The film crew had just finished the village scenes for the belated Cholera prevention video the day before. They were currently being driven by their host to an unknown location some 6 miles outside of Gonaives. As usual, it was nearly 85 degrees by 9 am and the sun was bright and had been awake for 3 hours. They had taken to the habit of carrying a cooler full of soft drinks, water and ice in the bed along with camera equipment which included two camera bags, one large heavy duty tripod and smaller less substantial one which was often neglected by the second cameraman who preferred hand held shots for close ups and cover footage. In the two camera bags were various chords, microphones, gaffers tape, light reflectors, dozens of extra batteries, scripts, props, logs, and many other items which had managed to work themselves into the bags such as toothbrushes, i.v. drips, sunflower seeds, tobacco pipes and a small bottle of clairin, which is a local moonshine created from sugar can, which the director was thankfully unaware of. It took the edge of the work. Also in the bed were John and Jake, their preferred location for different reasons.
Jakes reasoning was that he could be comfortable in the states where he couldn’t ride in the bed of a truck. He enjoyed the feel of the air rushing past him and feeling of freedom which was habitually denied him as both a resident of the United States and as a husband and father. His was rebellion. John, on the other hand, sat in the back because he didn’t want to be isolated from Haiti. He didn’t like the sterile cab of the truck with the air conditioning, firmly closed windows and laboratorial discussions of the plight of the Haitians by a fat American and a Haitian with an even fatter pocket funded by Americans. He wanted to be a part of the world he was “helping”. Sure he wanted the rush of the wind, but he also wanted the smells, the sounds, grit of Haiti bombarding him.
They were moving more slowly now over the rock road, not gravel, but rocks, golf ball sized to bowling ball sized sand stone rocks left behind after all the topsoil had been depleted. The small “candelabra” or cacti used for fencing around the village had become over grown in this desolate landscape, towering over the truck, threatening to reach into the truck bed and removed the passagers and video equipment bodily. The city had given way to the country side, and only one other motor vehicle had greeted the 4x4 in 30 minute, 6 mile ride. Houses were few and far between, people need land that can support them and this was not the place, and yet people were their final destination.
These people lived on the edge of everything. On the edge of Gonaives, on the edge of a vast barren landscape on the very edge of existences. Every day for them was another day to fight for life. Some had grown up there, some had married in to this landscape some had been forced here by an act of God. Nearly 60 refugees from the earth quake in January of 2010 near Porte au Prince ended up in the near desert location. The local congregation of the Church of Christ in a beautifully human display of hospitality welcomed their fellow Haitians into their homes and lives. Some had returned to Porte au Prince to pick up the pieces, some had, like one woman interviewed, remained because she had lost everything in Porte au Prince and had no pieces to pick up.
Upon arriving at the Bonlieu, the site of the housing project funded by the Goniaves based NGO H___, they saw a dozen men surrounding two earth bag houses which will eventually house the preacher and one refugee family consisting of one woman and her 6 children; the husband and youngest child had been killed in their crumbling concrete house. The earth bag houses are bags filled with dirt dug out to create the foundation, stacked overlapping with barbwire laid between each layer of the house and rebar reinforcements. Earth bag construction was the most recent fad at that time. The film crew got down and began doing interviews with the preacher of the Bonlieu congregation and the foreman of the site, an illiterate but strong man with leadership abilities and a member of the church. Also interviewed were three widows-by-earthquake. The plan for this particular interview session was to create a promotional video to show rich white donors a sob story in order to bring in more funds. It’s successful, but feels manipulative.
After the interviews were done, the intrepid film crew decided to climb the hill-mountain to get a feel for the local terrain which they could already tell was much different than Gonaives. John and Jake and Oneal made it half way up and decided they had had enough of the torturous razor sharp rocks and the dozen different species of cacti. James was followed all the way to the summit by malnourished children with bare feet.
John returned to the H___ headquarters and decided to write this in his blog in a narrative form in order to practice writing. Sincere apologies are warranted to his readers. He would also like it to be known that that night the amigos went for a stroll through post dark Gonaives and met a number of interesting, lovely, inspiring, mysterious, lively, invigorating Haitians who had not a bad thing to say about Americans, hated the American government, wanted Aristide to return and were not opposed to giving some blans a sip of the strongest stuff you can drink in Haiti: Clairin.
NOTE: There is no clairin in the camera bags, that was an embellishment. Also, done filming Cholera video, information gathering meeting tomorrow with reforestation group, I am really excited about that..
No comments:
Post a Comment