Camping Indoors

With the questionable water, the tricky outlets (if they work at all), constantly needing to use extension chords, and the perpetual infiltration of some sort of insect, the regular loss of electricity and wifi, and every transportation need essentially requiring the mad negotiation and coordination skills of running a small country; it is no wonder that I’m a little over my experience here in Haiti.

This country has so much beauty to offer. And yet, we are on an extended camping trip indoors just a short jog away from the capital…the heart of all things broken here.

Daily life is a balance.  We have our basic necessities covered. We are sheltered, we are fed, and we are safe. But I long for the real comforts of my real home. I don’t have to shower with my shoes on at home. I can open my mouth in the hot hot hot shower. Oh how I miss hot water. All of our showers are cold. Not cool. Cold. And I’m terrified of the shower curtain (I actually have one), as well as the rug on the floor. No one could pay me to touch that rug. And the towels…the towels are an abrasive former towel-like object that more resemble and feel like a cloth version of sandpaper. At least I’m getting my exfoliation done.

I don’t have to worry that a variety of unidentifiable insect will consume my food or explore my toothpaste at home.  I keep our home away from home tidy, but the difference between this home and the one I long to return to, is that despite the size of our tiny dwelling, the maintenance of our little place in Haiti is much more laborious and frustrating. Everything is constantly dusty and gross here. Random things become sticky…even when there’s no explanation for how or why they became so. Sometimes I’m glad I don’t know how or why something happens here. Naïveté is bliss. There is so much debris from burned trash in the air all the time that it settles and even indoors we find a thick layer of dust on everything daily. 

I feel like we eat Haiti MRE’s. Our food is regimented. I have absolutely eaten my life’s allotment of rice, spaghetti, mac n cheese, pizza, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Eating here is like being on a ferris wheel of carbo hydrates. The carb rotation, as I know it to be, can be so frustrating at times. I love food. I love variety. And I’m ready for a nice platter of change. I miss things like salad, and veggies. Just basic veggies. If I could pour salad dressing on a farm right now and chow down I would be in a new form of Heaven!! It would be bliss. I miss bruschetta so much that I have actually dreamed that I was able to order it on Amazon and have it shipped. Clearly my dreamscapes have my priorities squarely in check!

And cheese. Glorious cheese. Someone I know who lives here in Haiti has always requested cheese. And I never quite understood why. And then a friend arrived and brought me a hunk of Wisconsin cheddar cheese and my love affair with cheese was instantly rekindled. Omg I’ve never loved cheese so much!!! I became an inflammation balloon ready to scream out in agony because I practically ate half a block of cheese on two pieces of amazing toast with salted butter four days in a row; but it was totally worth it. I am not prepared to blame the spasms on the cheese, but will rather happily blame the disease I have likely caused by the Mexican antibiotics that cured everything that ailed me as a kid, and will gladly devour cheese again if it is given to me. That cheese unexpectedly temporarily soothed my emotional ailments. I felt happiness as deeply as my soul and I ate enough cheese to fill me from “tet” (head) hair follicles to toes. THANK YOU for the cheese.

Obtaining food is a process. For instance, a ride to the grocery store will cost me at least $30. I have a selection of stores, though. I can go to Delmas 2000, which has been designed to be a “one stop” shop location and contains a “TJ Maxx” like store, a store I’ve come to referring to as “China Town”, another we call “Sears”, and the grocery store. Delmas 2000 is also conveniently located across the street from a restaurant that we really like called Kokoye. Nanda, the owner, and her husband have done a really good job with Kokoye. The food is great and the prices are decent, which is really hard to come by here. Being inside Kokoye is like entering a portal to another city. There is air conditioning. It’s clean. And it helps push the reset button that we need pressed periodically.  We can get groceries, lunch and dinner to go all in one errand. Typically, I do this about once a week or so, as we try to minimize our outings for safety reasons. There are a couple of other stores we shop at as well, Star 2000 and Delimart both have a decent selection of items. So it really depends on what I need, but I can typically find anything I’m looking for (within reason).  Except veggies that I am craving, and the ingredients to make the bruschetta my soul needs.

