You dive behind the filing cabinet...a hail of bullets pinging off the sturdy steel surface. It sure is a good thing you bought this incredibly awesome filing cabinet that you saw listed on Craiglist one day. The ad said it was a "Super Heavy Duty" filing cabinet, and you bought it just needing office furniture, but you didn't know the back story. 

You poke your head out a bit, just in time to see the 70's era baddie with a grease gun slam another clip home and stand there, silk tie around his head Rambo-style, as he squeezes the trigger to send another fusillade of hot lead your direction. 

See, this cabinet had been manufactured in the 70s or 80s, back when they actually made filing cabinets in the US out of Detroit steel. It lived its life as a filing cabinet, serving admirably. However, its ugly battleship grey surface became un-stylish, and it was soon to be replaced by some new-fangled particle board furniture with shining brass knobs and plastic tracks. Nobody wanted the old grey cabinet, it had no place in this world. One man however saw a future in this chipped and ugly cabinet. Why should he spent $200 to buy a crummy Chinese filing cabinet expertly made out of used BBQ tinfoil when he could have this behemoth steel monster grace his office? The answer...he shouldn't! He showed up with a buddy, loaded up the filing cabinet into the back of a truck and off it went to his garage. Here, he painstakingly disassembled the filing cabinet, removing the rails and bearings, locking mechanism, and reduced it to its base components. He then took the pieces of this ungodly heavy cabinet to a powder-coating outfit in Paso Robles, where they powder coated it with a shiny black finish. The man picked up all the pieces, reassembled the cabinet, and used it for three years as his trusty "dump stuff in it and worry about it later" cabinet. 

However, he decided to move to Thailand to pursue a career in English Teaching, and really needed the money to help fund his trip. Seeing as how airlines are charging far too much for baggage these days, he didn't think he could get the massive 4-drawer monster in the overhead compartment, so he decided to sell it. 

You breathe a sigh of relief as this awesome cabinet you so insightfully purchased saves you from the baddies. Thank god for that guy on Craigslist! 

The A-team arrives to deal with the baddie problem... Mr. T takes one look at the cabinet..."Dayyum...thats a nice cabinet." 

Specs: 

18" Wide 

28.5" Deep 

52" Tall 

Color: Black 

Drawers: 4 Awesomely Cool Drawers 

Price: $125...you can also pay more for it if you want, because its that awesome, and I need the cash. 

I KNEW I shouldn't eat the cole slaw...I just KNEW it.  However, there are moments in which your desire to not offend usurps your caution and better judgement.  So, I ate the cole slaw.  I had grand plans to post a blog entry about my last day in Haiti before I left, with thoughts and reflections, perhaps with a bit of prose.  The best laid plans are for naught against gastro-intestinal uprisings of such colossal proportions that I truly wished I was dead.  

Thats the weird thing about being violently ill, every second of your resistance is pure agony, every muscle in your body clenches and releases in an effort to rid your innards of whatever poison you have ingested and in the process turns you into a human water feature.  To put it bluntly, I was very happy that the trash cans in the bathrooms in Haiti were 3' tall bio-waste disposal containers.  This allowed me to avoid the unfortunate decision about what end to point at the toilet, a decision that rarely ends pleasantly.  However, no matter how great your misery, you cannot do anything about it.  You simply endure the agony until your body can bear no more and then you sleep...and then you wake up and do it all over again.  

The morning we left I still felt like hell, we all piled into one of the ubiquitous micro-vans that seem to exist in all third world countries for the trip to the airport.  The drive from the hospital to the airport is a half hour with absolutely no traffic, and could take all day if the traffic is terrible.  I was charitably placed up front near what was theoretically an air conditioner vent by the other members of my travel party who knew I was not feeling all that well.  It was of course hot and miserable, the diesel fumes were thick and choking, as was the stench of trash and rotting debris.  The roads, as I have mentioned before, are not really roads... they are more a swerving string of meandering pot holes.  Anyways...long story short...just before we got to the airport my stomach decided that it had suffered through enough of this indignity and attempted to exit my body through my mouth.  Fortunately, I managed to get the window down in time, and climb halfway out of the window while we were in traffic before letting fly.  The driver pulled over, and I continued to heave out the window with everything I had during the day...which was only water fortunately, but still.  I hung there, out the window, with not a care in the world...there is nothing anyone could have told me at that point that would have registered in the slightest on me... body sapped, brain blank.  As I began to return to my body, I became aware that I had managed to puke about 3 feet in front of a pair of very shiny black shoes... my curiosity got the better of me, and I began to track slowly upwards...following the neatly pleated black pants with the stripe, over the tan shirt ablaze with badges and patches, to the disapproving face wearing sunglasses and a high military hat.  I just puked on an officer of the Haitian State Police.  Awesome...I win the crummy American contest for the day.  At least it was something totally uncontrollable and not something like elbowing people out of the way to take flash photos of the Mona Lisa.

