Adventerous Application Process for Premis De Sejour

In order to legally reside in Haiti for more than three months at a time, non-Haitians are required to obtain what is called a Premis de Sejour; I think that means a permit of the day, but that is just an educated guess since I don’t really know French.  Prior to coming, I gathered what I thought I would need for the permit.  There is a Haitian Sister of Holy Cross who has assisted many sisters with this process.    She submitted my papers and the papers of a young lay woman from Canada who is volunteering at the high school in Cap Haitian which is also sponsored by the Sisters of Holy Cross.  One of the things I knew I needed was passport photos so I had them taken in New Orleans before I left.  I do not remember reading that I would need six photos, so I only had two printed.  Once in Haiti, I was informed that I needed six, and had the picture taken at a photography shop here in O’Kap.  Last week I called the sister who was assisting me with the process to check the status and learned that I would need to go to Portauprince to sign a paper, although in reality it was more than a simple signature that was required.  On Sunday the lay volunteer and I rode with a chauffeur who was going to the capital to transport the postulants from the capital to O’Kap on Monday.  The trip took over four hours.  We arrived in plenty of time for Sunday dinner at the convent with the sisters in Portauprince.

 

On Monday morning we went to the immigration/emigration office in the city.  Riding through the city, I saw familiar sites and noticed significant changes as it has been well over three years now since I had been in down town Pourtauprince.  The National Palace has been completely demolished; I had  heard this, but to see an empty space where a massive but broken building had stood the last time I’d passed, is very different than simply reading the news on a website.  When we passed certain spots, that were only vaguely familiar, I recalled that large tent communities had once been there.

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We arrived shortly after 8:00 am.  While the other areas of the building seemed already crowded with people, there was nobody waiting in front of us when we arrived in the air conditioned Premis de Sejour room.  I was feeling a little nervous about the paper work because I knew it would all be in French.  I had heard stories of people who work in government offices, speaking French to people who don’t understand French and pretending not to know Creole.  While I don’t doubt there is at least historically some truth to those kinds of stories, thank God, this was not my experience.   Actually the woman who helped us knows English, and after a several minutes of the sister and I conversing in Creole and then the sister writing the French spelling of words on the back of an envelope for me to copy unto the application, the kind worker decided that it would be acceptable for me to write in English on my application.  I was glad that she was so helpful and patient.  My only complaint is that she asked me my color hair, and when I responded, “red, wouj, rouge”  (If my answer had been acceptable, I could have even written red in French, since I know the capital of Louisiana,) I was informed that my hair is not “red;” it is “brown.”  While I have always thought myself a red head, I quickly decided that in this context, this was not worth arguing about and wrote “brown” on the paper, in English.  When we got to the next question, I quickly said and wrote that my eyes are hazel (in English) before anyone had time to inform me otherwise.   The only problem was that my birth certificate had not been translated into French.  We were told that we needed to have an official translation done which a specific agency can do for (what I think is an excessive) fee.  I don’t understand why the birth certificate would need an expensive official translation; or really why if someone in the office knows English, and I can write my hair and eye color on the application in English, my birth certificate would need to be translated at all.  The young woman who is volunteering at the high school’s, birth certificate is acceptable because hers is  bi-lingual since she was born in Canada, however her certificate of health was not acceptable because it was written on prescription paper as opposed to a formal official letter; before her permit can be processed, she needs to go to a doctor here who will give her a certificate of health written in the proper format.  My doctor in the US happens to be Haitian American and wrote my certificate of health in the proper format and even in French (one less thing to have translated) and it was perfectly acceptable; thank God.  Before we left, we had to have our pictures taken, (even though we had each already submitted six pass port type photos) and we were finger printed. I think we were fortunate that they allowed us to have the pictures and finger prints taken even though neither us had submitted all of the proper documentation; otherwise, we would have had to make another trip. The office got busier as more people came in while we were there.  Still, it was not anywhere near as busy as the open room just outside the office; I am not sure exactly what happens there but given that the building said Immigration and Emigration I can imagine.  As we made our way through the crowd, I wondered, for every American and Canadian citizen applying for a Permis de Sejour to stay longer than three months in Haiti, how many hundred Haitian citizens are trying to get papers to go to either America or Canada?  I suddenly acquired a deep appreciation for the fact that I happen to have a birth certificate which indicates that I was born in the United States.

