My arrival in the earthquake-ravaged city of Port Au Prince Haiti on February 15 began a number of fun experiences over the next 30 days that I spent in the country. This second Haiti blog is an attempt at recording some of the most significant of those mildly ribald experiences.
When Becky Maesato and I arrived in the Dominican Republic on the 14th we had arranged to have a hotel in Santa Domingo for that first night as we were arriving too late to continue that day to Haiti. We got a taxi to the hotel that had been arranged and when we got there we were met by a middle-aged American woman, whom I will call Barbara, who volunteered to help us finalize the arrangements for our rooms. I thought she was part of the hotel management, but it turned out she was there with another humanitarian organization, planning to go to Haiti to do some work in an orphanage located in the mountains outside of Port Au Prince. There were four other younger people there as well; three young men and a young woman. When Barbara heard about what Becky and I were going to be doing in Haiti, she asked if she could join us rather than follow her original itinerary. Becky agreed, so she became part of our group.
We had planned to go by bus from Santa Domingo to Haiti. However, but in the morning when we were getting ready for the nine hour ride across the DR by bus we decided that since we had a good sized bunch all traveling to the same place, that it may be to our advantage to hire a driver with a minivan rather than ride in a crowded bus. The man who brought us from the airport was available, so we hired him for US $500 and were soon on our way.
There’s not much to say about riding across the Dominican Republic in a bouncy minivan, but we did talk a lot and got acquainted some on the way. I was most interested in this talkative Barbara who joined us. It was very clear to me that this was going to be an interesting two weeks while we would be together. This woman really liked to talk. It was amazing that she could keep it up for so long of a time. As I listened to her, I knew this propensity of hers was going to open some opportunities for me for some gentle pranks on her.
It didn’t take long to find an “opportunity” with Barbara. To save some money when we got to Port Au Prince, we found a hotel that had not fallen down with the earthquake that had a room with three beds. I would be spending two weeks, it seemed, with two women—Becky, a mild-mannered motherly wonderful woman and Barbara with her $2000 camera and exploding enthusiasm. Day and night, Barbara kept talking a steady stream along with taking pictures as if there were no end to the process.
I had been looking for something that I could use for a little merriment with Barbara when it presented itself on about the second day we were there. It was morning and we were all getting ready for our trip to the orphanage where we would be visiting and working that day. A tray of toast and coffee had been brought into the room that we had shared. Becky and Barbara had finished but I was still eating when I noticed a small insect almost too small to see crawling on the white table cloth the hotel people had used to line the tray of food they brought in. Seeing this as the opportunity I was looking for, I called for Barbara to get her camera and come over to the table. I told her, and she believed me, that I had discovered a rare miniature Haitian cockroach, and that she should take a picture of it. I explained as she hurriedly grabbed her camera and put on a special lens, that these miniature Haitian cockroaches were very rare and she would have a very important memory to take home with her. The insect was darting around the cloth as she approached, so I told her not to shoot with a flash, as cockroaches are very sensitive to the light and it would hide if she used her flash. She turned the flash off then got down within inches of the creature and started to take her pictures. After taking about six shots of the insect doing her best to focus on it, the insect disappeared under one of the plates and she stopped, excited, believing that she had gotten several pictures of the bug. She looked on her viewer to see if she could see it, but it was too small so all she could see was a close-up of a white table cloth. She wasn’t disappointed, however, and said that later in the day when we were back in the hotel, she would download the pictures on to Becky’s computer where we could all see her shots better.
That evening when we returned the first thing Barbara did was get on Becky’s computer, download all her shots of the day and view her photos of the rare Haitian cockroach. However, as she opened up the several pictures she took of the bug, all that showed up was the white table cloth. Somehow the cockroach had escaped her camera, or she had not focused properly to get the good pictures she wanted. I assured her that I would continue look everywhere over the next few days for another opportunity to photograph the elusive Haitian cockroach. I never found another one.
We had sketchy Internet at the hotel, and that same evening I had some time, so I did some research on the political and social history of Haiti. Randomly reading articles I found I ran across an article discussing the Creole Pig Eradication program that happened in 1978. It was an interesting article about how the first known occurrence of Swine Flu had been detected in Haiti carried by the Creole Pigs. These pigs, leftover from the Spanish occupation of the island, were everywhere in Haiti and were the basis for the Haitian economy at the time. The World Health Organization along with the U.N. and some U.S. health specialists from CDC considered this outbreak of Swine Flu to be so significant that an eradication project was negotiated with the Haitian Government that all Creole Pigs in Haiti be killed. In creating this program the U.N. and U.S. would replace the eradicated Creole Pigs with several species of pigs that did not have the flu. So all the pigs in the country were killed. For a very long period of time this action ruined the Haitian economy and turned out to be very problematic when the new pigs that were introduced to Haiti did not adapt well to the climate. Eventually other more hardy breeds were introduced pigs which managed to adapt to the climate and people started raising them again like before. The article gave all kinds of information and discussed the hardiness of the Creole Pig, and what it looked like. I had seen pigs all over the city as we drove around. They were all colors and sizes and most were rummaging freely on the garbage on the street. I knew after reading this article that I had the makings of another photographic challenge I could lay on Barbara. So here’s how it went.
