Israel's passing

Israel Valcourt. Died in front of Klinic Espwa at Castel-Pere on June 29, 2007 around 8:40am. He was 16-years-old.

*********** disturbing/graphic content to follow ***********

Paige and I emerge from the quad. It's not quite early morning but not late yet. Today reminds us of yesterday, sunny breezy, pleasant. We're going to meet Fr. Marc to go into town. Not ten steps from the building, a woman streaks by us, wailing, her hands in her hair, elbows akimbo. Then we hear more shrieks -- shrieks that can only mean that someone has died.

As we pass the clinic, we see a quickly growing crowd and in the midst, a white sheet covering what can only be a body. Security is quickly rounding up children and depositing them in the primary school. Fr. Marc is looking on with a solemn face, standing near the covered body. Later, when he comes over to sit with us under the mango tree, where we have self-consciously retreated, we will learn all the details.

One of the upper administrative staff guides Matante back to her home, she is calling out to God. Another staff member steps away and calls our lawyer, the local authorities and a funeral home. The body will not be removed until it is declared officially dead by the proper authorities. This will hopefully happen sooner rather than later, given that we have 400 curious children to worry about.

Finally, Fr. Marc joins our quiet twosome. I ask him what happen. And he replies,

"Israel died. A seventh grader. You knew him... 16 years old..." he trails off. After a moment, he collects his thoughts and delivers the rest of the story, as he's learned it. His parents are dead. His aunt, with whom he lived, said that last night he was very sick, vomiting blood. This morning he came to Pwoje Espwa to pick up his report card from the secondary school. Then, he and his aunt were hoping to get a ride in one of Espwa's vehicles to the hospital, since the boy could barely stand.

So they waited by the clinic. One of the drivers was summoned and he came expeditiously in a truck. Before he even reached the yard in front of the clinic, the boy collapsed, the rest of the contents of his stomach - and maybe even his stomach itself - were pouring from his nose and mouth. He was dead.

In the U.S., Fr. Marc reflects, this bright young kid might not have died. He would have gone to the hospital the night before, maybe sooner. We don't know yet, nor might we ever, why he died exactly. The doctor didn't seem to know. It all seems surreal -- but it's so real. Painfully real.

I watch as Marc calls over one of Israel's classmates.

"Was he your friend?" he asks.

"Yes," the boy answers, his eyes red.

"Was he sick?"

"I don't know..."

Then Marc pauss, thinking. "Did he have siblings?"

"I think so..."

Behind us, more and more villagers from Madame Combe march through our gate to see their deceased neighbor and stand with his family. The lawyer shows up a few minutes later and mercifully, the state official does too.

**************

Please keep Israel, his family and his friends in your prayers.

bye-bye rasta man

Jonas was walking in Camp Perrin with 4-inch, coiling dreads bouncing rhythmically about his smaller-than-average cranium. As he rounds a corner, a policeman's eye is drawn by sudden movement in the periphery of his "watch." He strides over to Jonas and grips his arm roughly. Jonas -- who carries only a sad collection of innocuous items in his worn backpack and who was doing nothing particularly attention-getting at the time of the encounter -- looks startled.

The cop drags him to the next corner, mostly wordlessly but also faintly mumbling profanities and the word "rasta," to a barber shop. The policeman plunks a miffed Jonas down in the barberchair and orders and old, boney man in the corner to chop the crop of natty coils.

As the barber goes to work with his razor, the officer leans on the wall in the corner of the shop. He wears a smirk. When the barber finishes, Jonas looks clean-shaven but decidedly less cool... even with the earring. The cop plops a few coins in the barbers hand and walks off, greeting his friends outside with a laugh.

a hair-raising experience

The rain was coming down it sheets. It was no tropical storm but still very impressive -- with the dark, pregnant clouds tumbling over the sky in a never-ending procession. The sun was obfuscated in this dark, windy mess and so time was lost, as it often is anyway on vacations. Glancing at a clock would have shown it to be dusk... but we thought of no such thing.

