There’s good news.

In September, I wrote to many of you that Jacob had been killed. He was an artist-entrepreneur who had been building an arts and crafts workshop in Site Solèy, Port au Prince’s most notorious neighborhood.

Jethro

He was murdered by a gang that was jealous of his connections to foreigners or of his growing business or for other reasons that I don’t understand. His wife and children had to flee, as did the group of young people who were building the workshop with him. The workshop was destroyed, along with all its recently acquired equipment.

The workshop’s destruction was a disaster for many of those who were involved. It was the way that some of them paid for school for themselves or their kids. Some depended on the work for more than just school. It gave lots of young people work to do in a country where unemployment is said to be at least 70%. It would be hard to exaggerate the importance it had.

I thought that the story was more or less over, but it wasn’t. Soon after the crime, I learned through a mutual friend that Jacob’s wife and children were safe in hiding and that at least some of the members of the workshop were ok as well. They had gone out to the countryside to escape and to grieve.

Wisly

Some time later, I heard that two of the workshop’s members, Jethro and Wisly, would be coming to Port au Prince. They had things to do and people to see. They had determined to try to re-open the workshop, and while they couldn’t safely return to Site Solèy, they could not accomplish everything they would need to accomplish from the countryside where they were staying. I let them know though our mutual friend that if they needed a safe place to spend a few days while they were in Port au Prince – someplace close enough to allow them to run their errands in the city but far enough to be out of harm’s way – they could come to Ka Glo. I soon got an e-mail from them in the countryside letting me know that they liked the idea and would come.

That was a few weeks ago, and since then they’ve been living in my house. I can’t really say that they’ve been living with me, since I myself haven’t been home more than a few days since mid-November, but they’ve been in the house, with Byton making friends in Ka Glo and getting to work. To see photos of them as they work, click TheArtists.

In the meantime, they are creating their wonderful cards again, and looking for ways to sell them. They are business people, and want to get their business running again.

Some of you have seen their work, so know its value. Here are a few photos that can give one at least some sense of what they do:

We hope that very soon their website will be running again and that they will therefore be able to accept regular orders directly. Meanwhile, orders can be placed by e-mailing me at [email protected]. The cards are ninety cents each, and the price includes an envelope. 100% of the sale price goes to the artists.

They have lots of different designs, but it’s not right now possible to accept detailed orders. Please specify, however, whether you would like religious or secular themes – if you have a preference.

Please order by January 10th. Delivery will take place in early February.

I had heard that one of the thirty-something candidates for the presidency of Haiti is a woman, but I had yet to see her campaign posters. But last week her posters appeared all over the place and all at once. Her name is Judy C. Roy, and her slogan is pretty straightforward. “Vote fanm nan” means, “vote for the woman.” It says nothing about her professional experience or her opinions, but it does set her apart. All the other candidates are men.

The other slogan that has caught my attention during these last weeks belongs to Simeus Dumarsais. He’s a Haitian-born American billionaire, and banners proclaiming his candidacy read “Yon lòt chemen ak milyonè a.” That means, roughly, “A different path with the millionaire.” He has decided, in other words, to identify himself as both different and rich. Here’s the banner itself:

I have been careful to stay out of electoral politics in Haiti. It’s not that I see my work as apolitical or as neutral. I’m not sure that any public activity either can or should be neutral. And my activity is, perhaps, especially political: The only appropriate basis for public decision-making is dialogue, and building the skills and habits that make constructive dialogue possible is the central goal of my work. But it would be improper for me to enter into discussions in favor of any of the parties or candidates that are running for office. Foreigners, especially Americans, have wielded too much influence in Haiti for much too long. Not only that, I couldn’t contribute competently to such conversations even if I wanted to. I just don’t understand things well enough. I don’t know what Haiti needs from its government and I don’t know what the various candidates might be able to offer.

The preliminaries leading up to the election are fascinating, though. So I follow news when I can, and I listen to any conversations I come across.