   

Later that morning we left the city with the Holy Cross postulants who had been in the capital all week for a formation program and two other sisters.  Soon after we left the city limits there was a “blokis” caused by a “manifestasyon,” which means a traffic jam caused by a protest.  One of the sisters called a young person to the window when we were completely stopped and asked what was going on and he explained that the manifestasyon was for “dlo” and “kouran.”  People had organized this to try to get the attention of the government because they do not have access to “water and electricity.”  In various places people had parked large trucks to block the roads, in some places there were also rocks, and at one point we saw a couple of burning tires.  The traffic was very slow moving to get around the obstacles; then we were able to travel sometimes a bit faster for a brief time until we came to the traffic caused by the next set of road blocks.  This went on for quite a while.  At one point we pulled to the side of the road to wait a while, simply because it felt safer to do so.  It took more than twice as long to return to O’Kap than it did not get to Port-Au-Prince the previous day.  I am very thankful that we arrived safely and grateful that at least here at the orphanage and convent we have dlo and kouran.  

 

Happy Thanksgiving!    

Angle

Sometime a couple of the older children ask me to help them with their English homework.  At times some of the lessons seem too advanced for their current level of comprehension.  There was a child who did not know the words “his,” “why,” or “what,” who had a passage to read about a historic Haitian figure and the reading included the words “guerrilla warfare” and “fervently,” which I struggled to explain the meanings for in Haitian Creole even though I know the Creole words for “his, why and what.”   Another time I assisted a child with a passage that explained how the rain creates streams and rivers that flow into the ocean; I ended up explaining the passage to her in Creole and it seemed like a light bulb went off in her head, and she appeared excited and I don’t think it was so much because she had learned the English but because she had learned a concept that perhaps had never before been explained to her in her first language.  It does seem that many of the passages were written about subjects that are somehow connected to Haitian culture and life, and that may be interesting to many children.  I did find it puzzling that on an exercise designed to help students practice placing either “a” or “an” before a noun, that the any English teacher would include the technical word for a female dog.

Some of the children have expressed an interest in learning English.  On occasion, I have offered very informal classes for whoever wants to come from the house of the older children.  I decided to try to make it fun.  We've done things like introduce ourselves, sang and did the motions for “head shoulders, knees and toes,” walked while saying things like “I am walking, we are walking” took turns jumping while saying “you are jumping” “she is jumping“ “he jumped.” etc.  (I have read that exercise and movement have been proven to help with the learning process; I include this just in case my readers think that I don’t like to sit still.)   Sometimes the children just want to ask me “how do you say….(whatever?)”  Kids seem to really enjoy looking at the bi-lingual picture dictionary I have, which was a text we used when I studied in Creole in Miami, although it was written with English learners in mind. 

On occasion children ask me to translate something.  Most of the time I am glad to do this for them and typically it is easy to do, with occasional exceptions.  There was a little plastic bag of drinking water, which is commonly sold in this country, (although I personally avoid drinking from them,) and on the bag in English it said “feel the ozone” in blue letters.  A child asked for an explanation.  While I know that ozone is a gas and am aware that depletion of the ozone layer is problematic environmentally, I felt clueless and unable to understand, never mind articulate in Haitian Creole the meaning of the phrase and thought to myself maybe it simply sounded good to someone who has studied English and needed a slogan.  If you have a better explanation, please make use of the comments section of this post; I am curious.  Sometimes the older children will ask me to translate the words on a t-shirt they noticed a stranger wearing while they were on the way home from school.  (T-shirts that Americans discard often end up here; the people wearing them frequently do not know what they say.)  On one occasion I’d felt that I could only try to explain the meaning, if I also explained that it was inappropriate and why; it was either that or pretend that the t-shirt actually referred to a (not an) female dog.  

