My last day

Today was my last day, and it was spent tying up some loose ends. I went to the Haitian consulate to say good-bye and thank you to the consul, but he was out of the country. Which was odd because I spoke to one of his co-workers just yesterday and I told her I was going to stop by to say good-bye to him and she said, "Sounds great! See you tomorrow!" Anyhow, I went from there to the market to pick up a couple souvenirs from the lady who called me family a couple days ago. She wished me a good trip back and we said our good-byes.

Then from there, I went to a friend's house to make lunch, a calalou. It wasn't as good as the last time I made it, but everyone was very polite and ate it. This family has been very welcoming, and one of them in particular has been really helpful in rounding up participants, so I wanted to do something nice. It was also the birthday of the youngest child, who turned 13, so they suggested I bake a cake. I asked what kind of cake he wanted and he said "An American cake." So I gave him the choice between a carrot cake and a banana cake, and he chose banana. I went with his sister to get the ingredients (trying to find a suitable replacement for cream cheese isn't easy), then we went home and baked the cake. I went home while they went to church, I bought a soccer ball as a gift, then came back with the frosting. They loved the cake, and even did my family's tradition of placing a glass in the center and using that piece for the birthday boy. All in all, a very nice last day. Later in the week, I'll write a final entry reflecting on the whole two months.

Agouti

This is the creature Dominique has been telling me I should see, even more than the monkeys. He comes into the yard to eat things out of the compost pile, as you can see in the video below. Adorable.

Done!

Finally, the project I set out to do during this visit is done. I have all the interviews i need for the pilot portion. It wasn't always smooth, but it worked out.

For starters, when I got there, I was surprised to find that not only was the building open, but there were lots of people there. This in spite of the fact that when I asked specifically if the building would be open this week, I was told that it would be totally deserted. So instead of having to do the interviews outside, we were able to do them indoors, although they refused to open any rooms to help me out. And the interviews went fairly smoothly, although almost everyone was late, and I had to turn away a bunch of people because they turned up too late, after we had started the interviews. But I was able to use the camcorders, which was good because at times the voice recorders apparently shut off on their own.

So tonight and tomorrow I can just tie up loose ends, getting ready to come home Thursday!

You've got to be kidding

Some of you may know that I have a rule for cereal in the U.S. : It has to cost $2.00 or less for me to buy it. Occasionally I have to violate that rule when there are absolutely no name brands or trusted generics that cost that little. Here, since everything is imported from France, there is no chance that I can find cereal that cheap. However, I have a new 3€ rule, which actually works out pretty well. I have to buy generics, but they're tasty. Most of the name brands cost about 4-5€. But the other day, I saw this:



At first, the box of cereal looks innocuous. But look closer.



Almost 8€ for a box of cereal. Seriously. That works out to almost $11. I wouldn't buy an $11 box of cereal even if it were Alpha-Bits in IPA.

If only I'd had a barrel, that would have been way more fun

Finally, after a month and a half of waiting, I finally got what I wanted. Look at this picture. Do you see?




In case it's not obvious, check out this close-up.


The monkey in the backyard! I was so happy.

I was out in the backyard putting my clothes out to dry on the clothesline (visible at the bottom of the close-up), when I heard a rustling in the trees. I looked up and there was this monkey, staring at me. Soon I saw another. So I slowly walked into the house, ran to get my camera, and came back in time to see them jumping from tree to tree. Unfortunately, I had trouble seeing my viewfinder in the bright sun, so a couple of the pictures I took had no monkeys in them. Luckily this picture came out great. So that's checked off the list.

Tomorrow is the last of the pilot interviews. Then I can go home with peace of mind.

Brazil!

While my passport doesn't show it, I have officially been to Brazil as of today. It was a disappointingly short trip, and most of my time was spent in a bus station, but still it was a real change from Cayenne. Oiapoque, the border town named for the river that separates Brazil from French Guiana, is a small town that has developed quite a bit in recent years, but still shows signs of an underdeveloped rural area. A colony as far from the minds of Brazilians as Cayenne is from the French. If ever a town made Cayenne look great, it was Oiapoque. That being said, it was really cool to just be over the border, because it felt so different from French Guiana. Different energy, different architecture, different people. Hopefully I'll go back one day. In the meantime, enjoy these photos.

