Spending over four months in a place will always make leaving a bittersweet experience for me. On one hand I loved Haiti, the work I got to do there, the people I met and the feeling of home I was able to establish. On the other hand, I will forever have itchy feet and after several months in one place, I almost always long for some new challanges and adventures.

So as Haiti has drawn to a close for me I am left with amazing memories and great friends. We had our last meeting a few days ago and it was a tear jerker as everyone took a moment to stand up and speak their mind about what their volunteering experience in Haiti meant to them. The best part for me was listening to the young Haitian guys speak about how Hands On had changed and affected them and then listening to the foreign volunteers say the same about the local guys. Haiti is a screwed up kind of place but the young guys I was able to work alongside really give me hope for the future of the country, as cheeseball as that may sound.

We finished off the deployment with a party for 200 of our closest friends complete with chicken, drinks, speeches, hugs, tears, dancing, singing and this slideshow that I put together from some of the photos taken since Hands On first arrived in October.

I’m looking forward to Nicaragua and reactivating my brain with a bit of language studies but I will miss Haiti and think about it often.

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Back when I arrived in early November it seemed like everyone was living in fear a bit. The streets were covered in mud, there was no power in the city, no businesses were open and the only place to get a somewhat cold beer was an enterprising guy with a cooler who will forever be known as Cooler Man. With a serious shortage in places to hang out at night and some intimidating warnings about Haiti’s safety hanging over our heads, we all tended to grab a couple of beers each night and retreat to our balcony. This usually ended in everyone getting wasted and being told to be quiet after 10pm then retreating to far off corners of the yard to continue the festivities.

One of the happiest moments of the deployment for me, and this is embarrassing to admit, was when a friend came back to base with the most deicious egg sandwich of all time. I’m not a big fan of the food here so the discovery of this 75 cent sandwich of the Gods was a life saver that everyone was soon addicted to. As an added bonus Egg Sandwich Lady (as she came to be known) is right across the street from us and also sells beer and pop. So Cooler Man was out and Egg Sandwich Lady was in due to food and being closer. We are so fickle.

At this point businesses seemed to be opening up again and many of us had been in Gonaives long enough to realise that it’s not the scary place it first seemed. The locals are friendly and we had all made Haitian friends and hanging out with them after work meant that we needed to find a real live bar. Enter Speakerman. His beer price was two for 50 gourde which was cheaper than everywhere else. Plus he had real tables, a fridge instead of a cooler so the drinks were actually cold, and he even had a sound system, hence the name. Speakerman soon became our local pub which was funny considering it consisted of some patio furniture on the side of a busy, dusty road with trucks barrelling down it at high speeds a few meters away. But traffic calms down after dark and that’s when the dancing in the streets begins to the ‘Beep Bop’ song which will forever remind me of Haiti. It has no words, just ‘beep bop beep beep bop bop’ over and over again and then the actual song is played over and over again - I think seven times straight is the record. How much I’ve had to drink has a direct effect on whether I want to shoot myself or dance along.

One night while at Speakerman for a few people’s leaving drinks, a huge UN vehicle full of Argentinian soldiers drove past us. They came back down the same road at about 1am and this time they stopped. Of course we were on their truck within minutes, wearing their hats, and drunkenly holding their guns. Did I mention I love Haiti?

We spend most of our nights at Speakerman but decided to venture out one night to a place called ‘Hotel Delux’. It involved a trek in the dark down scary alleys and over a trash pile. On arrival, the music was super loud, our local volunteers were practically molesting a willing girl on the dancefloor, the beer was expensive, and the place was mostly empy except for us. We were wondering why we ever ventured away from our beloved Speakerman and decided after a couple of drinks to leave. One of the other volunteers had bought a beer at Egg Sandwich Lady and was trying to bring the empty back but the doorman wouldn’t let her leave with it. Another volunteer reached through the door from the outside, grabbed the bottle and bolted. The door guy slammed shut the iron gate and suddenly three blan (foreigners) were trapped inside and three were outside. Some local volunteers came to our rescue after about 10 minutes of arguing and we decided that venturing off to unknown bars might not be the best idea. It was an entertaining end to an otherwise boring night though.