Zarenyen Krab and other updates

When I updated the blog on Monday evening of last week, we were all feeling grateful for the rain, but then it continued through the night and wee-hours of the morning. On Tuesday we were inundated with rain and it continued to fall sometimes quite heavily but with occasional breaks in between storms for much of that day.  The primary schools were already closed for teacher training last week, but then the secondary schools closed on Tuesday and remained so for the rest of the week to give people a chance to deal with the flooding that occurred in many homes and nearby streets.  We were all safe here, neither of the children’s houses nor the convent flooded, but many people in the nearby city, were not so fortunate.  We even heard that a couple of people died due to flooding.  Please keep the people of Cap Haitian and other areas of Haiti that experienced heavy rains, especially those who lost homes or loved ones in your prayers.    

There was so much rain in front of the door to the room I use for therapy on Tuesday morning, that I decided that it would not be wise to bring the children through such a deep puddle.  In between rainstorms, I did enter the room to straighten up a bit.  After I walked through the door, I turned around and noticed a tarantula sitting on the floor barely a couple of inches from the door frame I had just walked through. For a moment I regretted that I left my rain boots in a closet in New Orleans.  My wet feet were feeling a bit vulnerable in my sandals.    I considered getting the mop I had in the playroom and pushing the spider into the water, but I did not like that idea because I did not know if tarantulas can swim and did not want encounter it in the water once I left the room.   An older child, who apparently had noticed me heading towards the playroom, splashed her way through the puddle even as I told her not too; she entered as I was explaining to her that there is a big spider by the door.  She seemed frightened, initially.  While I was still discerning how I should respond, considering that it is dangerous and wanting it gone, but wondering if there might be adverse ecological effects if everyone murdered scary spiders, she pushed it out with the mop.  That day, I learned that tarantulas do float and sort of swim too.  Seemingly unharmed, it made its way across the water to the nearby small cement foundation, by this time several of the oldest children had gathered on the other side of the puddle.  One of the older boys killed it.  The Haitian Creole world for tarantula is “zarenyen krab,” which literally translates to “spider crab;” I find this interesting because in Rhode Island, there is a crab that resembles a spider, which is called a spider crab.  Personally, I would much rather encounter the crab that resembles a spider than the spider that walks like a crab! 

Last week, I wrote that I was happy to have electricity in the playroom and I was.  The electricity system we have here is somewhat complicated; although I am confident that I would be quite capable of understanding how it all works, if only there were someone who could explain it to me in my primary language.  The electricity in the playroom was on in the morning, I think because the workers in the nearby house for the younger children iron the children’s clothes at that time; and it is turned on again at 6pm.  The problem with that was that once the sun starts going down, at around 4:30, when I start my last group, the room starts to get dark.  I am grateful that my Haitian cell phone came with a handy built-in flashlight, but still this is not the best way to conduct therapeutic groups with young children.  I asked one of the sisters about the possibility of increasing the hours that electricity is available in the playroom by having it hooked up to the inverter and what the cost would be.  Thank you to those who gave me money for Haiti; a portion of it was used to pay electricians to hook up the building to the inverter.  Now most of the time there is electricity in the play therapy room.  The rooms in that building now also have working electric outlets!  Mesi anpil!  (Thank you very much!) 

If you are reading this regularly, you know that a couple of weeks ago a few sisters and a group of children and I attended a wedding. We heard this week that the bride recently gave birth to twins, one of the babies died.  Please keep the family in your prayers.  Thank you.

