Ian is here!

Most exciting news of the past week! After telling me he booked a ticket on Tuesday, Ian got here on Friday night! I am so very excited! Exclamation marks all around. The plan is for him to continue his job search here, and in the meantime start on an apartment search for us. He also has a stack of books, gym clothes, intentions to learn Creole and ideas about downloading a cooking app, so I think he'll be okay.

On Friday I took him to the Montana, a hotel that's still being rebuilt but with salsa music on Friday nights and great views. We spent most of the weekend touring around the city a bit (so he could get a feel for the apartment market!) and watching Euro cup games. Since he's been walking around and getting to know the city, looking at apartments, and going to the gym, so he's quite happy for the time being. And I'm quite happy too! All of the 101 reasons why Haiti is better than Kabul that I experienced, Ian is experiencing too, and it's reminding me how lucky I am to be here.

Other than that things have been quite normal here... I've been busy at work but it's a lot of meeting people and time away from my desk, so it's all a good balance. My roommate Juan has moved out but was replaced by a new intern, a girl who is very nice. As much as I will miss Juan (I mean, the guy left me Brownies as a parting gift!) it is nice to live with a girl and even nicer not to be the newbie but to instead be the one showing people around. I guess I'm doing that twice with Ian and Chiara (the intern), but it suits me just fine.

Anyways this is more of a personal post that a Haiti interest piece, so I'll cut it short.. but I hope you're all doing well and feel free to drop me a line whenever! xoxox

Rainy Sunday Post

Hello all,

I'm writing on what is the first rainy day in the 6 weeks I've been here... Rainy Sundays can be quite nice though, and so far today I've had a big English breakfast with my colleagues, Skyped with Shabari in Spain, gone to the market and had tea on a balcony watching the rain... and there is a scrabble game to come - yay. Altogether it's been a low key weekend, yesterday I went to a rooftop BBQ at night and spent most of the afternoon before that chatting with some friends... not a bad weekend all in all!

View from Tisous - taken on my Blackberry so it's low res

Friday was a lot more eventful though. I was plugging along at work when one of my colleagues announced "well, I'm off to Tisous (one of the neighbourhoods where we work), Kate, do you want to come?" I hadn't been to Tisous yet and my boss encouraged me to go, so I went along with Gordon, our lead structural engineer, to check on some of the houses we are overseeing, both new construction and retrofitting. Gordon walks around the neighbourhood in flip flops, so I thought I'd be okay in my work sandals and work skirt, and surprisingly I was! I'm sure the residents were wondering why I was so dressed up though, seeing as though our engineers are generally (rightly) in jeans, a t-shirt and baseball cap, but mostly they just smiled at me the way they do any other foreigner, and one lady smiled at me a arranged the neck on my shirt. One thing I'll say about Haitians is that looks matter, and they're happy to straighten your tie if it's out of place. Tisous is in a 'suburb' of Port-au-Prince called Carrefour and is quite different from the other big neighbourhood we work in. For one thing, there's more space in Carrefour, and even if the houses are still small, they have amazing views. It was great to get out and see some of our work in action, I'm slowly learning how to pick out what's right or wrong with the houses we're overseeing... It was nice to meet some of the beneficiaries as well, even though they're Creole-speaking, we could quasi-communicate with my French, and it was great to hear them so empowered about rebuilding their homes. And the lady who straightened out my shirt was very very nice.

Sacre Coeur parade from our second-floor balcony

I got back to the office and worked all afternoon, and just as I was getting ready to leave the office, I hear  what sounds like a gospel-choir outside my office. I look out, and literally hundreds of people were coming down our street - one of Haiti's many spontaneous parades. Apparently it was Sacré Coeur - why this merited a parade I'm still unclear but there were priests, a congregation, and a mobile keyboard/guitar coming down my street singing! It was pretty cool hearing all of those hundreds of voices singing and "amen"-ing though. There are some large shady parts on our street, so they stayed outside a good 30 mins, but this means I overheard part of a mass in Creole as well! It was Friday night and I was keen to leave the office, but if my comings and goings need to be disrupted, I'm glad its with parades and not the demonstration's I was used to in Kabul...

I'm not sure that there was too much more that was interesting about my week, so instead I leave you with an interesting Haiti fact: the Haitian currency is called a gourde, it's about 40 gourdes to a dollar. Some time ago however, they had "Haitian dollars", and five gourdes = one Haitian dollar. The interesting part of this all - it's not uncommon for people to price things in Haitian dollars, although you need to pay in gourdes. I've been to grocery stores where every price tag is in Haitian dollars, to restaurants where the bill comes out in Haitian dollars. Even more hilarious is the fact that when you ask "what's that in gourdes ?" (because of course you can only pay in gourdes), you generally get grumbled at and inevitably a calculator or phone comes out to figure out the conversion. If I buy mangoes off the street for five Haitian dollars, and this mango seller does the same transaction every day and knows she gets 25 gourdes, why doesn't she just tell me that off the bat?? Why are there grocery stores and restaurants that price things in a currency that doesn't exist?? It blows my mind. Happy Sunday everyone!