Gonaives will never be on anyone’s must see list for cities to party in but we’re doing alright here! It’s amazing how fun patio furniture on the side of the road with an overly loud sound system playing the same song over and over can be when you’re surrounded by the right people. I’ve had a blast here so far and, while partying wasn’t on my list of things to do here, I’ve had my fair share of crazy nights and fuzzy memories that I hope I’ll never forget.

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For our holiday all of us were looking for some serious relaxation and a chance to do next to nothing beyond eating lots of bad for us food, drinking cocktails and collapsing on the beach. The windsurfing town of Cabarete was suggested as a possible destination and it turned out to be just what the doctor ordered. We were surrounded by other tourists, bars, sand, surf, food and were a bit overwhelmed at first but managed to accept the pace of life and spent five days being lazy, drunk and stuffed with food. It was great.

When our holiday came to an end we were actually all ready to get back to Haiti. Cabarete was nice but too orderly and I think we were all craving the chaos and mud that we had left behind. After taking a tap tap with its own sound system we arrived into the chaos of central Cap Haitian and accidentally held up an entire intersection for a few minutes while we wrangled over price to meet a friend in a hotel at a beach an hour away. This taxi was definitely not meant for the hilly, pot holey, and all around terrible road and I was amazed it surived the journey. The road did a number on the taxi though and all the driver kept saying over and over was ‘not good, not good’ as the bottom of the car scraped along the road.

When we eventually made it to the hotel at 6pm and were in good spirits since we never expected to survive the ride. We were happy and confident having survived the taxi ride but were surprised to see that our friend had left for a place nearby called Labadie Beach. Normally no problem, we’d just go to the other beach… but this is Haiti and getting there involved short taxi and boat rides. Problem? Because he had already nearly killd his car, our taxi driver refused to take us any further and there’s virtually no traffic on the road we came in on. So we paid loads for the airport taxi guy to take us down the road and even more for random boat people to take us to Labadie. It all worked out ok after we got to the beach and were led on a wild goose chase down dark alleys and riverbeds. We found our friend, had some drinks, spoke to an interesting 83 year old American guy who runs a beautiful hotel there and pretty much just chilled out.

Getting to Labadie was kind of a nightmare so I’m not sure why it never crossed our mind that getting out wouldn’t be just as much of a pain. But we don’t think of these things so we wandered around town a bit and left way later than we shoud have. We ended up getting stuck for several hours at the end of the dirt road right next to a beach that Royal Caribbean has leased for it’s guests. The ridiculous thing about this beach is that the entire thing has been walled off so that on one side there are floating bouncy castles, cocktail bars, jet skis and copious amounts of white people and, on the other side, there is a dirt road and 100 Haitians (and us) fighting to get onto a pickup truck to get away from there. There was a gasoline shortage that day so very few tap taps were operating which meant that our fight to get onto a truck was unsuccessful and we were sort of stranded. Not how I was hoping to spend my New Years Eve.

By this point it was about 2pm. We were at the end of a long road with no hope of getting onto any kind of transportation so we just started walking. The new plan was to get to the hotel were almost stranded at the previous night and hope for the best. We had a sympathy drink once we got there which raised our spirits but a friend of mine was sick of waiting around and headed off walking further down the road. I joined her and we walked for about 3 minutes before finding a bar, grabbing some drinks and parking our asses at the side of the road chatting to a couple of nice Haitian guys who gave us jewellery.

Eventually we snagged a ride back to Cap Haitian with an airport taxi and managed to get on a tap tap that was due to leave at 5pm for the 4 hours journey back to Gonaives. I didn’t think vehicles travelled at night in Haiti but I was happy to see they did… until we actually started moving. We were pretty crammed and the road was terrible and even scarier at night than during the day. We passed the time by chatting to the locals and getting a mobile Creole lesson in the process.

