Buckeyes in Haiti

Posted on 01/07/2012 by paulefallon

I often describe Haiti as magical, and I am not alone in that view.  Mysticism is strong here where ancient voudou merges the physical and the spirit world.  It also provides context for the daily trials of people with so little control of their lives. Time and again my Type A American expectations are upended.  Like magic, Haiti is not rational.

No one would describe Ohio as magical.  It is sensible and grounded, rooted in fertile soil and industrious citizens.  It is the epicenter of the United States’ most enduring and traditional values, a practical place where logic and reason prevail.

As any of my regular readers know, I spent eight days cycling through Ohio this summer and developed a strong appreciation for its culture.  I loved the hearty food, the exuberant cycling community, and the citizen’s faith that products of the hand and mind, our infrastructure and technology, are the tools that build successful lives.

We have a group of 23 missionaries from a church near Akron staying at the mission house this week. They have been working on construction projects, painting the banisters and walls, building a roof on the new kitchen building and laying foundations for new guest cottages.  Last night Gama and I returned to the mission house before the last gasp of daylight and I was able to witness the handiwork of the dozen or so men (including three Cleveland firefighters, a civil engineer, a judge, a chemist, and three guys with a boatload of varied job experience) who built a roof that integrated logic and craft in three days.

The new kitchen is nestled into a corner of the mission property, Two property line walls meet at an obtuse angle to form two sides; the two additional walls are orthogonal to the other buildings on site.  The result is a structure with one right angle and three odd angles.  In pre-earthquake Haiti this out of squareness would hardly be noticed; most buildings got flat concrete roofs with haphazard cowlicks of reinforcing popping out for a potential second floor.  Those roofs crushed a lot of people, so many post-earthquake structures opt for wood frame slopes with metal roofs.  These will not last as long as the concrete in a country where wood is susceptible to decay, but they are too light to crush if they fall.

The new roof is a beauty.  At dinner one of the guys explained the logic to me.  We knew the metal roof needed to be between a 2 in 12 and 3 in 12 slope.  We set the ridge four feet above the dividing wall in the kitchen, so it could be sheathed in full pieces of plywood.  This put the slope in the correct range.  We had to sister the joists, which were only 16 feet long, but set the longest rafter perpendicular to the ridge to the top of the wall.  From there, we laid out the other rafters, some parallel, some not, to determine a consistent slope, and then built up the angled walls as much as needed to meet the rafters.  The result is a simple yet consistent roof sitting atop a skewed box.

I asked about hurricane clips.  We couldn’t find any anchors to drill in the concrete block walls, but we found a spool of metal tape and some through bolts. We set the bolts through the top course of the masonry, anchored the metal tape to one end, wrapped it over the rafters, and pulled it tight to the other side of the bolt.

The point of this story is not to sing the praises of the roof, which will not be published in Architectural Record any time soon.  The point is to highlight how completely different Haitian and American cultures function.  Take a dozen guys from Ohio, throw them in Haiti, give them an assortment of tools and materials and a jumbled problem and in three days they develop and build a practical, rather elegant solution.  Our ability to problem solve is great, we relish the challenge.

On the BLB site, where we are building a larger yet more regular building, every step is an arduous process that must be repeated and repeated.  The crew trowels grout into ten walls, but unless we tell them to grout the eleventh, they might not.

This lapse is not due to laziness; Lord knows Haitians work hard.  It is simply that their minds work differently than ours.  We look for pattern, for logic, we apply order wherever we can.  Haitians are less analytical, less inclined to assign effect to cause.  They are more comfortable with magic.

 

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Pedaling Principles – Chapter Five – Kansas

Posted on 01/07/2012 by paulefallon

Kansas – We Are What We Eat

Cows like me.  At least, that it what I imagine as I ride along the side of the road. When I ride by, cows stop what they are doing, grazing, and look at me until I pass.  Being herd creatures, once one does it, they all do it.  If they are facing the road they look straight up, if they have their behind to my path, they do a full U-turn of the neck.  I am a diversion in their day. And in the West, where towns are fifty miles apart and ranches ten miles apart and passing cars two miles apart and I find myself counting down the numbers imprinted in the concrete slabs of highway to mark off my pedaling, cows are a diversion in my day as well.

Colorado cows are spread over the thin grassed plains in extended families, maybe eight, maybe twelve, each nibbling away at what little there is, hundreds of feet from each other.  Actually they are cattle, but I think of them as cows.  They are friendlier that way. Kansas cows are completely different.  They are industrial. They live on feed lots, hundreds and hundreds of them, their black hides barely move against the chocolate brown earth of trampled mud.  They huddle along feed troughs or cluster under the shade of a single tree or settle into a pond so tight I cannot see any water.  Besides being the summer of the Great National Debt Ceiling Debate, 2011 is also the summer of the Great Heat Wave.  As I ride fromLamar, CO to Garden City, KS, it is my second day of 100 plus degree temperatures.  Little do I know that I will have eleven more to come.  It is better that I don’t.

As I ride, I fancy that feed lot cows are less content than open range cows, but that is mere projection. I have read Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore’s Dilemma and I want to think they are less happy.  In fact, when they look up at me, all cows are equally inscrutable.  We like to suppose that cows belong on an open range, but then we like to think that people belong on family farms, when for generations, given the choice, people flock to cities.  Cows have no choice, they live where they live, they die to provide us meat, and people who care about the difference pay more for meat that is open range and organic, while others eat whatever is served.  The differences in how the animals are raised, the effects of force feeding them a corn diet, the compromises mass processing introduces into the safety of our meat, and the nutritional loss that results are well discussed in either of the above books.  I observed only the two most elementary aspects of the process, cows and corn, and came away thinking the term ‘industrial food processing’ is apt; we have twisted nature to create food on a scale never intended.

Southwest Kansasis a giant factory of land.  After we pull minerals out of Colorado and ship off all that we can find, we move on, but in Kansas we use and reuse the land over and over.  The feedlots full of cows are but a tiny portion of the factory; most of the space is taken up with the cornfields that generate their feed.  Over the course of my trip, I spent 50, maybe 60 hours riding beside cornfields in six major corn producing states, but nowhere else did corn have the industrial sheen ofKansas. Southwest Kansas doesn’t get enough rain to grow corn, or much of anything else.  But since it sits atop the Ogallala Aquiver, a huge reservoir that runs under the High Plains fromSouth Dakota to Texas, giant rotating sprinkler systems can pull water from beneath the earth to irrigate the corn. The dense green stalks within the neat sprinkler circles are fertile; the land a foot beyond the sprinkler’s reach is parched dust.  A third component of theKansas land factory is the other stuff that we pull out of the earth; a smattering of oil and lots of natural gas.  These products of the land are channeled through elaborate pumping systems, with boosters along the side of the road every mile or so and mammoth processing plants at greater intervals. As I ride I hear the hissing and clicking of this elaborate system as if the land itself is gargling.  The final component of this land factory are the packing plants where the noisy fuels power elaborate machinery that turn the corn fed cows into hamburger and steak, while the rest of the corn is ground into the syrup we use to sweeten just about everything we eat.

