A Day in Haiti

The last few weeks I have spent the majority of my days walking through a few of the local communities evaluating the condition of the homes and retaining walls. I have had the opportunity to catch a glimpse of what life is like in these shanty town neighborhoods. I have seen the following:

• Naked children running through the neighborhoods without a care in the world.
• A young father and his young son (about the age of our babies) living in a severly damaged one room house with little, if any, furniture or belongings. I can only imagine where mom is.
• Older gentlemen sitting on the footpath outside their homes for the entire day, greeting people as they stroll by.
• The chorus of children shouting, "blan, blan" (white), every time I walk by. The only Justin these kids have ever known is Justin Bieber and it seems to be an easy name to remember, as a few of the kids have started calling me by name. Whenever I introduce myself as Justin Bieber, it always elicits a few laughs.
• The small open markets within these communities that sell a little bit of everything, from used shoes and clothes to 50 lb. bags of rice with an American flag (I am sure they were donated after the earthquake and ended up on black market) to an array of fruits and vegetables, many of which are unfamiliar to me.
• Most of the locals drink water that is sold in little plastic bags (imagine 6 ounces of water in a clear plastic bag). Rip open a corner of the bag with your teeth, guzzle it down, throw the bag on the ground and keep walking. The funny thing is that the name of the water company is Alaska. There isn't one thing in Haiti that reminds me of home, but I wonder if Alaska is some unihabitable, ice-locked land to Haitians.
• Lines of Haitian women along a shallow stream washing their clothes, day in and day out. Do your clothes get as clean as the person upstream from you? In fact, with all the trash, pit toilets, and what not, the water probably isn't very clean when it comes out of ground (natural springs feed the stream), and it only gets worse as it moves downstream.
• A single lady living in a tent canopy while waiting for her home to be reconstructed. A dirty mattress on the dirt floor, with her minimal belongings strewn about on the floor.
• The stench of open sewers running through the neighborhoods.
• The smiles and greetings from everyone.
• The joy of a family once they find out that we are engineers and are coming to inspect their home.
• 300 lb pigs rooting through the trash and always finding something to eat, whether it is truly edible or not.
• Everyone wanting to write their name and phone number in my log book to see if I can get them a job.
• All the kids returning from school early in the afternoon. I really enjoy seeing all the different uniforms that these kids wear. Apparently each school has different colors and uniforms and there must be many schools, because I see dozens, if not hundreds of different uniforms.
• While not necessarily in the communities, one word on traffic. Traffic is horrible, it can take an hour to go a few miles. If there are traffic rules, nobody follows them. Your side of a four lane divided highway can be overtaken by oncoming traffic. For the most part you never travel over 20 mph, which is a good thing I found out. When a Haitian driver hits a stretch of open road, the get after it. They get up to 60 mph over a stretch of a couple hundred yards and then slam on brakes when they hit traffic again. If your car breaks down, don't worry about getting it out of traffic, change that tire or walk to the gas station for gas, while car is sitting in middle of road backing up traffic for miles.

As I have mentioned before, life in Haiti is hard. It's sad to say, but you almost become numb to what you see everyday. What was so eye-opening the first few days is everyday life now. Although I always see something everyday that makes me chuckle and say "only in Haiti."

The people here live life every day just to make it to the next day. In these neighborhoods, few if any have any kind of steady employment. About all they can do is sell whatever wares they can get their hands on. But in spite of all the adveristy they face, they make it to the next day and that means everything to them.