Four of us, two brothers, one girlfriend and myself, decided to throw on bathing suits and run down to the beach. Before we even reached the sand, we were drenched, our hair hanging in strings about our faces. Once on the beach, the boys stood ankle deep in the furious surf and complained of cold. They were right, it was frigid with the pelting rain and chilling wind. We girls, after sampling the water along side the boys, decided to wade in waist deep.
On Cape Fear and the Fryingpan Shoals, when the tide goes out, you can walk out quite some ways in the water. Almost immediately, you will find yourself waist or chest deep but then there are little under-water hills that surprise you as the water level drops to your shins. So you keep walking and before long you are over 100 feet from the shore. This makes for an amazing bathing experience. The same shoals, however, are the meeting point of four very strong currents, which create a sort of intense, tunnel that drags every sort of sea beast to the near shores of populated island beaches -- little fishies, crustaceans of all kinds, big fishies, sand dollars, man-of-war jelly fish and sharks.

As Christine and I sought warmth in the balmy North Carolina waves, wading further out from shore and laughing as the rain bounced off our noses, a fifth wheel crashed our party. A six-foot sandshark was taking advantage of the rain, which brings little fishies out to feed in greater numbers, and the expansive 3-5 foot tidal basin created at low tide. Not to mention, it was dusk -- prime feeding time.

In the guide books and the movies, they tell you not to panic and simply move away from the carnivorous beasts as quickly but splashlessly as possible. Yeah right. No one knows how they'll react when they're hit until they're actually hit.

Christine turned to me and with a swallow asked,

"Did you see that."

"Yes!" I think I shouted.

We turned on our heels and "sprinted" out of the water, the waist-high water slowing our desperate thrashing to a mere trudge.

Once back on the safe, ankle-deep water's edge, we asked my brothers if they'd seen our fast moving friend. They replied in the affirmative, chuckling because only one night before we'd all watched Jaws. My eldest little brother swallowed another eruption of laughter as he pointed to our hair, which was suddenly and literally standing straight on end.

The electrically charged air, foreshadowing a lightning strike, caused static electricity to make our long hair stand straight up. This time we all turned on our heels and dashed back to the cottage.

Moral of the story: Don't swim at dusk in the ocean during an electric storm.

In other news, I am back in Haiti and all's well. I will post on things Haitian tomorrow.

Free the Kids!

Theo's Work has a new and awesome official website. Check out Free the Kids.

travel day tomorrow!

Tomorrow I am flying back to Haiti. I hear that our satellite internet link has been quirky lately, but I'll surely begin posting again from there as soon as I can.

I also noticed that some fellow bloggers have recently added me to their list of favorite blog sites. Thanks for that -- and I'll be adding you too!

happy as a fox in NC

neon plastic baracade

Does it look like fun?

an island of vacationers

Leisure time at sunset.

quick post script

PS: In case it was less than obvious from the last two blog entries, I am still in the USA. At the very last minute, for a variety of reasons, I prolonged my stay for about 10 days. At the end of June, it's back to Haiti...

strange beach creatures

A storm brews around the shores of North Carolina's Bald Head Island (satellite image, Google Earth).Along the shore, riddled with rip currents, lie strange and displaced sea creatures.

pink dress & blue waves

bye bye bros... and stuff

Is it strange to have a "clique" of friends that consists primarily of family members? Faces and names in the periphery change slightly from year to year but the ever-constant, related core remains the same? Perhaps it's odd, un-American (I hear it's a more a Latin sort of thing), out of vogue or what have you. Cool or not, that's the way it is in my family...Though I feel I must return to Haiti - even WANT to return to Haiti (this shocks some people, I know) - I will desperately miss this trio. One brother will move to the Left Coast this August, another to Europe and, as I'm off to the Caribbean again, it's clear that we all must and will go our own ways. But still, it's too fun to pretend that if I stayed in the District, time would stand still and we'd continue our time together.
Thursday it's back to Haiti. No more salads, no more cool evenings, no more hanging with the brothers.

