Haiti days 5 & 6: Down the mountain

Leaving Port-Au-Prince can take a while.  For one, all the roads would make great settings for SUV commercials.  Traffic, dust, smog, and people selling stuff car window to window on the street make for quite a long trek.  Fortunately, our driver could have been a NASCAR driver as we would hit probably 90 miles an hour at the breakaways, horn blaring and people diving out of our way.

We left the city for the Leogane area, just south to southwest of Port-Au-Prince, on the edge of the mountains.  We would be working with CODEP, or Comprehensive Development Project, which is taking on a number of great initiatives in the mountains of Haiti, to help provide a self-sustainable living economy for the people that live there.  Clark had spent several months with this organization and was excited to see the progress they've made over the years.

Saturday night, we arrived at the CODEP guest house on the coast, a lovely place with a beach AND a washing machine (a very welcomed sight at this point). We learned a little about the project and ate a delicious pumpkin soup dinner before calling it a night.

The next morning began early as we packed for a night in the mountains and jumped in the back of the truck as it drove up the steep mountain slope.   Being on the back, we were able to take in the gorgeous views of the valleys down below.  Already, we felt as if we were in another world, coming from Port-Au-Prince.  The air was clear, there was hardly any traffic congestion, the quake damage wasn't so much visible.  However, we would soon learn what kind of damage the people of these mountains face as we gazed out at mountains once full of trees.

Our first stop was at a church service, a church where Clark had lived and helped teach.  The church was a partner with CODEP.  We were ushered to the front of the room, where around 50 or so Haitians were gathered.  Clark did his best to introduce our group in Kreyol, and we sat through the service, not understanding much beyond communion, offering, and the tunes of a few hymns.   We were a little surprised that service only lasted an hour.  Our previous experience with third-world churches, as well as comments by Clark led us to believe that we'd be in church for the long-haul that day.  We would later learn that BECAUSE they knew we would be there that Sunday, they prepared a SHORTER version for us Americans.  They would continue "their" service later on that afternoon.  Sure makes you feel silly!

After the service we joined the congregants for a coffee hour and some attempts at communication.  We also checked out the place Clark had stayed when he worked there, a house that had moved from two stories to one during the quake.  Seeing quake damage even in the sparsely populated mountains was very interesting.

Further up the mountain, we began our hike (the 7 of us, CODEP director John, and several "animators"-Haitian locals with responsibility over reforesting plots, funded by CODEP.  The hike featured gorgeous views of the landscape.  Soon we would see the process of re-foresting in its prime.  After a mile or so of crumbly, dry ground, we came up to a heavily forested area, one of the first CODEP projects.  The process in a nutshell: build ramps with grass to catch rainwater, when mulch gathers plant Eucalyptus trees to nutrify soil and provide tree cover, THEN fruit trees can be planted to provide sustainability and income.  The results were astonishing.  Simply looking at the difference between a barren and forested landscape was proof enough of the effectiveness of the project.  Further, we learned that the focus is on educating the residents of the countryside on these methods and encouraging them NOT to move to cities, but rather to sustain themselves where they are located.  Here's a map of the area we were in (pictures in the next post):

After around 5-6 miles of hiking, we arrived at a home of a CODEP partner deep in the mountains.  This would be where we'd crash that evening.  I'd done a home stay before - a very humbling experience, as the hosts usually insist you stay in their rooms while they cram in another room.  This was no different in that regard.  However, somehow we ended up staying at the neighborhood MOVIE THEATER.  In between two houses was a sheltered area where a tv and huge sound system was set up.  Around 20 Haitian kids were gathered, where they had paid money to watch a series of low budget action flicks at super high volumes.  Us, tired from our massive hike, were ready to crash, around 9pm.  What are you gonna do...tell the gracious hosts to shut up?  We did note the bitter irony of the fact that the local Haitians were all glued to a TV while the Americans were the ones hiking all day and going to bed early.

We finished our hike early the next day, coming back down the mountain for pickup.  Our ride back to the CODEP guesthouse took us through fields of corn crops and banana trees, lush lowlands.  Its hard to imagine a country so full of wonderful food exports suffering so much.  Potential is enormous, yet as we had seen, the years have not been good to the countryside.  Deforestation and poverty in the mountains sends people to the city, where the suffering is magnified.  

It runs down from the mountains like the rain.