Riding out of Dodge City in the early morning light I passed the massive Cargill plant.  Rows of tracker trailers stood waiting to be filled with meat to distribute acrossAmerica.  The sides of the trailers bore the slogan ‘Meat Solutions’.  The phrase puzzled me in every direction.  Is meat a problem?  Is there something inherently wrong with meat that Cargill feels compelled to fix?  Is there something beneficial about what Cargill and their cohorts do to our meat – modifying the digestive structure of cows so they can feed off of corn instead of grass and making our meat so homogenous we cannot isolate contagions?  I rode on a few miles, chewed on their slogan like cud, until it occurred to me that ‘meat solutions’ must refer to the sheer capacity of our industrial meat production.  Every cut of meat is available in every supermarket in every season in every city and town in America.  Whatever we crave for dinner, we can have.  That is quite a feat.

No country in the world has a food system as bountiful and ubiquitous as theUnited States.  Rib eyes, roasters, pork chops, portabella mushrooms, melons, mangoes, figs, and filberts, everything is available all the time.  The industrial food system developed in direct response to our desires in chicken and egg fashion.  As we found ways to bring more products to market of predictable quality regardless of season, demand grew.  As demand grew, it prompted ever more technological enhancements to bring products to market.  We import grapes from Chile to sell through the winter; we keep apples in climate controlled storage in Washington to distribute year round, and we slaughter beef inDodge City on a continuous basis.  Over time our food has lost some flavor and nutritional value, but these are evolutionary byproducts; by the time we started to balk at the downsides of industrial food, the system was so entrenched that the alternatives, organically grown food, locally grown, locally slaughtered food, were little more than niche markets.

One unexpected down side of our plenty is just that – plenty.  We have much too much food.  We hold surpluses to counter bad crop years, we pay farmers not grow in an effort to maintain price levels, and we have so many staples that we dump our excess rice and grain on foreign markets, which undermines the subsistence farming systems that maintain millions of small farmers in developing countries.

We have so much food, our food is really cheap.  As a percent of income, food in the United Statesis cheaper than anywhere else in the world, or at any time in history. The average American spends less than ten percent of her income on food, and over 40% of that is in restaurants.  During the Depression we spent a quarter of our income to eat, with scant restaurant fare.  The percentage of income we spend on food dropped steadily until the 1970’s when it hit around 12% and has continued to float down ever since.  People in other developed countries spend 15% or so of their income on food, in developing countries that figure approaches 25% while in some Third Worldcountries people pay more than 40% of their income on food.

Humans evolve over centuries, not years.  We are programmed to eat when we can because it wasn’t too many generations ago that we literally did not know where our next meal was coming from.  Now we are awash in food, yet we are still programmed to eat when opportunity knocks.  Is it any surprise that we keep getting fatter?  I started my trip inColorado, the only state in the country with an obesity rate under 20%.  (19.8% according to a 2011 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Study, versus a whopping 34.4% for top ranked Mississippi).  This sounds great until we recall that a mere twenty years ago, no state in the union had an obesity rate over 15%.  We are getting fat very fast, and the further I travelled east, the more obesity I observed.

Like most people on vacation, I ate more food on my trip than usual, and I specialized in hearty local cafes; pancakes at breakfast, biscuits and gravy, meatloaf, barbeque, and soft serve ice cream after a hot summer day.  I ate large restaurant portions and feasted on foods I rarely eat at home.  Bicycling seventy miles per day, I could do that without gaining weight.  But what of the people who sat around me in the restaurants?  One night I observed a family of four gulping down an all you can eat buffet.  Each of them, even the children no older than ten, hung over their chairs as they slouched over platters of steak and potatoes.  Another morning the ample young women in the booth next to me ordered biscuits and gravy and home fries for breakfast.  That was it.  How can such an unbalanced breakfast provide the energy she needs to navigate her day, let alone get trim?  Observing these representative Americans, I doubted that any of them had long bike rides scheduled into their day.

Our food system is upside down in every sense.  Never before have the poorest people been the fattest.  But since fattening foods are the least expensive, laden with inexpensive ingredients of marginal nutritional value, we have the paradox of people being both overweight and malnourished.  Meanwhile, economically affluent people are the thinnest, as they are usually the most knowledgeable about their food choices and can afford to buy more nutritious food.  The result of all this cheap food is that it the savings we incur are illusory when we consider the healthcare costs of obesity. Current estimates place the obesity burden on our healthcare system at $270 billion per year, or $870 per person.  That is fully a third of the total amount we spend on food every year, $3,300 per person.  Even if we paid more for healthier food, we could come out ahead if we reduced the healthcare costs of obesity.  The problem, of course, is that statistics are not experienced in this comparative manner.  At a given moment we are confronted with easy, abundant, cheap, tasty food.  The hidden cost of obesity lingering in that food is not experienced until much later and in more indirect ways.

If we analyze our food system through the lens of our guiding principle, ‘Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness’, we must applaud our system for providing us whatever we want whenever we want it. However, it is fair to say that few, if any, of us want to be obese. Obesity is the byproduct of eating too much. What we like is the eating, not the getting fat.  The conundrum is that we often pursue short term happiness that does not foster long term happiness.  Delayed gratification is not one of our guiding principles.  However, we as a country can help align the short term opportunity to eat whatever we want with the long term objective of being trim and healthy – happiness now and later.

First, let us appreciate and capitalize on what is good about our system.  We have an unparalleled infrastructure to provide all foods everywhere.  In fact, we might question whether all that capacity is actually required or even desirable.  We need to ensure that we have enough food, but are we well served by having all we want of everything all the time?  I don’t think so.  If we let our food system reflect seasonal adjustments, we would be able to look forward to, and savor, strawberries in the late spring, when they taste the best, rather than rely on systems that ensure something the shape and color of strawberries year round.  If we loosen up the production side of food so that we don’t expect everything always, we can work towards a more natural system.

We don’t want to deny anyone the ability to eat what they want, or even as much as they want.  However, we can try to align costs and actions as closely as possible.  Therefore, we can make all foods available, but price them to reflect their true cost to discourage us from making poor choices and to better reflect the social costs of our selections.  Again, our food system is upside down on this.  Apples should cost less than chips, milk should cost less than soda, and salad should cost less per pound than steak. Yet, just the opposite is true because chips, soda and steak are products of the industrial food system, which is big business with lobbyists and influence, while apples, milk and salad represent smaller players of our food system with less clout.

