Haiti Made is a local countryside Cafe and Gift Shop.
If you walk outside the Christianville front gate, past the security man sitting in a chair with an automatic fully loaded weapon by his side, you make a quick right and follow a single winding lane road into the countryside until you get to their front door.
Less than a quarter mile, past the Old Well, you can drop by Haiti Made, grab a smoothie and visit with locals and foreign tourists in the heat of the day.
Displayed on tables,walls and pallets are handmade items made by local men and women who are part of the Haiti Made’s craft co-operative.
Jan is in court today and works the register, takes orders, meets friends who come in with pitches for various community projects. There are Americans living full time in Haiti and many have Christian intentions and charitable goals.
Love and Grace are operative words today and the smoothies are truly smooth. My favorite is banana cherry, but some of the kids like banana peanut butter, or cherry lime. They are all made with real fruit and thick enough you can use a spoon to scoop them out of the glass..
On this hot afternoon, with heat rising and the feel of rain in the air, going to Haiti Made makes a good comma in another long drawn out Faulkner sentence about hope and fear in a desolate Garden of Eden.
If a smoothie isn’t your cup of tea, you can choose a cup of coffee and have a muffin.
On a hot afternoon, it feels good to sit under the shade trees on the patio and swing in an old tire swing that hangs down from a tall sturdy branch above it by a thick thick rope that only a hangman would love.
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 Haiti, in a drive thru Port Au Prince, of collapsed concrete buildings, lingering fires in the street, pigs eating garbage as people sift through it next to them, street shops made from sheets of tin and plywood, hands shoved in your car window selling bottles of water.
The difference between the imagined Haitian paradise and the real fallen city is stark.
Would we rather accept a sentimental vision, or adjust to gritty reality?
Is our glass half full, or half empty?
Haiti is a pot of spicy soup with ingredients we savor, and ingredients we spit out.
When you travel, you meet reality.
Haiti shares its island with the Dominican Republic. Haiti speaks French and the Dominican Republic speaks Spanish. Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere while the Dominican Republic is a tourist mecca with white beaches, all inclusive resorts, stunning landscapes.
Haiti was discovered by Columbus, claimed for Spain, ceded by Spain to the French, and became an independent country when Toussaint L’Overture, in 1804, led half a million slaves in revolt.
In 2003, Voodoo became an official Haitian religion.
There have been 70 dictators here since their Independence Day.
Unemployment is around 80% .
The 2010 earthquake that hit Haiti was a 7.0 magnitude with over 300,000 Haitians killed and property damage that has never been rectified.
There is too much Africa and Europe here, and not enough opportunity and freedom..
Being kept a slave, by your own countrymen, is hard to fathom.
Where all the money donated to Haiti went, after the earthquake, is in someone else’s Swiss bank account.
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 a deep well drilled in the 1950’s when the Christianville Bible University occupied the hillside above the well. The University was taken out by one of Mother Nature’s hurricanes some years ago and all that is left of it is a concrete shell of a building at the top of the ridge, obscured by battered trees and beat down vegetation.
Often, at this well, there are vehicles, motorcycles pulled off the road while men and women fill yellow five gallon plastic jugs with water to take home for cooking, drinking, and bathing.
I splash water on my face, direct from the spigot, stopping my walk to Haiti Made for a moment.
A hurricane, taking out this Bible University on the hill, is ironic.
If the well had been taken out too, the tragedy would have been exponentially worse.
While having a God helps us survive, not having water is a death sentence.
A phone call has been made to get this work started.
This workman uses a ladder to climb up into the tree branches,and, with deft strikes, his machete becomes an ax and tree limbs come down with a crash.
This crew of four has spent half a day trimming trees and another half loading debris into the back of their old pickup to be hauled off. The hood of the truck is left open to cool the engine.
Contrary to popular myth, Haitians work hard when there is work to be done that someone will pay you to do.
My apartment, after this tree amputation, will be fifteen degrees hotter because there are no longer branches to shade me, but I won’t have to listen to mango’s hit the tin roof day and night, with a noisy crash.
In the famous words of some long forgotten philosopher, written on some bathroom wall, ” The longer you wait before doing something,the better the chances you will decide it doesn’t need to be done. ”
I wish I hadn’t said anything about the noisy falling mango’s on my roof to the East Indian scientists who live upstairs, who then called Elizabeth, who then called the Christianville Public Works Department.
Shade in Haiti is more important than quiet.
Sometimes, it is best to keep your complaint to yourself, hold your tongue, and let things be as they have been a long time before you arrived.
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