This is my first view of Brazil.

This is the bridge that will connect French Guiana to Brazil.

But as you can see it's not quite finished.

This is a monument in the middle of the town.

This is basically the first thing I saw when I stepped off the boat.

This is the community of Saint-Victoria, which has been growing a bit over the last few years.

Postponed

My trip to Brazil has been postponed until tomorrow morning, so it will really be more of a day trip. With the extra time I had today, I decided to change my money in preparation for tomorrow's trip. The euro is strong against the real, so I should have plenty of money.

Then I wen hunting for bouyon wara (which I previously talked about in this post). To save you a bit of a trip, bouyon wara is THE national dish of French Guiana, eaten mainly around Easter and Pentecost. Its base is a paste of the wara, a fruit from the buba palm tree, a fruit whose flesh is quite fibrous and not that great to eat raw, though the flavor is delicious. The fruit is then cooked into a paste which forms the base of the dish, and to it is added pork, beef, chicken, and shrimp, as well as lots of spices (though shockingly it isn't spicy hot). To make a good bouyon wara (bouillon d'awara in French), you really have to start on Friday and keep cooking until Sunday. In the end it should be soft, slightly salty, with the meat being the consistency of brisket or pulled pork. After several days of searching for it, I finally found it at the market (though they hadn't been selling it the other times I'd looked). The price: 20€ for one kilo. I bought two. Why spend so much on one meal? Well besides being delicious, 20€ is actually a bargain for what it costs to make it at home. Assuming you don't want to spend a day trying to make the wara paste, you can buy a bottle of the paste for 15€ (the raw fruits to make the paste would cost probably about 5€, and then the oil would probably cost another 5). Then there's the cost of all the meat. Recipes typically call for several pounds of meat, because when you cook this, you really don't bother cooking for one. So actually, 20€ for a meal that would have cost me way more was a great bargain. I bought one kilo for myself, and one for Alex, who will be the only one home with me tomorrow night. He's done my interviews for free, so this is my way of repaying him.

And the rest of the day was spent working on my interviews and on my introduction to linguistics class that I'll be teaching this summer.

Finally here's a picture of me. I know I haven't had many pictures of myself up this time around, so in response to all the clamoring, here you go.

Busy day

Last night, I had a great dinner with a friend who took me to his Haitian friend's house for dinner. The food was very good but the conversation was amazing, mainly because of the level of mixing when the guy spoke. It was unreal. I could never really tell what language he thought he was speaking. I had to write down as many notes as I could remember from what he said, just so I wouldn't forget. But also on a personal level, he was very likable and very concerned for people's well-being and the construction of a society where all groups work together for the common good. It's always nice to meet people like that.


This morning I got up at an ungodly hour for no apparent reason other than the fact that I was awake. I went into town (which wasn't nearly as dead as I'd been led to believe) and picked up some souvenirs, the last ones, finally. I came home, listened to yesterday's interviews (disappointing, unhelpful), and went to a friend's house to talk about the study.

Then at 5, I left for Kourou, site of the European Space Center, to see the launch of Ariane 5. Lots of people were there, and I even heard some native English speakers, which I hadn't heard in a really long time with the exception of a brief encounter with a Mormon missionary. The rocket launch was awesome, and it was nice to see the countryside as I left Cayenne for the first time. Here are some pictures and a video of the launch.

Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien

So today was my first round of interviews. STRESSFUL.

It started with being unable to print my documents on campus, so I had to go into town. Once in town I went to my normal internet café. When I went to print out one document, I could see that almost all the spaces between words had disappeared. I had to take 10 minutes to reinstate them all. Then I printed them all out (at US$0.40 a sheet!), only to discover that another document had similar problems. It was only then that I realized the files had been corrupted in such a way that deleted all the spaces between words that the computer didn't recognize as being French. Luckily these weren't crucial documents so I cut my losses and went to the campus to set everything up.

Though the set-up was fine, there were a ton of no-shows, to the point where even though I had overbooked the interviews to guard against such a crisis, I still only had two interviewees. Refusing to let the perfect be the enemy of the good (an expression translated by the title of this post), I decided to have the interviewers do one-on-one interviews and salvage whatever linguistic data I could get. At the very least it will inform my work, even if I can't formally include it in the study since its methodology is so divergent from the rest of the projected study's.