Perhaps the most interesting story in this election thus far has centered on the candidacy of Dumarsais. He’s been in the States, making his fortune, for something like forty years. And he has American citizenship.

And that’s the curious point, because the Haitian constitution seems to proclaim rather clearly that anyone with dual citizenship is ineligible. And the provisional government and its electoral council proclaimed Dumarsais ineligible.

But that’s not the end of the story, because Dumarsais sued and the Haitian Supreme Court, for reasons I don’t understand, declared him eligible after all. The government responded by creating a special committee whose charge was to evaluate the citizenship of each of the candidates. The committee declared that Dumarsais and two other candidates are not Haitian citizens and, so, it invalidated their candidacies. The matter seemed decided and ballots were ordered printed.

But last week, the matter opened up again. The Supreme Court re-affirmed, still for reasons I don’t understand, that Dumarsais’ candidacy is valid. Surprisingly, the government fired the justices – actually announced their retirement. This although the Haitian constitution does not appear to give it the right to do so. Within days, the government arranged to swear new justices in, but the apparently-though-illegally fired justices and their supporters blockaded the ceremony. A few days after that, the government swore in its new judges, but installed them in offices in the Presidential Palace rather than in the White House.

It’s hard to guess where this all might lead, with a first round of voting scheduled for January 8th and ballots already printed. If someone had wanted to undermine the possible legitimacy of the election, then the manner in which Dumarsais’ candidacy has unfolded would have been a clever way to do it. If the Electoral Council is forced to include him, over their objections and over the apparent letter of the Constitution, then the election will most likely have to be delayed, again, because ballots will need to be reprinted. And we are already near two years of a provisional government whose constitutional mandate would have been to hold elections within three months. If he is excluded, it will be at the price of ignoring the Supreme Court.

Whether the coming election can be legitimate under any circumstances is a serious question. One possible candidate was blocked from participating by his arrest. The electoral council ruled him ineligible because he could not deliver his candidacy papers personally. At the time he was, and in fact still is, in jail. Not that he’s been charged with anything. His imprisonment could easily appear to be a strategy for excluding him from the ballot. And it might just be that.

Voter registration was problematic. Distribution of voting cards to those who did register continues to be difficult.

At the same time, it’s hard to imagine what alternative there is to at least accepting whatever the election’s results might be. The frontrunner appears to be Rene Preval, the man who replaced Aristide in 1995 and was replaced by him five years after that. He has been strikingly quiet through the campaign thus far, bearing himself like a classic frontrunner. He recently said that he would not “engage anyone in polemics.” This seems only to promise that he won’t discuss any differences he might have with other candidates.

The current government has no mandate to continue governing, if it ever had any mandate to govern in the first place. It can’t reasonably continue. And replacing it by any means other than election would surely be less legitimate than even a poor election would be.

And plenty of Haitians are engaging themselves in the current electoral process, at least in the sense that they’re willingly talking about the different candidates, both in terms of their strengths and weaknesses as possible presidents and in terms of their respective chances of winning. One hears discussions everywhere: on the streets, in the busses and trucks that serve as public transportation, on front porches, in places of work, and elsewhere. This is true even though many of those who involve themselves in the conversations will say, at the same time, that they don’t really believe that there will be an election and that, if there is, the results don’t matter because the outside world will impose whatever governance on Haiti it desires. Former President Aristide was, after all, elected.

But there are, as I said, few alternatives to hoping that the election will go reasonably well and that its result will be accepted by most. At least there are none that I can see.

I’ve been trying to figure out a way to explain the enormity of the challenge that Fonkoze faces. It’s not easy to convey.

Let’s assume I’ve already made it to the appropriate bus station. The trip to any one of them, starting from Ka Glo, is about two hours, but I’m happy to make it. It’s the price I pay for the luxury of living in the countryside, rather than Port-au-Prince, and it’s not really part of the point I want to make anyway.

