Scott’s Haiti Timeline

When I eat breakfast with the kids, i sit with Diana, Jenny, and Hannah, an intern at Ms. Sue’s. This morning the girls want to see pictures on my phone and flip through the camera roll.  Kids like to see pictures and really like to see pictures of themselves. Jenny takes my I Phone and […]

In a hallway to the tv room, on a wall in front of the boy’s dorm, is a tree with kid’s photos hanging like fruit. These photo’s were taken some years back and the children have long since outgrown their photos, each day becoming something new, their emotions taking them on minute by minute roller […]

There are competing perceptions of Haiti. There is the portrayal, in its art, that Haiti is a rural place of simplicity, order, old ways, peaceful, a collage of beautiful colors, shapes, and sounds. This is the Haiti that Gauguin would have painted had he sailed to Haiti instead of Tahiti. There is the reality of […]

Outside the front gate of Christianville, you take an immediate right to go to Haiti Made, a local cafe, coffee and smoothie shop run by Americans. An eighth of a mile down the rock strewn, bumpy, water puddled lane, that barely makes a foot path, is the landmark Old Well. It is called old because […]

It is Sunday morning. Sun squeezes through delicate spider webs by an old stump. Water seeps through screw holes in the tin roof of the guest house. Children sing songs at Ms. Sue’s. When you have little, you tend to be happy with what little you have.    

In the 1950’s, the world was in a Cold War. Yet, there was hot atomic testing with Pacific atolls being blown into non-existence and school children crawling under their desks at a school bell.  Russia and the United States were headbutting and angry rhetoric took the place of missiles. Scientists, and what they were working […]

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 […]

Roads, in the Haiti countryside, are mostly dirt holes, filled with rain water, surrounded by a sprinkling of stones. 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]