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24580: lyall (talk) voyaging to the hills to see family



J.David Lyall <postmaster@lyalls.net>


So, after the trip over la morne avek Dok Phillipe on petit moto (two weeks ago) I learned that we had passed by the zone of Mama. My Mother in Law grew up there. Her father lives there now and she hadn't been back since she left as a young woman. Like, 40 years since she's been home. And it is about 30 kilometers as the raven flies. Considerably longer as the paved road goes. So I started on a campaign to take Madam and Mama on a trip andeyo/to the countryside. To see Grann Papa. Eventually we got a trip together and ti Roxanne and Lu and Mama and Lu's sister Beatrice and I all piled into the jeep to spend some days at Cayes Jacmel and the zone below Seguin. The days before Vendredi Sancte, Good Friday (March 25) were when we could go. Rented a little house on the beach at Kabik in zone Cayes Jacmel for 30 u$d per day. It would have been a nice vacation stay but days of walking up and down the mountain were in store instead. The trip down thru Port au Prince and Leogane then over the hills to Jacmel revealed a U-joint going bad again. The Jeep eats U-joints for some reason. Thursday morning was therefore spent hunting for the proper part to ranje the jeep. Returning to the ti lakay on la plaj found the family busy cooking up pots of food, seemingly for 10 people. We finally got going around 2 pm with buckets of food to take to Grann. Thru Marigot, detouring over the dry river to Peredo then begins the climb to commune Seguin. The first section of road out of Peredo is hand built of stones. Cobble stones. Sensible work; a good method for building a road up there where stones are basically the only natural resource. Some places were in need of repair but a dozen men with picks could keep it in repair. If someone would pay them to do so. I would be interested to know when and who did build that section of road. Climbing up takes you thru zone Gwayav where a coffee project is working and the Chinese are doing something. Perhaps they are working this part of the Haitian Bleu zone. This is a pretty area at 4 or 5 hundred meters elevation. Cooled off but not in the clouds. Apre Sa one begins the climb into the clouds. The rains haven't come this year, the big river is dry while last year the ford was almost a meter deep. Zone Seguin was in the clouds each time I visited this month, however. We finally came to a wide place in the road where Mama demanded kanpe la. Stand here. Stop. Didn't look like a kafou/carrefour to me but there is a pathway up the mountain once one gets out to look. Now, Mama originally said that the lakou/compound was "de minwit" from the road. Two minutes. After walking one minute from the road she pointed up a cliff face and indicated we were to climb that. With a two year old and buckets of food and a duffel bag of presents. The path was at a slope of about 75 degrees much of the time and I sure wished that I had my Baton Moise. Hand me down my walking cane. (Baton Moise - Moses Baton) After 40 minutes of climbing we reached the plateau/platon. Now, I had thought that mama had to be in worse shape than me, she never leaves the house that I can tell, but I couldn't keep up with her going up that trail. And then the platon kept climbing; not as steeply, but we must have gone up another hundred meters or more getting to the lakou. And the air is thin up there. My heart needed help keeping up. Finally we got to the lakou in the bananna grove. Plantains actually. Banann en kreyol. With coffee bushes growing under the banann. Grann Papa is bed ridden now but his wife of 35 years and his younest daughter (27 years old she guesses) live there with him. Two babies share the back room with the youngest daughter. My aunt, she is. Matant. The house is as Vanite (Mama in law) remembers it, a stone and mud shack of 10 by 20 feet with an earthen floor. It does have a tin roof. The kitchen is a wood fire in a bananna leafed shed; sort of a tent, an A-frame house about 4 feet high in the center.

