Tales from Rohan

Today I helped Inveneo bring decent Internet access to NGOs in Leogane by climbing up a 60m tower to adjust an antenna. Mark and I setup the matching antenna in Leogane at the Hands-On Disaster Response base there.

About to head up the tower. Nice view! I am happy that it is foggy because it is cooler. The bottom antennas are 2m terrestrial microwave antennas.

If you look carefully, you can see me up there…

Close up:

I am staying the night at Hands On tonight. Tomorrow I’ll be getting connections up to Save the Children and the Canadian Red Cross. A lot of very happy volunteers wanted to buy me a beer tonight, but I stopped at 3.

More than half the words in Creole are borrowed from French. However it is useful and kinda fun to understand how certain sounds shifted during the transition. It makes it easy to guess words if you know the word in French already.

First of all you change the spelling to be phonetic (e sounds like pray, ou sounds like hoot, and ch sounds like ship)

papa -> papa
café -> kafe (coffee)
machine -> machin (machine, car)
radio -> radyo
police -> polis
plastique -> plastik
piscine -> pisin (pool)
fois -> fwa (time—as in one more time)

Then you just drop those barely pronounced R’s and L’s the French love so much

filme -> fim
bible -> bib
rancontre -> rankont (meeting)
tard -> ta (late/later)
fort -> fò (strong)
ferme -> fèm (farm)
professeur -> pwofesè (professor)
ingenieur -> enjenye (engineer)
rendre -> rann (to make, to render)
quelque -> kèk (some)

an, en, and on are nasals (except when accented)

pain -> pen (bread)
bon -> bon (good)
fin -> fen (end)
Haïtian -> ayisyen (Haitian man)
quinze -> kenz (fifteen)
employée -> anplwaye (employee)

ro becomes wo

problème -> pwoblem
fromage -> fwomaj (cheese)
erosion -> ewozyon
environnement -> anviwonman  

u becomes i

plus tard -> pli ta (later)
bureau -> biwo (office, desk)
pleasure -> plezi
université -> inivèsite
epui -> epi (and then, therefore)

A lot of words you normally hear with an article or with the preposition “de” just integrate the sound into the base noun:

l’église -> legliz (church)
l’école -> lekol (school)
l’est -> lès (east)
de l’eau -> dlo (water)

Likewise many nouns is French that begin with a vowel that are usually plural, integrated an initial z sound in the base noun (from the liaison that is usually present when speaking about them in French)

les amis -> zami (friend)
les étoiles -> zetwòl (star)
les épaules -> zepol (shoulder)
les armes -> zam (weapon, “arm(s)”)  

Generally if you need to guess a Creole verb from a French verb, use the most common form of the verb in everyday speech in French, which will often be the past participle or the infinitive

changer -> chanje (to change)
manger -> manje (to eat)
chercer -> chache (to look for)
couper -> koupe (to cut)
aider -> ede (to help)
batir (bati) -> bati (to build)
finir (fini) -> fini (to finish)
faire (fait) -> fè (to make, to do)
venir (venez) -> vini (to come)
travailler (travaille) -> travay (to work)
apprendre -> apprann (to learn)
dire (dit) -> di (to say)
lire (lu) -> li (to read)
ouvrir (ouvrit) -> ouvri (to open)
prendre (prends) -> pran (to take)

Sometimes a verb becomes nasal for no apparent reason

connaître (connais) -> konnen (to know, also use for savoir in Creole)
fermer -> fenmen (to close)
aimer -> renmen

Finally Haitians love contractions and simplifying long words. This is especially noticeable with some common verbs.

oublier -> bliye (to forget)
entender -> tande (to listen, also to hear in Creole)
attendre (attends) -> tann (to wait for)
regarder -> gade (to look at)
arriver -> rive (to arrive)
demander -> mande (to ask)
retourner -> tounen (to return, to go back)
vouloir (voudrai) -> vle (to want)
devoir (dois) -> dwe (should)

Hope you found this interesting.

Monday it was already six months since the earthquake. Still in Port-au-Prince, fewer than 5% of the condemned buildings have been demolished and cleared. Unfortunately there are some perverse incentives that help keep it that way. Most people in P-au-P rent their home. The convention for rentals here is that you pay in advance for a year or two. (Apparently is also very hard to evict someone squatting on your land, so the landowners counter by insisting on a year in advance). Even if your house is destroyed, you’ve already paid the rent and apparently the owner is under no obligation to fix the house you rented if it is destroyed. So now there are two perverse incentives. Owners don’t need to bother rebuilding because their renters have already paid anyway and if the renters get fed up and rebuild for them, they get someone to do their work for free. Renters don’t want to spend money to fix a house that isn’t theirs, and if they hold out, there is the chance that some NGO will show up and build them a new house.

To make matters worse land title is very unclear in Haiti. In some cases there are two different people with official deeds to the same land granted under different presidents. Meanwhile there are probably one or more families that actually live there.