We arrived back at base at 10:30pm and I’ve never been so happy to see a place in my life. We were all in one piece and pretty thirsty so we headed up the road to Speaker Guy for several tasty beverages, a badly timed New Years countdown, hugs and kisses, terrible dancing, some serious avoidance of drunken Indian UN guys, more drinks, worse dancing, and fuzzy memories. It was probably my best New Years so far and it couldn’t have been in a more bizarre place, dancing on the side of the road in Haiti and happy as hell to have made it there in one piece.

Happy New Years everyone!

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I’ve been in Haiti for about six weeks now and the blisters on my hands and bruises on my legs say that I need a holiday. So early on Xmas day, myself and three other volunteers wished our HODR family a Merry Xmas, opened our stocking of goodies, ate some breakfast and then wandered off down the road in what we hoped was the general direction of the bus station. The plan was to attempt to make our way to a town in the Dominican Republic called Cabarete. The reality is that we didn’t have much of a plan for actually making this happen and no map or guidebook but we were hoping for the best and ready for an adventure.

We arrived at a non-operational Texaco gas station and assumed that was the bus station because of all of the tap taps and school buses in the area. No ticket windows, signs, or even staff… just a collection of scary looking vehicles and drivers shouting their destinations loudly in an attempt to lure you on board. We found a tap tap (a popular Haitian vehicle which is basically a pickup truck with hard benches around the outside) to Cap Haitian which was to be the first stop on our route. It didn’t bode well that the tire was off and we were the only people on board but we stuck with it. It was due to leave at 8am and we eventually rolled out at 8:45am with 27 people on board, a fat woman practically sitting on my lap, an iron bar in my back and my friend’s knees pinning me down at a really awkward and painful angle. Add to that a bumpy road, sheer cliffs and a crazy driver and you have, possibly, the most uncomfortable four hour journey of my life.

Our arrival at the border soon turned from relief to distress when we found out that the border was closing. The clocks are an hour ahead in the DR and, as it was Xmas day, their immigration department had closed and the gates for the bridge were in the process of being locked. We started chatting to a friendly Canadian UN guy who told us where to get our Haitian exit stamp before we could cross the border. Unfortunately, their immigration office happened to be all the way across a huge field. With the fear of being trapped in this ghetto Haitian border town we all legged it across to the office and were hoping for the best.

We got the stamp without too much hassle and ran back through the desolate, trash fire, litter landscape towards the bridge to the promised land of hamburgers, strawberry daquiris and toilet paper. As we arrived we saw that the gate across the bridge had been closed and locked. The Canadian UN guy told us that we could go around the gate by hanging off the edge and climbing over a rope and then told us to hurry because the Dominican immigration office was closing. He then continued talking to us for another 10 minutes about buses, hotels, passport stamps, fees and a few other topics that were totally unrelated to our predicament while still telling us to hurry. We eventually escaped his conversation, got past the gate and found ourselves at the mercy of the Dominican immigration officials. We were adopted by a nice guy on the other side and he told us we could pass but would have to come back the following morning for a passport stamp.

So we were in the Dominican Republic but trapped at Dajabon, the border town. Not the beach setting we had in mind but we made the most of it and had plates of chicken and french fries for Xmas dinner and washed it down with a few beers and then a few more. we ended the night drinking Bailey’s in a gazebo after hopping a fence to get into the park. A pretty surreal ending to a crazy day but it was one of the best Xmas days I’ve had, despite the craziness.

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I can safelty say that I haven’t worked any harder in my life than I have this week so I was looking very forward to a day of lounging around on the balcony, surfing the net and attempting to practice a bit of Creole. So when I found out we had to work Sunday to shuffle the Xmas and New Years days off around, I felt a bit defeated and was pretty sure my body was about to break down. Fortunately, we were given the option to work a half day and I jumped at it and ended up having another great day after all.