Getting to Trouin from the station in Carrefour is, at least, uncomplicated. The simplest way is to climb onto a truck headed to Bainet, in south-central Haiti. The trucks that make this trip are large, open crates. They fill with cargo, stacked about seven or eight feet high, and passengers climb onto the top. If it rains, you get wet. If there’s dust, you are dusted. You hang on as best you can as you’re shaken and tossed along the road through Carrefour past Léogane up the mountain on the road towards Jacmel. You turn off the paved road at St. Etienne, and take the long, rocky, narrow road down towards Bainet. About an hour later, you hop off in Trouin. In all, it’s about four bone-shaking hours.

Or it should be. I was once on one of those trucks headed back from Trouin when an dispute erupted between the conductors and the passengers as to the correct fare. So the truck just stopped for over an hour, in a downpour, while the argument raged. I eventually gave up, got down, and walked the last hour through the rain to St. Etienne, where I got a bus back to the city. It’s the sort of thing that happens sometimes.

Getting to Baptiste from the station in Croix-de-Bouquets can be almost as simple, if you’re lucky. There are a couple of busses that make daily trips between Croix-de-Bouquets and Belladère. From there, you hire a motorcycle for the 90 minute ride southward into the mountains.

The busses are uncomfortable even on good roads, like the excellent one between Lascahobas and Belladère. You sit packed three to a bench that wouldn’t carry more than two in the States. That’s three adults: bags, backpacks, sacks, chickens, children and other luggage don’t count. If you’re on the aisle, you’ll be looking for something to do with 50% or more of your – excuse me – rear end, because it won’t all be on the bench. If you’re not on the aisle, you’ll be trying to figure out if there’s a way to add an additional joint to your legs, a way to fold them one more time, because the distance to the seat in front of you won’t be quite enough.

If you don’t get one of those busses, you’ll be taking a similar one to Mirebalais instead. Then it’s the back of one pick-up truck to Lascahobas and another from there to Belladère, where you get that same motorcycle into the mountains. It’s a full day’s work.

To get to Trou du Nord, you take a bus to Cap Haitian from the station at the base of Delmas. The ride takes six-eight hours if all goes well, cramped into those same busses. From there, it’s a twenty-minute walk to the northeast bus station, where you get an hour-and-a-half’s ride across rotten roads to Trou du Nord. It’s an hour or two longer if you need to go to Fort Libertè or Ouanaminthe. All on those busses that I’ve already mentioned.

My point in all of this is not to complain about a hard and uncomfortable job. It turns out that one gets used to such circumstances rather easily. As my friend Erik was reminding me recently, those trips can actually be fun as long as your health is good. A camaraderie can develop among passengers, and it’s an instructive pleasure to be a part of it. People talk about themselves, their family, their work, their country. All sorts of things. They exchange advice and sometimes teasing. They tell stories and they jest.

My point is rather, as I said, to talk about the enormity of the challenge Fonkoze takes upon itself as it attempts to bring banking and educational services into the countryside. I’ve written before about others aspect of Fonkoze’s challenge. I’ve written of how hard it is to prepare poorly educated women to teach other women how to read and to do so quickly and inexpensively. This would be formidable in any environment. I’ve also written about how hard it is to support such teachers through site visits because one’s presence as an observer so forcefully affects what one sees. All this apart from how basically hard it is to help a busy adult, living in a culture where there’s little reading and little to read, learn to read and write.

Fonkoze’s mission is more difficult still because it aims to reach rural women. It would be difficult enough to serve women in Port-au-Prince and a few major cities, but Fonkoze has as its goal serving women in Haiti’s hard-to-reach corners, and that’s another matter entirely.

Because the challenging voyages I just described only get one to Fonkoze’s offices in the countryside. (At least the trips to Trouin and Trou du Nord. Baptiste is somewhat different.) Getting all the way to the credit centers where educational services need to be offered can involve much more time and trouble. In other words, all that traveling still doesn’t get me into the field in any meaningful sense.

