Survival

Survival

Carrefour

After returning with Jè, Kevin settles into a new routine at the station. The Head Engineer has postponed his vacation. Tim is busy in Petionville, setting up soft rock radio station for the upper classes. Making everything less difficult, Kevin has also solved his transportation problem. Jè helped him work out a complicated deal with a few local mechanics who can fix anything. They buy two broken-down Russian Ladas from a Cuban man and talk Tim into giving them the station’s abandoned Lada. The mechanics combine parts from all three to create one functioning Lada for Kevin and one for themselves.

There’s no safety inspection required in Haiti. As long as the Lada keeps running, Kevin is mobile. Most importantly, he’s not reliant on the station’s motorcycles anymore. A friend at the Department of Motor Vehicles downtown paid another friend and now Kevin has a valid Haitian driver license. The friend was a missionary, so they agree no bribes should be paid, but there’s nothing wrong with paying a “tax and customary fee”. That’s how Kevin writes up the expense report.

For water, Jè and Kevin are making do with a gravity-fed 55-gallon drum on their roof and a hand pump that fills the drum from a rain cistern. Unfortunately, Haiti is in a severe drought so there hasn’t been any rain. It’s late evening and getting a bit cooler when they discover that the shower is dry and the toilet won’t flush. They climb up onto the roof and find that the drum is dry and the cistern is empty. The radio station has been paying for tank trucks of water to keep their swimming pool filled and toilets flushing, but there is so little water anywhere that the station has been using the compound pool as a cistern.

To say that Kevin and Jè are out of options is putting it mildly. As they stand on the roof wondering what to do, Jè begins to pray out loud. It’s a prayer he’s used before, but Kevin never paid close attention before. It’s not really a Christian prayer in the usual sense of “Thou” and “Art” and “Amen” and so forth, but more of a hymn. Before Kevin can ask Jè about it, the wind shifts suddenly and a cloud bank moves in from over the ocean toward Carrefour. The clouds open and a cool, soaking rain begins to fall. Kevin looks at Jè, raises his left eyebrow and says, “You didn’t need to wait until now to summon rain. It doesn’t have to be this exciting!” Then they hug and laugh and agree that God’s grace is good.

A few days later, the cistern is refilled but Kevin decides it’s unwise to rely on Jè as his only source of rain. He arranges to have a submersible pump shipped from Miami and pays a local man to dig a well in front of their house. It was quite impressive the first time Kevin plugged in the pump and it started gushing water into the street. Unfortunately, the pump was so powerful and the well too shallow that it could only fill a handful of buckets before the well went dry. After trying this a few times with no new results, Kevin is resigned to waiting for rain.

But Haitians are not so easily deterred and before long, Jè has arranged a system with the neighborhood, where the kids and women with water buckets can just wait on the front porch until the well refills. Then refill their buckets in the shade, before carrying them back home across the street or around the corner. It’s much more efficient for everyone than dragging five-gallon buckets along the dusty roads. Kevin learns that one five-gallon bucket of water is the maximum unit of measure for each water carrier. It’s the most a child can reasonably carry and all that those waiting will tolerate, before it’s the next person’s turn.

The whole situation becomes a source of entertainment for the neighborhood and every few hours, a new crowd forms to see how many buckets the pump will spit out this time. It’s a great way for Kevin to meet the neighbors and now everyone knows him. Without comment, Jè has hooked up a remote switch, so that even when they’re not home, anyone who needs water can reach inside their “fe foje” iron bar security system (or “house cage” as Kevin calls it), turn on the pump, and see if there’s water available.

Before the water pump, Kevin and Jè were sort of a community joke. No one really thought they’re “a couple”. But the neighborhood’s confusion is resolved, when Jè brings Fleur into the picture. Everyone then accepts that the blan fou is just too busy for a wife and stops asking about it. The water pump switch system is providing water to all the houses within a few blocks, so instead of being “the white guy and his Haitian friend” they are now two pillars of the community. Kevin is able to move freely throughout Carrefour because when people see the Lada or the station SUV, they just assume it’s both of them inside.

While Kevin was on Mount Boeffe, his NGO negotiated a new agreement with Tim and the station’s board. Kevin will transition out of his role at the station to assist with other NGO priorities in Haiti. But he should remain available for emergency situations. Kevin quickly agrees to this, since Jè is perfectly capable of handling any emergencies that can be solved without guns or money. In Haiti, lawyers are rarely needed.