FOOD DOESN'T GROW ON TREES

 Food doesn’t grow on trees…

Food doesn’t grow on trees here. It must be coaxed, nurtured, wheedled, and cajoled out of the dry earth. 

Mostly, if you try to grow carrots, the piglets will dig them up; mostly carrots, like mostly everything else, has to be purchased up at the weekly market at the site of old Fort Kampon.  

This market, “upstairs," as I quipped, is an hours' hike, depending on if you are Haitian or blan and the time of day.  My neighbors are out the door with laden baskets on their heads by 4 a.m.  If I make it out before 7, the hike will go faster before the sun gets strong.  

Yes, it can take me 2 hours.

The Fort Kampon market is where Madame Andre taught me how to sell rice by the tin can, yon gwo marmite, yon ti mamite. 

It was one of those cans from Maxwell House coffee  — yes they used small tomato sauce cans, and Maxwell House, coffee tins, precious containers. 

And  no, you would never, ever throw away a plastic bag!

Yes, I measure, I learn.  It was a great beginning. Understanding the world.

Madame Andre, my teacher, master of Haitian economics

"Markets are conversations,"  - who wrote that?

Madame Deklis is thrilled to have customers for peanut candies. 

I'm also thrilled because they go great with hot dark Haitian coffee.

On the road...watch every step. Every exhilarating step.  Did I really do this, live it, love it?

The Anthropologist's Hero, Carlo Levi

Clearly, God was in this place.

    Let me tell you: 

    My current  hero, the physician-anthropologist-partisan, Italian Carlo Levi, crafted an ethnography of his exile in mountains of Basilicata, Southern Italy, under Fascism. His memoir was Cristo si è fermato a Eboli,  — Christ Stopped at Eboli.

Nothing much about Christ stopping here, in these mountains, somewhere, in southern Haiti.  At 4,500 feet, give or take. Dr. Levi’s title is better translated as “Christ Never Made it Up Here.”

Mountain? This Haitian hillock. It’s too alive, verdant, earthy, sweaty, breathing…bare footsteps murmuring up and down the paths, Kreyol calling. Perhaps…perhaps, here, on this small mountain, despite the deprivations, the hard-scrabble lives I share…perhaps, here, well — Christ —that notion of redemption through suffering…doesn’t sell well here.  

At least, myself, I’m not buying.

Here, there is all-over green, pandanus, kokoye, trees, young and old pea plants…a vast, jungle-y drooping smelling life, a wildness that feels, in contrast to Carlo Levi’s bare village, starving peasants somewhere in 20th century Basilicata, in Italy’s boot, a dried, forsaken, abandoned plaster… 

Here, well, on the mountain, well, God is in this place. “And I didn’t know it.”  Mon Bouton, Haiti. 

       

         Now, I must show you. 

        

        Here.

In Living Color

Lives I witnessed, pitied

Lives I shared

The living earth, verdant, lush vines gripping

You could see, if not imagine, forever...Miami!

Yes, I am an anthropologist, a seeker, wanderer...and so?

 Introducing My Colleague, Elisee Abraham, aka "Toma"

My colleague, Toma, is a Jack-of-all-trades -- if he does not know how to do it, he figures it out. His efforts to support the various objectives of "If Pigs Could Fly - Helping Hillside Haiti ---that is, harnessing solar power to pump water, the school snack program and managing paid work projects in infrastructure and schools --- that and his work as a para-veterinarian have served his community for over 20 years. This is a salute.

https://youtu.be/vgJHfmd0xkE