When I visited Trouin, the literacy supervisor, Rony, and I had an hour’s trip to the credit center in Meyè that we wanted to visit. And that center wasn’t one of his more distant ones. Though his office is already in the countryside, he’s responsible for centers for which site visits require overnight stays. In Trou du Nord, the supervisor, Saül, has a motorcycle to use. But he still has site visits that require an hour’s ride or more.
If you’re at Fonkoze’s Lagonav office, which requires not only between one and four busses or trucks, but also a boat, you are still a couple of hours by motorcycle from some of the more remote centers. And the roads are bad enough to make the motorcycle trip genuinely hard riding. Even for someone like me, who sits as a passenger behind the driver, who’s doing the real work.

And it’s not as though Fonkoze can choose to save its resources – its time, energy, and money – by not sending its staff to the more distant centers. Not only do the literacy teachers at work in the centers need support, but even just the credit operations require extensive travel because Fonkoze’s clients cannot be required to come even to the branch offices in the countryside. They do not have motorcycles, and they’re hard at work almost constantly building the businesses they’ve created with their loans. The couple of hours that a round trip to a Fonkoze office would require is out of the question for them. So Fonkoze credit agents take loan applications, disperse loans, and accept payments during visits to the scattered credit centers. And Fonkoze literacy supervisors get out into the field to coach teachers, encourage and evaluate students, and collect data.

And the fact that Fonkoze is a financial institution, and the fact that it spends money it receives from other institutions that have a range of their own reporting requirements, all means that, as scattered as Fonkoze’s branch offices are, and as very much more scattered still as its credit centers are, they all require a close, unified oversight. And there are over twenty branches, all over Haiti. Some of them are easier to get to than the ones I’ve mentioned, but many are not.

Trying to imagine how it’s all supposed to work for Fonkoze’s 27,000 clients, at all of Fonkoze’s 20+ branches would be overwhelming at least for me. So we just try to focus on getting jobs in front of us done. Sometimes we succeed.

That’s what makes all the traveling I do for Fonkoze really worthwhile. I see Fonkoze’s success in the excitement of its clients who are learning to read or to build their businesses or to talk about sex and protect themselves from AIDS. I get to talk to them individually and in groups. So I know that, even if we not accomplishing everything we’d like to do, there are lots of rural Haitian women pleased with what we are able to do.

My grandmother has been very unwell. It’s hard for me to be clear just how unwell because I’m overseas and hard to reach.

She’s 93, so I suppose it’s not surprising that she’s having problems. Nevertheless, until about a year ago the most that you could have said is that she had some trouble with her memory and that she was increasingly prone to being confused. It was not without difficulty that she attended our family’s Passover Seder last spring, but she seemed to have a great time. She’s always had a particular affinity for small children and our Seder was well-stocked with them. A committee of four very energetic little girls made sure that my sister’s house, which is where we met, was very much alive. And my grandmother too came alive in their presence.

By the time I saw her in September, on my way back to Haiti after a visit to the States, she had deteriorated. She seemed more lost, less lively, more fragile. And shortly after that she fell. She broke her ankle and needed surgery.

The surgery is proving to be a terrible challenge to her system. When I rushed back to the States in October to see her, she was miserable. She seemed to recognize me at moments, but not all the time. She wasn’t interested in eating. She was extremely confused, unable to understand where she was or even to recognize that she had broken her ankle and was incapable of walking. It was rather soon after her surgery, and I hear some suggestion that she’s making progress, but it’s hard to be optimistic, hard even to know what to hope for.

I am writing at such length about my own sad news in part because I always try to write about what’s on my mind, and my grandmother is foremost on my mind these days. At the same time, my feelings about my grandmother provide the frame within which I am trying to face the other sad news I’m dealing with right now: the decline in health of Madanm Marinot.

Madanm Marinot is my makomè. I’ve written about the word before. In its narrowest sense, it would mean that she is my godchild’s mother. By the word can have more extended meanings as well. In this case, she is my godson’s grandmother. Her son, Saül, is my very close friend and monkonpè. His son, Givens, is my godchild. And for about a year, Madanm Marinot’s been calling me “monkonpè” as well.