There is a fast food chain here that has been compared to McDonald’s. While I’m not hip on McD’s with the exception of their french fries, I have to say that Epi’Dor doesn’t hit that spot for me. The kids LOVE it. And what I’ve come to find comfort in, is that their favorite meal at Epi’Dor is this incredible chicken that knocks their socks off. They talked about it for well over a year before we had the opportunity to go there, and when we finally did I was hoping that I could recognize flavoring or seasonings used so that I could make at least a measly attempt at recreating their favorite dish. To my delight, their delicacy is none other than rotisserie chicken. That’s right. Good old, plain and simple, rod and twist rotisserie chicken. AWESOME. There is another fast food place Muncheez, I’ve heard a lot about around here, but I’ve never been. We have been invited to lunch with another ex-pat family and I can’t help but laugh when I think that a restaurant here may have been named by some high college student. You just can’t make this stuff up.

When we are not eating out (which is 95% of the time), I make a lot of one pot meals. We only have one working outlet in our kitchen, and our refrigerator is plugged into one of the sockets. So that only leaves one socket available for us to cook. I have an electric griddle/casserole dish that I can make just about anything in. I can bake, fry, boil, and grill in it. So I have to get creative sometimes and try to do as little prep as possible to create a whole meal in one pot. Like I said, indoor camping. Without the ash cakes. Periodically, a large lizard will perch itself on the lid of my griddle. I have told the boys that he/she wants to help cook and that we should fashion a chef hat for it and call it Ratatoulle. Mainly because I haven’t come up with a clever lizardesque chef name. I’m all ears if anyone has a name for my cooking compadre!

With all this carb eating, I was initially very happy to maintain the size 6 I arrived in Haiti at. Hot sweaty yoga without the yoga was working so well!  I called it the croissant diet. And I’ve enjoyed the salted butter and bread diet so much that I’m no longer feeling like a size 6. Crap. I don’t sweat as much now that I’ve acclimated to the heat, and I fear that I’m getting fat again. This sucks. I’ve definitely lost muscle definition and feel like I’m getting jiggly again. I’m dreading the scale at home. But I know that I did the hard work and ate the right foods to get back into shape. And I’ll do it again. I just really want to do it again NOW.

There are things that I will miss when we go home. I have learned that I love kenips (little round fruit that grows on trees in bushels here), and Haitian almonds. I also love Haitian Coke because it’s made with sugar cane syrup, and it’s fantastic. The upside down label also makes me chuckle. Haitian potato chips are also seriously fantastic. They’re basically a kettle chip. Although the boys continually argue that they are not made of potato. Neither are Pringles. Because potatoes are gross. Ok what ever, boys. We eat a lot of Bongu cheese too. Bongu is like Laughing Cow, only it is made in Egypt of sugar cane milk and shipped to Haiti for packaging. It has the same consistency and is used the same way laughing cow would be; but apparently Laughing Cow will not be an acceptable replacement for Bongu. So shoot me now.  We eat American apples. And they are about $1 a piece. But it’s worth it. There are a lot of food and beverage options that are shipped into the country. I sprang for a carrot juice for the boys at Epi’Dor one day, and to our dismay, when Parker opened his juice, a tiny cockroach was taking a swim. PITCHED that one! I won’t miss cockroaches.  I won’t miss tarantulas. I won’t miss ants. I won’t miss gunshots. I won’t miss the mosquitos. There’s so much I won’t miss.  Enough of this indoor camping without the hiking trail. I’m ready for some cold weather (I can not believe that I really am), a fruit and veggie diet, and my elliptical machine. It’s time to blow this salted butter and Haitian Coke POP STAND and go home!!!

