in a factory at first glance, except the plastic baubles in the little girls' hair and the father's broken sandals.

The children are too shy to say "Bon Swa" but as we go down hill a small voice from behind the piled rock fence calls "Blan, blan" and a hand waves from the obscurity of the mud and thatch house. Twenty metres square perhaps, and the only chair is child-sized - here no-one has ever had enough.

kay - house

bon swa - bonsoir

blan - white or foreign person

Heavy Rain in May

Inside the house is as dark as at five in the morning, with the same infrequent squawks of chickens and the odd shout from the road, almost no-one is out. All day the nieces lie huddled under the covers, sleeping or murmuring on their cell-phones. An odor of kerosene pervades the corridor, it was used to light the charcoal fire - there is a big plate of rice and some boiled cabbage at noon. There may be something else before dark, or maybe not. The first day of rain everyone ate more to ward off the chill, now they are too bored even to cook or eat. All the clothes are damp, and the walls sweaty to the touch. 

Poultry, cats and small boys huddle disconsolate on the gallery. The spare buckets and pans are up in the roof-space, catching drips, but the wind shakes the house enough that coffee beans are dislodged from between the rough-sawn ceiling boards, they may have been there for years, this house was for a long time a grocery store and coffee depot.

Outside a low cloud descends, from time to time, and becomes thin mist. The ground is sodden but the paths no longer slippery with red mud, since only the stones remain. 

The occasional house has a small gathering on the porch, most are shuttered until better weather. Nobody came from the market today or brought the bread in a big basket on his head, nobody sang as they usually do. 

There was a hiatus, when it looked like clearing, and we were briefly animated, then more rain and the torpor of chilled reptiles used to the sun.

Mme Bob stirs herself to make a hot dish of black beans, very soupy with the heaviest dumplings in the world! I give the eldest niece, who is citified and bored, an English lesson - concerning jobs, introductions, and the placement of objects... above, behind, etc.  The rain is so loud on the tin roof and her intonations so different that I cannot always tell if she is repeating what I've said. 

The domino game on the gallery is now in it's eighth hour, with mostly the same players though they circulate a little.

There is no more kerosene when the lamp runs out, and there hasn't been cooking gas for days. Every chair supports a wet towel or shirt. Piles of small black beans wait to be sifted free of chaff and dust - it cannot be done in the rain - from a flat woven grass tray one shakes and flicks away from the body, out in the garden.

Sometimes the rain is so loud I can't distinguish French from Creole, or maybe the distinction is blurring?

I was thinking what a peaceful village this is... in spite of the weather, the boredom, the availability of the clairin (local high-proof rum) - there are no fights, no arguments at the dominoes, no shouting.... it has rained about 20 inches in three days and all the roads are washed out, including the half-built lifeline to the outside world everyone has carried rocks to, for the last three weeks. Down on the coast people are swept away and drowned in the floods, we hear via the tinny radio and a few phone calls.

Everyone is wearing everyone else's clothes to keep warm, just as they find them - I have Timo's football jacket, he has his mother's floppy blue felt gardening hat on, the young men have T-shirts tied round their heads like banditos, and Clairyanne, the youngest niece, goes all day under a red towel like a statue of the Virgin.

It is three days outside of life for us, but in other houses in the village a grandmother living alone with a small child must go out and find another yam to boil, keeping the fire alight all the time as there are no matches, a man has spoken to no-one but his toddler and the memory of his dead wife so far this week, a family are coughing together in a heap of damp rags as their mud and field-stone walls dissolve visibly below the holes in the tin roof.

The LOW TECH STOVES slideshow shows the main stages of building several types of simple stove during my two trips... Note: click on slideshows to view full size on Picasaweb!

The stoves cost virtually nothing to build, can be adapted to  different sizes of kitchen/family, using 60% less fuel they save biomass eg. wood, charcoal, dried maize cobs, save collection time, and distance travelled in search of fuel. (This can be a safety issue for women and children e.g. in Somalia where they are frequently attacked outside refugee camps). They use smaller fuels - meaning dead and fallen branches rather than cutting whole trees. These stoves make less smoke and particulates saving people's lungs and polluting the air less. They cook hotter and faster than open fires. They are safer - fewer women and children are burned as the fire is enclosed. The cob rocket stoves are even portable.

It was wonderful to be able to go back, make improvements, try the stoves out, exchange recipes, see them in use and help ensure acceptance of most of the innovations. Let's hope the cob stoves are now dry and being tried out!

Madame Clem

Staying with Madame Clem.

The wisdom of 84 years close to the soil surrounds her, though she is almost never still, the first to rise in the morning, she spends her day cooking, tending the banana-grove, a small bean crop, her herbs, missing nothing that happens in this household of at least 16 people.  Probably not a lot escapes her in the district of several thousand... with nine children, and more grandchildren and great-grandchildren than bear counting, she still has time for the most distant cousin, the stray foreigner, the kitten venturing for the first time from next door. 

