Eggs come from a local source and are delivered when ordered.
There are 30 eggs to a flat and ten flats to this stack which makes three hundred eggs. It sounds like a multiplication word problem from one of the kid’s math workbooks stored in a plastic crate on the back porch.
It becomes more than a multiplication problem when the cook cracks a hundred eggs for this mornings breakfast alone.
Now, it becomes a logistics problem.
Multiply your own children times a factor of ten, fifteen, or twenty, and think which direction your household finances are going.
What complicates the story is these kids don’t have parents, have parents who have left them to be raised by strangers, or have been abandoned.
That turns this post quickly into a lesson in multiplication, logistics, and heartache.
The crack in this wall began after a contractor built a security grate of ironwork on top of the storage unit so thieves couldn’t slip in at night and help themselves to someone else’s food. The crack has dangerously expanded and weakened the wall, and, in extension, the entire storage room.
This morning Mich poses next to a Haitian broom that looks like it wouldn’t work but does nicely on concrete, tile, even on stones in the yard. The broom’s fibers are flexible and strong enough to push mango leaves and paper into a pile to be picked up and thrown into an old oil drum to be burned or hauled off later.
The broom’s bristles are held together by rope twisted around them and the long thin wood branch handle. The broom is light to carry and easy to shake out and leans against the wall like a ;professional loafer.
Mich smiles.
He is happy even if this crack looks like a lizard ready to swallow him up and smack its lips after it’s snack.
Lucky has had two litters.
Her first litter was given away and taken at night when no one was paying attention.
This second litter of seven is housed in a suitcase under the front porch of the guest house. Besides the banging of mango’s falling on the roof, Scott is serenaded by puppies at one in the morning every night. Their four part harmony is mediocre but they are great at crescendos.
Lucky, diligently, stays up all night barking at threats to her brood but sleeps all day on the tiled front porch floor, in the shade.
This morning, Ms. Sue’s girls are coaxing Lucky back to her puppies by laying down a string of dog treats. They lay one down and Lucky walks to sniff it, then gingerly eats it. They lay another bite, just a little further, and Lucky follows them. No smart dog is going to turn down a snack.
Back at her suitcase, she is reunited with her kids, each one named by Ms. Sue’s children.
Their names, as chosen by committee, are Lacy, Lucy, Larry, Lalo, Lily, Lewenski, Lemenski.
No one is sure where the last two names come from but they are on a handwritten note given to Ms. Sue. The note has a big heart drawn on it and all seven names are printed neatly in a little girl’s hand.
How anyone will put the right name with the right puppy is yet another miracle?
Roads, in the Haiti countryside, are mostly dirt,with holes filled with rain water, covered with a sprinkling of rocks.
After a strong rain,these roads, leading deep into the bush, become non- negotiable and new paths have to be made through the underbrush so folks can reach their plywood shacks with tin roofs, homes with sheets for curtains, and plain Jane outhouses.
This steer is stretched to the end of his rope and he drinks from his own muddy bowl in the road’s middle, guarding it like a dog guards his bone.
Placing distance between us, as I gingerly walk past, I look at distant mountains and hear goats tied to fences, complaining continually about their nooses in the pastoral setting.
This bovine is intimidating.
I don’t see him taking off with a stranger without a brawl.
It would take a special kind of thief to take the end of this rope and lead this guy home.
There are volunteers this week, from Indianapolis, who lend fifty hands.
On our work menu is covering up a newly installed septic tank, filling in a washed out area around the clothesline, spreading gravel in areas that get muddy and cause kids to track mud into the home, sanding and refinishing kid’s beds, making new friends.
Work goes quickly when spread among many, and, by the end of two days, much has been accomplished The septic tank is buried, the washout is gone, beds, with a fresh coat of stain and polyurethane, match up with their mattresses.
Most of us work our own pace and some of the kids help, curious, wanting to try their hand.
Volunteers come and go, but kids, and staff, are here long term.
Nobody here thinks they can do everything by themselves.
The desire to help is a common Christian directive, and helping others, I am told frequently, by church folks, is something “we don’t have to do, but we get to do.”
Gecko’s are ubiquitous, strutting on television commercials, hiking up walls, screens, lounging on tree branches around my Haiti home.
This gecko doesn’t stay long enough for introductions and moves away quickly as I approach. In a shutter click he is off the screen and down into the underbrush,his green body lost in thick vines. His best feature is his unrelenting hunger for mosquito’s.
Mosquito’s are a Haiti problem, as well as the diseases they carry. Besides dengue fever and zika, mosquito’s carry malaria. Most volunteers with church groups from abroad pop big orange malaria pills, started two days before a visit and carried on a week after getting home. We are all shot full of strange potions and wipe ourselves down with insect repellent first thing in the morning and last thing at night.
This gecko has eaten his fill on my porch screen, and, for that, is a master of pest control.
I will celebrate his return this evening as he runs up and down my screens like a freestyle rock climber.
I really love the fat lizards who don’t care about looks and wag their tongues, like fingers, as if to say, ” You ain’t gonna eat more than me tonight. ”
Gecko’s are not reptiles that everyone hates.
They have style.
Next to Ms. Sue’s is a house with an upstairs and a downstairs.
Upstairs is rented to two east Indian scientists who run the Christianville lab on infectious diseases. Downstairs is a small two bedroom apartment, furnished, for guests at Christianville. Being a solo traveler, this is the place for me and my suitcase. My costs for room and board are small because I am a working volunteer.
This house is shaded by mango trees and my apartment has electric but no TV and no wifi. Ceiling fans keep air moving and screens keep mosquitoes mostly outside. In early morning. sunlight streams through the apartment’s louvered jalousie windows that have no curtains. Water, drinkable, comes from a nearby well and there is warm water for showers and a stove for cooking if you wish.
The only shocks here are midnight mango’s hitting the tin roof with the force of bombs, and Lucky, the mother dog, barking at shadows that threaten her pups who live in an old opened suitcase under the front porch of my apartment.
The accommodations are my home for two weeks.
Being thankful for what you have is always a travelers best mindset.
This, stacked up next to some places I’ve lived, holds up very well.
On customs forms, my destination is spelled – Christianville, Haiti.
Christianville is not a town, city or village but a walled, fenced, compound in the Haitian countryside that is a trade school, a co-ordinating point for churches from abroad doing missions in Haiti, a research lab on TB and infectious diseases, an operator of three private schools, K-12, and the location of Ms. Sue’s children’s home.
The ride to Christianville from Port Au Prince is a juggernaut with the nightmare being highway repair that forces four lanes into one single file lane with police spot checking paperwork of vehicles and driver’s passing through the gauntlet.
Along the main road leading out of town, darting in and out of cars, are walking vendors peddling bottled water, food, treats, toys, and anything else they might make a dime from. Along the rutted road are shacks,smoldering fires, garbage and gaunt faces of urban people surviving a country with eighty percent unemployment.
Through this juggernaut, Ms. Sue, Hannah and myself leave Port Au Prince, enter rolling countryside, green with fields, and, in the distance, mountains. The countryside, anywhere, is better than cities. Cities are squeezed, packed, crammed, noisy, crowded and stacked. The countryside is open, wide, green, quiet, expansive, shady.
My purpose is to make repairs at Ms. Sue’s kid’s home, but most repairs needed here go beyond my pay grade.
I can’t put broken families together. I can’t undo untimely deaths. I can’t make things equal.
Broken rain gutters, sagging gates, leaky plumbing, walls needing paint, moving dirt will be on my plate this week and earning my eighth travel ring will take some effort.
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