Smoke

     I smell like smoke. It’s Port-au-Prince (PauP). I just spent five hours driving through PauP. We left Christianville in the Kia at noon with Eugene at the wheel. Makendy was out collecting samples and was not available. Eugene is a C’ville driver. I had never ridden with him before. We drove to the PAP airport to drop off Char and Bill and Char’s daughter who were in C’ville over the weekend to artificially inseminate the goatherd. Then Eugene and I drove up to Epsilon Medical Supplies. I had a shopping list of supplies to pick up for the STI study. I had called Marc, the owner, to let him know we were coming and he started pulling some of the supplies out for me before we got there. Eugene had never been to the store so I called Makendy and had him give Eugene directions on how to get there. He did alright and we were soon in the store. I paid with my Jackson pre-paid credit card (what a relief!) and we loaded up what Marc had in the store. We then followed Marc over to his storeroom for the remaining boxes. The storeroom is over Gamma Medical Supplies, the store run by Marc’s parents. It’s all in the family. We moved down the dusty, unlit upstairs hallway past rooms marked off with numbers. Then Marc found the supplies I needed. As we walked out and back down the exterior stairway, Marc warned me not to step too close to the side wall which was topped off with a roll of razor wire.  Then we were on the road back to the airport to pick up Madsen and two other people from UF who were arriving on American flight 1665 at 2:30. If you ever fly American into PAP, you are likely to be on flight 1665 in-bound or out-bound, or both. I think it is the same plane that just flies back and forth from Miami to PAP. Every day.

     As we drive down Delmas 3, I stare out the cracked windshield of the Kia. The windows are rolled down. The Kia has no air-conditioning. Traffic is backed up, as usual. As the trucks and tap-taps in front of us inch along, a burst of the black diesel smoke of first gear fills the air. We drive through it. Traffic stops. We stop. Traffic starts up again and the air is filled with smoke again. And so it goes. There is smoke everywhere. From the endless line of cars and trucks and tap-taps belching black diesel fumes from their exhaust pipes to piles of trash burning on the side of the street. Things burn in Haiti. In late afternoon, it seems to be worse. People set their trash out to burn. There is some trash pickup now in PauP but even that trash is burned.  Along the Route de Rails at the entrance to Carrefour, there is a large trash dump with a perpetual shroud of smoke hovering over it. At times the smoke coming from the burning trash dump drifts over the road obscuring all traffic in front of us.  In addition to all that smoke, Haitians burn charcoal for cooking. Even in the cities like PauP. That is why you can see charcoal for sale in the markets in PauP. And out in the country, they burn wood to make charcoal. So tonight, I smell like smoke. I'm exhausted and I smell like smoke. I'm back in Haiti. Need some sleep. Big day tomorrow.