Her face is deeply creased but not wrinkled, her knuckle-joints are scarcely more enlarged than someone of 60; she stands up from her ten-inch-high cooking chair with the ease of a young woman, and goes down from the gallery at the front of the house with alternate feet, never hesitating and placing both feet on a step as the old usually do. She loves a new hat or shirt and twirls it like a girl, still tall, still a queen. What burned away in eighty cycles of this troubled earth left her the peaceful strength of ages  - was she born one of the wise ones? Will I achieve the same in any measure?

We sat, not speaking much, for a while in her smoke-filled wattle-and-daub outside-kitchen, I on the old log by the door where half the village stops, from dawn to dusk, for advice or tea or left-overs. She shifts a pot of pois-noirs, the soupy black bean dish that is almost  the daily menu, and stirs coffee beans as they cool in the broken pot she has just used to roast them, tilted on it's side so none are lost through the hole in the bottom. The chicken coop is behind the fire, where the hens roost at night, otherwise this room contains some loose firewood, some bark and shavings in a box the hens also roost in, a few spare stones to prop the basket she carries out from the house daily, with her pots, a knife, some coarse rock salt... There is the small chair and the "pilon" mortar and pestle for the coffee  and cocoa, and of course the three-stone fire with the three logs that are pushed inwards to the centre  as they burn. It's only semi-light despite the open spaces at the tops of the walls and the wavering shafts of sun where there are holes in the tin roof. 

When someone called my name I stood up to go out  - Mme Clem waved to me to wait, and lifted a broken pot from an old shelf, handing me a just-layed white egg from behind it, calling me "sister" as she pushed me gently out the door. Even I, virtually a professional expatriate, am overcome for a minute with the feeling of being at home... This is the centre of the family, the village, the heart.

"Batte-pois"

September 2009 -

The four young men on the old concrete threshing floor beat black beans from their pods with sticks they cut from a tree nearby, it could be a hundred years ago but for the style of their shorts and the cheap plastic sandals. Their shirts off, they glisten at first then the dust of the threshing covers them evenly, without changing the intensity of the blackness that the strong sunlight gives them, though some are more red-hued than others. This coffee drying area is also used for the other crops, the roofed area with the husking machine at one end gives shade - there is the usual audience of an old man, someone's pretty young girlfriend - already pregnant - a stray toddler in a shirt and nothing else, small boys walking by with various things on their heads, a rooster hangs by its feet from a string in one child's hand. One older woman, who arrived with a flat round basket a yard across on her head, attends and keeps an eye on the quantity of beans while sweeping with a bunch of leafy twigs, her own children have a stake in this.

The beans are called pois noirs, or pwa nwa - most everyone eats about half a cup a day of them here, when they can get them, that would make the amount just threshed - in the hot sun by two teams of four men, and other helpers to sweep the beans and pods into piles, remove the pods by carrying them away in huge piles on an old blanket, bag in old rice sacks, and carry away to storage - serve a very small family for a year. But many people here have six to ten children... and these particular beans were from a very large field...

Pwa nwa are served in crushed boiled maize mush, or in rice, or as a sauce, as a thin soup with yams and green bananas in it... they are a pleasant mild tasting bean, not as insipid as the other local varieties.

Coming from the north I somehow have never thought of beans as needing to be threshed, or even as a daily food... How they get into those plastic one kilo bags in the supermarket never crosses our minds. Here, families who cannot pay the annual school fees of 250 Gourdes, or about $8 US, can contribute two one-gallon measures of beans (two marmites, or cooking-pots full) to the school lunch program... still a hardship for some.

Poem in Three Languages

Poem in three languages:

(1)

I'd like to stay here for a long time

Until I have only the scent of woodsmoke

and after bathing,

Of "Giv" soap they sell in the market in boxes

Bright green or orange with pictures of black women

Whose skin is lighter than my Englishwoman's skin.

I'd like to stay here for long enough

Babies wouldn't cry if I held them, a strange white woman -

Children wouldn't call 'blan, blan'* when I pass

People wouldn't try to feed me whatever they have

When I don't need to eat and someone else is hungry.

* 'white, white'

(2)

M' vle rete isit lontan

Mwen gen sant lafimen selman

E apre benyen, ak  savon 'Giv' yo vann nan marche a

Ti bwat savon yo vèt ou byen zoranj avek imaj yo

De negres ak po pi blan ke po mwen ki Anglez.

