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!