2 plane crashes (three if you include Africa) and more:

I’m in Port-au-Prince for a few days clearing up the atelier. I will leave it come what may. I have given most of the furniture and fittings way to street-people and Faustin – my really devoted driver. The atelier is bare and bleak now and I am back to sitting on the floor.

Today will be an 8 – 15 hour drive to our fantastic beach-house hidden in Cormier. I am doing some creative writing, sorting out file-sharing and accountancy and preparing some concept papers and swimming a lot. Erratic internet takes its strain and my speakers packed up (Schumann Fantasiestücke cello sonata will have to wait.) so I am back to star-counting at night. Life is – in one sense – is a fantasy idyll: Odysseus in the land of the lotus eaters. I’ll tell some UNPOL Canadian policemen living nearby my address. I still have the heeby-jeebies after sharing an American Airways flight with an arrested drug-dealing ex-beneficière of one of our armed gang rehabilitation projects. I was in the front row club-class (Ho! Ho! - a rarity) and he was manacled between two of New York’s finest on the back row – but that plane was still not big enough for me…

The Cherokee Chief’s drive shaft has been out and laid out on the road so often we are like old friends. Toyota now put coils springs on their Hi-Lux 4WDs front wheels. That means that we may be spared any more 3 day waits as a crippled blacksmith makes us up a leaf-spring plate completely from scratch as happened in Sierra Leone collecting post-war weapons.

Drivers in Haiti know nothing about their vehicles. It is a point of pride that they don’t (‘that is the mechanic’s job to know’). Of twenty-one drivers I interviewed not one could tell me what system suspension a Land-Cruiser uses. One said ‘shock’ as in ‘shock absorbers’ were probably how it was done.

Progress with Fondation Avenir is frustratingly slow and frankly I am losing the will to ‘pick my self up dust my self down and start all over again’. (But I will find it again.) I am biding my time waiting for my flight home (Arr. UK 6 October). I still have faith in Vladimir (CEO Fondation Avenir), he is trying so hard. ******** is refusing to pay him a large tranche of his last project – he is lining up lawyers. Drama is ceaseless.

I tried to take a photograph from the top of the cathedral in Cap Haitien. Even I said “no’ the ladders look too rickety”. That must be a first.

I may be unable to use the return-portion of my pooty little cigar-plane Caribintair airflight from Cap Haitien to Port au Prince, as two of their planes crashed this month. So not only is the airline grounded but they have precious few planes to fly anyway. (Cessnas with Pratt and Whitney engines for the aficionados). Readers of this report may recall that Belleview went and crashed on us in Sierra Leone two years ago. How long will my luck last?

I have always worn “kickin’ boots” on my failed-state projects – I feel better that way to exit scrapes with extreme prejudice. I walked 3 miles with only flimsy sandals and $XXXX in my pockets today … Never again. I had to count it out in the bank. I didn’t realise that the huge wads were held together by a paper loop concealing a rubber band. Trying to pull a $100 bill out the paper loop ripped but the concealed rubber band held. The bill ripped – the bank won’t accept the bill. $100 down the toilet unless I can find a solution.

Everybody loves my architectural plans and artistic vision. But is there funding? Yes - but can we secure it? Yes - but will I bleach my bones before it comes through? Ah… there’s the rub…

If I don’t have a contract to return to Haiti when I leave Haiti on the 5^th Oct. I’ll stay in England and wonder what on earth to do next; hoping the blocu will un-block. But a ‘contract’ is not clear-cut here. A ‘contract’ really means an agreement on chasing a series of projects, none of which, individually, constitute a firm ‘contrat de service’.

Bang! Gunshot as I write.

Someone I admire got 8 bullets in his house frequently. I wrote a little tribute to him for friends in the UK. I copied him in - and offended him. The matter was to him very private – and I suppose I stepped over boundaries – and probably got the facts wrong. Mea culpa.

*******

The worst fears seem to becoming true. The govt. dept is insisting that they hold the budget and dole out sums on a weekly basis. This is not surprisingly unacceptable to the staff who are trying to take over as the national NGO running my old project. Budgeting and timing of accounts payable and receivable will be a nightmare. My old pal who was at the forefront of talking to the gangs is quite convinced that the govt. wishes to hold the purse-strings in order to siphon-off any money they can. The will achieve this by accusing my old project of being disqualified for receiving money on any trumped-up excuse. The govt. will then keep the money.