It is easy to make light of an incident like this, one of those purely miserable moments that is quite hilarious in hindsight.  It is another thing entirely to look at Haiti, and try to find some levity.  Here I sit, in my air-conditioned office in the states, trying to make sense of the things I have seen over the past weeks.  I don't know what else to say about it right now...we as a race (Human) can do better than this.  The Haitian people are a people who have been ridden into the ground by the top 1% of their society, and are unable to lift themselves up.  Haiti has only risen to the level of international attention recently due to the earthquake, but every Haitian you speak to says that other than killing many, the earthquake did little.  Their streets were destroyed before the earthquake, their people starved before the earthquake, their children died before the earthquake.  It certainly didn't help, but it is incorrect to think that the earthquake is what has crippled the nation.  The earthquake was only the tumultuous headstone placed atop a diseased and rotting corpse.  

Where has the disconnect been?  How did this happen?  How do we fix it?  I don't know the answer right now...if you have one, please, let me know.

 

P.S.  I would like to thank all of you with whom I was privileged to work these past two weeks.  It was truly wonderful to meet all of you, and I hope to see you all again. 

 

 

CLICK HERE TO SEE ALL OF THE PHOTOS I SHOT IN HAITI - PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO USE ONE OF THEM FOR SOMETHING.  THANKS! 

There is only so much a human heart can bear before it begins to crack, before it begins to wear at the seams and show through thin in some spots.  Sometimes it is a single shock that breaks it, reverberating through the sinews and tearing it with a sickening twist.  Other times, it is a slow and steady grinding, like the relentless wearing of sandy water upon the rocks in the stream.  Either way, you feel it.  You feel it in the depths of your soul in ways no words will ever be able to describe.  The dark twist of a sympathetic knife from the pit of your stomach to your sternum, leaving your eyes wide and your mind shattered.  My words fail me when I need them most.  I feel like I am trying to use crayons to paint the Mona Lisa, or a leaf rake to shovel water uphill...

Today, I made some shoes for a woman who has only walked once in her life.  I was walking down the hallway on some errand when I was met by one of the orthopedic surgeons.  In his hand he held two shoes, the type you would tie onto the bottom of a cast to make it possible to walk.  He asked me if it would be possible to cut the shoes down, to fit smaller feet.  I examined the shoes, and asked if I could see the patient who needed them, to get a better feeling for her disability.  He had mentioned she had a congenital birth defect that had never been corrected, but nothing could have prepared me for the sight that greeted me when I walked into the room.  In the hospital bed (and she is one of the fortunate long term patients who gets an honest-to-goodness bed) lay a woman with a smiling face and bright eyes, her name was Adnisse.  Her younger sister, Mali, was at her side.  Adnisse was draped with a light sheet, but underneath the sheet I could see the ugly bulky shapes of external straighteners.  The end of the sheet was pulled back to reveal her feet...two twisted and broken clubs.  

Adnisse is 22, though I would have placed her much younger than that.  She was born like this, and for her entire life has known nothing other than the floor.  Her knees are knobby and misshapen from being crawled on her entire life. Her legs are in external straighteners, elaborate braces with screw points that go down to her bones, in an effort to stretch out her knees so that she can walk on them.   

Two days ago, Adnisse walked for the first time.  To visualize what it is like for her to walk, imagine standing up on your feet...but imagine walking on the top of one of your feet, your entire foot inverted.  Then, imagine walking on the side of your other foot, but turn it inward to point at the heel of your first foot.  Her legs themselves were nothing more than sticks, atrophied by 22 years of disuse.  