On one of our return trips from the orphanage while we were riding back to the hotel and Barbara was taking pictures nonstop, I brought to Barbara’s attention some of the pigs we were seeing along the streets of the city. We had already passed by many by then rummaging in garbage that flanks every city street in Port Au Prince. So after getting her attention and seeing that she had stopped talking for a moment, I told her the story about the Creole Pigs adding to the story the following unfacts: First, that not all of the pigs were eradicated in 1978 and those that survived the slaughter fled into the forest and became feral pigs. Added to that was the next unfact that the offspring’s of these pigs, while very rare, are occasionally seen on the streets of Port Au Prince. And . . . if someone with a camera was able to capture a photo of one of these rare Creole Pigs and place that photo on the Internet, there was a very good chance that the photographer would be rewarded with a lot of money for the rights to the photo. To make sure that Barbara would be able to identify the “right” pig to photograph, I followed with another unfact, that Creole Pigs are always black and that they are smaller than the ordinary pigs one sees on the street more often that are the offspring of the replacement pigs. I explained that while there are many black pigs in the city, the Creole pigs can be identified with certainty by their size and their pink noses.
So that Barbara would not be told that my story was a farce and ruin search for the Creole Pigs of Port Au Prince, I revealed the prank I was pulling on Barbara to Becky, our driver Patrick and later to the four other Americans who came down from the mountain the latter part of the second week and joined us at the hotel. Barbara had looked for but had not found any Creole Pigs up to the last day before her and the other American’s were to leave Haiti. On the last day that they decided to take a full day’s tour of the city. Before they left that morning, I told the group for the sake of Barbara’s poor results on her search for the Creole Pig that they all keep their eyes open during their tour and let Barbara know if one of these rare pigs was seen. They agreed, knowing that I was hoping for closure to my prank on Barbara.
To my surprise when the group returned late that night after their long walking and taxi tour of the city, they had found a large black pig with a pink nose. The group convinced Barbara that this was in fact a Creole Pig even thought it was a little large. Barbara, they exclaimed, was ecstatic about the find and took many pictures of the pig, but also took a video of the young American girl attempting to take a ride on the back of the pig. They all came back anxious to tell me about Barbara’s find of the rare Creole Pig, show me the photos of it and the video of the young woman’s attempt to ride the animal. My prank had a wonderful, albeit unusual closure. I never told Barbara that the pink-nosed pig she found was too large to be one of the rare Creole Pigs, but I believed with her propensity for telling long stories, that when she returned to Kansas to her second grade children for whom she was a teacher she would be telling stories about the Creole Pig she found and photographed in Haiti.
It was fun continuing with my stories as more people came to work on the projects we were doing at the orphanage. When the 10 masons and general contractors came down to Haiti on the second week that I was there, two of the men who came down that I had previously met in St. George Utah the week before took me aside and asked a favor of me. They told me that one of the fellows in their group would be a very likely candidate for any story I might conjure up. They encouraged me to take full advantage of this friend of theirs. I thought right away this might be another fun intervention, so I agreed to find something that would work on this fellow.
When I met him I knew right away that he was very naïve and would be an easy target for anything I could give him. So as a starter I told him the same story about the Creole Pig that I had told Barbara. He immediately bought into the lie and so started to look for these pigs as the group was transported from the job to the hotel and on the tour that Becky arranged for them to see the devastation of the city.
A little later, while I continued to study the history of Haiti on my computer in the evenings, I ran onto the most interesting story that I thought might make another trick that I could play on this gullible fellow. The factual part of the story takes place in Haiti while François “Pappa Doc” Duvalier was ruling Haiti from 1957 to 1971. Papa Doc was an expert in voodoo who ruled Haiti with brute force and terror, with a ruthless security force, the Tontons Macoutes, acting as real-life bogeymen who routinely executed his opponents.