Work

I’d been wheelbarrowing for days and wanted to escape them, so I actually appreciated the morning spent in a bucket line which is a job dreaded by pretty much everyone. It basically consists of standing in one place and passing heavy buckets of mud from one person to the next down a line. It’s repetetive, boring and murder on your hands and shoulders but I was loving it today for some reason. When you get a good rhythm going and are passing a full bucket as you receive an empty one, the whole thing becomes sort of meditative. It might be a sign that I need a holiday if a smoothly flowing bucket line is what makes me relax!

Football

The best part of the day was attending game one of the Haitian national football league final - Gonaives vs Cap Haitian. Tickets cost about $3.50 and didn’t buy me a seat but I got something even better - a chance to watch the match while actually standing on the football pitch! The pitch is made of dirt and is surrounded by a concrete wall with only a metre or two of space between the sidelines and the wall. We found ourselves ushered into an area along the sidelines and I ended up watching the entire match practically standing in the corner kick area.

The area all around the football pitch was buzzing and, to my surprise, people were queued up in a perfect single file line that stretched on for ages. I expected chaos and brawls but was met by an orderly line. I think police and UN soldiers’ guns might have had something to do with that or the fact that Haitians are very used to lining up for food and other types of distributions. The chaos and brawls I had expected in the crowd were saved for the field and a pushing match broke out between the two teams before the game even started.

The crowd was hugely passionate and my favourite part about the game was the after-goal celebrations. Gonaives scored twice (the final score was 2-1) and each time, the crowd rushed onto the pitch, ran around screaming, waving their arms and hugging each other, and then returned to almost the exact same spot they had just been standing in. It was a bizarre combination of mayhem and order in the most random of locations and one of the coolest things I’ve done so far in Haiti.

Goodbye Party

There are a few bars that have popped up recently around our HQ and we have found ourselves frequenting Speaker Guy’s place the most. He’s known as Speaker Guy because of the giant, blaring speakers he has in his bar. He’s the guy who we went to the football match with and we all went to his bar later that night to celebrate the win and to say goodbye to friends who were leaving the next day. As always, things deteriorated fairly quickly into a dance off in the street between locals and blan. It was sad to say goodbye but great to send people off in such a strange little hole in the wall bar while eating goat and drinking Haitian beer. A great end to a great day!

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Yesteday a crew of about 8 of us finished clearing a massive house of an insane amount of mud. The house was expected to take two weeks but ended up taking five and a half days, mainly because we all worked like crazy people. I spent an hour and a half of the first morning on wheelbarrowing and nearly killed myself. There was a bottleneck in a narrow alley so we had a system in place where two people would get their wheelbarrows loaded with mud, two people would run out the alley, and two more would wait at the dumping site. It all ran like clockwork but was super fast so I had to save myself and defect over to the less intense, but still hot and sweaty, shoveling team.

I had so much fun at this job, partly because the mud was almost perfect, partly because the family whose house we were working on was so appreciative (and made us lunch twice) and mostly because our team was made up of fantastic people and hard workers which made the day really intense but also pretty inspiring. I have never seen people work that hard.

The best part, I think, was on the last day when we sorted out a pretty good system for getting the wheelbarrows out to the dumping site and back in. When we arrived that morning, a group of Haitians were in the process of clearing a mountain of mud from the street. There were about 15 of them walking wheelbarrows from the front of the house, down a narrow path beside the house to a field in the back (that they had told us not to dump on a few days before). We all thought there would be too many people on the path because it was too narrow to let wheelbarrows pass but we decided to get out there with them and try it anyways.

We had a Haitian volunteer, Richardson, directing traffic with a whistle we’d found in the first aid kit. He was like a traffic cop, all serious and waving his arms about and the only thing missing was the white gloves. The funniest thing for me was watching our volunteers making the Haitian guys out front run like hell. Our guys had been working like animals running around with wheelbarrows all day long for days and, in order to not get run over, the Haitian workers had no choice but to run as well. It was so funny to look out the window towards the alley and see Haitian guy, white guy, white guy, Haitian guy, white guy… bang bang bang running like maniacs up and down the path.