Aligning food prices with social costs raises that dreaded term, ‘transfer cost’.  It is possible for us to tax food low in nutritional value or subsidize food in high nutritional value or some cost neutral combination of the two.   Conservatives would yell ‘foul’ at such a proposal, yet don’t we subsidize the industrial food system now?  Isn’t our farm policy all about moving us more and more towards large scale, corn-based, mass production food?  Why do we make growing corn so cheap even as it is the basic ingredient making us overfed and obese?

A food system based on our individual freedom to choose what we want to eat does not have to equate affordable food with a high calorie, low nutritional value diet.  We can offer true choice by educating individuals about the implications of their food selections, by making food prices reflect actual social and economic costs, and by maintaining, or even loosening, our distribution systems.  Any negotiations about farm subsidies, transfer costs on unhealthy foods, and seasonal adjustments will be difficult if we approach them from the point of view of fixed interests.  We will have to keep in perspective the big picture goal of a food system that provides healthy food to all.  We need to appreciate what we do well and acknowledge the consequences of the system as it has evolved.  No blame needs to be assigned, but if we collectively decide that our food system can be both cost effective and healthy in every respect, we can do it.

East of Dodge City, past the Cargill plant, I pedaled past a beautiful monument commemorating the northern most point of Coronado’s 1541 pilgrimage in search of the Querecho civilization and their fabled riches.  I was surprised to learn that the Spanish colonial empire extended as far asKansas.  Then I realized that despite all the cattle I saw in my three days in the state, I did not eat in steak houses while inKansas, each night I ate at local Mexican cafes.  Waitresses who spoke no English served delicious food that I ordered by pointing to pictures on the menu. In fact, I saw many more Hispanic people than Blanco’s on the streets of Garden City and Dodge City. They are the laborers of our industrial food system. Spain may have lost its title over lands so far north, but it has not lost its influence.

 

 

 

 

 

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Construction by Hand

Posted on 01/04/2012 by paulefallon

A five gallon bucket is a foot in diameter and just over a foot tall.  It will take over 11,000 buckets of concrete, carried from the mixer by hand and up a ladder, to pour the second floor of the Be Like Brit orphanage.

Bucket Carrier at Be Like Brit Orphanage site

Dressing block at Be Like Brit Orphanage site

Mixing mortar at Be Like Brit Orpahange site

Laying concrete block at Be Like Brit Orphanage site

Tapping Grout at Be Like Brit Orphanage site

Removing formwork at Be Like Brit Orphanage site

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Waiting Around

Posted on 01/02/2012 by paulefallon

Waiting around in Haiti is a national pasttime.  I always have a book or magazine with me because you never know whenever the ‘plan’ will be derailed.  Today was a good example, representative rather than extreme.

This morning Gama dropped me at MOHI where we planned to begin bending rebar.  We were running late in a Monday morning after New Year’s sort of way.  I got there about 6:20 am.  The gate was open; women and children from the neighborhood streamed in with five gallon buckets to get filtered water.  Leon and his crew, designated to cut and bend rebar, had not arrived, nor had the translator.  Within a few minutes the crew showed up and we reviewed the diagrams I had made showing exactly how long to cut each bar and where to make each bend.  We need 550, so it is worth the effort to get the first ones right.  Leon understood pretty well.

Next chore was to get the saw, which was locked in a storage room and no one had the key.  My cell phone was dead, Leon’s worked.  We found Ricardo who had a key and by 7:00 am we had the storage door unlocked.  The rebar saw is a gasoline powered unit with a pull chord ignition.  Of course it did not work; so a few more Haitians joined in the activity. One had a screwdriver, another a wrench.  They dismantled the machine, cleaned it, oiled it, put it together.  By eight it was running and they started cutting, then bending rebar.

During all of this I am waiting around, which is not my preferred occupation.  But there is lots of other activity around the water station on a Monday morning.  Jenison stopped by, dressed for school and wearing shoes, though not the ones I gave him.  We drew soccer balls, he showed me how to make an origami boat, I showed him how to fold a paper airplane.  We got so involved in paper folding that his five gallon bucket of water overflowed and he could barely pick it up to tote back across the road.  Two younger boys, Chris Love and Mackin Love got in on the paper folding and we had paper gliders everywhere.  Mackin Love, age 4, drew the letter ‘B’ all over his wings, singing a little song “Be Like Brit, Be Like Brit’ the entire time.  Everything was good until both boys wanted the only red pen, so pulling and crying ensued and Lex, who showed up at some point, laughed, “This is what happens when Paul is around.”

By 8:30 the rebar operation was humming, only about two hours late, and I headed up to BLB.  Sometimes it is how we fill the interstices of time that makes the experience worthwhile.

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What Am I Doing Here?

Posted on 01/01/2012 by paulefallon

It’s Sunday, New Year’s Day in Haiti. I have the day off.  People have wondered what am I doing here, so perhaps this is a good time to lay out a day in the life of Mister Paul, l’architect, which is how I am known locally.

5:30 am – Gama knocks on my door at Mission of Hope guest compound.  Gama is the clerk of the works for the Be Like Brit orphanage, a 20,000 square foot building that will house an orphanage for 66 children as well as a clinic, clean water, and other services for the surrounding neighbors.  Be Like Brit is being built by Len Gengel, a home builder from central Massachusetts whose daughter, Brit, died in the 2010 earthquake while on a college trip to Haiti.  The full story is at http://www.belikebrit.org.  For our purposes suffice to say we are not just building an orphanage, we are building a remarkable family’s tribute to their beloved daughter.

5:45 am – Gama and I leave the mission house in his truck before others are up and drive along the river bed (it is dry season) as the sun rises over the mountains.  The mountains in Haiti are not tall, 2,000 feet at most, but they rise right out of the sea, very steep.  They are more picturesque than many a 10,000 footer.  Gama is a Haitian-American, fluent in Creole and English, who was living in Central Massachusetts when Len enticed him to return to Haiti to run the project.  Gama has no previous construction experience, but he is a great translator, a patient listener, a hard worker and a congenial soul.  He is a pleasure from morning to night, which I know for fact because we spend that much time together.

6:00 am – We arrive at the site, halfway up a mountain west of town. The view of Bay of Gonave is breathtaking.  The workers are already there, all seventy of them.  If anyone shows up after 6:00 am they are fired, and jobs are hard to come by in Haiti; especially ones that pay four dollars a day and teach valuable skills. The workers are gaunt, pitch black men, we exchange bonjours, I am beginning to learn a few names.