Tonight, a friend is taking me to dinner with his Haitian friend. Reports on that tomorrow.

Souvenirs

Having secured my first round of interviews for tomorrow, I decided to spend the morning looking for souvenirs, both for myself and for others. I managed to find a place that sold a number of different spices that I wanted to give to people, spices that can't be found in the U.S., such as roukou and lemon salt (which is quite powerful here). I then went to a stand that had a picture I wanted to buy, but it was too expensive. However, there were so many other good things there that I kept picking out more and more stuff, and the lady who ran the stand ended up giving me a great deal, adding extra items but not charging me. I mentioned that I was here doing a study on Haitian Creole, and she in turn mentioned that she was Haitian. We started talking in Creole, and she claimed to not mix the two creoles, which I was skeptical of, considering she's been here since before I was born. However, when she tried to point out the differences between Haitian and Guianese French Creoles, I found out why she didn't mix: She had trouble with even the basic sentences of the local creole. This isn't in any way a criticism, of course, but rather just goes to show the diversity of linguistic experiences that a person can have even in this 250,000-person community known as French Guiana. Some people can live here for 30 years without ever bothering to learn to speak one of the lingua francas, while others feel extreme pressure to fit in and try to hide their language. In any event, at the end of our conversation, she invited me to visit her when I come back and knocked off another 10 euros from the already reduced price because now "ou se fanmi mwen" 'you're family'.

As a side note, my apologies for not posting this last night. Now that I use my own computer and try to get wifi in a stairwell, the battery frequently gives out with no warning. Last night, this happened as I was about to post.

Panic!

This morning I went to the local university to see if I could use some rooms there to do my study, since the Haitian consulate was not really a neutral space. They showed me some rooms, said sure, no problem, and when I mentioned that I wanted to do them Friday, they said, "Oh, but French Guiana shuts down from Good Friday on, for the next week." Really French Guiana? Nobody wanted to mention this to me before when I was talking about doing the interviews next week?

In any event, it sent me scrambling to arrange 8 interviews for Thursday morning and afternoon. I left messages on most people's voicemail and I'm still waiting for responses, but I'm still hopeful. If worse comes to worse, I can always do interviews without use of a camcorder, which wouild allow me to conduct them outside and therefore would allow me to conduct them next week. Anyhow, now it's a question of a waiting game. I'll have to call people again tomorrow.

On the bright side, it does mean I'll be done in plenty of time to enjoy my last few days here, seeing a rocket launch on Friday and going to Brazil and perhaps a bit of Saint-Georges on the border.

Salon du Tourisme

Yesterday was the final day of the tourism expo for French Guiana, so Dominique offered to take me. Basically it was a bunch of stands handing out flyers and other goodies advertising places to go in French Guiana (and a couple of nearby places such as Martinique, Suriname, and Brazil). I got a bunch of materials to look over for when I finally decide to treat myself to a bona fide vacation here.

They also had stands selling artwork and artisanry. I found this lamp and bought it on an impulse. I'm not sure where it will go in the house, but I don't care. It's made of local woods and it's adorable.

Relaxing

This morning, I got up quite early to go to church to be able to recruit after the service. I have to say, the stamina of the Adventists is remarkable. Three hours of singing, lessons, stories, discussion groups, and a sermon. I'm proud of making it through even one service, and they do it every week. Luckily, it paid off, as I now have more subjects than I need for this phase of the project, which allows me to schedule interviews even if not everyone is available.

After that, I just hung out with Dayale's family for the rest of the day, eating lunch, showing off the Haitian Creole-English dictionary that my university (my dissertation co-director) produced in tandem with a Haitian dictionary team, and just talking about all sorts of stuff. Then I came home, watched an episode of Doctor Who, and came to the university campus, which is absolutely empty, making the wi-fi super fast, allowing me to download things with ease.

There's also a slight possibility that I will be actually leaving the Cayenne area for the first time next week. Dominique is leaving, and I might get a ride to and from the border region of Oiapoque/St. Georges. If I do, there will be a lot of pictures to share.

More food

Another market, another chance to explore the cuisine of Cayenne.

This is a grositron 'large lemon', basically a lime the size of a large orange.

