Day 11: Delmonte Shapes Up

Previously on the NU Haiti trip...

Delmonte had not worked at all. He passively stood while the team and Macles (the other translator worked their butts off. However, when word reached his supervisors about his work ethic, he had but one choice: shape up or shape out...

After the some one had a conversation with Delmonte's supervisors, his behaviour drastically changed. He worked a lot harder and even broke a sweat. Clearly hard work is in Haitian culture, just Delmonte needed some gentle reminders. Delmonte is actually a very talented young man and demonstrates what Paul Colliers in The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It, calls the "brain drain" or that when a country falls behind and all the talent leaves to more prosperous areas. Also, we worked on fixing up a small field and planting 4 different types of wheat seeds in it. 

Despite the focus being on work today, one of the interns still managed to annoy me. I don't know if he would normally annoy me, but it was just the right amount of me being tired, him being both arrogant and overly talkative, or that he didn't work very hard.  I later observed that what I perceived to be arrogance may have just been his nervous reaction. That is, that he may have talked arrogantly about himself and his family and everything he's ever done because he was nervous. I hope it was a nervous reaction. 

Day 10: Mobile Medical Clinic Day!

You can learn a lot about a culture by examining the people of that culture medically. That's what I did today.  I was in the triage station, so I organized about 40 patients by taking vitals (pulse, temperature, and blood pressure) and asking some basic health history questions through an interpreter.

Haitians have a very high emphasis on cleanliness, but they don't understand that to clean some one, you need clean water. This is evidenced in that all of the women that came in today had one common complaint: vaginal itching and discharge. Not only do they douche a lot, but they use dirty river water to do this which is the source of their discomfort. With some basic knowledge of about proper cleanliness this problem could be corrected.

What surprised me most was when a 16 year old girl walked in. Her right eye was swollen with bleeding in her eye with the surrounding area being heavily bruised. When I asked her how she got it, she said her father beat her. The translator didn't even flinch. when I asked him about it later, he said it was normal for a man to beat his children or wife in Haiti. Not an organized spanking or some form of discipline, but just a man losing his temper and beating his family. While some things may be right or merely different, this aspect of Haitian culture is wrong.

Day 7: Soil Sampling Solei

Today we cultivated soil and planted the beans we sorted yesterday. The goal is to find a variety that is resistant to the plant virions in the Haitian soil, has good nodulation, and can grow in harsh soil conditions (Nodulation is when the bacteria in a root forms a node which is used to transfer some of the nitrogen from the air into the soil so it can be used by plants). In all we planted 1200+ st. ft. of bean seeds for 3 reps of 100 seeds for 16 different varieties with a total of 4800 seeds planted. We also sampled the soil around the area.

Turpin is a generous village as the local church donated the field we used so we could conduct research. A big sacrifice as it could have produced a lot of food for them. Besides that they were also very hospitable and even brought us a large bowl full of mangoes.

We also got to view the spectrum of the Haitian work ethic. Delmonte just sat there and tried to take pictures of himself to make it look like he was working, while Macles worked his butt off. I think this is just a representation of the individuals themselves and not of Haitian society as a whole although I am told that Haitians think it strange to see 1 or 2 Haitians working with a group of Americans if they're not getting paid. Delmonte was getting paid so he's still not excused.