In 1963 Papa Doc had a heart attack that left him very paranoid about affairs of state and people he believed were his enemies. While he was recovering from his heart attack he left Clement Barbot in charge of his affairs. Bardot was at the time head of the dreaded Tontons Macoutes, the organization that carried out all of Papa Doc’s ruthless killings throughout the country. Right after Papa Doc recovered, however, Bardot left his office over problems he was having with Duvalier and set upon a campaign to assassinated the man. When Papa Doc learned of this plot against him he ordered that Bardot be found and shot. Before he was found, however, word got to Papa Doc through his voodoo priests that Bardot had transformed himself into a black dog. Hearing that, Duvalier ordered that all black dogs in Haiti be put to death. The order was carried out and throughout the country all black dogs were summarily eradicated. Later Bardot was found and murdered.
I told this man John the story about Papa Doc and the black dogs, but added a little lie to the end for John to pursue. I told him that like the Creole Pigs that escaped the eradication, a few of the black dogs also escaped death and fled to hiding places throughout Port Au Prince. Offsprings of these dogs, I told John, are still roaming the city, but are very rare and hard to find. I said that if anyone finds one of these dogs and can photograph it and post it on the Internet there are certain Haitian historians that will offer a large reward for those photos. John found that story fascinating and bought into it along with my challenge that he keep his eyes open for one of these black dogs and also keep his camera ready at all times when he was being transported from the orphanage to the hotel. He never found a black dog or a Creole pig to photograph.
On the first Sunday after the 10 men arrived from the U.S., Becky arranged for them to go to church and then have a tour of the city. The tour came late in the day and as evening approached and the group was riding in the back of Becky’s pickup, the Haitian boys who were acting as hosts and tour guides for the group were trying to get through the late evening traffic and get the group back to the hotel before it got dark. They told the group that being in the dark and in the open in a truck in the city was open season for street gangs to rake havoc on a group like those Americans riding in an open pickup. This warning didn’t bother most of the group, but I was told later that John, my favorite target for stories, had been so frightened after hearing about gangs in the city that he almost cried and insisted on sitting inside the truck rather than staying on the back with his friends. After their tour John couldn’t stop talking about how afraid he had been on the tour. This was so annoying to his colleagues that one of the fellows who had asked that I try out some stories on John told me about this matter with John and asked that I figure out something that would keep him on his toes as they continued their travel to and from the orphanage.
I hadn’t been with the group during their Sunday tour so I asked our driver, Patrick, to give me a hand with this particular request. Patrick came up with the following caution that I passed on to John:
First, John should not establish eye contact with any person he sees on the street that has his pant legs rolled up. Rolled up pant legs, I assured John were the way gang members identify themselves. If John did get eye contact with one of these street gang members it was a sure bet that something dreadful would happen to John or anyone else who would be getting eye contact with these awful men on the street. We knew we had a good one this time, as it was common for young men who hung out on the street to have their pant legs rolled up almost to their knees. It wasn’t, however, because they were members of gangs, necessarily.
During one of our breaks while the men were working at the orphanage, our driver Patrick demonstrated what John was supposed to be on the watch for by rolling the pant legs of his Levis up so John would be sure he was looking for the right thing. I didn’t hear much about how John was reacting to this new challenge of mine, but one evening a few days after I told him to be on the lookout for these so-called gang members, I overheard him talking to one of his American colleagues telling him exactly what to look for regarding Haiti gang members and how to keep from being hurt by one of these men by avoiding eye contact with them. I heard later that on a couple of occasions while the group was returning to the hotel, they observed John ducking his head and looking away from certain men on the street.
On the last day of the tour, one of John’s colleagues, the one who had instigated my telling lies to John, told him that he had been taken by me on these three stories. John took it very well and said to me as they were leaving that he didn’t hold any antipathy against me.
They left, but the fun was not over for me, as least. Late in my month-long tour, the word had gotten around to everyone that they should avoid believing anything that I told them, so I was not able to do much more after the group of men left the country. However, Patrick, our driver who had heard all the stories I told and was himself on guard that I might catch him with one of my pranks, decided he would pull one on me when an opportunity availed itself to him. Patrick found the opportunity and got me big time. It went like this:
We were traveling a lot the last two weeks of my expedition when it dawned on me that with all the travel we had all over the city, I had not seen any women carrying babies anywhere on the streets. Knowing that Patrick was a long-time resident of the city, I asked him if he knew why women seemed to be hiding their babies or leaving them home. He saw his opportunity by my question and immediately came back with a scenario that I bought into completely. He said that it was common throughout the city that poor women, especially, were looking for ways to make money and that one way to do that was to sell their bodies in prostitution. He broadened his story by that adding that men on the city did not want to have sex with women who were obviously mothers of small babies. So the women leave their babies home with family members while they prostitute their bodies and that was why it was very rare to see women carrying babies in the open on the streets of the city. A few days later I was in the process of telling someone else about Patrick’s lie about hidden babies, when Patrick and Becky who knew that Patrick had gotten me on this story began to laugh. I knew I was the victim and realized that there is a price to pay for being a liar like I am.