These are maripa. I know nothing about them.

This is lyann amè, or 'bitter vine'. It's a spice but again, don't know much about it.

These are parépou or peach-palm fruits. They're a local specialty (and were actually featured on this blog last year). You soak them and boil them in saltwater to eat them.

These are ponm sitè 'Cyther apples', a local fruit often used for juice.

These are called chateny, which translates as 'chestnuts' but it's not the same food.

I can't remember the word for this fruit that looks like grapes but has a consistency closer to that of cherries.

These are babadin. Again, I don't know what they're like.

And finally, some views from the fish market. These fish are gigantic at times. It's really impressive.

Photo expo

On Thursday, I was on my way into town and I saw a sign for this photo exposition that I hadn't had a chance to see. With nothing pressing, I decided to take 15 minutes to see it. It was called Les Guyanais ('The French Guianese'), and was intended to spotlight people from all over the region and from all walks of life. Here is a sampling.

This might have been my favorite. I am a huge fan of landscape photography.

I was there when this picture was taken. It's right outside the Internet cafe where I used to go every night. It's a celebration of one of Brazil's victories in the World Cup.

Adventist

I think I'm being adopted into the Seventh-Day Adventist church.

My friend Dayale is quite involved with the church, and has brought me along to various activities involving it. So for instance, I thought I was going to a church service where I was going to have the chance to recruit during the 'Announcements' part of the service, but instead I just sat through the whole service, which was only excruciating due to an extended (90+ minutes) discussion of proposed architectural modifications to the church. Luckily, after the service was over, she introduced me to people who could help me. For example, one person who I will DEFINITELY be including in the study was talking to me when the service was over, and when we were talking, it was very clear that he mixed the two creoles a lot. As a bonus, he thought I was a French person who had lived in America so long that it had corrupted my French. So of course, I liked him a lot.

Then today, she introduced me to a friend of hers who is quite unique. She is an Aluku, one of the Bushi Nengue ethnicities in French Guiana. The Bushi Nengue are a group descended from slave populations that escaped from the early days of slavery in Surinam, and managed to survive in the Amazon, eluding those that came looking for them. Many of them ended up in French Guiana and continue to live in the Amazon, while others live in the cities. They speak an English-based creole. But this particular woman happens to also speak Haitian Creole with an impressive degree of fluency. Anyhow, what I thought was just a get-together between two friends was in fact a prayer meeting. So for the second time in as many days, I felt like I was at church. Almost like what I used to do at choir camp.

Then tonight, we were supposed to go to a radio station run by the Adventists to advertise my study. She asked me to listen to the radio, and I heard 10 seconds of one song in English and I was like, "That's clearly not the right station." "Why's that?" "Because the lyrics were 'I wanna have sex tonight, I wanna have sex tonite." Apparently they haven't mastered their screening process for songs. In any event, the program was not on, and I didn't recruit on the radio. But I've met lots of Haitians over the last few days, so things are on their way to getting done.

TV

I have had the pleasure of watching TV down here recently. Normally I get home after the best shows have gone off the air, but I've made it back in time to see a few good ones. You can never tell when an American show is going to take off here. For instance, there are a couple of terrible American shows that have made it here, such as the "Cleveland Show" (which was surprisingly funny in French) and "Two and a Half Men" (which is still abysmal in French). There are also some great shows, such as "Glee" and "The Closer".

Last night, however, I watched a great program, basically a compilation of funny animal clips. It was great because the entire family was around watching and laughing, and of course, animals are inherently funny. This video was what they used to end the show. My sides were splitting.

Never Say No To Panda - watch more funny videos

(Bus) Stop! In the name of...

All the bus stops here in Cayenne have special names. Different lines have different themes. For example, bus line 2 has names of different plants. The one outside my house is called sorosi, which looks like a cucumber left out in the sun all day and tastes quite bitter unless you dice it and pour boiling water over it.

Other lines have other themes. For example, line 3 is all flowers, and line 5 is all place names. If two lines share a stop, then one line gets to choose the name. I haven't figured out that system yet. All the names are in Creole though, which is kind of cool. That's all for tonight!

