to the Fort!

Yesterday morning, Jean Juneul asked me if I would like to hike to the Fort, and I said yes. There is an old, French fort from the colonial period high up in the mountains and everyone calls it “Fort Bayonnais”. It is about 200 years old, and is pretty massive. Vital and Demilsaint had said it was a pretty long, hard hike and that it might take a couple of hours to get there. But everyone in Bayonnais has been up there at least once, so I figured it couldn’t be that hard a hike. Long story short, I don’t make it to the Fort. After an hour of hiking up very, very steep, rocky slopes, I looked up to see how far we were from the Fort and saw that it had not moved in the distance. I estimated that we were probably ¼ of the way to the Fort, and that if I didn’t turn back, I was about to experience the most physically trying experience of my life. And the trip back down was just as hard as the trip up. There were numerous moments when I pictured myself slipping and falling to my death on the jagged rocks below me. Only after I got back to OFCB did the others care to inform me that the hike to the Fort is the hike from hell. The Fort may have won this battle, but I will win the war. Sometime this summer, I will make it to the Fort. It will be my grail, my Everest! (In the picture above, the Fort is at the top of the far mountain in the distance. And I am zooming in, a lot.)

On the way up, at about the point when I think that I am going to collapse, I see an older woman walking down the path carrying a large basket on her head that must have weighed 30-40 pounds. She walks past me very slowly, taking very careful steps so not to slip and fall on the mountainside. I had been told that some people walk for miles, down from the mountains, to sell food at the Bayonnais market. Kids may walk 4-5 miles downhill to go to school in the morning, and walk back up at night in the dark (and by dark, I mean no electricity for miles). I had walked about a mile up these slopes, and I was about ready to die, while little kids hike these slopes for miles everyday. And I think, the average Davidson student pays about $40,000 a year (far more than most Haitians will make in a lifetime) so that they can have a 3-minute walk to class, and so people can do their laundry for them. These kids walk across MOUNTAINS (ones that resemble the ones that Frodo crossed in Mordor, only prettier) so that they can get a basic education. That is the cost of their education.

Once Jean Juneul and I are back on the ground, and I can breathe again, we decide to take the long way back to OFCB. He takes me through his “garden” where his family is growing corn and carrots. There is a giant mango tree overshadowing a brook by one of the fields, and he throws rocks up into the branches to knock some mangoes down. He washes a mango in the brook and gives it to me. And it is the most delicious mango in the history of delicious mangoes. Never again will there be a mango as delicious as this mango.

Last night, I sat in on a meeting between David Nichols and some of the head people of OFCB. David is basically the head honcho for OFCB back in the US, and has been in Bayonnais this week with his wife Judy and his brother Eric. The topic of conversation was the future health center in Bayonnais. Most people in Bayonnais do not have the resources to go to Gonaives, the nearest mayor city, to get medical care. There is no convenient, neighborhood CVS or Rite Aid in Bayonnais. There is nothing. The task of constructing a functional health center in Bayonnais is far more complicated then I could have ever imagined. Questions that arose included: If a farmer and his family travel for 20 miles to come to the health center, where will they be housed and how will they be fed? If they travel with a donkey, where will the donkey be housed/fed? How will the center be staffed in the first few year or so, with only one OFCB “home-grown” doctor graduated from college? What is more important, a maternity ward or a pharmacy, granted that one will have to be constructed before the other?

So, today I met my roommate: Jacques-Elie Saint-Louis. He was also Morgan’s (Before me, there was Peter. Before Peter, there was Morgan.) roommate last year. He is 23 years old, and has just finished his first year of college. Jacques-Elie is very calm, and very pensive, and I’m pretty sure that he can read my mind. He is a very deep guy, and it will be great to get to know him over the next few months. In return for practicing his English with me, he plans on teaching me a lot of Creole.

Jacques-Elie, posing:

Our room: