Smelly Cave, Dancing in the Street, and Braids

This week proved to be more low key then weeks past as we only worked three days this week. On Monday, another missionary couple, Cristi and Jean Jean, took us all on a hike up to a cave called Vout Santi (literally translated, Smelly Breathing Cave). We set out early in the morning to beat the heat and were soon sloshing along the muddy paths left by the heavy rains from last weekend. We climbed to the top of the mountain and then over the other side and down a bit into a ravine. It was amazing to see the farmers working on the steep hillsides planting corn, sweet potatoes, and other such crops.

Once down in the ravine Jean Jean found the entrance to the cave, which was completely grown over with vines. Apparently no one has visited there in a while. Jean Jean called to some local farmers who came with machetes to cut a path to the cave. So we climbed down into the cave and the darkness. I couldn’t believe how large this cave was. Jean Jean explained that the rooms of the cave keep going and going, but no one has ever explored or mapped out the caves. They believe that the mountains in this area are full of cave systems that are all connected together. Wouldn’t that be neat!

Carolyn, Jenny, Beth, and I explored the caves a little climbing from one room to another. It was fun, but the floor, walls, and rocks in the cave are completely covered with guano (bat droppings). This would explain the smelly cave name. As we climbed lower into the cave we could see the bats flying overhead and hear the rocks got pretty slippery, so we decided to turn around. All in all it was a fun experience, and I really enjoyed the hike to and from the cave!

Thursday we got another day of work to meet the Missionary Flight International (MFI) plane that was coming to Pignon. MFI is the agency that flies in all of our mail. Normally they fly into Cap-Haitien and we send a driver to pick up the mail and bring it back. However, on Thursday MFI had some special drop offs and pick ups to make in Pignon. We drove to the grass airstrip and watched the MFI plane land. It’s still beyond me how they land planes on that patch of grass!

We picked up the packages that were sent for HAFF then headed into Pignon for lunch. We ate at a restaurant called Creole La and greatly enjoyed a plate of BBQ chicken (Haitian style), rice and bean sauce, and fried plantains of course! It was good food. We were also joined by a girl name Kara who works at another mission run school in the area. It was fun to meet another white girl our age, and I am eager to get to know her more over the next couple months.

Thursday night, Josette and Minous, two Haitian friends, had planned to have a birthday party for Carolyn’s birthday. They brought a couple other friends, we had a total of 10 people including us, and we enjoyed a Haitian style party. Josette began by reading a section from scripture out of Bible in Creole, then I followed reading it in English. Then Minous led a worship song in Creole, and Jenny prayed in English. This was pretty much the program of the party. Following that, we put on some music and danced. Everyone was embarrassed to dance at first, so we tried to find something else to occupy our party guests.

Luckily, some other girls from ECHO sent us a package of party toys and things from the states for Carolyn and Beth’s birthday. Inside the package were some brightly colored plastic army men with parachutes and some balloons. So we pulled out the army men and began throwing them in the air and letting their parachutes catch them. Seems childish, but it was a ton of fun. When this began to wear off, we started a balloon fight. We quickly discovered that balloon fights are an international form of communication. As soon as the balloons were out, everyone was comfortable and the party took off from there. And yes, we even got some dancing in! It was a fun evening!

Friday we went back to work and accomplished quite a bit. We walked down the road to HAFF 2, another garden plot where we are doing some research on sweet potatoes, sorghum, corn, cassava, and pigeon peas. We had been informed that birds had come and eaten all of our sorghum plot, so we were prepared for the worst. Entering the garden we discovered that things hadn’t been eaten up as bad as we expected. That was nice! We took data on the different varieties and I took pictures for our files.

The last few times we have gone to HAFF 2 a group of kids, who live across the street from the garden, have come over to hang out with us. The first few times they kept asking us to give them things, but this time they just wanted to be with us. They jumped into my pictures and were eager to see themselves when I showed them the viewing screen. This was a lot of fun!

When we left the garden the kids followed us down the street skipping, dancing, and laughing. I have made a habit of becoming a kid and copying them and dancing with them down the street. Although I’m sure this makes me look like a crazy white person as the adults in the street stop to laugh at me, it makes the kids laugh and we have fun doing it. Needless to say, I skipped down the street and danced with the kids until they had to turn around and return home.

Later in the day we took more data and pictures on a banana variety trial we are doing, which was also fun. I am learning a great deal about experimental design and understanding the data. It is also really exciting to see different varieties of certain plants outperforming the local varieties. This gives me hope that farmers could get a hold of varieties that are better adapted to Haiti’s conditions, and produce more for their families and communities. I am grateful to be a part of this work!

I completed the day by talking with Dr. Motis about a possible worm trial. Crazy I know, but I think worms are pretty cool. They take kitchen scraps and other organic materials and produce high quality compost. Funny that God would create a creature whose sole purpose is to eat and produce dirt. However, where would the world be without these decomposers! Worms have a lot of potential to help small farmers improve their soils. Dr. Motis wanted to experiment more with vermiculture (making compost by using worms) and I said that I would be interested. So we sat down and figured out our experiment, which I plan to put together on Monday. I’m actually really excited to see how fast the worms reproduce and how much compost they can create in the next two months.

Saturday began just like any other Saturday. We woke up, loaded the truck, and drove the crazy roads into Pignon to buy food at the market for the next week. This is the week before school starts here in Haiti, so the market was crazy. We bought what we needed and made our way to the Pignon Hospital to eat lunch at the snack bar. I passed up the half liter of coke this time, but I did dive into a plate of Haitian spaghetti, enjoying every bite of it.

After returning to HAFF, Jenny and I met Minous and Josette at the intern house to have our hair braided. So we settled into some hard straight-back wood chairs for two and a half hours of hair braiding. It was a long time, and my body was ready to move by the time it was over, but it was fun to hang out and enjoy Josette and Minous’s company.

Okay, so maybe it wasn’t as low key of a week as I thought! God keeps opening doors and daily I grow to see His heart a bit more. What a blessing!