Missed connection

I still cannot connect to the wi-fi network at the university. Every time I think I'm about to get it, there's a new obstacle. In Peanuts terms, I'm Charlie Brown, wi-fi is my football and French Guiana is Lucy. The first time, I thought it would just come naturally with my inscription in the library. Then I was told, you might have to wait 24 hours. Then after waiting several days, I asked again on Friday, and they told me to go to the main university campus, which would open again on Monday (if anyone was wondering why Europe can deliver university education at such a low cost, it's by not providing services that we consider basic, like services that are open on weekends). So today, I decided to go to the campus -- which is literally around the corner from my house-- and look for the office. I went to the library branch there, where one of Dominique's friends works, and she helped me figure out who I needed to see. They weren't there, so I explored the building a little bit in case they guy was just out of the office. As I explored, someone asked what I was looking for, and I told her. She said that the offices were actually in another building, and I believed her because it seemed odd that the university would have only one person for these issues, so I assumed that there was one person posted in the building I went to and that the main offices were where she said they were. Lo and/or behold, they were not. So I wandered some more hoping to find them, then returned to the library. They sent me to one of their support staff that thought he MIGHT be able to help me, but wasn't sure. Then he got a call from the guy who was supposed to help me saying he was on his way back and would be there shortly. I went to the library to work, and an hour later, my battery was dead and no one had come. As I was leaving I ran into a friend who had agreed to be interviewed, and she and I got to talking, and she said she'd love to take me to her church, which is full of Haitians, in order to recruit. She's a Seventh-Day Adventist, which straddles the line between being Jewish and Christian (I think I know what that might be like). Anyhow, it looks like I might get not only participants, but also a new, additional place to do interviews.

Cold

I know I've been in French Guiana too long when I feel cold. Normally, I'm so overheated that I have to have the fan on full-blast and even with the fan on and shirtless, I still sweat profusely. The only times I feel cold are when I'm in a room with air-conditioning or when I have to get something out of the freezer. But today, I felt legitimately cold. I was on the beach playing soccer at around 8 a.m. It was hellish because unlike last week when the sand was wet, packed, and flat, this week the sand was dry, loose, and had a lot of give. This made it impossible to run effectively, created random holes where the ball would just settle instead of continuing on to its inteneded recipient, and generally just exhausted us. Add to that the fact that it was raining, we were all in just shorts or bathing suits, and I'm a highly unpredictable soccer player (I basically just wind up messing things up for both teams), and it was a rough morning. But the worst part was that at the end of the game, besides having all of our clothes totally soaked from the rain, was that I ended up cold. And it didn't let up. All day long, I sat around with long pants on. Long pants! I actually had to open my suitcase just to find them. And when I went out to come to the internet café, I even considered wearing a spring jacket. My blood is thinning. I've been here too long. Just a couple more weeks though.

To Market, To Market

Today was not particularly productive, though there was a lot of produce. I managed to get myself up earlier than usual, which meant I could travel to the market with Dominique in a car, rather than going by bike, which in turn meant that I could buy much more. I decided that it was time to cook dinner for the family once again, so I bought enough food to make charquican, calalou, and macadam. OK, one by one:

Charquican: This is a Chilean dish that I never actually made myself (at least not rom scratch) until AFTER I returned home from Chile in 2004. However, it's my go-to ish when I want to make something special that I'm pretty sure the people 'm cooking for have never had (though I also make watermelon curry from time to time for the same reason). Charquican uses potatoes, winter squash, and dried salted beef for its main ingredients (fun fact: when I say 'beef' I really mean 'horse', but I'm pretty sure that horse meat isn't usually used these days). However, since dried salted beef wasn't available, I had to use fresh salted beef when I made it tonight. Still good.

Calalou: This is a French Guianese dish. The name is a bit tricky-- for some calou is the word for 'okra' and calalou is the name of this stew (which features okra). For others, the two words are reversed. For still others, they use only one word (either of them) and not the other. Anyhow, this stew uses a LOT of spinach, some smoked fish, smoked lard (which I refuse to use), pig's tails, and of course, okra. I'll mae ths later in the week.

Macadam: This is another French Guianese dish. This one is another fish stew, which is made with tomatoes, onions, roukou, shrimp, and some other stuff that I can't remember. I am planning to use some sting ray that I bought. Take that, Steve Irwin.

