It’s Karnaval! (Part 1)

Any way you spell it, Carnival / Carnaval / Karnaval season has definitely arrived in Haiti. While the official celebration in Port-au-Prince is still a week away (the Monday and Tuesday before Ash Wednesday), there are lots of smaller celebrations happening all over the place. Yesterday , a few friends and I headed down to the beach town of Jacmel to experience their “old school” style Karnaval. It features children and young people masquerading as all sorts of animals, plants and creatures by day and an incredible street party by night. Here are some photos. I’ll provide some more background on Haitian Carnaval history and culture during next week's big celebrations here in Port-au-Prince.

my kitchen office

While most of my days are pretty routine, every so often one comes along that makes me feel like I have one of the cooler jobs out there. Today was one of those days - the only problem was that it was a Saturday work day instead of a Monday.

In order to measure the dietary intake of babies in our project, we need to know the nutritional value of the foods they are eating. There is no set of "nutrition facts" available for infant foods in Haiti. We have to document detailed recipes on our own so we can then use to calculate the average calories, fat, vitamins and minerals in a Haitian infant's diet. Here are some photos from today's "recipe standardization exercise"- that's just a fancy way of saying that we had moms show us how they cook for their kids.

Remembering James Frank Mikes

One week ago I made an unplanned weekend trip to Chicago to attend my grandfather’s funeral. James Frank Mikes, my mother’s father, died on 16 January 2008. He was 83 old.

Standing by the gravesite, huddled close to one another to defend against a below zero Chicago winter day, we watched two young men from the Great Lakes Naval Station stand at attention through a recording of taps and then slowly (probably due as much to frozen fingers as ceremonial protocol) lift the US flag from my grandfather’s coffin and fold it into a tight-cornered triangle.

It was one of those moments that reminded me of how little I really knew about his pre-grandfather life. My 29 years overlapped with the last third of his. As one of 19 grandchildren (plus 2 spouses and 1 great grandchild) personal time with my grandfather wasn’t really a part of our family culture. .

I wasn’t there for his tour of service in the navy during World War II. I didn’t know him or my grandmother during their season as childhood neighbors, high school classmates, and newlyweds living in a dorm at the University of Illinois – prior to the arrival of my nine aunts and uncles. Back in grade school, I did get to experience a small taste of his 30+ years directing his family’s construction business. I remember chasing my brother through his office with its big metal desk, drafting supplies and the smell of sawdust… but that is when he was well on the road to retirement – not during the years that my mother remembers of seven day work weeks and heading back to the office after the family dinner.

I am thankful for what I did experience during his grandfather years. His quiet but quirky sense of humor displayed through witty captions on Polaroid snapshots that decorated an entire room in their lake house. His incredible skills as a contractor and builder – evidenced through the extensive remodeling jobs he carried out at all our family members’ homes. The feeling of the scratchy polyester beard he wore each year on Christmas Eve to round out his Santa suit and pillow-padded belly. The slight smile on his face and the light in his eyes as he quietly watched our family’s lake house antics from his favorite positions in the living room recliner or the captain’s chair on the pontoon boat.

I do have one memory of my grandfather that is all my own. Several years ago, when I was back from living in Kenya and trying to decide what I should do next, he pulled me aside and said, with a tone of urgency, “You do what it is that you want to do”. Simple words, but profoundly meaningful coming from a man who more than half a century earlier made a reluctant choice to join the family construction business and to not finish the last few months of his engineering degree. He was very aware of how that one decision to not finish university and pursue his own professional dreams had redirected his and his family’s life – not in a way that destroyed them - but in a way that definitely robbed them all of some joy over the years.

Listening to my aunt and uncle’s eulogy at my grandfather’s funeral – a humorous reenactment of a conversation between God and the angel charged with brining him home to heaven - I was struck by how even the parts of my grandfather’s story that I never knew have shaped my mother's family - the foundation upon which my own childhood was built. I’m not sure how well I will follow his advice “to do what it is I want to do” – that involves actually knowing what I want - which is usually the hardest part for me. However, from the story of his life, I do know that the promise of things being worked together for a greater good is a true one - and that is a firm foundation for constructing my own future.

Our (mine and Obama's) kind of town...

I haven't been paying nearly enough attention to the presidential primaries back home, but this Salon.com article that puts Obama's political success in the context of Chicago history caught my eye. Hope some of you other Windy City folks can enjoy it too.

To get myself in a more US political mindset, I took this Dutch quiz on the US political landscape: www.electoralcompass.com You give your response to a number of statements relating to key election issues and the site maps how your views fall relative to the leading democratic and republican candidates. While there are a few issues I'd love to see added to the site (and political platforms in general) such as trade policies and global poverty reduction, I recommend that you try it out. It was most interesting to look at the issue by issue function and to see on which issues the candidates line up according to party lines (e.g. health care) and which they seem to each have a unique stance on (e.g. education)

A case of the blans

Last night my fellow Illinois-born friend L and I went to a party to celebrate the 4th anniversary of JUPED - a "youth" (read anyone who is single and not too much older than 30 years old - e.g. me) organization that is partnered with MCC, a volunteer organization that a number of my fellow foreign ("blan" in Kreyol) friends are associated with.

