Weathering the storm

I suppose my last post left you hanging a bit. Many apologies as typical Haitian events conspired to prevent me from getting to e-mail. At any rate, we are safe, if a bit more cautious than before. I am encouraged by the Haitians, who seem to manage to carry on their lives as "normally" as possible. However, more Haitians (friends of Sacha) are talking about leaving. Thing is, they've been talking like that before and they're still here.

Anyway, things are more calm in P�tion-ville. No gunshots the last few days and most of the trouble has been confined to the poorest areas of Port-au-Prince. Don't let that lead you to believe that this violence is an uprising of the desperately poor. It is a band of thugs who are taking advantage of the fact that law enforcement is almost non-existent. They want Aristide back because he was paying them--and probably still is from his exile haven in South Africa. Now that their income stream has been disrupted, they're pissed. However, on Friday, the nation took a special holiday declared by the people whereby they were not going to work in order to protest the violence. It was uniformly supported. Bottom line: Aristide will never be allowed to return to Haiti.

The power to our house is part government provided, part from a battery-driven inverter. We had weak power for about 3 days, then it went out completely. A transformer was broken and nobody knew when it would be fixed. Our water comes from Mother nature via a rooftop cistern. THe reservoir is in the basement, but a small tank is on the roof...in case the power goes out so you will have some gravity-powered water. With the electricity off for a couple of days, the water pressure became non-existent. It was also cold, but that was the least of our problems. We had just stocked up our refrigerator a few days earlier, so Sacha cooked up a feast from the fridge. It would have been a romantic dinner had I been with my wife. As it was, the bottle of wine and a few Barbancourts helped us ignore the heat and the mosquitos.

Just when we were going to buy an emergency generator, the power came back on. Our quartier is in a rather wealthy part of town and it includes a couple of embassies. Someone must have put some pressure on the utility company because there are reports of power being down for MONTHS. A generator is definitely in our plans now, but the power went out on a Thursday and the anti-violence holiday was on Friday and all stores were closed. We worked all day on Saturday, and when we arrived at home the power was back.

Our dubbing is continuing a bit slowly but generally on schedule. I'll give more technical details on our process in a future post. I am confident that we will remain here unless things get a lot worse. The embassy sent home all but essential employees and advised that all Americans who are not here for emergency activities return to the USA. While our movie isn't an emergency, I figure that thousands of Haitians live here every day, so why can't I? I'm nobody special, that's for sure, and carrying on as "normal" is an effective means to let the thugs know that they aren't going to mess up our lives. Besides, I get to miss all the campaign bullshit here. It's a compelling reason to stay, at least for the next couple of weeks.