Hashing in Haiti

I think my last post was Wednesday, right before I went to Chicken Fiesta? In between those wings and now, I've had a good couple of days... Chicken Fiesta was delicious, as expected, but I found myself in an unexpected place afterwards. I had met a girl named Sarah through work last Tuesday that told me about "Wednesdays at the Petionville Club", which she kindly invited me to, so I headed over after Chicken Fiesta. 

The Petionville Club is a country club that's been operating in Haiti for years. When I was here three years ago, it had tennis courts, a pool and a golf course! Two years ago the golf course was claimed by a displaced persons camp (Sean Penn's, actually!) and the tennis courts by their staff. Fast forward to now, and it has reclaimed its salt-water pool and tennis courts, though the camp is expected to stay another year.... The Petionville Club is very much a country club, membership required, but on Wednesdays they open their doors up to the public and generally have Haitian music as entertainment. In and of itself, that was great, but Sarah happens to be very good friends at the owner, so I had a place at their "VIP" table with lots of wine being poured. Thankfully Thursday was a holiday, thus a day off of work! I wound up spending an hour talking with the owner, having an interesting conversation about what it's like to run a country club in an impoverished country, among other things. It definitely wasn't what I expected going in, but a good night nonetheless. I think it may become a regular Wednesday spot for me.... 

I laid low on our holiday Thursday, doing a bit of work and working on my tan. Friday night I went for burgers with my colleagues to a place called Hang - it was blasting dance party music but was a burger joint, certainly different from my waitressing stint at the Works! I kind of enjoyed shaking my shoulders to the tunes while chomping down on my burger though..... Saturday I spent some time by the pool and met up with a friend from Kabul at night, and I even managed to take in the hockey game! Hopefully I can catch game 6 when I go out later tonight... 

Hashers trying to make it down a very steep hill

Sunday was another interesting day - I participated the hash! For those of you who don't know the hash, they describe themselves as a drinking club with a running problem... They have either a walking or running group that goes out on a trail, and then there is a whole bunch of drinking afterwards. I did one hash in Kabul but, as you can imagine, this was quite different. Aside from the fact that I could wear shorts and a t-shirt (yay!), the trail was quite different. Since Port-au-Prince is full of hills, we went up a hill, down the hill and across a ravine, up the informal settlement, through a bit of a forest (going up and down hills all the time), back across a ravine and then back to the starting place. It was interesting seeing houses being built (since that's my new gig), but also just seeing life happening in the settlements. It's nice to see things as they happen instead of through the window of a car... And nice to relax this way after seeing it all! 

Cheers! 

The reality of working on a tropical island..

#1 - You can still catch a cold. Which I did a few weeks ago, slowing down my extracurricular activities and also my blogging. Sorry!

#2 - You still have to work. And I do - long hours! Fortunately a weekend is a weekend here, two full days to sleep in a suntan and just veg out. But I often find myself working a long day, coming home to change clothes and go back out again for a dinner or networking thing, otherwise I am too tired to sit down and write anything meaningful anymore. So sorry about that too!

I have been doing a couple interesting things that merit mentioning though, like lunch last Sunday. We went up the mountain to a restaurant called Trois Decks, which had a jazz band play all afternoon. We had a very civilized meal accompanied by a few drinks and a great atmosphere, we were on one of the decks overlooking the tree canopy. I did have the foresight to take a photo but I must have had one too many rum sours because I only took photos of the foliage. I attach for your amusement anyways.

I'm starting to keep a running tab of why Haiti is better than Kabul - I think I mentioned in the first few blogs about being able to go to the beach on the weekend and show my elbows at all times? These things still excited me. As does the latest: the parties. Not the parties themselves, because a Kabul party was pretty kicking, but the fact that there isn't a guest list to get in! Kabul was insane for that! I hadn't had to 'fake' getting into somewhere since I was a teenager! But there is none of that in Haiti, yay. And if you're going to put on a party, the costs of getting alcohol are much more reasonable...

My last tidbit for the day is the language, not French but Creole. The words/phrases I learned before have come back to me, but I've been slow to learn some more - I'm still getting comfortable communicating in French. However, I'm not anticipating a problem because I (unlike a lot of Europeans here) understand Quebecois, and if you can learn Quebecois you can learn Creole. They are both a phonetic version of french, but one's fast (Quebecois) and the other at a slower pace (Creole). Some of my favorite examples so far: dlo (d'leau = water), machine (pronounces mah-shine = car), pwojé (projet = project). It should be a piece of cake.

I'm off to discover all that PAP restaurants have to offer, this time to a place called Chicken Fiesta that specializes in wings! Who would have thought... ?