For the second time since I arrived we had a liturgy here for the children on Saturday evening. This time much to my surprise (and disappointment,) even the homily was in French.  One mass part and one song were in Haitian Creole; I felt happy when the one song we did sing was one that I like and  learned from attending the Haitian Creole mass in New Orleans.  Since the high school age children did not have to be transported into the city because schools were closed, a couple of mornings last week, instead of going to the cathedral for daily mass we went to another church in the opposite direction, and I am glad that that liturgy is conducted primarily in Haitian Creole, the language of the people, which is spoken by everyone.  I still do not always understand everything in Creole, but certainly much more than I do in French.  I do not understand why so many masses here, including liturgies for children would be mostly in French (the language I understand has traditionally associated with government, education, and the wealthier and more educated classes.)

I have had very good internet for nearly a month.  Today I went to pay for the next month and felt very confused by the options available as I continue to struggle with understanding large numbers in Creole and then to get a sense of how much money something would be in American dollars, very challenging for me in a noisy telephone store where the clerks are so close together and the individual waiting on me seems annoyed when I ask her to speak slowly (most of the time most people are amazingly patient with me.)  I can only hope that my klè will work as well during the coming weeks as it has recently.  We shall see.  I did get behind with responding to emails last week, when the children did not have school and therefore even my mornings were busy.  Hopefully I will catch up this week.  Thank you for all who have emailed or messaged me; I am very appreciative even if I have not responded.  Many blessings!    

Twins, All Souls Day and Rain

Much has happened this past week. 

The lay woman who had been volunteering here for two months, returned to Canada.  She is already greatly missed by the children, and the sisters, myself included. 

On Friday morning twin babies arrived at the orphanage as planned.  Their mother had died, I believe while giving birth to them; from what I was told, most likely her death would not have occurred if the hospital had not lost electricity.  The father of the children has several other children, including one with a significant developmental disability and so had decided that it would be best for his youngest babies to reside here with us.  The twins, like all of the children here, will maintain contact with their family.  They are beautiful.  It has been very touching to see how the other children welcomed them and seem to love them.  If you saw them, I am sure you would love them too! 

When I was in Haiti before, Haiti did not participate in day light savings time.  I did hear that they started after I left.  We did set the clocks back yesterday which caused a little confusion regarding when we were supposed to leave for mass.  On Saturday electricians were here and now there are two energy efficient lights in the play therapy room.  For this I am very grateful especially since it is now getting dark out when I am doing my last therapy groups most days.  

       

Yesterday was All Souls Day, an important day in the Catholic Church and in Haiti for remembering and praying for those who have died.  The priests and brothers of Holy Cross invited all of the Holy Cross family in Haiti as well as sisters from another congregation to a special mass that was held at their high school here in Cap Haitian.  The entire mass, as well as the Morning Prayer that preceded it, with the exception of two sung mass parts and one communion hymn was in French.  The liturgy was followed by a procession to the nearby cemetery where we prayed and placed a few wreaths of flowers.  Since the Marianites pray every day for our sisters who have died, typically reading their name, year of death and place of burial on the anniversary of death, I knew that a Marianite had died in Haiti and was buried in Cap Haitian.  I was very grateful when one of the Holy Cross sisters showed me her tomb.  Seeing the initials MSC after her name, helped me to feel connected and somehow further confirmed for me that I am where I am supposed to be.  I may be the only Marianite currently living in Haiti, but I am certainly not the first.  The cemetery contains Sisters of Holy Cross, Priests and Brothers of Holy Cross, a Marianite of Holy Cross as well as sisters from one other congregation.  It is truly a cemetery for the family of Holy Cross, which I think, greatly pleases Fr. Moreau, our founder.  Following the procession, we were all invited to a gathering; it is always great to connect with other members of the Holy Cross family, and as a bonus( among other things) there was delicious fresh pineapple to eat.   

  

We had almost no rain the first month that I was here and needed it.  Now we have had some rain for the past few nights and it has been raining on an off all day today.  In fact, it is raining quite heavily as I write this. We are grateful for the rain because things were getting pretty dry and some of the older children recently planted a garden.  It is a bit cooler than usual as well; a much welcomed break from the recent heat and humidity.