It was the last day in Gonaives for a couple of people who worked on this house from the start and we were all kind of sad that the job was over, but happy that those two got to see the end of it. It was my favourite day so far in Haiti and a reminder how amazing this experience is.

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Six girls wandering around the outskirts of Gonaives with tents is apparently a confusing thing for the local population to see. We decided it would be a fun (and ridiculous) idea to go camping for a night near a lake on the outskirts of town.

As we walked, we amassed a small following of people who were trying very hard to grasp the concept that we wanted to go sleep in the middle of nowhere. Eventually one guy, Charles, caught on and led us to a field caked in cow poo. People came out of the woodwork to see what the crazy blan were doing and we eventually had amassed a crowd of about 50 people, all staring at us as if we were from another planet. I think I can safely say that their community has never been descended on by white women wielding tents before and we were their entertainment for a good few hours.

Since we accidentally set up our tents in the middle of the village’s football field, we figured we should entertain the children for awhile. We played with the kids and chatted a bit with the crowd before retreating to our tent to eat tuna sandwiches and drink wine. As it got dark the crowds dispersed and we made a fire out of twigs and coals and sat around it chatting and probably getting gassed.

Charles stopped by to check on us in the morning which was really nice of him except that he did it at 5am just as we’d all finally managed to fall asleep. The whole experience was pretty ridiculous and it’s not a trip I’m going to forget anytime soon.

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Last night was one of those crazy nights I seem to have from time to time. As a volunteer with Hands On, we get Sundays off and have to work the rest of the week which usually means that on Saturday we might have a few drinks and stay up a bit later than normal. Wild and crazy! But we seem to have had a recent wave of arrivals who like their booze and, as a result, it was deemed that on this Saturday night some serious partying would be done.

It started out innocently enough for me with a few rum and Cokes on our balcony chatting about civilised things like politics and other things that required brain power. I was pretty happy staying put where I was but a big group of volunteers, probably spurred on by the mystery alcohol they were all drinking, decided that an outing to a local nightclub was to be the plan for the evening.

Another rum was downed and soon after a gang of about 15 of us were marauding our way down the mean streets of Gonaives to take the local disco by storm. A few of the local Haitian volunteers were leading the way and it was shaping up to be a fun night. The club was more like a small bar with a mysterious pitch black room off to the side where everyone danced.

The bar was pretty hot so a bunch of people moved outside where there was, inexplicably, a half full swimming pool. It didn’t take long for a couple of guys to wrestle each other into it and that was the cue I needed to jump in after them. A few more people jumped or were dragged in an suddenly we had ourselves a pool party. The Haitian guys were singing and the rest of us were splashing around like idiots. The entire bar emptied and were watching our antics. A bar full of blan (white people) is probably unusual enough… a pool full of them splashing around fully clothed for hours is probably not something that is seen every weekend. The whole night was pretty ridiculous. The local guys we have working along side us were having as much fun as we all were and it was awesome to escape the balcony and check out the local bar scene. I spent most of today in recovery mode and did nothing but I guess that’s what Sundays are for.

I’m still having a blast here after two weeks. I’ll be leading up a painting team tomorrow at a local school, on Tuesday I’ll be helping some of the local guys write resumes and I have no doubt that the week will be filled with some more mud shoveling as well. I’ve got a couple of the guys attempting to teach me Creole and I did pretty well this morning practising down at the local market. We’re having Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday for about 60 people including the local volunteers and staff so that should be another big party.

Bring on the next couple of months, I say! It should be loads of fun if the first couple of weeks are anything to go on.