I stood there, holding these two shoe blanks, looking at this girls feet.  I took some mental notes about what I would need to do, and took the blanks down the hall.  I walked down to the end of the hallway and sat looking out at the tropical rain and thought about this girl.  Adnisse: 22, father killed in the earthquake, mother paralyzed with a stroke, only her little sister to sit by her side and sleep at her feet.  I sat and watched the rain and thought about this...I wept.  This girl, so happy and brave, and drawing the shortest of the short straws in a country of nothing but short straws.  For a while I just sat, my gut twisted by the immense unfairness of everything this girl has been subjected to.  All of this, and I had been chosen to make shoes for her.  

I sat there, staring out at the banana trees and watching the rain as I worked on her shoes.  For the rest of the afternoon I whittled away at the shoes, cutting them apart, tearing out their stitching to break them down to component parts, and then slowly beginning to stitch the new shoes together.  I am not good at sewing, but I wanted this girl to have good shoes, so I worked at it all day.  Once I had resewn the shoes, we padded them very well and took them down to her room.  As we walked in, her sister was toweling down her feet with cool water and trying to rub a cramp out.  They were both happy to see us, and we got to put the shoes on her feet, lift her out of bed to stand on her feet with a walker, and watch her take a few steps into the hallway.  You could see the strain in her face and her body as she struggled to support herself on her walker...a slow painful shuffle down the hall with her new shoes.  She said they made her feet feel better, and that it made her feel more safe than walking with her feet on the bare concrete and tile of the hospital floor.  The shoes still require some modification, but they were a success...I helped a girl take her first steps in shoes of her entire life.

This is a happy story, but I just can't square it up in my head.  So much suffering, so much pain, so much tragedy...and shes trying so hard.  I know I can't fix it, I know I can't make it better, and I know that there are thousands in situations similar to hers.  There is Gregory, the young boy who lives in a tent outside the hospital and whose entire family was killed.  The nine month old baby who was admitted to the hospital weighing only nine pounds and who has a bad skull fracture from a wall collapsing on her.  The mother who can't nurse her children because she is so malnourished.  I know I can't fix it all, but there is something about Adnisse and Mali that just cuts me.  Its like the girl has to carry a bag of rocks, not just any bag, but an enormous bag of really heavy stones.  She must carry her sack of rocks all by herself, and no matter how much I want to help, I can't take so much as one single rock from off her back...I have to stand and watch her struggle under the weight.  I just do what I can to be her cheer leader, sneaking her and her sister food and snack bars, getting her some sheets and fabric so she can sew things, just trying to help and make it a little easier to carry her load.  Its hard to watch, and I know that its nothing compared to what she has to go through.

In other news, I have finally adapted to the heat.  It is to the point where it is almost uncomfortable to be somewhere air conditioned.  Its like living in a swamp, around 100 degrees and 95% humidity, but I think I actually like it.  Its comfortable now.

Today, I also modified a hip implant, one of the internal ones that gets bolted to the bone with a screw that goes down inside the femur...I modified one of those so that it will fit into a child sized person.  I don't think its actually going into a child, but some of the Haitians are very very small, and the adult sized implants are just too big for them.  

Lots going on, lots to do, and never enough time to do it all in.

There is something about women who are within a certain age group.  The group seems to begin at about 75, and continue on upwards until roughly the age of the concept of the wheel and other such inventions.  One of the characteristics of this age group is the irrepressible desire to feed people.  I don't know if it is some sort of super-martiarchal instinct that kicks in, but the universal constants are the need to feed people and the ability to "cook like a grandmother."

I have just returned from a small bar down the street, called The Détante Bar, on Diquini Street in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.  I went there with a few members of the ER and surgical staff after a day out at Jacmel, a local beach.  The Détante Bar, or The "Easing of Strained Relations" Bar is just a hop skip and a jump down the street from the Hospital.  We all went in the middle of a full fledged tropical storm, and despite the fact we went less than 100 yards, we all arrived SOAKED to the bone.  The bar itself is a tiny little place, maybe 8'x12', and could fit all of us in a pinch.  The hosts were delighted to see us, and in short order we had run clear through their supply of beer (the native Haitian beer, Prestige, plus a handful of Dominican beers)...much to their delight, as we were paying the "American Price" which seems to be a minimum of 20% higher. It was a wonderful way to end a long day.

