Fried Plantains and Other Haitian Delights

(Play this song as you read this post :)

WE ARE BACK. And now we can tell you the most fundamental reason we took last week off.

We went back to Haiti! Beautiful, lovely, distraught Haiti. I'm once again in an internal battle on our return...what can I possibly leave out?! how can I begin to describe it? how do I write it all?

Before I get too overwhelmed, I'm just going to start. This post is about the beauty of Haiti. There will be others following that have more about our activities!

Haiti is the poorest country in our hemisphere. The streets reek with trash fires and smog; the stores are ten foot portable shacks; the national highway is pocketed with car-sized potholes. The rivers look like giant cappuccino spills in which people bathe, defecate, and wash clothes. Children lug jugs of water from the village well to their homes made of broken cement and relief-effort tarps. Even the well-off in Haiti don't have air conditioning or washing machines. Oh and it's 100 degrees every day.

And yet it is so beautiful!

Look at these children!

The clear water beaches are just one beautiful part of the Haitian terrain. There are rice patties and mountains and rivers...all lined with mango and avacado trees.

 The favorite Haitian meal is chicken with beans-and-rice, all doused with some sort of tomato sauce. These are the remains of one of my meals, supplemented by a huge, fresh avocado bought at the street market by our friend and guide Papitass. If you've been reading long, you know how I feel about avocados, and this one was everything good and more.

A typical Haitian market is crowded booths with shades strung up too low for most Americans to walk under. Meat is slaughtered there every morning; fish are brought in from the ocean side, and hundreds of vendors sit in the heat, awaiting a sale. Maybe I was the only one to find beauty in this, but it was so saturated with culture!

And Haitians love to dance! A ton of my time was spent with these two ladies trying to teach us to move like Haitians. We learned the song above from them too.

So. Haiti = Lovely. For so many reasons. There's a lot more to come...consider this a preview.

;)

You can check out my favorite photos from last year here.