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I’ve been in Gonaives, Haiti for a week now and I have seen a lot of mud. A LOT. The entire town is covered in it. I’m not sure exactly what happened after the area was hit with four hurricaines but the result is serious amounts of mud in people’s homes, piled in the streets, covering schools and just everywhere. Having volunteered with Hands On in Bangladesh, I had a good idea of what the setup would be like and I know quite a few people from there too. I wasn’t at all sure what Haiti woud be like, though. I’d heard about kidnappings, food riots, revolts againsts the government and all sorts of things so I was kind of apprehensive about the whole thing, to be honest.

Well, I’m a week into this adventure and I really couldn’t have asked for more here. True, the situation in the city is pretty dire and the poverty isn’t something that’s easy to look past, but the work here has been really rewarding. There are a lot of local Haitian volunteers involved in this deloyment and working side by side with them is really what’s made this first week so great.

• Day One - Arrival. Went out to a job site for a couple of hours in the afternoon and witnessed a man sort of attack one of the local volunteers for dumping mud in front of his house. We regrouped and continued the work after finding a new mud dumping site but it was a bit of a harsh introduction to the area. The volunteer was ok but a bit shaken.
• Day Two - Oxfam tool distribution. This was an interesting day consisting mostly of waiting around with a few hours of furious activity in between. Hands On teamed up with Oxfam Spain to distribute sets of tools to fifty families with the idea being that they would work together with other families in the neighbourhood to clear mud from their homes. The distribution went well after a bit of chaos at the beginning and it was very interesting to see a major international organisation like Oxfam at work. Besides sending wheelbarrows out unassabled to people who probably don’t own the tools to put them together, it all went smoothly. We later found out that people in this area didn’t actually have nearly as much mud to clear as the homes we were helping and learned that the Oxfam people didn’t even know about the extreme need in the areas we’d been in.
• Day Three - Day off. I attempted to sort out my stuff by building a shelf out of plywood but mostly took it easy and let my sore bones rest. There are lots of really nice, funny people here and finding someone to chat with each night is definitely so problem.
• Day Four - Clearing an easy house. Worked on a house that was totally empty of furniture and filled with pretty good mud. There are many classifications of mud here (mostly made up by the volunteers) ranging from sticky to heavy to dry to wet and everything in between. The mud in this house was heavy and sticky but, because it broke off into chunks, it was easy to handle. I spent the day shovelling and can safely say I have never worked so hard or sweated so much, not even when I was picking fruit in Australia. We finished the house in one day and it was really satisfying to know that we all worked hard and got someone back into their house faster than expected.
• Day Five - Clearing a difficult house. Went to a home that had been under mud over six feet high. Hands On have been working at this place for over a week now but, because of the amount of mud and lack of space to use wheelbarrows (buckets are passed between people instead) things have been very slow going. I ended up getting water in my rubber boots so it was kind of a miserable day but even the bad days are never that bad.
• Day Six - Painting a school. Spent the day painting windows and doors at a school that Hands On have been working on since they started the project on October 10th. When the work began, the courtyard and all of the classroms were under several feet of mud and now everything is mud free and in need of some coats of paint. Even though I wasn’t here to see the school at its worst, I can completely imagine what it was like and seeing it cleared up and having the painters moving in is a cool thing. Pretty tedious work but it was a relaxing day and there was a bit of a leaving party at night for a few people so beers were drunk.
• Day Seven - Clearing Happy Lady’s house. Worked on clearing a foot of sticky mud and lots of furniture from a lovely lady’s home who thanked us with kisses at the end of the job. She was very thankful that we were doing this work for free and it was great to see that she understood this point because, often, our people think our local volunteers are getting paid and it’s nice to see them get credit for being volunteers.

So it’s day seven and, after watching an awesome sunrise from the roof of the house here and eating a yummy dinner made up entirely of mystery dishes, I’m surfing on a super fast net connection and attempting to get caught up on emails.

I really think this is going to be an amazing experience and I’m really looking forward to seeing what the next two months have in store. If things continue to be as good as the first week then I’m in for an awesome time!

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