I was in my mid-twenties and a curiosity to the young nurses at the hospital. As they bustled around in their white dresses, pink smocks and plastic sandals, they often stopped by the lab to ask Celamise about me. It wasn’t long before I knew enough Creole to have conversations with them. They wanted to know about my life in the US, if I had a girlfriend there (I did) and things they might expect if they moved there. They knew they weren’t qualified to be nurses so they asked how much domestics were paid. They wanted the American Dream of freedom and the good life.
At that time, I was concerned about the lack of letters from my girlfriend. Mail service on the north coast was pretty good excerpt on rainy days when the planes didn’t fly up from the capitol.
Travel in Haiti was always and adventure. We had to go to Port-au-Prince periodically and the only way to go was to drive over the mountains and along the coast. When Hurricane Flora devastated the southern peninsula, I went with a group of Mennonite volunteers from their compound in Grande Riviere down to the capitol to see if we could give assistance. When we left Limbe about nine o’clock in the evening, storm clouds still hung of the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti. We had only the lights of the jeep to see by. On the way up the mountains we had to cut away a fallen tree that had blown across the road. The rain was heavy at times, often filling ravines with water that gushed across the road so we had the constant worry about being swept down the mountainside.