6:15 am – Gama organizes the work crews, I go into the construction shack, turn on the computers and check the email.  Email is our lifeline with Len and the engineers in the States.

6:30 am – Once work is in full swing I walk the site.  Gama calls me eagle eye because I can see where the reinforcing bars were not installed at the proper spacing or the electricians forgot to grout the outlet box.  When I return to the office Gama and I review the lists.

7:00 am – We have three lists.  The white board displays the 12 goals that Len wants us to complete before he returns in two weeks.  Our current priority is to have all the first floor walls in place before I leave so we can install formwork to support the second floor concrete the week of January 9.  We won’t make it, but we’ll push to get close.  The second list is my To Do’s, coordinate the expanded clinic with the doctor in the US, design the front steps and patio around the mango tree, determine how to terminate the second floor slab at the open courtyards.  The third list is Gama’s To Do’s; demolish a wall due to clinic changes, add a switch where we need a three-way light, weld door anchors that were missed.  Len creates the first list, I create the other two.  This week, since I am just starting and we are playing catch-up on quality control; Gama’s list is long.

8:00 am – I am hungry and snatch some bread and peanut butter.  The Gengel’s don’t eat much Haitian cuisine so the construction shack is chocked with snack food.   I try not to indulge too much, but since Gama gets me up so early I miss breakfast at the mission house.

8:15 am – I work on my list. When we fantasize about building in a third world country we envision ourselves in shorts and bandannas laying concrete block or shingling a roof.  The quake shattered that illusion.  Be Like Brit is a highly engineered, sophisticated building.  We are committed to ‘raise the bar’ of construction in Haiti, to build to the highest earthquake standards and teach local tradespeople better construction techniques.  It sounds noble, but it winds up being as tedious as any other form of work.  My role is to monitor, to observe, to anticipate what needs attention and make right what was built wrong.  I make a lot of sketches and create a lot of spreadsheets – how many block do we need to finish the first floor (1,800); how much reinforcing do we need for the second floor slab (1,325 bars, 40 feet long, of various diameter); how many separate concrete pours will it take to complete the second floor (10 pours at 20 to 35 cubic yards per pour, hand hoisted in 5 gallon buckets).

10:00 am – I walk the site again.  Gama’s list grows.

10:30 am – A pair of straggling boys, barefoot in torn T-shirts, knock on the shack door.  We have a hockey bag full of shoes and they want a pair. I try to give only one pair per child, but they know how to confuse me, so I am sure many have gotten two pairs.  We have mostly girl’s shoes left, but girls’ never stop by. Haitian girls stay home near their mothers. The boys roam free.

11:30 am – There are three women who have set up cottage take-out stands at the BLB site.  They cook breakfast and lunch over small charcoal grills protected from the sun by a scrap of tarp.  They sell food to the workers.  Gama says a man can eat very well in Haiti in $1.50 a day.  Gama usually buys something around this time and offers some to me.  At first I declined, not wanting to take his food, but then I realized he was offering as host, so now I accept.  He tells me MOHI food is ‘Americanized’ and I can tell the difference, though I like it all.  One day he had cornmeal pellets with beans and a small fried fish; another day rice and peas with shredded beef. So far my iron stomach appreciates everything I’ve been dished

Noon – I walk down the hill, soaking in the view and chatting with the children along the road.  Everyone knows my name and I am making progress at reciprocating.  Route 2, one of Haiti’s four paved highways, is at the bottom of the hill.  A few hundred yards towards town is the Mission of Hope School.

12:30 pm – Renee Edme runs Mission of Hope (MOHI) (www.mohintl.org) with her husband Lex.  They are evangelical Christians, she’s American, he is Haitian.  They are people of generous spirit and make me feel welcome despite my different beliefs.  It is the work that matters.  Renee has a small plywood framed office where Marieve, MOHI’s cook, delivers a pot of lunch.  Rice and beans and a brothy sauce with onions with maybe a bit of chicken or goat left over from last night, a basket of bread and juice so sweet I drink it last, for dessert.

1:00 pm – More than half of MOHI’s property is a construction site where we are building a new school to replace the one damaged by the earthquake. Progress is slow since they do not have Len Gengel’s resources or construction expertise.  They have cobbled together contractors from different parts of the US who come down for a week or two to spearhead the local tradespeople.  Their concrete superstar, John Armour, will be down on January 15 for two weeks.  In advance of his arrival I will determine all the reinforcing they need to finish the foundation and work with a local crew to fabricate 419 U-bars and 30 reinforced concrete cages.  More emails and conference calls, more spreadsheets, inventorying what rebar is on site and determining what we need to order. Starting Monday, we are ready to cut and bend bar,

2:00 pm – I walk back to BLB.  Len is building a beautiful stone retaining / drainage wall along the uphill side of the road.  It is easy to see he develops tony subdivisions in the States; the wall is as opulent as anything in Sudbury, MA. The masons take a break to chat with me.  When Len first introduced me to the group of laborers I made a pigeon Creole speech that I would help them build the orphanage if they would help me learn Creole.  It went over well; they are always offering up new words and phrases for me test.

2:30 pm – Back on site for another walk through, more emails, keeping things humming.

4:00 pm – The workers knock off for the day but Gama doesn’t quit.  He writes his daily report; I add my part.  We photograph progress to post to the website.  He is devoted to this project.

4:30 pm – I am tired and make my way back to MOHI.  One day Renee left before I arrived so I walked home through town.  I am still getting comfortable with navigating the streets; I say ‘bon soir’ to everyone and get smiles and nods in return.  I have a car at my disposal but I have only driven it once.  As Renee told me, if anything happens it’s automatically my fault, since I’m the blanc.  Not words that motivate me to want to hop behind the wheel.

5:30 pm – Whether I walk or drive or hitch a ride, I get to MOHI’s ‘office’ a concrete house in the middle of town with a rear courtyard that has a giant tree and a collection of outbuildings where all the food for all the MOHI enterprises is made.  Marieve and her staff cook for 50-150 people, every meal, every day.  I load whatever pots and baskets and jugs of juice have to go to the mission house.  Riding along the river bed with the sun sinking over the bay with the aroma of succulent food is a satisfying moment.

6:00 pm – I live like a prince at the mission house.  There are four ‘private’ rooms with baths on the second floor and BLB rents one full time for their staff.  The room sleeps five and when Len is here he often has an entourage, but I am here on the off-weeks and pretty much by myself.  When I return my bed is made, the bathroom is clean; I shower in the cold water drizzle and wash the microfiber pants and T-shirts I wear to the site. I change into shorts and a fresh shirt, and hang my work clothes to dry.  I have two sets and alternate them daily.

