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!