The nun had started an education program in La Savanne, considered one of the worst neighborhoods in Les Cayes. Les Cayes doesn’t have many “bad” neighborhoods, but La Savanne qualifies. It’s where protests, or, manifestations as they’re called, often start and generate heat, and it’s place foreigners don’t venture into when the sun sets.  This sister had spent the past 30 years in Brooklyn, New York, but after the earthquake had decided to return home and see how she could help. What she found, after being away for 30 years, was quite a few changes.

“There is no trace of Haitian culture in Les Cayes!” she tells me.

Her memories of a quaint Haitian town have had a rude awakening. Les Cayes, while certainly Haitian, is not of the romantic variety of towns. It is no Jacmel, no Cap Haitian. It is a meat and potatoes city, functional, lacking much grace or attention to aesthetics. Of course, from my perspective there’s more than enough here visually to keep me interested, to not even bother to think that this city might not live up to a Haitian person’s standards (aside from the usual problems of extreme poverty, and poor city services such as trash removal, road work, consistent electricity, etc.) of what a “true Haitian city” looks like. I have very little to compare it to, honestly. While I’ve seen much of the countryside, the only other city that’s of comparable size I’ve been to (Port au Prince cannot be compared to anything, it is an Albatross) is Jacmel, which too is not a “normal” Haitian city. It’s a renowned Haitian city, a place people specifically travel to from the US for Carnival. It’s a city that has, well, a lot of culture. Les Cayes does not. It is a market and fishing city, and while I won’t get into the meaning of culture, less I regress back to my freshman year of college, there is a difference between a commercial city and an artistic one. Perhaps both have their own brands of culture, but they’re not the same. To foreigners, the commercial city might be more romantic than the artistic one:

“this is how Haitians really live!”

But for the sister, who, when leaving Les Cayes 30 years ago, appears to have been leaving a city that was culturally relevant, a place where “the city was so neat!” It was, apparently, multi-cultural, with a large number of Syrians owning shops in town, something I had to ask her to repeat, lest I had misunderstood. “You mean, from the Middle East?” I asked politely, sure she had gotten her internal creole-english translation jumbled. “Yes yes, syrians from the middle east, they owned all the shops here.” This was news to me.

“30 years ago we had 1 secondary school in town, and parents would pay 50 goudes a month for a room to rent for their studies. There was a truck that came every day at 4am and picked up all the trash you left outside!”

She says this not with the naiveté of someone who’s never seen such a thing before; after all, she’s been in Brooklyn the past 30 years—but says so with a wonderment that such a thing could exist in a city such as the one that exists today. I admit, picturing trash collection each morning seems a bit of a stretch, but why shouldn’t it happen? I feel guilty for doubting the possibility of this. Now, the sister says, in La Savanne the kids run around naked. People kill other people. There’s prostitution.

“We have, what you call, human trafficking.”

I take this all in. It is the first time someone has expressed to me what things used to be like, has expressed shock and outrage at what things have become.

I won’t go into the details of her project—it helps heads of families become literate, along with several nutritional and health components to it, and sounds wonderful.

Two interesting anecdotes.

1. An NGO here donated 100 chairs (she tells me this almost in awe—100 chairs! Can you believe it?!), and the first thing they did was engrave in each chair a serial number. Sure enough, a few days later two chairs went missing. She told all the people she helps to look for those two chairs with the very specific numbers carved into them. She went into the street and told anyone who would listen about the chairs and the numbers. The next day they were magically returned. “We must have miscounted,” one of her employees told her. “Yes,” she responded, “I’m sure that was the problem.”
2. A while back she received a fairly large order of food that she was to distribute to her adult students. She walked in to her depot one day to find two men in the process of stealing this food. She started screaming “chinese”, and told them she was a very special nun, one who knew karate! She proceeded to get into a kind of Karate Kid Swan Kick stance, which scared off the intruders. “You cannot let these people think that you are afraid of them!”

The day started at dawn. We were traveling to Baraderes, a small town on the northern side of the peninsula (Les Cayes, where I live, is on the southern coast). The problem? A small mountain range in between the southern and northern coasts. The two sides of the peninsula is only 29 miles apart, yet the drive takes close to 4 hours thanks to steep, rock roads made more for donkeys than cars.

We support a school there run by one of the funniest people I’ve met here, who has the added virtue of being a nun. My boss told me that if we weren’t careful, she’d take the shirt off our back, and he wasn’t kidding. Not five minutes into talking to her about how things were going (“oh, I can’t live here much longer—too hard! No power! My eyes are going. I have to go to sleep when the sun goes down!”), and she was trying to convince us to:

1. Pave a road
2. Get her newly purchased generators up and running for several blocks
3. Implement a midwife program

The third program we might actually do, if we can figure out what it would actually cost to do.

Best part of the day (besides the reams of data I was able to get from the school) was the drive.

(more pictures coming–internet connection this week has been horrendous)