The woman who is the cook at this little place reminded me of every incredibly old grandmother I have ever met.  Beautiful in only the way an ancient woman can be, her face sharing with the world the weight of her years of life.  She came out of the tiny kitchen, crooked and bent with age, wearing a massive chapeau.  She hobbled over to us on ruined feet and shook our hands, smiling through missing teeth.  I am going back with a friend of mine tomorrow for lunch so she can cook us spaghetti, her specialty.  It is hard for me to see an old woman like this without thinking of my own Grossa Oma, my great grandmother.  Her gnarled thick hands and thicker accent, her garden, her kinda frizzy hair she was always so particular about, her garden, and most of all...her cooking.  There is something about food that is cooked with love, something that makes it more than just food for the body.  There is no restaurant in the world that can compete with my great-grandmothers cooking.  

Today was a day filled with bitter observations and irritating realizations.  As the Hospital I am staying at is a Seventh Day Adventist hospital, there was a church service this morning.  I poked my head in momentarily, took a couple pictures, and went and sat on the steps in front of the hospital with the translators and the daily herd of children who live in the tent-city on hospital grounds.  One of the little girls, whose name was French and seemed as long as my arm, brought a book up to me.  It was one of the normal SDA bible story books you see in great abundance within any SDA church, but it had one subtle difference.  Inside the front cover someone had written, "I am hungry, please give me money, (5 dollars US)."  This is verbatim, with brackets and everything.  There are several conflicting reactions I feel upon reading this...and I am not comfortable with any of them;

1.  The girl IS hungry, and there isn't enough food to go around.  While people are sending millions of dollars to Haiti, most of it is being eaten up by corruption, and the people in the street are literally STARVING.  I would LOVE to help this little girl, but I cannot just give her money, or we will have a riot on our hands.  This makes me feel like a stingy bastard...but what else can I do?  I cannot directly give her anything without giving EVERYONE on the hospital grounds the same thing.

2.  The girl is maybe 8, tops...she didn't write this.  This tells me that someone, one of her family members most likely, wrote it for her and sent her out to hustle the Americans.  While this whole business of being hustled is kinda par for the course here (and often I go along without complaint because I know the people are desperate), I really don't like the fact they are using a little girl to do it.  Even if I did give her something, she would probably go give it to whoever her 'handler' is and probably get little or nothing for her efforts...not that I support them in the first place.

What does one do?  I don't speak Haitian Creole, so I couldn't articulate my internal conflict with the entire issue to her, nor could I express my displeasure in any form other than being mean...so I did what I think most people would do, patted her on the head, smiled, and pretended like I didn't see it.  She didn't seem to think ill of me for it.  It bothers men that the situation existed at all, and I don't know what to do about it.  

We took a trip to Jacmel today, a beach about three hours southwest of Port-au-Prince.  It was quite an experience to travel inland, out of the city and through the mountains to the other side of the peninsula.  As it is in the rest of Haiti, the drivers grasp of the concept of 'safe driving' was incredibly tenuous.  Outside of Tartarus-like pit that is Port-au-Prince the rest of the country is incredibly beautiful.  The hillsides are festooned with tropical trees and blooms.  Coconut and banana trees grow like weeds, overhanging the road in places with their fruits.  We were also able to see some direct UN presence in the form of SriLankan troops wielding massive earth movers.  

It was sad to see the cane and fruit plantations, each with their collapsed brick houses.  However sad that was, sadder still it is to note that while the people are rebuilding, they are building their new structures in the exact same fashion as their old ones had been.  They are even rebuilding them using the materials from their destroyed domiciles.  Its very sad to see that no matter how great the effort to assist the people materially is, they will not be any better off unless they change.

I think a friend of mine is correct in saying that the foundation of a successful society is a successful education for the members of that society.  Here, the people build like this because they don't know any better.  They don't see that their own shoddy construction directly lead to the deaths of thousands, they only see the fact that mother nature whomped on them.  Things won't really change until the nation as a whole can pull itself together and educate itself to the nature of the world in which we live.