Voyage au Paysage

On Wednesday (1/11) we departed Port-au-Prince for the village of Cange, a 2.5 hour journey with 17 of us (14 Americans, 3 Haitians) packed into a van meant for somewhere between 12 and 15 people, with our luggage piled on top. The Blanchard children gave us a fabulous send-off, waving and jumping on the back of the van and generally carrying on. As hard as Port-au-Prince was in some moments, I will always look back at the final moments at Blanchard as uplifting, because of those children.

View from the back of the van...there were four of us back there

But before we loaded into the van, the Coopers adopted a little girl from the Blanchard school. Her name is Steve Spierdinia (we're pretty sure she goes by her middle name) and she is 5 years old, which means Coopers will be able to support her for many years to come, and hopefully return to Haiti on mission trips and see her progress through school. $400 a year pays for her tuition, uniform, school meals, as well as any medical attention she may need.

We traveled on Highway 3 to Cange, which had recently been finished and was fantastically smooth, making our journey relatively painless. As we drove up through the mountains we got a better idea of what the landscape of the country really looks like: mountainous and arid, unfortunately. It's beautiful landscape, but much of it is rocky and lonely, with drive riverbeds in the valleys and not much growth where there should be. We did pass some evidence of USAID and EU agricultural projects, or at least signs for them. We also passed the Péligre dam on the Arbonite river, built during the 1950s by the US Army Corps of Engineers in order to provide electricity to a large part of Haiti. Unfortunately, many of the inhabitants of the land were unaware of what was going to happen once the dam was completed, and one day the river began to rise without warning, forcing thousands off of their arable homesteads onto the rocky mountainsides. The subsequent lake is beautiful to the unknowing eye, but unfortunately the dam has fallen into disrepair and fails to provide the electricity it once promised. One more footnote in the story of the plight of the people of Haiti. 

Our arrival to Cange was just as wonderful as our send-off: the new school there, built as a cooperation between Partners in Health and DigiCell (Haitian mobile phone company) welcomed us with a song, sung by most of the students. They all lined up with their teachers, and (some more enthusiastically than others) sang a tune in Creole just for us. On the face, the situation was slightly odd. Most of us had absolutely no connection to any of these children or the teachers, most of them had no idea why we were even there in Haiti, yet there they were, singing to welcome us to their community and their country.  I'm not sure I could ever imagine an entire American elementary school lining up to sing welcome to a team of random people from another country simply because we wanted them to feel comfortable. This, to me, speaks to the incredible community spirit of the Haitians, and helps me understand how rich their lives are, in this aspect. 

There's much more to write about Cange and our visit to Zamni Lasante  as well as our general joy at being in Cange, but I shall save that for another post. Meanwhile, delight in this!