There is a beach in Gressier. You turn down the side road before the Total gas station and drive along the dirt road for a few minutes. At the end of the road, there is a night club, Guilo Club. A little way past it, you can drive up on to the beach. We park next to two horses. Why not? The beach is a little strip of sand sloping into the calm, waveless water. There are a few fishing boats on the beach. Some of them are even sea-worthy. The others are like the trucks on the side of the road – propped up on blocks. There is even one sad-looking boat for sale. There are a couple of people (playing? swimming? bathing?) in the water. Meer brought me here to show me one of his sample collection sites, the place where the Gressier River empties into the sea. There is trash everywhere. Some people live here on the beach.
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| Gressier beach |
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| Gressier beach |
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| Gressier beach |
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| Gressier beach |
There is a beach at Jacmel. I have not been to that beach yet but Jacmel is where the people from Christianville go when they want to go to the beach. Jacmel is about an hour and a half, 60 km drive over the mountains to the south coast of Haiti. The drive is beautiful, up and down the central mountains to the south coast. We drove there last week to pick up some samples and then headed for a hotel on the beach for lunch. We had the entire patio of the Hotel Cyvadier Plage restaurant to ourselves. It was mid-week so there were no tourists there yet. We sat at a table overlooking the sea. Not a real beach but a beautiful cove with clear blue water. Behind us on the terrace there was a swimming pool. What am I doing here, I thought? This is Haiti? We order shrimp cocktail, Creole spaghetti, and some seafood. Makende orders a Pepsi. Meer gets a Coke. I order a Prestige. The air is cool and there is a breeze. We might as well be at a restaurant at a beach somewhere in Florida. Except, we’re not. The hotel is at the end of a dirt road off the highway. There is a guard with a shotgun at the entrance to the parking lot. And when we leave to return to Gressier, we will drive through the hot, dusty, crowded, noisy streets of Jacmel, back to the mountain highway.
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| View from the Hotel Cyvadier restaurant, Jacmel |
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| View from the Hotel Cyvadier restaurant, Jacmel |
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| My lunch at the Hotel Cyvadier restaurant, Jacmel |
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| Meer and Makende at the Hotel Cyvadier restaurant, Jacmel |
Contrasts? Just look at the photos. There are parts of Haiti that are so rich in beauty. And there are others that are so wrenchingly poor and grim. There are lush green mountainsides full of trees. And there are grey, bare, rocky slopes stripped of vegetation after the forests were cut down and the rains washed the topsoil into the sea. One overwhelming impression I have on driving through the cities and along the highway is trash. There is trash everywhere. Trash fills the drainage ditches. Trash ends up in the rivers and washes out to sea. There is construction waste. Pieces of broken cement blocks, pieces of reinforcing metal bars, bits of plastic pipe, electrical parts, wires, couplings, random pieces of metal of all shapes. It seems like construction is going on everywhere and some things actually get finished. But mostly it seems like the country is in a permanent state of re-building. After we get back, I grab a plastic bag and start to pick up some of the trash around the lab building. There is still construction going on so I don’t know how much of a difference it will make. But I feel that the area around the lab should look neat and clean to reflect the professional job we carry out inside the building. Look professional, be professional. Who knows, maybe the idea will catch on.
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| A trash pile in Gressier |
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