It was great to be there. We drove out to a neighborhood towards the edge of Port-au-Prince that begins just where the paved roads end. They had set up lots of small tables and chairs in an empty school room. There was a DJ and a dark dance floor set up in the next room over (dark rooms seem to be a prerequisite for dancing to Haitian Kompa music). As the night went on, people filtered in, a few short words were said, we were served drinks and several courses of snacks and then a full meal after midnight....but mostly people just sat around and chatted -getting up from time to time to hit the dance floor. It was fantastically mellow - and brought me back to my days living in Honduras and Kenya where I just felt so much more in touch with community life.

One thing about the night, though, did remind me that I was in Haiti - not Honduras or Kenya. It was L - my fellow North American friend. During my seasons in Honduras and Kenya, I was most often, the only foreigner in the room. In Haiti this time around, that is rarely the case in my social world. There is almost always at least one other blan (usually L who is fortunately for me much more attuned to Haitian culture and speaks much better Kreyol than I do) who I am out and about with.

It's been really interesting to get a slightly different perspective on what it mean to be the foreigner now that I have been able to watch Haitians interact with my blan friends. One thing I've become aware of is how I too often buy into the stereotypes of blans.....but then somehow naively assume that those stereotypes won't be applied to me or my friends.

One (not very positive) illustration - there is a definite stereotype that when you see a blan man out with a Haitian woman in a club, she is most likely a prostitute. More than once, I've been guilty of making conjectures about whether or not the relationship is based on money or actual love. Then, the other night, I was out with a female Haitian friend. We ran into a blan friend of mine who was out with his Haitian girlfriend. They were being a bit too publicly affectionate - but I still wasn't prepared for my Haitian friend turning to me and asking, point-blankly, if the girlfriend was a prostitute. "Of course she's not!", I said. But why not? She was just applying the same stereotypes that I do every day.

There is such an interesting and sometimes exhausting tension involved in being another one of "those blans" in the eyes of most people I interact with here. It's really hard to find a balance between being aware of and sensitive to the assumptions (which are both positive and negative) and knowing when to just let it go and allow people to think what they will...

Around the world in 20 days

Happy New Year! I arrived back in Haiti yesterday after three weeks of holiday travel. While I didn't quite make it around the world, I managed to spend time in three different countries (Haiti, Jamaica, USA) and five different states (IL, NJ, NY, PA, FL). While all that busyness means I didn't come back very rested, after spending time with a number of family and friends. I am returning to Haiti feeling loved...which is definitely more important than eight hours of sleep per night for my overall health and wellbeing.

The trip started off with a week in Jamaica for my friend Wendy-Ann's wedding. Here are some photos of the momentous event. My parents definitely win "parents of the decade" award for all their love and support throughout this PhD season but particularly in the last few weeks. On a day's notice they flew out to Ithaca to help me pack up my room to put things in storage (I'm planning to be in Haiti all of 2008). I truly wouldn't be here without you Mom and Dad - thank you!

To be totally honest, I really wasn't (and still am not) so sure I was ready to return to Haiti. My feelings about being here are so mixed. Between PhD expectations and workload, the complications and isolation of living in a relatively insecure place like Port-au-Prince, and almost constant change in my living situation and social circle, I feel like I just haven't established a rhythm to my life here that allows me to enjoy it. Most days I feel emotional and exhausted....and just not quite myself. I know that these are not the sorts of feelings that a few weeks away are going to cure. They are the sort of feelings that I just have to live through. My experience so far has proven that faith and hope have managed to come in small doses at the moments when they are most needed - but not a moment sooner. So here I am. Back in Haiti.

A food systems perspective

One of the most exciting aspects of studying nutrition at Cornell, a rural agriculture-focused university, rather than at my other grad program option, Emory's School of Public Health which is attached to a medical center, is the chance to learn more about how food systems work from the agricultural production side.

When we talk about nutrition interventions, many of us think of popping a multivitamin or choosing calcium-fortified orange juice. However, most of our nutrients - including energy (calories), vitamins and minerals - come from the regular old foods we eat. When we talk about nutrition at Cornell, we don't just talk about the physiology of metabolism but also the economic, social and environmental factors that affect the food systems through which we access our nutrients.

The root causes of pediatric malnutrition in places like Haiti is not a lack of maternal knowledge about what to feed their children, but rather more fundamental issues such as the lack of transportation infrastructure to help farmers get the foods they produce to markets where urban population can buy them at an affordable price.

Anway, this entire post was inspired by this article in the BBC online. It talks about China's changing food system and the way that economic growth has influenced consumer preferences which in turn change what farmers grow and has forced China to start importing food. The Chinese context is very different from Haiti but the article illustrates some important principles about a systems perspective on food and nutrition - a change in one part of the system has ripples through the entire system.