Grann Papa was tickled to see me and spoke to me in spanish. Like many country people he assumes that blan are spanish. {digression: Many of the men of the country side go to work in the Dominican Republic. San Domingue they call it. Matant's husband is there now, cutting sugar cane. There are no sugar plantations in Hayti these days to soak up surplus labor from the countryside. The sugar that one buys in the marketplace is from Mexico or Nicaragua or the D.R. Some small amounts of sirop de canne are produced en hayti but granules are all imported it seems.
/digression}
I asked Grann how old he was. He doesn't know of course but recalls that Borno was president when he was a child. That was the 1920's or so? During the first occupation by the Department of the Navy. The first road building period of the repiblik. I tried to ask Grann if he remembered the period of the Marines but he didn't understand me. He does talk about how the soil is exhausted now and how much land he has had taken from him. How was his land 'taken' from him? This I didn't attempt to figure out but property rules can be very complicated. It could have been stolen and illegally registered in someone elses name, the government could have taken it legally or illegally, it could have belonged to the government all along and assigned to someone else, or it could have belonged to someone else all along. For 80 years? People do claim these things. There are a lot of people on that platon these days altho it doesn't seem so very poor compared to many places. There are few full sized trees on le platon but there is grass by the pathways and the farm land is half way level so it hasn't all washed away. Just around the hill from the ti lakay there is a dried up streambed. It used to flow all year long. They still have good water some walk away but many of the 'source' on la morne have dried out over the years. It was late afternoon when we arrived that thursday and we had to get down the hill before dark. Getting going was difficult as usual and it was almost 6 pm before we set off to find the trail back down the mountain. A very rough trail to be hurrying on, carrying a 2 and a half year old girl in the twilight. Thursday nite in the ti kay on la plaj. The beach. Friday was Vendridi Sancte, good friday and fish were hard to find. We had to take food up to prepare a meal for the family. The port of Marigot was sold out by the time we got there. Found fish in the peyizan market by the river, luckily. An hour back up the hill took us to a different trail, higher up the hill with a path reportedly less steep but longer. Beaucoup cousin et cousann came around to visit with Mama Vanite and Madamn mwen. Lots of little kids come around to stare at the blan. Many of them had probably never seen a blanc before, but the grown ups there say 'etranger' rather than 'blan'. I heard a new pronunciation of 'sale' there too. 'salwi' is what one gentleman said. Salut is the french I guess. I talked with a neighbor woman who had made the walk to Kenscoff to sell vegetables. Long walk. She agreed that it was about 4 hours to Ca Jacques/Ka Jak from this platon and then 5 or 6 hours to Kafou Badyo. She had walked to Duret/Kenscoff where the big trucks load produce from the mountain gardeners to take down to market in Port au Prince. I queried whether the prices paid at Kenscoff were better than down at Marigot. Yes, they consider the walk worth the investment for the better prices. It is hard to consider that one basket of vegetables carried on the head could yield a profit worth a two day walk. They consider it worth the walk tho. Actually, going down to marigot requires almost as long a walk I imagine, if you don't take the camion. The camion down to Marigot costs 50 gourdes. 10 dola ht. Expensive, considering that the tap tap from PetionVille up to Kenscoff costs 4 dola ht. Taking a moto taxi up la morne costs 25 or 30 dola ht. 150 gourdes. A lot of money for these people. One cousann came around to visit with Vanite. Decades since they had seen each other. He was a hard working farmer and had made the trip to Kenscoff to sell. He'd been to work in San Doming as well. He has considerable land and owns a mule. Bought the mule. I saw another mule, but didn't see any bourik. Someone else is doing the mule breeding. That would be a good business, one I've long wished to do.

Madamn and Se (my wife and her sister) spent the day cooking up a big meal on the wood fire under the bananna leaf shed. Fresh fish from Marigot and boiled banann and di riz. By the time it was ready it was time to head back down the hill, not wanting to get caught in the dark anko/encore. The youngest daughter, Vanite's sister, came with us, wanting to discover where her house is. Apparently another of Vanite's sisters lives above PetionVille near her, but she knows not where. How many years since they have seen each other? Unknown, but a substantial number. So we headed out back down the hill in the fog, this time with a bucket of food cooked on the hill and the same duffel bag, this time filled with Banann and coffee beans. I couldn't carry that duffel bag but Matant, a 27 year old woman, 6 months pregnant, wearing plastic flip flops, carried that 40 pound bag down the hill faster than I could walk with expensive lace up boots on my feet. Ah, we also were carrying 4 chickens, poul, presents from the family. We stopped off at 3 or 4 cousin's houses on the way down, one of which was a substantial concrete house with veranda, a concrete yard and a mule in the yard. It hangs over the edge of a cliff and I saw no farmland nearby but he must do well with some land somewhere. The Mule had a big sore on his spine where the pannier carrier rubs. Many of the country bourique and cheval have this problem. They don't bother to design the carriers properly. Dok Phillipe used to build proper burro saddles which don't cut into the skin of these hard working beasts. The parade down the mountain was about 9 people this time, with various mountian cousin/cousann carrying whatever. When we reached the road it turned out that another young woman (besides Matant, Auntie, the young sister of Mama) was intending to ride into Port au Prince with us. I guess Mama had told her she could come but there was no room in the jeep. 5 people and baggage and chickens fill up a jeep wrangler pretty effectively. RaRa bands were filling up the road in the little settlements going down the hill. We had to pay 50 gourdes to three different bands to get thru. Two more bands down in the towns with electricity didn't demand payment for passage. Having marching bands take over the roads is one of those little pleasures of living en Hayti. I much prefer marching bands and RaRa bands to crazy haitian drivers trying to cut into a 10 foot long space between cars. the great misfortune of this trip was that I forgot to bring a camera. There are no pictures of all those cousine/cousann and grann papa and le platon of zone anba/below seguin.


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J. David Lyall
http://www.lyalls.net/