In Haiti Nov.
1 and 2 are national holidays, so I took a short vacation back to the US to
visit friends and family in PA. The logistics
are such that it is best to get back to Port the day before your international
flight, and stay overnight. The options
for making this trip from Les Cayes are:
- Charter a
MAF flight for $500 or so, or if the timing is right, book a seat for $110 on a
flight someone else has chartered.
- Pay a
private driver (a friend of a friend) around $250.
- Pay $10 for
a bus ride on Travel Chic or the bus that leaves from the Meridian Hotel.
I was
nervous about taking a bus back to Port, picturing it to be crowded and driving
too fast (I heard it takes 3.5 hours on the bus, when everyone else takes at
least 4.5 hours).
But my friend Jehu
saved me from that!
He is the
brother-in-law of missionary friends in the Central Plateau, and took me on
a tour of Port au Prince the week before the 2010 quake.
And he happened to be in the area and driving
to Port the day I need to go.
So I rode
in luxury in his giant cargo truck, high up in the passenger seat with a great
view of the land.
And great view of the destruction
caused by Hurricane Sandy.
These
pictures don’t do it justice.
I saw
banana trees and corn fields flattened.
Water
and mud on the road, high and very turbid rivers.
And this was 5 days after the hurricane left.
From our 3
rd floor guest house in
a strong concrete building, we had no idea of the havoc Sandy was wrecking on
the country.
This article indicates that
70% of Cayes corn, bananas, and breadfruit crops were destroyed.
Haiti was already facing high food prices
with the loss of US crops due to the drought this summer.
I also saw my first tire-burning protest, about an hour into
our trip. It was in an area where the
river floods often, so may have been related to the government not doing
anything about the flooding. Or may have
been about food prices. We never found
out. But the police were out with their
giant guns and Kevlar, and turned us back.
We waited it out at a convenience store, and were entertained by an older
hippy-looking Haitian woman dancing with young men to the blaring music (Why do
they need to blast music in the Caribbean?!
Even churches have giant speaker systems that make the service
unpleasant.).
In Port I stay at the Matthew 25 House, a very relaxing
oasis in the midst of dirty, crowded Port au Prince. Arriving in Port after being in Les Cayes was
a shock. There was a brown haze of
smoke, dirt, something over the city. People
still live in tents. There’s shanties everywhere,
a ton of trash along the road and in the river beds.
Fortunately MAF was flying to Cayes on my return, so I was
able to make the 40 minute flight and had a great view of the southern peninsula
and the very steep, deforested mountains (which of course the pictures don’t do
justice). I also saw the wide swaths
where the flooded rivers had raged down the mountains, unimpeded by any
riparian vegetation.
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| Flooded field along National Rt 2. |
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Tire burning down the road (where the smoke is).
|
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Police dealing with the protest.
|
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| Flooded National Rt 2. |
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| Steep mountains on the Southern Plateau |
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| River bed. |
