Duncan Peabloggy: Tranten (Thirty-One)

We’re doing a small water system project in my friend Cameron’s community in the southwest of the country right now. It’s a Batey (Haitian sugar cane cutting community). Batey 9 to be specific. That is the beautiful name it was given by the sugar cane company.

Batey 9 is where they invented the term “When it rains, it pours.” The majority of the year it is drier than a British sense of humor lost in the desert without water. Nobody even knows I’m white because the constant sweat and dust combine to form a natural blackface which can only be removed with a Brillo pad. But then about four times a year the sky drinks a couple wine coolers and loses its inhibitions and opens up to Batey 9, gushing about all of its condensation problems. The result is a giant mud puddle.

Then the mosquitoes emerge and have massive mosquito orgies in these puddles. But don’t let the sexual promiscuity of these insects fool you. These are not hippy mosquitoes. Once all the wet n’ wild procreation is done the mosquitoes organize into highly efficient, blood-sucking warfare units. Unit six is assigned to Cameron’s house and is especially deadly. We are forced to retreat into the force field (mosquito net). The mosquitoes hover around until we emerge for more provisions or to carry out bodily functions and then they attack like little buzzing vampires trying to cash in on the Twilight/True Blood craze.

Speaking of bodily functions, the Bateys in the southwest have a very interesting design feature in which the houses have no bathrooms. I’ve come to have a very loose definition of what a bathroom is in this country. Any kind of hole in the ground with a structure that will not collapse in the next five minutes meets my requirements. But in Batey 9 they literally have nothing. So you have to go outside and poop in the fields. You might think that this sounds freeing, the open air on your bum, no tan lines. It’s not. It’s hot and dusty and there are thorny bushes that poke your butt if you’re not careful. Except at around 6:30 in the evening when there’s a nice breeze and the sun sets over the mountains. Then it’s nice.

Everybody in the Batey speaks Creole (Haitian) which I don’t understand. It’s strange to be in a place where I can’t understand the people. One benefit is that rather than seeming like an odioso for not making small talk they just assume it’s because I can’t speak Creole. I’ve started learning some important basic words such as food (“manje”), water (“dlo”), and elephant (“elefan”) so that I won’t lack food or water if I ever find myself at a Haitian elephant farm in the middle of an African savannah.

We started work last week. Everything was going uncomfortably well until Saturday when we were finishing up the connections to the houses and the pastor came over to tell us about a community ordinance which requires all water taps to be inside the house. Now I’m pretty sure all “ordinances” in this community exist only in the Batey 9 ether but we decided to comply anyway. Or Cameron and I did. All of the people working with us threw a fit and controversy ensued. This put me more at ease and I was able to start working the way one should work in the Dominican Republic, surrounded by conflict and grudges.

Cameron and I work pretty well together because we’re very different. Cameron has a mild case of OCD and would, if given the opportunity, undergo an operation to become a robot so that he could be more efficient. But then he would get stuck on a task and his mainframe would not allow him to move to the next task until he finished the first one but his wiring screws up and he overheats and needs to cool off. I am more of a squirrel, immersing myself in a task for 30 seconds, then looking up, look left, look right, look left, look right, “hey, that tree looks nice!” scurry, scurry scurry, immersed, repeat. So together we are a squirrel robot which everybody knows make the best water engineers.

UPDATE: Success! We finished. Everybody has water. Hooray.