6:30 pm – We may be five of fifty for dinner, depending on the number of missionaries visiting.  Right now there is group of four from Pittsburgh who are great fun and a new group of thirty from Ohio who are just settling in. We eat under a huge thatched hut called the choucoun, with a view of the bay and the sound of the ocean. More rice, more beans or peas.  The chicken is good, the goat is excellent.  Occasionally there is a pepper tossed among the onions in the sauce to keep things lively.

7:30 pm – I read or blog or do Suduko on the porch outside the room.  I have become expert at the ‘Tough’ level and even completed some ‘Diabolical’ puzzles.

8:00 pm – Gama gets back to the mission house just before I head for bed.  His room is next to mine.  He turns his TV on loud and falls asleep to the sounds of American popular culture.  I try to read for a few minutes, but the darkness feels like midnight, so I fall deep asleep.

Mister Paul, l’architect, at the BLB site

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2011 – The Year of Living Consicously

Posted on 01/01/2012 by paulefallon

If Socrates’ maxim “an unexamined life is not worth living” rings true, I lived 2011 with a vengeance.

January Abby and I visit Haiti for a week to lay out the foundations of the Be Like Brit orphanage.  We stop in Miami for R&R on our return where Abby comes down with Dengue fever.  She recovers after eight days in the natural course of things, despite $75K plus of erratic American healthcare.

February I fly thousands of miles designing hospitals. I begin to question the point of the work; it used to be about helping others, now it’s more about feeding the healthcare behemoth.

March I complete the design and proposal to build a new school for Mission of Hope International in Grand Goave,Haiti.  We receive a $350,000 construction grant from a German agency.

April brings spring and an escapist fantasy – could I take a long bike ride this summer to shake off my malaise?

May Abby graduates from UMass Amherst with Honors and celebration.  I ride my bike ninety miles out and back to test the feel of a long ride.  Four hours of heavy rain fails to dampen my enthusiasm.  I spend a week in Haiti laying out the foundation for the new school.  When I return I negotiate a seven week vacation from TRO JB.

June is a month of intense work and travel; I race to finish my client work.

July 19 I fly toDenver, pick up my new touring bike, and cycle the Children’s Hospital Courage Classic over the Rockies with my family. On July 26 I head east on the bike to visit family in Oklahoma.

August is a month of solitary bliss; pedaling during the day, writing my blog at night.  I ride the blue highways, stay in vintage motels, eat local food, visit roadside attractions, and fall in love with the countryside and the people I meet along the way.

September 4 – 3,050 miles in seven weeks!  I finish the book I wrote along my journey, Pedaling Principles, while adjusting to regular life once more.

October I complete my 600th Bikram yoga class since I began in 2009.  My practice provides deep benefits of health and introspection.

November brings a coup to TRO JB!  Rumors fly, heads roll, hard times compel good people act in desperate ways.  I take the chaos as a sign to reassess.

December 27.  I am back in Haiti. I will supervise construction of the orphanage and school for two weeks every month through 2012.  I am retaining a consultant relationship at TRO JB.  Andy says I’m retired; I tell him I am exploring work opportunities where money is not a factor.

I am grateful for this year of change and growth, for the wonder of our country at a very slow pace, for the grand old four family house in Cambridge that gives me financial independence and my stupendous housemate Paul who keeps things humming while I follow my heart, for Abby and Andy’s maturity and fellowship, and for TRO JB’s understanding.

I am excited about the prospects that 2012 offers.  I hope that each of you find similar energy in your own passions.

 

 

 

Christmas with

Abby and Andy

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Jenison 3

Posted on 12/31/2011 by paulefallon

The first person I saw in Grand Goave, of course, was Jenison, standing outside the gate at Mission of Hope as casually as if he had just happened by, as purposefully as if he had not moved a muscle since I last left him in May.  Jenison is ‘my Haitian’, he adopted me back in the summer of 2010 when he appointed himself my nail holder one day while I was building temporary shelters.  He has been a glue stick to my side ever since.  I have blogged about him twice before, calling him Jameson, but recently I learned his name is actually Jenison. Mispronunciation never compromised our affection.

Jenison is taller, his eyes just cleared the window as I opened the door and scooped down to pull him into me. He was endearing when he was eight, pixyish and smart, with a scary facility to mimic English. At ten the sores and blisters of a life lived out of doors mark his body and he has picked up the rudiments of begging.  He moans that he is hungry, which he probably is, and asks for dollars.  Unfortunately for him, my heart is more practical than soft and I make sure he gets a good plate of rice and beans rather than giving him a lollipop (peewilly in Creole), and I prefer to sit under a tree and look at the words and pictures in a magazine with him than give him money.

Stories abound about Jenison. Word is his mother died and that he was adopted by Brenda, the only woman I ever met here who works construction rather than cook and sweep.  If you ask Jenison if his mother died, he draws a somber face and whispers yes, and then just as quickly brightens to another antic.  There no way of knowing if she actually died or if he has just mastered another heart tug. The women’s very existence is lost in translation.

There is a hockey bag full of shoes under the counter at the job shack at Be Like Brit, ready to give any child who shows up at the site needing footwear.  Somehow Jenison knows about it; the kid seems to know about everything.  Sure enough the day after Len left and I am on my own at the job site Jenison shows up and asks for shoes. He is barefoot, but that is normal for him.  We rustle through the bag and find a nice pair of sneakers that fit with room to grow.  I give him a peewilly while we’re at it.  He thanks me with great appreciation and wears his sneakers outside.

I turn back to my work.  In a few minutes I look up and see Jenison, barefoot, new shoes in hand, racing down the hill. Maybe he’ll sell them.  Maybe he’ll keep them as a prize.  Maybe he just wanted them because he could get them.  The only thing I know for sure is that the next time I see Jenison; he won’t be wearing those shoes.  Shoes are not his style.

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The Only Way out is Through

Posted on 12/30/2011 by paulefallon

The weather forecast for Port Au Prince was optimal; high of 90, low of 75, sunny for days.  Late December is the coolest time of year in Haiti; it is not uncommon to see natives wearing sweaters.  So when I landed in PAP I was looking forward to that saturating warmth that enfolds Northerners escaping winter’s chill. My last visit to Haiti was in May, when oppressive heat is the norm, and previous trips had been in July and August, when the heat slams against you like a force field in a sci-fi flick.  I anticipated 90 and sunny with pleasure.

Somehow I forgot that ninety degrees in Port au Prince is not the same as ninety in Aruba or Acapulco or other tropical venues that lack PAP’s peculiar charms of rotting garbage, street corner fires, and dust clouds that obscure the millions wandering the streets.  On Port Au Prince’s pavement ninety is still hot, still rank, and still oppressive.