It's obvious that I miss food. And it really is such a huge part of daily living here. Trying to figure out what to eat. Water is another huge issue. We can't consume what flows from the tap. And we use about 5 gal of water daily. I can either pay for water, or we can haul it from a Culligan container at the reception desk of the hotel every day. So that's what we do. I have a reinforced bag and we use recycled milk bottles fulfill our daily water needs. We wash dishes and cook all of our food with bottled water. I have a container in the refrigerator that we keep filtered water in to drink and for making juice. I can't even explain how nice it will be to return home to brush our teeth, wash our hands, wash our dishes, cook our food, and shower in clean water without the risk of illness. In addition to "Haitian Happiness", which is a well known and greatly dreaded GI response to filthy water consumption here, I am also highly prone to staph infections here. And in an awesome way, I typically get them on my face. I currently have one and am using a topical antibiotic to treat it. I think I've had four in the past six months. But this one is by far the worst, and I will likely have to get on an oral antibiotic for it as it has spread really badly in the last three days. Unfortunately, I don't have very many choices here. And I have to bathe. So I run the risk of it continuing to spread. SELAVI as they say. DEGAJE. All meaning, "It is what it is."

In addition to the culinary cutie I have visit my kitchen fairly regularly, I've also recently been seeing more tarantulas. This is not what I signed up for. And it seriously makes me want to set the whole apartment on fire and run home screaming. But I have to "big girl it up" a bit and seek the pests and find them. If I can't remove them without the risk of being bitten, then they must die. Unfortunately, today I found one in my closet, and it got away from me. So now every hair on my body is on end. And I'm not sure that I'll be able to muster up a mind over matter trick for myself to sleep well tonight. It's already bad enough that every time I feel like a small piece of hair is touching my forehead, I realize that it is an ant. I'm so over the ants. They infiltrate my whole apartment. They're truly awful. I have at least four kinds of ants, too. Red ones. And they bite! Flying ones. And they bite too! And huge black ones that lead the way for the smaller black ones. Several times we have left our apartment and come back to find hundreds of them in a group on our floor. It's as if they know we've returned, so they all retreat to the walls. It's crazy. We also have termites. They leave a visible tunnel of sawdust on the wall. So we always know where they are. They are white with a brown stained pincher on the tip of their heads. And they bite too! I've had to keep everything in bags because they will eat through cardboard. Then there are several kinds of kitchen bug that have invaded my sealed pastas and rices. I had to pitch my whole container of powdered butter because what ever Haitian "weebles" are, they LOVE powdered butter. 

We lose power several times a day. It's the norm. We wait a few minutes, and without fail the generators kick on and we again have our needs met. The only time this is truly awful is when you're in the shower. So you hope that you've got soap in your hand or something useful as you'll be standing in the pitch dark in a cold shower, unable to see a single thing. So you might as well give something a little extra scrub for a few minutes and hope that something isn't hiding behind the dreaded shower curtain waiting to attack you in the dark. I've spent a few nights standing in the shower stall praying that my own personal arachnophobia hell doesn't come true. Then I'd definitely wind up touching the shower curtain because I'd have to jump out of the shower, possibly Kung Fu style. And then I'd definitely step on the rug. I'd probably blow out my flip flop. I'd open my mouth to scream, which means the horrible Haitian water would definitely get in my mouth. And then as I'm lying in bed with a horrid case of Haitian Happiness, I'd be terrified that the vengeance of the brothers and sisters, and mothers, and fathers, and cousins, and children, and God-Father's of the tarantula that I killed in my kitchen will be exacted on me in my weakest moment. And there's no clicking your heels three times, and saying, "There's no place like home!" to get me out of that one. Yeah...that's a true fear of mine. It could happen. Just like that. But then the lights usually come back on, and I take a survey of everything and find that it's still just me standing in the cold shower doing a little rub a dub dub, and my evening continues normally.

Normally. DAMN. None of this should be normal. It's time to go home. I think I’ve had enough indoor camping to last a lifetime. Yep! DEFINITELY TIME TO GO HOME!