Thus the govt. seems to be building in back-handers into the system. My old project has been without funding (or computers, office space or vehicles which are presumably being driven around by the govt. as they build their private empires – as prophesied by another old hand) for nearly two months now.

I am planning a little muck-raking, but first must invite the govt. to right to reply…

Violence

Kidnapping is back up high on the agenda. The US embassy told a US citizen wanting to come here: Don’t: There were 60 US citizens kidnapped last year. The country is NOT safe.

But if pleasure is removing a painful stone from one’s mouth then I would describe my state as pleasurable.

Taking photographs in public toilets

Some public toilets are great places to take photographs. Actually I tell a lie, it’s not council administered public toilets I favour, but hotel, restaurant and smart institutional public toilets. They have wonderful downward pointing lights that emphasise the bone-structure for a portrait and a big mirror.

I love this result from the toilet in Ickfield House, National Trust property, Suffolk. UK. It’s a self-portrait as I’m about to go onstage to take part in a Hallowe’en fire-show, October 2007. Unfortunately it can look I have a gun to my head.

How to get shot:

How to get shot:

Try to get out of the capital city, Pourt-au-Prince, Haiti, in a beat-up Cherokee Jeep. Inevitably it breaks down. No fuel getting to the engine: Distributor: Filthy, clean it up.

Fuel lead: Press the nipple; fuel all over fingers – OK. Fuse box: Aha! It is loose on its mountings so the box bounces around under the bonnet (hood). Clean up the fuses. No good. Test circuits, inconclusive. Get mechanic – no joy, get electrician and 4 hangers on along for the ride – no good.

Consider flying – no good – airline grounded due to crashes. Night coming on. Dangerous to be out. Get a tow back to city. Lorry (truck) arrives. He produces a chain and really stupid fixing technique: modified reef knots. No good. Crazy tow. Now dark. Getting robbed getting more likely. We are on edged of city, the huge city dump: Continual fires of hell burn and gone-wild horses skit around. The stinking rotting dead horse has gone from last week.

The tow into town will be like Walpurgis-Nacht and Lutzow’s wild hunt and that Terminator 16 wheeler chase scene all in one. When you are being towed SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) is for the towed driver to act as the breaks for both vehicles. They don’t know this and I lack the determination to tell them. Abandon tow.

Consider local hotel. Opt to drive all the way back to city, abandoning vehicle with armed guard (shotgun and 10 rounds) who will guard it all night.

Route National 1 passes the Cité Soleil slum. This route is totally utterly off limits to UN staff and anyone not wanting to be shot. Madam H had her nephew tragically shot in crossfire here. He died. She has been really kind to me as an outsider because I am working against the violence. Madame M lost he husband in exactly the same way same road. She is a feisty woman, lots of bourgeois bling. Mulatto, keeps the blacks down I reckon. Canadian UNPOL shot here. Bullet came through side of Land-Cruiser door. (Windows are always up for security, occasionally a bullet will not go through a door because the windows are down and the combined door panelling and window may slow bullet down enough. But the window was up…)

The bullet was low enough to penetrate his leg and sever the main artery. The UN sent an APC (armoured personnel carrier) to rescue him. He was loaded up and the APC set off as fast as possible to the UN hospital – fortunately not far. But it was rush-hour. London taxis get stuck in London traffic and this was a third-word dysfunctional megalopolis. The APC crashed. The young Brazilian driver was probably scared out of his wits and the Canadian would already be grey in the back. He died.

It is night and I am standing in the back of an open lorry the wind in my hair, and – God almighty, we are not turning left at the airport, but carrying on straight up the very same route National 1.

Vladimir said when I climbed down after the ride I was like something deranged with a wild look in my eye.

Kill the werewolf.

I don’t need to embellish this story. I’ll just tell it.

A couple of weeks ago, outside our office in Haiti, a young man accused a 20 year-old girl of being a loup-garou – a werewolf. She had, he said, been flying around the rooftops of Carrefour-Feuilles the off-limits inner-city area where no whites are seen, well, except me.

The accusation of being a ­loup-garou was enough and the locals went to work. At about 9.00 in the evening in a capital city they tortured her by ripping out her entrails. Then they ‘necklaced’ her: The pushed a tyre over her and set it on fire.

Next morning the smouldering remains were out in the street for all to see. The guts were strung around also.