It's tragic, growing up.

a brief (if vapid) interlude

"Inside the Frame" intends to shed a spotlight on and provide the occasional snap-shot of life in the region of the world where I experience it. This Friday I'll be back in Haiti and posting and observing from there. For the moment, however, I am in the United States of America. Some of my behavior and choices may seem superficial to the less-than-dedicated reader, but they serve to lend a stark contrast to my everyday life in the Les Cayes area. Forgive me if I offend.

California sunset

So pardon my long absence from the blog-o-sphere. It's not like interesting or remarkable things stop happening the second I land on U.S. soil. On the contrary.

The New York City bars, several weeks ago, were quite a trip (skinny drunk girls in $500 dresses, long flat hair swinging as they rocked to the rap music) after a 7 hour lay-over in the Port-au-Prince airport. In fact, now having traveled a bit more (but no where near as much as this guy), I agree that "Airports themselves are unexceptionally unexacting, unhappy, unsanitary, unpleasant places of waiting." Toussaint Louverture International is no different.

Unfortunately, I spent my first week back in the States battling a mean little Haitian germ. I guess it stowed away somewhere in my GI track for a while and reared its ugly head only when my immune system was debilitated from travel and irregularly late nights. This episode over-lapped with my eldest little brother's (take a minute to figure it out) graduation from Cornell. So instead of romping around campus and reliving the glory days, I lay in a hospital bed clutching my stomach and moaning in agony. I didn't even get to see Soledad speak. :-(

After New York City and Ithaca, I got to hang out in the Washington-Baltimore area for a few days where I marveled at my friend's close relationship with her huge Bengali-Tiger cat named "Baby Cat" (below). Baby-Cat is 4 times the size of my sweet little Teelees and I think they're the same age.

Tilees

Their markings are strangely similar despite obvious physical and temperamental differences. They both like to stalk though.

Then came a California voyage. I landed in Oakland, rented the ritziest SUV in the Enterprise lot, and drove south to Santa Cruz. In retrospect, I should have noted the warning label on the sun visor: "high roll-over risk. Avoid fast maneuvers and high speeds" given that a majority of my drive down the peninsula was on winding mountain roads. The purpose of my voyage? A wedding. Yes, the first of my good friends took the dive. It was a "do-it-yourself" wedding. All those present for the entire weekend stayed in cabins nestled in the redwoods. This select, cabin-bunking crowd, who participated in the bachelor/bachelorette parties, rehearsal dinners and Capitola Beach lunches, chipped in by flower arranging, giving facials, running errands and cooking late-night batches of macaroni.

I returned late last Monday to the District of Columbia with bright pink, California-esque nail polish on my toes and fingers. The Washington, DC area is so boringly conservative at times. At my regular DC-area spa, a manicurist looked down at my vibrant nails with a disapproving frown and said "ve-dy Cal-ee-fo-rrrr-nia."

Sound superficial yet? I even exchanged Brothers Karamazov for The Debutante Divorcée during my stay on the Left Coast. It was a delightfully vapid read.

Since returning to the capital area, I have made it my business to do all the things that are so very Washington: Drinks on the Georgetown waterfront, Latin dancing at Citrón and Rhumba, over-priced dinners comprised of "tasters" and tapas, shopping in Friendship Heights, trips to the Baltimore waterfront, backyard barbecues, and downtown lunches with folks of stature.

On the 14th, I head back to Haiti. Not sure if I am ready yet, but here I go! There are some cool projects coming up and I'll be doing most of the photography for Espwa now that Nick has left, so keep reading for more pics and more on the happenings of this volunteer in le Departement du Sud.

I am looking forward to a hot, sweaty summer in the Caribbean and to you living it vicariously through me via the blog.

Shazam!