I can safelty say that I haven’t worked any harder in my life than I have this week so I was looking very forward to a day of lounging around on the balcony, surfing the net and attempting to practice a bit of Creole. So when I found out we had to work Sunday to shuffle the Xmas and New Years days off around, I felt a bit defeated and was pretty sure my body was about to break down. Fortunately, we were given the option to work a half day and I jumped at it and ended up having another great day after all.
Work
I’d been wheelbarrowing for days and wanted to escape them, so I actually appreciated the morning spent in a bucket line which is a job dreaded by pretty much everyone. It basically consists of standing in one place and passing heavy buckets of mud from one person to the next down a line. It’s repetetive, boring and murder on your hands and shoulders but I was loving it today for some reason. When you get a good rhythm going and are passing a full bucket as you receive an empty one, the whole thing becomes sort of meditative. It might be a sign that I need a holiday if a smoothly flowing bucket line is what makes me relax!
Football
The best part of the day was attending game one of the Haitian national football league final – Gonaives vs Cap Haitian. Tickets cost about $3.50 and didn’t buy me a seat but I got something even better – a chance to watch the match while actually standing on the football pitch! The pitch is made of dirt and is surrounded by a concrete wall with only a metre or two of space between the sidelines and the wall. We found ourselves ushered into an area along the sidelines and I ended up watching the entire match practically standing in the corner kick area.
The area all around the football pitch was buzzing and, to my surprise, people were queued up in a perfect single file line that stretched on for ages. I expected chaos and brawls but was met by an orderly line. I think police and UN soldiers’ guns might have had something to do with that or the fact that Haitians are very used to lining up for food and other types of distributions. The chaos and brawls I had expected in the crowd were saved for the field and a pushing match broke out between the two teams before the game even started.
The crowd was hugely passionate and my favourite part about the game was the after-goal celebrations. Gonaives scored twice (the final score was 2-1) and each time, the crowd rushed onto the pitch, ran around screaming, waving their arms and hugging each other, and then returned to almost the exact same spot they had just been standing in. It was a bizarre combination of mayhem and order in the most random of locations and one of the coolest things I’ve done so far in Haiti.
Goodbye Party
There are a few bars that have popped up recently around our HQ and we have found ourselves frequenting Speaker Guy’s place the most. He’s known as Speaker Guy because of the giant, blaring speakers he has in his bar. He’s the guy who we went to the football match with and we all went to his bar later that night to celebrate the win and to say goodbye to friends who were leaving the next day. As always, things deteriorated fairly quickly into a dance off in the street between locals and blan. It was sad to say goodbye but great to send people off in such a strange little hole in the wall bar while eating goat and drinking Haitian beer. A great end to a great day!
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