I am a pretty adventurous traveler but I have never stepped foot on a city street in Port au Prince.  I am in no rush to do so.  There are supposedly nice sections, but I have never seen them.  I am an anomaly in this city, a white guy, a blanc, a good target for a robbery or maybe even a kidnapping. Nothing bad has ever happened to me in PAP, and I intend to keep it that way.  I am met at the airport by a driver who takes me to my destination, and delivers me back before I leave.  If the timing requires an overnight in PAP, the lodging is a walled and gated mission house.  There is no Airport Marriott in this country.

Still, I have driven through much of the city.  I passed the President’s mansion before the earthquake felled its dome.  I bussed through the central market where open hands poked through the windows grasping for alms while piles of merchandise and piles of refuse lay beyond, indistinguishable to the American eye.  I have driven past the container port post earthquake where boatloads of trucks and bulldozers, gifts from many countries, sat shiny new on the docks but turned chalky grey the minute they hit the rubbled streets. I have rattled along that horrific boulevard whose median was lined with tents, where children who inadvertently stepped beyond their flap got clobbered by a vehicle.

That tent city is gone, but many remain.  In some places new subdivisions have emerged.  Subdivisions in PAP don’t have idyllic names like Eden’s Grove or Prescott Woods as we do in the States.  These are rows upon rows of tarped or wooden cabins stenciled Oxfam or UN or USAID.  My favorite is a sea of wooden cottages near the airport, twelve feet wide by sixteen feet long by eight feet high, painted a rainbow of colors to differentiate one from another.  They have been occupied for almost a year now and are already looking Haitian as people add sheds off the back and connect them side by side with tarps and blankets.  I give them two years, three tops, before the original structures are thoroughly buried beneath the aggregating additions.

On every trip to PAP I pass the main covered market, gift of the citizens of Venezuela.  This Wal-Mart of Haiti is a vast terrain of goods extending as far as the eye can see. Rows of women sell bananas followed by rows of women selling breadfruit followed by rows of women selling discarded T-shirts followed by… you get the idea.

The weather report for PAP was accurate, but it lacked full disclosure.  The sun was up there, a bleary yellow dot, but the haze was thick below. The temperature was ninety but the sweat of the throngs and the cracking flames of burning garbage made it feel hotter.  It was stifling and humid.  As my trusty driver Howard rocketed me through the city streets, horn blazing, I could not help but note how this is a fascinating experience for me; an observer passing through, absorbing all I can, simultaneously fascinated and ashamed by my fascination.  But what of the thousands of people traipsing the streets all around me?  For them this is not a passing experience.  This is their reality.

We got out of Port Au Prince in record time. There was relatively little traffic.  On every successive trip more earthquake debris is removed, more roads are repaved.  Things are improving. Still, things are appalling.

Once Port Au Prince is behind, Haiti opens up as if the entire island were but one magnificent outstretched hand. It is hand in need, asking, begging, for help.  But it is also a wise and weathered hand, a hand chiseled with pride and suffering into a surface of infinite character and depth.  Route 2 is the life line along Haiti’s palm, stretching out of Port Au Prince extending to the far tip of the island, just as our own life lines emerge from the dubious folds between our fingers to spread out across the breadth of our own hand.

You cannot begin to fathom Haiti until you have witnessed Port Au Prince.  But you have not seen Haiti at all until you pass through its capital and venture to the land beyond.

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Pedaling Principles Chapter Four – Colorado

Posted on 12/30/2011 by paulefallon

Colorado – Our Defining Character

Colorado induces clarity of spirit.  I believe it is due to the air, or, to be more accurate, the lack of air. I travel to Colorado about once a year to visit family and it takes a few days to get used to the diminished oxygen a mile high.  Breathing takes effort and I drink water constantly to ward off altitude headaches.  This consciousness of basic elements, air and water, attunes my mind to basic concepts.  To me, Colorado evokes the fundamental character of Americans; independent, ingenious and industrious.  As a long time Massachusetts resident, one might think that the birthplace of our revolution conjures those feelings, but Boston is wrapped in history and tradition.  It was the spark plug that ignited our nation, but its roots are too European to reflect our uniqueness. Boston had already been settled for 146 years before the revolution. Colorado hasn’t even been a state that long.

The history of Colorad is one of men exploring, exploiting, and moving on.  No mountain was too tall or plain too dry that we could not dominate it. Conquering the mountains and enduring the hardships required to extract their hidden resources was a feat of economic gambling, engineering savvy and brute strength.  Men came lured by the promise of gold, and though some was found, they mostly found silver, iron, copper and molybdenum.  They figured how to extract the metals from inhospitable places.  They dug mines, built towns, laid railroads, and when the veins ran dry in one place, they moved everything to new locations.  The main highway through Climax, CO, which goes overFreemontPass, was relocated five times as engineers mapped the shift in molybdenum deposits.   The entire town of Dillon, CO moved four times, first to accommodate railroads, and later, for water.

Colorado’s early economy, based on pulling precious stuff from the ground, produced cycles of boom and bust that reflected prevailing economic patterns in the United States throughout the 1800’s, when the role of government was more limited and our systems of banking and trade were still being formulated.  Booms were periods of high living, but there was no cushion for the busts, no social security, no safety net.  People sustained a bust with whatever got tucked away during the boom, along with the inherent understanding that bad times were only temporary. Everyone understood that in this land of bounty, another opportunity would reveal itself, around the mountain as it were, and another boom would explode.  Americans had good cause to be optimistic; the frontier was inexhaustible.

The three terms I use to define our character all begin with ‘I’ for good reason; we are a society of individuals, a less generous term would call us self-centered.  Independent is our premier characteristic.  We are nation of people who chose to leave the constraints of an earlier life.  Perhaps it was our parents or their parents or their grandparents who severed their roots and came here; most of us don’t have to count too far back.  The brothers and sisters who stayed behind to care for kin among familiar surroundings, well, they were the kind of people who stay behind.  We are the ones who left hearth and home and the known world to come toAmerica.  Being independent is practically a precondition for being American.

We are ingenious because we came to a place and saw its untapped value.  The Indians who roamed this great land before we arrived had a very different relationship with their environment. They were integrated into a web of live, linked to the grass and the bison and the rivers and the fish without hierarchy.  Our hierarchy was simple, we were the top dogs, and top dogs don’t look at their world to see how they fit in, they look at their world to see what’s in it for them. Americans are masterful top dogs; we always find an ingenious way to plunder and extract whatever we want.