While she’s a good deal older than I am, she’s a long way from being old. I suppose she’s around 60. Saül is the oldest of her seven kids, and he is only 36 or 37. I used to know exactly.

But her health hasn’t been really good for several years. She’s diabetic and suffers from high blood pressure. So at the moments when I’ve seen her over the last couple of years, whether at Saül’s house in Pòtoprens or at her own home in Ench, she’s been a little bit lifeless: quiet, inactive, depressed.

Only someone who’s known Madanm Marinot can appreciate how odd this is. She was previously an extraordinarily dynamic person. Almost too dynamic. She was a hurricane. The first time I visited her home in Ench, she was dizzying: running around, shouting order after order at her own children and the other members of her household, assuring that everything happened just as she thought it should. It was a little hard to take, even though it was all being done for my benefit.

But in October I visited Ench with Papouch, and she was an entirely different person. She spent most of our visit lying quietly in a bed, in her home’s back room, as her daughters looked after Papouch and me. (See: PriviLege.) At the end of our visit, she apologized tearfully. She was upset because her health had not permitted her to receive us properly as guests, this despite the lavish hospitality her daughters had displayed.

The problem was that she had recently had surgery to removed a non-cancerous lump in her breast. The surgery had gone poorly and she wasn’t healing well. She was tired and in pain. Shortly after our visit to Ench, she went back to the hospital in Piyon, where the surgery had been performed. They recommended a new biopsy, for which she would need to come to Pòtoprens. The lab work would be done in the States. She waited for the results at Saül’s house in Pòtoprens. The news finally came in that there was nothing non-cancerous about her condition at all. She has what appears to be an advanced case of breast cancer, and it’s not yet clear whether there’s anything that can be done. Right now she’s getting painkillers and nothing more.

Of course the news has been dreadful for her family, just as my grandmother’s recent decline has been terrible for mine. My monkonpè had tears in his eyes last week as he told me of his mother’s situation.

But things are a little bit different here. Since she has no health insurance, her children are having to pay for every bit of care she gets. And though there is no comparison between the cost of medical care in Haiti and its cost in the States, there is also no comparison between the resources available to my grandmother and those available to Madanm Marinot. Her three youngest children are still in school. She, her husband, and her older kids are funding their for-them-expensive educations. The next oldest child, her fourth son, would like to return to school as soon as possible. His education was interrupted because of his own health troubles, but he’s much better now, and is anxious to move on with his life.

That leaves her three oldest sons, but the middle of them is a farmer and cattle merchant who barely gets by on his own. So she has just two children who can help her, Saül and his younger brother Felix. But there is only so much they can do. Not only are their own financial resources quite limited, not only do they already go to extraordinary lengths to support their siblings, but they are both married and both have children of their own that they must think of as well.

When a doctor suggested that they take her to a final specialist, an oncologist who could evaluate whether she’s a candidate for chemotherapy, her children didn’t hesitate. Her youngest son, a twenty-something medical school student named Job, made the appointment and took her there. But she wasn’t able to undergo the tests that would determine whether chemotherapy would stand a chance of helping her. She was too weak. And even if it could help, it’s not clear whether she, her husband, and her children could afford the expense.

Job, with whom I am especially close, spoke to me at length about how very distraught he is by it all. He insists that he and his family have no right to leave anything untried in their efforts to help their mother, but there is very little he can do except insist. He is not yet supporting himself, and so he’s very far from being able to contribute financially to his mother’s care. When I asked him to say, straight up, whether he thinks his mother would accept the one financial contribution he could make – sacrificing a year of med school so that the tuition money could be spent on her care – he had to admit that she never would agree.

So we are all simply waiting. Madanm Marinot now insists that she wants only to return to her home in Ench to await whatever may come. She is still entirely lucid, so unless something changes the family will probably try to accommodate her wish.