Then there is the issue of ownership of the rubble. Rubble contains broken cement, wire, and metal which can have commercial value (at least theoretically). The rubble of a building is the property of the building owner, but rubble from a multi-unit building can also contain personal effects, appliances, and even human bodies from several different families. Often buildings in the hilly neighborhoods that were especially badly hit fall over into neighboring property. Any of these potential owners (any of the tenants, the owner of the building, and of the putative owners of the land where the rubble is sitting) can then object to removing the rubble (their property).

With this legal quagmire, you can imagine that even clearing rubble is taking forever. It looks like we will need another place to stay for people who lost their homes for a long time to come.

I promise to write more later about “temporary” housing…

A friend and former boss asked me how he could help in Benin or Haiti. How silly of me not to write this up earlier!

Benin

Peace Corps Benin - Kate Puzey Girls’ Camp Commemorative Fund [donations]

One of the best and most important programs run by Peace Corps volunteers in Benin are the girls camps. To say that girls get shafted in Benin is a gross understatement. Many girls drop out of school around 8th grade and almost all drop out by 10th grade. The girls camps take girls in villages who are staying in school. They spend a week with Peace Corps volunteers and hand-picked Beninese women mentors from their communities. Last year, 179 girls participated in four girls’ camps. PCVs in Benin have the time and energy to have more camps, but the limiting factor is money. (An incredibly small amount of money.)

Kate Puzey was a volunteer in Benin who was killed on March 12, 2009. She was a model volunteer and especially active with girls camps and girls rights. The Kate Puzey Girls’ Camp Commemorative Fund was setup for donations to the girls camps. 100% of this money goes directly to PCVs in country to spend on the camps. It does not go into the PeaceCorps general fund, or even the Peace Corps Benin fund.

https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=680-CFD (when you fill out the donation form be sure to specify in the comments field that the donation is for the Kate Puzey Girls’ Camp Commemorative Fund)

Haiti:

Hands on Disaster Response

http://hodr.org/

These guys are a young organization who are doing very impressive work in Haiti. They are almost 100% volunteers. Most come for week to month long stints and clear rubble in Leogane (85% of the homes severely damaged), work as runners in a field hospital, or build transitional schools. Smashing rubble with sledge hammers and carting it away with pails and wheelbarrows is back-breaking hard labor. You have to be seriously committed to do this work. When they arrived immediately after the quake they had a few dozen foreign volunteers. Now they have about 120 foreign volunteers and 50 Haitian volunteers (they are going for a 1:1 mix).

Just the work they are doing in encouraging volunteerism within Haiti is fantastic. I spoke with a handful of their Haitian volunteers. They are mostly Haitian men in their 20’s who are intelligent, curious about foreigners, strong and hard working. Most don’t have any other job offers and want to help their country. (Unfortunately, a lot of poor or middle-class Haitians who want to clean up, don’t even have tools like wheelbarrows and sledgehammers). They get to practice their English, make a lot of new friends, and a lot of them end up getting jobs working with other aid organizations.

J/P HRO

http://jphro.org/  

This organization is running one of the largest camps in Port-au-Prince (about 50,000 people). It is also probably the best run camp in the country. It’s very close to my house. They have a handful of full time staff people and a small army of volunteers. Volunteers and staff sleep in the same kinds of tents as the residents. This organization is proof that you don’t need to have an aid background to be effective.

MSF

http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/   and http://msf.org

Medecins Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders) is one of the big boys in the aid community, but they continue to impress me. They arrived early and setup clinics all over the place. The clinics are all free, free to everyone, clean, and well run, but never extravagant. When I was living in Tombe Gateau I would see white SUV festooned with various logos driving back and forth between Jacmel and Leogane. One day I saw an MSF land cruiser with three Haitian passengers. One had a full leg cast, and one was on an IV drip. This is exactly what they should be doing—sending badly injured Haitians from smaller clinics to a larger hospital. That you don’t see this very often reminds me still how different and dedicated MSF is.

University of Fondwa

http://www.unifusa.org   and http://ufondwa.edu.ht (still waiting on the domain name registration)

The University of Fondwa is the only rural University in Haiti, and the only Haitian University to offer a degree in veterinary medicine. The goal of the University to stop the brain drain from rural areas and provide students with an alternative to moving to Port-au-Prince to get higher education.

While I believe in the students and the mission of the University, I hesitate to recommend making an unqualified general donation. The University definitely needs money to pay teachers salaries, but they need more rigor and planning before I feel comfortable that they will spend your money well. That said, if you are willing to make a donation for a specific purpose (ex: water catchment system, windows, etc), I can make that happen. The University will need computers (give me your poor neglected 3 year old laptops yearning to breathe free), but don’t have a dry, safe place to put them quite yet (stay tuned).

However I can mention two areas that I can recommend whole-heartedly.