Briefly

Kind of an awkward day: after a good second meeting with the Haitian consul, I stopped by a friend's house for a lunch we had planned. Only when I arrived, some serious drama started up between a couple of the rommates, where one accused the other of stealing 70 euros, and of course the friend denied it. In any event, i had to hang around for an awkward couple of hours where people were stressed and unable to talk to each other, until finally the owner of the apartment got so stressed that he kicked us all out. So I went to the library to work on the dictionary project and came here. Not a remarkable day, although the Haitian consul did agree in principle to let me use the consulate to do interviews.

Ups and downs

Yesterday morning, I went to what was supposed to be a round-table discussion on Haiti and French Guiana cooperating for movies. I arrived just after 9, when it was supposed to begin. Not only had it not started yet, but no one had even arrived. The reception was no help, because when I asked them where it was supposed to take place, they told me that it was at the reception (psh). They arrived 15 minutes later, and that wasn't even everyone. So I was there talking to someone for a little while when another woman came over and talked to him for about an hour. He was very nice and spoke to both of us, but for her, it was like I was invisible. Quite rude. Anyhow, by the time everyone had filtered in, there were all sorts of conversations going on, mainly about the problem of DVD pirating among Haitians. It would have been a total waste of time if someone hadn't mentioned a little film that had been produced recently about a Haitian immigrant in French Guiana. Then, after a brief stop in town, I went back to watch more movies. It wasn't that they were bad, but they just seemed to drag on, and everyone one of them was followed by interviews with the directors, but that sent them way off schedule. I would have been ticked off, except there was one movie that made up for all that, called the "Gold-digger" (L'Orpailleur in French). Really powerful movie that showed French Guiana in all its linguistic and natural beauty. This morning there was another round-table scheduled, but I decided to skip it and instead head to the Haitian consulate at the invitation of the consul himself. We had a long conversation (in Haitian Creole) about my study, how I'd come to decide on it, and what I needed. I also mentioned that I'd heard about that film at the round table, and he said, "Oh we have that" and lent it to me. I promised to return it tomorrow, when he'll tell me if I can use the consulate to do my study. After that, I went out to mail some postcards, and I ran into one of my interviewers and set up a training session. So everything should be in place by Wednesday to get the interviews done by the time I come home on the 28.

More food

At the film festival, there was a small buffet of hors-d’oeuvres after the second film, so I got in line. I soon discovered that that was a mistake. I don’t want to generalize beyond tonight’s experience, but the people at this event had no concept of a ‘line’. It was very much a blob. People grabbed plates and shoved them in front of the server, who then placed the food on their plates. It bore no resemblance to order. Eventually, I managed to get some food, and it was delicious. But it got me thinking that I really haven’t put any food pictures up in a while. So here we go: This is tétéwélé, which translates roughly as ‘salty stew’ or ‘Jason just makes up translations for words that don’t have any’. It’s a stew made with dried, salted fish, akin to what the Italians call baccalà, and is made with tomatoes and onions (again, like the Italians prepare it). A smidge too salty but not bad. Fun fact: I got this at the same restaurant that catered the film festival.




At the market, I picked up some carrots, and the stand where I picked them up had these three herbs/spices. The first is piman kafé or ‘coffee pepper’. I’m not entirely sure why it’s called that, though it might turn brown as it ripens. Anyhow, I don’t think I’ve mentioned the French Guianese love affair with peppers, but they are everywhere. In most of the important recipes, you add a bit of spicy pepper. With your pizza, they give you a spicy pepper sauce. Hell, now I’m thinking that ‘coffee pepper’ might derive its name from the fact that you’re supposed to stir it into your coffee. Anyhow, there’s always a wide variety of spicy peppers to choose from, but you have to be careful and know what you’re getting into. For instance, for some peppers, you must not must not must not eat the seeds. And when you buy the jarred pepper sauces in the supermarket, you have to keep in mind that because peppers are probably used as pacifiers, people have a high tolerance for spiciness, so ‘medium’ strong is actually intolerable, and if you buy ‘strong’, you should probably call your family and tell them you love them, because you might not survive it. I wish I were kidding, but there’s actually a chili pepper powder called souf or in English ‘suffering’. I’m afraid to use the small bag I bought. The next picture is bwa denn ‘Indian wood’. This is used much in the same way bay leaves are used: you just drop it in the soup and it gives it some flavor, but you can’t eat it. Like bay leaves, this is usually sold dry, but these were actually fresh, so I got a picture. Also, bwa denn is available not only in leaf form, but also in small, peppercorn-size chunks. The last is poupyé or in English ‘pussley’. I really know nothing about it.

We’ll end with dessert. First, there’s a picture of the sispa I’ve already talked about. Then there’s the picture of a guy who made sorbet in the traditional style. Here, he’s serving me some passionfruit sorbet. Very tasty, not really creamy, just falls apart in your mouth but in a good way. The guy had a good sense of humor too, telling me that he didn’t give change out on weekends.

Good night

I’m just getting back from the first night of the film festival, and I’m really happy. The two films were really interesting. The first was a short documentary about two women working as rockbreakers. Seriously. Their job —usually done by men in Haiti— is to wake up early in the morning, go down to a site with lots of rocks (not really a quarry in the traditional sense), put rocks in a large bucket, carry it (on their heads) up a steep hill, dump it out, and break the rocks into smaller rocks to be used as cobblestone or gravel. For this work, they make just under US$10 a day, which is about twice the minimum wage in Haiti. Of course, one of the women was the sole wage earner for her 9 children and 11 grandchildren. An interesting film, quite powerful if you know nothing about Haiti, but for those of us who’ve studied it, it was a bit lacking in artfulness. It was more like an extended news report than an interesting documentary. The second film was a feature-length documentary profiling 6 Haitian women successively, called 6 Exceptional Women. Each one was no younger than 80, and they all did something important for Haiti or for their communities. 5 of them led bourgeois, upper-class lives: a classical pianist (80), a dance instructor (91), a singer (83), an author (80), and a political activist (85). There was also a midwife, who was 105. And none of them were retired! They were really incredible women, and we got to know a lot about them, their families, and their lives (including their love lives— one woman talked about how she could only have sex with someone around 40, and the 105-year old woman grabbed her husband indelicately and said things that even *I *found filthy). So it was particularly hard to find out at the end of the film that the last woman profiled, the activist, died the afternoon of the premiere, and the husband of the midwife had died just before that. One of the audience members, during the question and answer period that followed the film, complained that the women shown were mostly bourgeois, and didn’t reflect the ‘real Haiti’, to which the director replied 1) that he had done plenty of other films dealing with the subjects that the audience member was talking about, including the rockbreakers; and 2) that there is more than one Haitian way of life, just like the Americans, the French, and the French Guianese all have different classes of people within their country. But beyond the films, it was a great night professionally. Thanks to Dominique, I got to meet several people who could help me with my project, including a few who wanted to be interviewed and with whom I exchanged phone numbers. I also met someone from the Haitian consulate, who invited me to visit the Consulate this week to talk about my project, so I think one day this week I’ll head over to see them and maybe even try to secure a couple rooms to do the interviews in. I also met filmmakers and other important Haitians, including a couple who knew my dissertation adviser. So all in all, a very good night.

Traffic

Traffic is a pain here in Cayenne. I have the perspective of passenger, cyclist, and pedestrian, and it is hell no matter what. I'll share a few of my experiences.

For starters, pedestrians and cyclists are not unanimous as to what is the proper side of the street. This isn't different from the U.S. but there seem to be so many more of them here. And it's frustrating to be riding my bike and I have to go around the pedestrians, IF of course there's enough room between me and the cars speeding along. Or as a pedestrian, to be walking along and all of a sudden have a bike whiz by is quite startling.

Today, on the bus, we were riding along and then we got into town where the streets were clogged. People were parked on both sides of the streets and then a tractor-trailer came towards us. The bus and the truck managed to thread the needle, coming within inches of each other. The bus driver then got a bit cocky and drove off, only to hit a parked car 30 seconds later. Like any responsible driver, he backed up, straightened out, and fled the scene.

This, combined with the ridiculously high gas prices that just went up by 5 eurocents the other day, is why I am reluctant to drive here.

Video Blog 3

Old University

Below are the pictures from the old university site, which was the main campus until 2010, and is still the site of the library. Pictures of the new site are here: http://frenchguianaandbeyond.blogspot.com/2011/03/university.html