Tap-Taps

Public transportation. At night they're like rolling Haitian parties, not really but they have great music and flashing disco lights!

French Colonial 'Gingerbread' Architecture

Port-au-Prince's 115-year-old Grand Hotel Oloffson, the intellectual and artistic center of the city, provided the background for Grahme Green's classic novel "The Comedians"

French colonial hotel in Jacmel

Cite Soleil and The Beauty of Existence Series

History of Cite Soleil and My Early Years – Part I

During my first few trips to Haiti my family accompanied a group organized by, Bob and Jane Corbett, who had started an organization called 'People to People'. The group consisted of other families, health professionals, and often a big contingent of high school seniors doing their 'senior project', a common, mandatory volunteer stint required by St. Louis high schools. At the time, I was fourteen and as naïve as any adolescent, so when we had a family meeting (a first for us) about whether or not to go to Haiti, all I really took in was sandy beaches and palm trees. I didn't have a clue where or what Haiti was like. This was 1987, only a year after the deposition of 'Baby Doc', Jean-Claude Duvalier, Haiti's second generation dictator. Haiti had always been one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere, but as ruthless as the Duvalier's were, they ran a tight ship. Crime was very rare, besides what had been done and perpetuated by the Duvalier's themselves, and the Haitian's spent the 1800's and 1900's highly isolated from external influence. Originally, because it was the first successful slave revolt, in 1804, and were hence blacklisted by the surrounding, still slavery dependent countries. Agricultural practices, especially in distant rural communities functioned in almost a medieval simplicity – hand plowed, hand carried water, and subsistence living. This is still the case in much of the country. Even Port-au-Prince, a city of 2 million in 1987, had an old world feel, a place out of time. Colonial French 'Gingerbread' buildings of saturated colors and intricately carved wood work peppered downtown. Equally vibrant Tap-Taps, public transport, carried us around to our various volunteer sites. The open warmth and curiosity of the Haitians that I met was so palpably a unique deportment. Haitian internal emotional life is infinitely more expressed outward than that of my American culture. During my early trips to Haiti, the Haitian expressiveness - singing out-loud, laughing, effortless talks with strangers, and a playful way of interacting made these trips not like daunting excursion into a small foreign country, but more like being welcomed into a really big neighborhood.

We organized a clinic in the main slum called Cite Soleil, 'Sun City' (or 'Site Soley' in Haitian Kreyol). Francois Duvalier 'Papa Doc' built Cite Soleil in order to concentrate a cheap labor force, originally naming it Cite Simon after his wife. The Duvalier's invited American companies to set up factories, making use of the cheap labor force. For example Disney had garment factories in the 1980's and all Major League baseballs were hand-stitched by women for decades. Unfortunately, the stretching of the leather would eventually debilitate the worker's chest muscles. My early medical experiences during these impressionable years (early teens) were surprisingly not over-whelming, shocking, or disturbing at all. It was invigorating!