Finally, we are industrious, because it took an incredible amount of work to transform our ingenuity into products and profits.  It requires a good effort to ride a bicycle over Tennessee Pass and Vail Pass and Fremont Pass, but the work pales in comparison to the effort demanded to create those passes, to build the trails and the railroads and the highways to the mines, to pull the metals out of the mountains and to transport them East. Whenever I came upon an historical marker along the road, I read the snippet of local history and tried to envision the bleak, unformed land that greeted the first explorers who came to Coloradoin search of possibilities.

These days, those historical markers are just another tourist attraction.  In the past twenty years Colorado has experienced a boom that eclipses all others – the tourist boom.  Ski resorts and second homes is the economy of theRockies now.  The mountains are brimming with picturesque wooden villas available for a weekly rental, Interstate 70 whisks vacationers up fromDenver in a few hours, while the locals make a better livelihood catering to the whims of well-heeled visitors then they ever did mining ore.

If our American character is shaped by the rugged explorers who first tapped this land, how is that character impacted by the transition from a working landscape to a landscape of leisure, from a population at work to a population at play, from a land of inhospitable elements to one of generous creature comforts?  By turning Colorado into a resort, we have dominated it more completely than any miner or trapper could imagine.  The tracks they laid through treacherous passes are now bicycle paths, unscalable slopes are now Black Diamond ski trails, the most dangerous rivers are full of thrill seeking rafters.  We can have great fun in Colorado, but we have lost the opportunity to hone our independence, ingenuity, and industry in this land.  The traditional frontier is gone, and the frontiers on our horizon; sustainability, information technology, biomedicine, virtual reality, robotics, even quarks, are fundamentally different from the physical frontier of the past.  These are knowledge-based frontiers that will be championed through collaborative teams and incremental improvement rather than bold individual initiative, exploration, and brute strength.

The American Character, which was so successful in building our country and spreading our culture throughout the world, is increasingly irrelevant in a world of shrinking physical challenges and expanding intellectual ones. We created the transportation, communication, and business systems that enabled globalization to occur, yet, ironically, the signature attributes of our character that made these leaps possible are not the most successful traits required for navigating a tightly knit world.  Getting Neil Armstrong to walk on the moon was the ultimate expression of our independence, ingenuity and industry; finding a meaningful way for all of our citizens to work and participate in society is a murkier problem; and understanding our role in a global economy that requires playing well with others is worse still.  We are so used to being the Big Man on Campus; we scorn collaboration and cooperation as signs of weakness.  Yet, those are the very skills that will lead to the most well balanced societies in the years ahead.

When people speak of the ‘national malaise’ in this country, I believe it is a longing for that time when our core attributes, independence, ingenuity and industry, were the signature traits required for success in the world.  We cannot address this malaise by changing our attributes; they are powerful, innate characteristics that define us at our best.  Rather, we need to learn how to leverage these traits in a more interrelated world, and develop corollary characteristics to create a broader vision of our character.  We must build on and expand our strengths rather than bemoaning that they are no longer entirely sufficient.

It is important to understand that independence means something different in a country with 310 million people and fixed boundaries than it did when we were a foundling nation of just over a million citizens with limitless westward expansion. Like it or not, we bump into each other more these days. At root, independence means I can go wherever I want and do whatever I want.  I reality, we have to add the caveat, except when it impinges on others. Once that caveat is affixed, we create opportunity for negotiation.  I can play my stereo indoors with the windows shut as loud as I want.  If I take it out to my deck in the afternoon, I can probably still play it pretty loud without complaints from the neighbors. But if it gets to be midnight, I have to turn it down, or off altogether.  If I get along with my neighbors, we can negotiate the volume among ourselves.  If I don’t get along with them, or don’t even know them, we have laws that establish acceptable parameters.  Our hierarchy is that independent behavior is allowed so long as it does not impinge, when it affects others it is negotiated, and when negotiation fails, laws intervene.  With 300 times as many people in our country, there is whole lot of impinging going on these days.

Historically, the ingenuity that our forefathers brought to this land has been reinforced through the United States premier educational system and our carefully constructed patent and copyright protections; two excellent tools for promoting ingenuity. Together they created an environment where the knowledge base required for innovation was spread among the entire population; innovation was acknowledged and duly rewarded.  Unfortunately, each of these ingenuity enhancers is under siege.  Our decentralized educational system provides unequal basic skills among our children, while at the national level our educational system has slipped in relation to other developed countries.  We have a smaller pool of people capable of innovating, and more innovation originates abroad, undermining our role as the world’s ingenuity leader.  Meanwhile our copyright / patent protections are often not respected beyond our boundaries as the easy flow of information makes piracy more prevalent.  The key issues for us in maintaining a leadership role in ingenuity are both internal, to make our educational system more innovation friendly, and external, to spread the protections we have developed to promote ingenuity throughout the rest of the world.

Perhaps the most challenging of the attributes that define our character to analyze is our industriousness.  The United States is still the most productive country in the world, on a work output per hour basis.  However, the scope of our economy has become narrower as more basic production and services are outsourced to areas of the world where people are willing to work for longer hours and less money.  It does not matter if we can work effectively at $20 per hour; as long as someone offshore is willing to work for a quarter that cost.  Even if they work half as efficiently, they are the more attractive economic option.  We are well past the point when trinket manufacturing went overseas.  Today, customer service, medical technology, architectural rendering, web site design, and other knowledge-based work are all outsourced.  When we couple this with slipping leadership in ingenuity, our industriousness becomes questionable.

The United Statesis a mature economy and we have accumulated the trappings of people who have lived well for a long time.  We expect good wages, good benefits, good working conditions, and reasonable work schedules.  We have regulations to ensure minimum wages, overtime pay, and safe workplaces.  All of this is appropriate and humane, but it also drives up the cost of doing business in the United States and places us at a disadvantage in relationship to countries where standards are slack and workers are hungry.  Back in the twentieth century, when most of the worker rights and benefits we enjoy came into being, the American worker competed against others like himself.  The GM assemblyman completed against the Chrysler and Ford assemblyman, not some worker in China or India.  Wage and benefit packages grew as domestic industries competed for a contained pool of trained workers.  In the era of globalization, we are competing with a much larger pool of workers willing to work for less money under less favorable conditions, and as a consequence, the American worker appears to be less industrious.  Globalization is here to stay, and on the whole, it is a good thing.  It will allow each of us to work to our maximum potential.  But it does upset how we measure our industriousness.