If you have a background in agriculture, finance, or management and can come teach classes for one to three months under very basic conditions, then please come volunteer.

Secondly, there are a lot of good students who need scholarships or student loans. There is no student loan program available in Haiti. Even Haiti’s largest microfinance bank (Fonkoze: http://fonkoze.org ) does not offer student loans.

Inveneo

http://inveneo.org

Last but not least there is Inveneo. In rural Haiti you currently have the option of using a slow, congested, unreliable GPRS (cellular data) service for $40 per month and $50 upfront, or a high-latency, congested, lossy, and even more unreliable satellite solution for several hundred dollars a month and a few thousand setup. We are building affordable, appropriate wireless networks in Haiti to provide support for relief and recovery operations, education, healthcare, and microfinance groups.

In Port-au-Prince there are several canals that carry storm runoff to the sea. This is one of the bigger ones and drains the whole Ravine Bois de Chêne. After a big rain, any garbage lying in the roads or in the ravine gets swept downstream. The heavy stuff usually stops somewhere along the way, but the plastic floats and usually stops right here when it hits the bridge.

Two days ago, I rode by and saw that a portion of the ravine was on fire. This photo was taken yesterday. You can’t see it, but the blackened part is still steaming.

I can’t help but wonder how much less plastic there would be somebody offered a bounty of even 1 gourde for 20 bottles (800 bottles for a US dollar). The other major components of this mess are clamshell styrofoam and refrigerator insulation. Sadly, the fledgling recycling industry in Haiti doesn’t have the capacity to do much of anything with the waste produced even in the capital.

At this point I am pretty used to finding and removing critters (cockroaches, mice, rats, lizards, even birds). However last night was a bit exceptional. I came home last night and put down my bag. I saw something move in the dim light and thought, “this can only be one thing”. I told Eugene he probably wanted to put his feet up!

close up for scale

Anyway, the tarantula was very sensible and took my gentle encouragement to get out. We joked briefly of keeping it as a pet to eat our cockroaches.

Below is a photo taken a few weeks ago inside the main office of the (fixed line) telephone company in Leogane. Note the date on the calendar. There are roughly 60,000 land lines for a country of almost 10 million people. No wonder everyone has a cell phone.

An Unqualified Sermon

I rode in a minivan this afternoon from Port-au-Prince to Tonmgato where the guy sitting immediately next to me started giving an impromptu sermon at the top of his lungs right next to me. Everyone else ignored him as I tried to, until he said that according to the Bible, the earthquake was a punishment from God and that women exist “for” men. I jumped in with the end of the Noah’s flood story and the two versions of the creation of man and woman in Genesis and asked him how this figured into his beliefs. The guy had never heard of them. He didn’t even believe me that I said that there are two creation “stories” in the Bible and called me a liar. It turns out the guy can’t read (even in Creole) and hasn’t even heard the whole of Genesis read to him. Yet he feels qualified to spew his beliefs at the top of his lungs based on his belief in the absolute truth in parts of a book that he has heard only a tiny portion of and has never read personally.

It worked so well in their country…

You see UN troops driving through Haiti all the time. They are there to discourage looting, riots, and overall anarchy. You most frequently see Sri Lankans and South Koreans, but yesterday I saw two jeeps full of Iraqi UN soldiers. My “salaam alaykum got a big smile and a hearty “alaykum salaam” in response. I think it is ironic that Iraqi soldiers are helping to provide security here in the Western hemisphere in the backyard on the US. Meanwhile their own country has a huge security problem which would not have existed if the US hadn’t invaded. If we weren’t in the middle of two wars, we’d probably have a bunch of our troops available to provide continuing security in Haiti. But after so much US influence in Haiti (some claim the US military kidnapped president Aristide in 2004) maybe its better that we don’t have the troops to keep them here anyway.

Bringing cake to the wedding

I heard an unconfirmed rumor that some government or aid organization donated mangos and coffee as “food aid” immediately after the quake. These are the only two crops that represent a substantial export for Haiti.

The dominant form of transport in Haiti is the tap-tap. It is a shared, usually crowded, truck or bus that runs a regular route and will pickup and drop off anywhere along the way (space permitting). Many of them are decorated in bright colors. The larger ones in Port-au-Prince are especially well decorated. On some tap-taps there is space to ride on the roof, which is much more comfortable, but a bit more dangerous if the tap-tap flips over. During the day, they are frequent and convenient, but they stop running pretty early. I usually need to catch one by 4pm from Port-au-Prince to get back to Tomgato and I almost got stuck in Jacmel once.

Our market is on Wednesday and Saturday. A lot of vendors come from nearby even smaller villages with donkeys and horses with their produce. I especially like this photo of the market “parking lot” starting to fill up.

But what do these horses and donkeys carry? All sorts of things. But I thought the idea of carrying a few banana trees on horseback was especially amusing: