Day 4

It can get pretty lonely in a strange place like this, especially when you have a little time on your hands. When you’re out and about, it’s such a buzz – even just riding to work and back is fascinating. But when you get back to the hotel, on your own with nothing but a book and the internet for company, you get jittery and restless. Three hours of free time is practically torture. The funny part is that I know I should be enjoying it, relaxing by the pool with my trashy horror novel. I know that as soon as the rest of my colleagues from NY and Geneva arrive, I’ll be so busy that my stress level will go through the roof. But right now, at this moment, I’m going stir crazy.

I feel like a junkie. I’m in withdrawal. I don’t want to be here, cloistered within the white-washed walls of the hotel, with its tacky waterfall pool and its incomprehensible casino. I want to be out there, amid the bidonvilles, the hand made cinder-block houses that choke the ravines of PaP.

They’re not like any slums I’ve ever seen before. Even out in the rural areas, the informal housing looks deceptively… formal. It’s not like South Africa, where the shanties are made of aluminum, cardboard or wood, leaning into each other at precarious angles. It’s not like Chad, with its hovels of dried mud and sticks. Those places look like what they are: something scraped together, scrounged, built with whatever could be scavenged nearby. The houses here are more substantial, made of cinder block and stone, even the ones in the bush. Instead of windows they leave an open square, or use a type of block with pie-shaped holes in them, creating a kind of latticework. They even have porches fringed with cinder blocks in the shape of turned wood posts.

These structures aren’t as strong as they look, though, and with an environment as volatile as Haiti’s, they are easily breached. As a result, a lot of them have been abandoned, leaving behind crumbling walls that poke up through the grass like tombstones, or something even more ancient. It’s kind of eerie, lending the impression of a ghost town, broken and discarded.

What little space there is between the dwellings is crowded: corn stalks, washing lines, livestock. The animals are everywhere, goats and pigs and cows and donkeys. The goats are especially common, well-suited to the debris-strewn ground. Domesticated as they are, they still seem to prefer precarious perches, as though they were still in the mountains, so you see them on the roofs of buildings and the hoods of cars. They just sit there, chewing their cuds implacably, watching the chaos of the traffic. None of them is stupid enough to venture onto the road.

Speaking of precarious perches, many of the houses – thousands of them – are built on the steep slopes of the mountains, the more convenient spaces already being full. This would be a feat of engineering for an engineer. These folks aren’t engineers – not credited ones, anyway. I actually get weak-kneed looking at them, staggered like benches in the nosebleed section of a stadium. In addition to torrential rains and landslides (remember, no trees), Haiti is prone to earthquakes. Even a small shaker would be enough to reduce these neighbourhoods to dust. It’s not a question of if, but of when.

I’ve been trying to take pictures of all this, but so far I’m not overly impressed with the results. We can’t get out of the car, can’t even lower the windows, so everything has been shot through a reflective layer of dirt. It’s frustrating. I’m going to keep trying, though, and hopefully some will come out well enough to give the general idea.

Time to go get ready for a luncheon with some of my colleagues. It’ll be interesting to see their houses, how the ex-pats live here. More on that later, probably.