We are accustomed to thinking that things will always improve; America has a long track record in that direction.  We take the wage and benefit packages that our father’s won as the starting point from which to expand.  We consider their baseline to be our entitlement.  But through globalization, corporations can find a parallel stream of providing manufacturing and services that eliminates that baseline altogether.  When a company moves their operations toIndia, American industry standards become irrelevant.  The challenge for our industriousness as an element of character is to accept that our twentieth century definition of industry no longer applies.  Our measure of industry has to include all the elements of productivity, technology, mechanization, communication, transportation, and human effort.  If we want to continue to have greater salaries and benefits than our overseas counterparts, we have to be that much more efficient in other components of our total productivity. We cannot assume the baseline for human industry will remain static, we must understand how humans fit into the entire process of production and service.  This requires openness to change and a willingness to constantly improve.  If we get stuck in the mindset that we are ‘entitled’ to certain standards without understanding that achieving those standards requires working differently than our fathers did, we will be left behind in the world marketplace, and ultimately poorer than our fathers.  Our industrious character is still a critical component to achieving success.  It just has to be better integrated into complex business processes and a more collaborative approach to work.

After I finished three days of riding through the mountains, I meandered out of Denver on a bright Tuesday morning and pedaled towards home.  OutsideElizabeth, the outer limit of the Denver exurbs, the landscape exposed the ancient seabed that formed this area, the land rolled as waves, the cottonwoods in creek beds were anemone at the bottom of the giant ancient sea, the clouds wild as whitecaps above.  I traversed twenty, maybe thirty swales, pedaling to the top, cresting, and surfing the pavement on straightaway descents.  Each swale got a little broader, a little flatter, a little more barren, until finally, by the time I reached Limon, the earth was flat.  The Rockies had met the shore.

As I rolled towards Limon that first night traveling alone, I considered whether I had left the American Character, the quintessential expression of ‘Life,Libertyand the Pursuit of Happiness’ behind me, whistling like a lost wind through the Rockies.  Can the traits that so well served rugged pioneers and explorers translate into a nation of 300 plus million people enmeshed in a globalized economy with six billion potential competitors and collaborators?  At the termination of Colorado 83, on a rise looking east over the plains, the view is limitless, but I was hardly alone.  I was on an overpass, the continuous rumble of I-70 beneath me.  What was once an isolated parcel of plains is now connected to everything else.  There are too many of us on too small a planet to allow every individual to do as he likes unfettered.  We need to search the soul of our character to discover how it can translate to a world that has extinguished its physical frontiers.  I am too confident of our inherent strengths to believe that we will ever abandon what is best about us.  Our challenge is how to apply our independence, ingenuity and industrious to this new, compact world.

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JFK Connection to Haiti

Posted on 12/28/2011 by paulefallon

 There are two ways to fly from Boston to Haiti, American through Miami or Fort Lauderdale, or Delta through New York. Most flights leave early in the day so the planes can deposit folks in Port Au Prince and then hightail back to the States.  Planes do not lay overnight in Haiti.  On the surface, the Florida connections are preferable; the legs are balanced, the airports bright, the on-time stats positive.  But flying through JFK is often less expensive and/or has more availability.  This morning, in the wake of the Christmas travel rush, it was my only option.  Truth be told, I prefer the weathered grit of JFK to its smooth and sanitized Florida counterparts.  My challenge in flying from Point A to Point B is that the plane moves faster than my psyche’s ability to process change, and the cultural shift from stoic Boston to chaotic Port Au Prince needs time.  Routing through New York puts me in a Haiti state of mind.

At the big New Year, back in 2000 Donald Trump announced his resolution to help the Big Apple get a truly worthy airport.  Paris, Hong Kong, Osaka, even Detroit have created terrific airports in the past decade, while JFK muddles along with an upgrade here and a new terminal there but no sense that the whole is anything more than a cacophony of disparate parts.  JFK is a disorganized mash-up were the world’s travelers wear blinders to their surroundings as they motor from gate to gate.

The gate for PAP throbs in disorder.  People huddle around the check-in counter more than an hour before take-off, they have a wheelie, a bulging shoulder bag and two gigantic shopping bags that appear to be stuffed with king size down comforters, but when a clerk suggests they check one, they look away in bland detachment.  The people flying to PAP are not average Haitians; average Haitians cannot afford to fly.  We know the tacit rules of flying, but we chose to ignore them.  The airport is the place where we shed American norms and beta test the behavior that will engulf us once we land in Port Au Prince.

It takes about twice as long to board a flight to Haiti as anywhere else I go.  Besides the swaggering guys with embroidered fedoras and too many carry-ons scanning the space is if they are alone on a mountain, there are the frail old ladies barely five feet tall who fumble through their purse checking every scrap for a boarding pass, and the elegant men in their shiny, shiny three piece suits with neon acrylic ties and distinctive grey goatees who approach the gate as if processing to a coronation.  When the first boarding announcement goes out people mob the desk, boarding zones be damned.  That is when I head out of the lounge to the men’s room, which will be quiet just now, and I have a solid fifteen minutes to wash up without any fear of being left at the gate.  Upon return the crowd is still huge, moving in fits and starts, a dense cloud funneling randomly towards the hollow tube that will take us to Hispaniola.

My flight leaves on time, almost. Inside the plane the attendant’s rasps over the mic to please take your seat, let others pass, we cannot leave the gate until everyone sits down.  They repeat it in English, in French, in haste, in anger, in exasperation.  No extra points for customer courtesy here – they are simply trying to get us to move!  Attendants practically rip the ubiquitous wheelies out of the hands of struggling passengers, the end-of-the-line souls with a seat assignment but no space in the overhead bin. Eventually we settle in, more in spite of the attendants than in response to them.

The plane takes off and we are barely above the clouds when people pop out of their seats.  I am in the exit row (hooray!) opposite a beautiful French flight attendant who becomes so exasperated asking people to sit down she finally tells a young woman, “It is dangerous to be up and walking around, but you’ll do whatever you do.”

I watch all of this, enthralled by the petty improprieties, the endless need to thumb order and authority, however trivially displayed.  I love how Haitians pride of their place in the world as the first Black Republic supersedes their acknowledgement of the tragic battering the Republic has endured for the past 196 years.  They are simultaneously victims on the world stage and survivors of the highest magnitude.

This is my sixth trip to Haiti since 2009.  I have agreed to supervise construction of the Be Like Brit orphanage and Mission of Hope International school on a part-time basis through 2012, so more trips will follow. I will be leading a bifurcated life – two weeks in Haiti dealing with hand mixed concrete and steel reinforcing bent on home-made jigs followed by two weeks in the States designing iCT operating rooms with million dollar neurological equipment that weaves a fiber through a human brain.  I look forward to appreciating each dichotomy as a way to participate in, and contribute to, the full range of human experience, and I am grateful for the hubbub of JFK to modulate my transitions.

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