My mother and father have been forced to take full responsibility for my grandmother’s life and well-being. It’s a sad thing because my main memories of my grandmother are of a very loving woman, both capable and strong. Her grandchildren – my sister and brother and I – all live too far away to offer our help. I know it’s hard on my parents, but they have Medicare, doctors, nurses, my grandmother’s excellent financial advisor, and probably others as well working beside them. At times, the very task of managing such a scattered team must itself be a burden, but I’m glad they have access to such assistance nonetheless.

Madanm Marinot’s family is able to huddle around her in her time of need. She doesn’t lack for their time and attention, but it’s not clear what any or all of them can do.

As I said: We simply wait.

The situation was odd, but strangely not awkward. I was in the surprising position to be talking with a sixty-something-year-old mother of eight and grandmother of many about her sex life. She had lots of things to say, of various sorts, but it all started with this one fact: She told me she no longer “had relations with anyone.”

We were talking about her sex life because she had participated in Fonkoze’s educational program in Sexual and Reproductive Health. It’s a fourth-month class for members of Fonkoze credit centers. (See www.fonkoze.org.) Participants use open dialogue to work through three comic books – I suppose that nowadays they’d be called “graphic novels” – that deal with various issues related to reproductive health.

The obvious issues are there, such as family planning, HIV/AIDS, and other STDs. But there are also stories that bring out the difficult situations Haitians, especially Haitian women, face in their sexual lives. One of the most popular is about a rural couple, Sentana and Toma. The man, Toma, decides to head to a city, where he can find work to support the family he leaves behind. But both he and she end up, each for a different reason, taking up with other partners. And the story describes the difficulties that creates for them both. In an area like Lagonav, filled with women who are raising their children alone because their husbands or partners are away in Pòtoprens or farther, the story really hits home.

Haitians who read the stories love them. Not just Fonkoze clients, but others as well. I have a copy of each of the three books, and the young people in Ka Glo, where I live, are constantly borrowing them.

If the familiarity of the stories is one key to their success, then the process that produced the stories is, in turn, what assured that they would feel familiar. They were created by Kathleen Cash, who worked closely with a team of Haitian interviewers whom she trained to talk extensively, seriously, and intimately with Haitians about their sex lives. She thus learned their stories, and was able to use them to develop composites that would highlight the issues in them that seemed most important to raise.

Perhaps the clearest sign of the program’s success was the fact that Madanm Lumière and others were so open with me about their situations. One of the goals of the program was to help the women who participate learn to be comfortable talking about what are, traditionally, private matters, and for Madanm Lumière and others it had clearly worked.

http://apprenticeshipineducation.com/images/MadanmLumiere1.jpg
Madanm Lumière

As she herself reported, when the program first started she had hidden her books, embarrassed to show them to anyone around her, especially to young people. She had soon learned, however, how important sharing the books would be. After all, she said, as a woman no longer sexually active, sharing information with her friends and family was the reason she had chosen to participate in the class in the first place. Now she found herself making an effort to talk to young people, to encourage them to talk with one another, about their choices and to encourage condom use.

This latter point she found hard, because the class time that was spent talking about condom use was especially challenging for her. For her, those discussions became too graphic. They were, she said, “vulgar.” But she understood their importance, and now was talking about condoms with young people she knew who would listen.

Another one of the program’s participants I spoke with was taking things even farther. Her name is Brigitte. She’s also in her sixties. She’s a single mother of seven children who supports and has supported herself and her kids – the two youngest still live with her – by selling coffee and hot chocolate on a street corner in Ansagale every morning.

The program could have no greater fan than Brigitte. As I spoke with her, I couldn’t help but think of the biblical instructions to speak of God’s commandments when you walk along the road, when you lie down, and when you rise up. Brigitte has made communicating what she learned in the class a major part of her life. She can read, and so she reads the books out loud at home. Friends, neighbors, and family members come to listen. And she brings the books to her little coffee shop, too. There, her customers can read them as they sip and chat. She pushes those she reads for or with to ask her questions and to tell her what they think, and directs herself especially to the young, boys and girls alike. They are, she says, the ones who have the greatest need to learn to avoid the diseases that come from making bad decisions about sex and to avoid having children whom they are not ready to raise well.