M' ta renmen rete isit ase lontan

Ti bebe pa tap kriyé si mwen pote yo

Timoun pa tap rele 'blan, blan' si m' pase

Tout moun pa tap eseye ban mwen twop pou manje

Memn lè m' pa bezwen manje

Epi yon lòt moun nan grangou.

(3)

Je voudrais rester ici pendant longtemps

Jusqu'a j'aie seulement le parfum de fumes de bois

Et après s'être baigner 

Du savon 'Giv' qu'ils se vendent sur le marché, petits bôites

Vert clair ou de l'orange, avec des images des femmes de coleur

Lesquelles peaux sont plus clairs que mon peau Anglais.

J'aimerais rester ici pour assez longtemps

Les bèbès ne pleureraient pas si je les tenais - une étrangère blanche

Les enfants ne crieraient pas 'blanche, blanche' quand je passe

Les gens n'essayeraient pas me donner tous qu'ils ont à manger

Quand je n'ai pas besoin, et quelqu'un d'autre a faim.

A.Thody 2009

Last day in Haiti, September 2009

Approaching the end of another adventure, we get up at 3.30, in Madame Clem's house, Au Centre village, and set off in pitch dark before 4am up into the hills to catch the bus to Port au Prince. Luckily here the mobile phones have built-in flashlights, my Maglite flash gets feeble quickly  so I trade, the villagers could do this walk in the dark, it's the twice weekly market route, and the daily work and school commute for many.

Somehow it seems quicker than usual to reach the top in the dark, or at least it comes unexpectedly for me, probably because it's cooler at night. The path is mule- and walker-width, all slippery stones that roll underfoot, between flatter muddy stretches, not as slick as feared when the rain started again briefly at 3am - it was never really hard rain yesterday and intermittent, extraordinary luck. My friends have been worrying about whether I will make it to Beaumont with them, (many other options have been discarded, taking a motorbike to another town in the opposite direction further along the bus route for instance, as that road is now too  slick for safety) - I don't really have any choice as my flight is the next day, and they are babying me as usual.

We are a group of four men and two women, three of us (Timo, myself, and Timo's nephew Blaise) going to Port au Prince, and the other three are self-appointed porters of the luggage! The men wear their "house" shorts, so that their long pants will not be splashed with mud they will put them on at Tita's house which is right where the bus stops. Once there (it only took an hour and twenty minutes in the dark, as opposed to my usual hour for the walk) I change clothes  and wash the red mud off my feet, though the stains it leaves on light skin will be there for several days. Our 'porters' take off the camouflage jackets they wore against the night chill, it's 5000 ft above sea-level here, and they are often chilled when I am relishing the coolness. They are all small except Timo, and wearing various types of ladies' flip-flop sandals  - whatever fits goes. Once it's light every sack and bag is repacked, (a great quantity of fruit, beans, maize, and cassava bread is accompanying us). The sun lights up the tops of the coconut palms opposite, and a neat little black hen with four chicks searches the verandah for crumbs from our bread rolls, we drink té sel,  a bouillon cube and some herbs infused in hot water. The hedges are entirely hibiscus bushes, and in Tita's garden five or more grapefruit (shaddeck) trees have at least a thousand ripe fruit. Timo has gone off to return the cassava-seller's basket and get onto the bus at an earlier stop in town, in case of problems. Several more young men arrive to say goodbye at 5am - almost the normal hour here and no hardship, and to get their instructions for the upcoming week, all seem to be involved in Timo's village projects. People start going past en route to the big Tuesday market. Even here in the town a boy of six or so goes by with a bundle on his head, wearing absolutely nothing but an undershirt that barely reaches his navel. No-one takes notice of course.

My knees are still shaky from the descent but this whole trip I have not fallen once, assisted by the mainly dry weather and the Landsend hiking sandals!

The bus driver had phoned us at 2.45 to say the bus had left Jeremie, 3 to 4 hours drive away, so it's expected around 6.30. There are reserved seats for us! Last time we had to do this trip by motorbike (without helmets or in one case, brakes!) for four and a half hours to meet another bus halfway to the capital, the Jeremie-PaP bus never left at all that day...

At 6.30 the bus does arrive and we are aboard and moving in five minutes in spite of an argument... the reservations were made days ago but the money was couriered to the wrong bus driver so this one wants Timo to pay again. He doesn't and it all settles down. The tickets cost around 500 Gourdes or 12.50 US depending on the price of gasoline... Blaise is alone at the back where suitcases keep toppling onto him, I have my privileged seat left front behind the driver with both a window and an air-vent, plus Timo between me and the world... he has even paid for an extra seat so that we are not squashed! It's a quieter crowd than my last trip,  mainly adults and a couple of trussed fighting cocks, plus the jokey conductor. We  make excellent time all day but this is due to the recklessness of the driver, which causes much muttering and complaint - he "klaxons" constantly, hovers in the opposite lane where the road is wide enough to be two-lane, forces smaller vehicles aside and takes corners too fast. The bus company,  Ange de Dieu (Angel of God), has three buses but five drivers, this one is new and thought to be 'too young'... Our bus is Ange de Dieu 3, though the only wings are those painted on the plywood Boeing 747 that forms the luggage rack on top. Two young men ride atop to stow luggage, covering it with a tarpaulin if it rains, they also clamber up and down to remove loose rocks from the road, help with flat tires on this and passing buses,  plus running repairs, and couriering envelopes and packages in care of the driver. The bus is an American school bus ( I wish I knew what vintage) with the capacity figures carefully removed... extra seats are added by means of selling three tickets for each double seat and then another for the aisle, where a piece of plywood with a cushion is placed across the gap... we are now 7 across rather than 4 per row! At least there are no goats or piglets... 

The first half of the route is less than two lanes wide over muddy pot-holed flats and alarming slopes of rolling fist-to-head-sized stones, (a Belgium firm has just started the contract to improve and asphalt all the way to the western tip of the island, 35 years after the plan was first proposed). There are frequent hamlets and villages, smartly turned out schoolchildren trot along in gingham shirts and matching skirts or shorts between peasant farmers with mules, bundles of harvested bean-stalks five feet wide on their heads, tied up in huge cloths ready to be dried and threshed. Vendors, or marchands, some walking with their tables on their heads so that they appear to be caged, carry their wares in buckets or baskets in each hand. Almost all the livestock is small and scrawny, little black horses and pigs, mainly brown mules and goats,  scavenging dingo-type dogs. There are many children not enrolled in school, tagging along in rags or a shirt  but no shorts.

After the 10am "lunch" stop at Camp Perrin,  where a small restaurant serves a good styrofoam box lunch - baked chicken drumstick, mildly spicy sauce, rice and beans, a leaf or two of salad and crispy fried banana slices - for $2.50 (100 gourdes) - with bottled soda at 5 gourdes or 12c US - we are back on the tarred road, except where the surface has eroded completely or on the detours caused by flooding last year.

Now we go faster than anyone except the driver would like... 

After Au Cayes (Les Cayes on many maps) one of the carnival-barker style vendors jumps on and persuades for an hour, talking non-stop and handing out candy, samples of some tonic in a rum-bottle cap, and spraying perfume about. He doesn't seem to sell much of his  stock of lotions and potions for the effort. Other vendors jump on and off at different corners, with cold sodas, trays of fried foods (hot-dogs, crispy banane pesé or fried plantains, other crunchy bits), cassava bread in giant circles folded in quarters, a sort of gingerbread,  and peanut-brittle-type sweets... 

The road slows at Leogane, where the market is strung out along the road for several miles it seems, the marchands wearing their huge traditional straw hats, wider than their shoulders, against the coastal heat.

We reach Port au Prince at 3pm, very early, in spite of five stops to help the bus in front of us with an unexplained mechanical problem and once a flat tire, at Dichetty not long after we'd gotten going. There were also several "chat" stops with other drivers of heavy vehicles, and a police check of the driver's license and vehicle papers.

Our first sight is the harbor  - three ancient-looking fishing boats under sail, a motor-skiff full to the gunnels with men and nets, then a solitary fiberglass 40' yacht and a motor-trawler (confiscated?) anchored next to a police station, behind them is the modern container-port. Then the city, flat but growing by the hour towards the Apocalypse, up small hills with the smoke of smoldering piles of trash visible for miles, reeking of plastic. This is Port au Prince.

Anything that can be bought in a store can also be bought on the sidewalk or between the buildings where an illegal concrete shack hasn't already filled the space - witness: wedding dresses, iron gates,  carved bedsteads, out of date medicines in blister packs arranged in huge cones exposed all day to the sun, coffins, violently colored orange drinks poured into used bottles with a straw, refilled without washing or replacing the straw for the next customer!

At the stop along Grand Rue (Boulevard Jean-Jacques Dessalines) at last - the bus pulls up close to a pile of spare tires, constricting the doorway, we step  down into the fumes of heated rubber as a blow-torch is used to weld patches onto the inner-tubes. (It reminds me of how bicycle tires are repaired without patches or glue in the villages - a string is tied tightly around the pinched-off damaged area, so that the tube resembles a loop of warty sausage). The game-birds squawk  as they are handed down,  the first sound they've made all day. Men wait with wheelbarrows to take luggage to taxis, we are being met here, so deprive them of their rightful work, causing consternation. It is so unusual for a foreigner to take these buses that no-one quite knows what to make of me, the most obvious "étranger" being a white female... Even speaking French and some Creole will never make me part of this society, where I will always be an observer, and in a small way an adventurer.