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 5th 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.
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