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Brigitte

She found the story of Sentana and Toma particularly important. Readers, she says, “will learn to be careful.” Sentana and Toma, she says, “seek out disease” for themselves and, so, end up “living in a terrible situation.”

All the Fonkoze classes were run by women who are members of Fonkoze credit centers. All the participants were their fellow-members. This is in strict accordance with Fonkoze’s goal of helping the centers develop into long-term solidarity groups in which learning has a natural and permanent place. The women who ran the classes received two weeks of preparation in a workshop at the beginning of the session and on-going support from a field supervisor who had participated in the same workshop with them.

Over and over, as I talked with participants, I learned how little the program’s spread was limited by the fact that direct participation in the classes was restricted to Fonkoze clients. In fact, space in class was so limited that only a third to a half of the members of any of the credit centers could join in. Nevertheless, in every center that I visited I heard how women were committed to sharing the books with family and friends and to talking about issues like condom use, sexually transmitted diseases, and birth control.

For Fonkoze, the program’s importance is thus two-fold. In a most straightforward way, it can contribute to the well-being of Fonkoze clients and their families. And that is, after all, what all Fonkoze programs are actually for. At the same time, it is providing its members with an opportunity to look beyond their families’ and their centers’ needs and to become agents of change in the communities they live and work in.

As they share these books and talk about the issues that they raise, they are transforming themselves into community educators of the most valuable sort: Educators who live and work within their home community to improve the choices that their communities’ members make for themselves. A traveling educator, a permanent outsider like I am, can only look on in admiration and delight as these true teachers reach more deeply into their communities and teach more effectively than I could ever hope to do.

I was thinking of my aunt. I think of her often enough. I’ve only ever had one true aunt. She’s an important part of my life, and she always has been.

But this time she was on my mind for two specific reasons. First of all, we had just arrived at Robert’s aunt’s house. It was well after dark, and we had hiked up from Pwentarakèt, where we had spent a few minutes with that very aunt of his. We had decided to walk to her house in Lapalmis because Robert needed to get back to Matenwa for school by 8:00 AM – he was giving his first graders their first-term exams – and we would be hard pressed to get there that early from Pwentarakèt. Lapalmis is within three hours of Matènwa by foot. If we got up by 4:00 AM, we’d have no trouble getting to school on time. The aunt herself would be staying in Pwentarakèt, where her husband and nephew were sharing a hospital room.

The day before, Robert had received a phone call. His younger brother Kenson was very sick, suddenly and inexplicably. Various a symptoms were described. Kenson hadn’t seen a doctor yet, Robert was told, because the problem was supernatural. He was sick because someone had cast some kind of spell on him. He was being consumed by a distant relative, a man who was in the process of becoming a vodoun practitioner.

Robert doesn’t put much stock in such explanations. So he was concerned that, because the disease was being attributed to magic, no doctor’s advice was being sought. He determined to go himself to see Kenson at the first possible moment to make sure he got to a doctor. Their parents are both dead, so Robert feels a strong sense of responsibility towards his younger siblings. He offers them all sorts of support, including financial, though his own means are limited and though he has three beautiful kids of his own to worry about as well.

The next day, even before he was able to get away from his work, he learned that Kenson was still very sick but that he had been moved to the hospital in Pwentarakèt. There his problem was diagnosed and was being treated. So Robert relaxed a little, and prepared to walk across the island of Lagonav to visit to see the younger man.

We left after school on Wednesday. I had asked Robert whether I could join him, in part because I met Kenson over the summer, liked him, and wanted to visit. Even more important was my admiration and fondness for Robert. He’s a really good first-grade teacher at the Matènwa Community Learning Center, a very enthusiastic participant in all the activities I’m involved in there, and a warm and charming person. The chance to spend an afternoon and evening walking and talking with him was too good to pass up. Finally, I was interested in the hike. I don’t get to walk around as much as I’d like to in Haiti. I just don’t have time. And I’ve seen very little of Lagonav, though I’ve been there often enough over the course of several years.

So we headed off early in the afternoon. It took awhile for us to get started, because first Robert needed to go to Nankafe. There’s a little grocery store there, and the store changes money. Robert had a some dollars that he needed to change into Haitian gourds so that he’d have some money to give Kenson for food. Hospitals in Haiti are different from those in the States. The sick person and her or his family has much more responsibility during a stay. The hospital does not provide meals or medications or sheets. The family has these responsibilities, and normally will have one of its members actually staying at the hospital as long as the patient is there. So Robert needed to make sure Kenson had food money, and he took care of that first, before we really were on our way.

It turned out to be lucky for us that we had to go through Nankafe, because there we bumped into some high school kids that were on their way home, up into the mountains between Nankafe and Pwentarakèt. They heard where we were going, and how we planned to get there, and told us they could show us a shortcut that would enable us to arrive well before dark.

The mountains outside of Nankafe are lovely. Much of the region is still thick with trees – something that sets it apart from the mostly deforested Lagonav – and after weeks of heavy rainfall, things were intensely green. We brought a thermos of coffee and some bread, so we had a snack. We got some water to drink from a house we passed at the top of a ridge. Looking across the trees and the plots of corn and sorghum, over the dark blue Caribbean, to the mountains of southern Haiti in the distance, I really felt as though I was in the midst of a tropical island vacation. It’s a sense I rarely have as I wander around the country in various forms of cramped, uncomfortable public transportation. Strolling with Robert was something different.

When we got to Pwentarakèt, we found Kenson in one of the three beds in the only room the hospital – really just a little health clinic – has. Their uncle was in another of the beds with complications from a broken foot that had not been well-set. Kenson was weak – nothing like the lively teenager I met over the summer – but he was improving. His fever was way down, the nausea was gone, and though he complained of a headache, he seemed to be mainly out of the woods. We didn’t stay long, because it was already getting dark, but Robert had time to speak both to Kenson and to their aunt and uncle. When we left, he felt confident that things were being handled well.

I was particularly impressed by their aunt. She was juggling a lot, with her husband and nephew both bedridden. Her husband has, it turns out, been disabled for some time, so just running their household without his ability to work on their farm or to do much in the way of carpentry must be a challenge. But she was cheerful and seemed to be concerned, as much as anything, that we receive a proper welcome for our unannounced visit to her home that night, even though she wouldn’t be there.

Robert told me that, since his mother had passed away, this aunt had done everything she could do to be a mother to him, and I believe it. A few minutes after we left the hospital, she caught up to us from behind. It turns out that, as soon as we had left, she had gone to buy a box of matches. She was worried we’d arrived in a dark house and be unable to find the sheets and towels we’d need for the night.

The path up to Lapalmis from Pwentarakèt was hard going because it was steep, narrow, rough, and it was getting dark. It must have been 9:00 PM or so when we arrived, dirty, hungry and tired.

The second reason my aunt came to mind is that what we ate when we arrived in Lapalmis was boiled pumpkin. Aselon, one of Robert’s young cousins, and the younger kids who were staying in the aunt’s house were already in bed, but they had boiled a pumpkin before turning in, and were happy to share it. My one and only aunt has a deep affection for pumpkin and other winter squashes so she comes straight to mind whenever I come across one.

It was delicious. Haitian pumpkins generally are. This one was no longer hot, but was still warm. It had been boiled in slightly salty water. As simple as that. There were grapefruit on trees in the yard, and Aselon got up and made some juice. Robert pulled a big avocado and some bread out of his backpack. It turns out that his aunt had slipped them to him at the hospital that afternoon. All in all, it was a great meal.