The Food Issue

Rice, beans, spicy meatballs, and cabbage

No travel blog of Elaine Siew would be complete without a rundown of the local cuisine!

Wednesday morning crepes!

Fiffy's pizza

We have been very lucky to have 3 square meals prepared for us every day by the talented cook on the compound, Fiffy, and her team of lovely ladies.  After just a few weeks, we had memorized the weekly food schedule that Fiffy prepares pretty consistently.  I know the best night for dinner is Monday – shepherd’s pie (pate chinoise - it's Chinese in Haiti, not Irish!) – or maybe Friday – Haitian pizza! (The crust is like flaky pie crust, mmm...) And everyone loves Wednesday breakfast – crepes!  Other delicious breakfasts include omelettes/fried eggs and toast, porridge (which tastes like dessert for breakfast), and Fiffy’s special caramelized French toast. Lunch is my absolute favorite meal of the day – huge and hearty Haitian comfort food stuff.  Maybe too heavy for people who enjoy light lunches or fresher foods in the heat, but I love it – lots of rice and beans, slow-cooked meats, veggies, and plenty of saturated fat :)  Other dinners include “fried night” (fried plantains, potatoes, yucca, with meat chili), pasta with spicy meat sauce, potato and hot dog stew – and always accompanied by salad with Fiffy’s secret-recipe salad dressing.  There really isn’t anything on the menu for any meals that I don’t like – everything is super flavorful, with lots of cloves and peppers.  And whoever in the group volunteered to dole out servings had to become very familiar with my “Elaine-size portions.” 

An Elaine-size portion of Shepherd's Pie

Rice & beans, chicken, spicy beets

So with all these wonderful prepaid meals, I’ve only had a few meals out.  The crazy-looking stew that looks like something out of a witch’s cauldron is called bouillon – with potatoes, boiled plantains, goat meat, and finger-like dumplings.  It’s quite tasty and filling, and a staple of the Haitian diet here.  And then there is the street food – ahh, my beloved street food.  Everywhere I go, there is nothing I love more than eating food on the street.  In the past few weeks, I’ve made a habit of eating something off the street every day.  You’ll find delicious fritage stands everywhere – ladies who sell a variety of fried foods, like pressed plantains, akra (little fry-shape dough), chicken, boulettes, and empanada-like patties filled with veggies and a bit of meat.  They serve them all with this great piklis – a cabbage and chili pepper slaw.  I’ve also just discovered bonbons at street vendors, which are sweet cookies or bars baked with coconut.  And then everywhere you go in the world, there’s always some kind of ubiquitous food for sale on every block, like the Fanmilk carts in Togo and Ghana, or chai tea in India.  Here, it’s packaged cookies of different varieties that cost about a quarter or less, and funny enough are all imported from India.  You are guaranteed to find cookies everywhere you look, so as you can imagine, I’ve been eating a lot of cookies.

Bouillon

Then there’s the delicious island fruit in season.  There are beautiful fruit trees all over this region.  I’ve been eating mangoes all summer (and there are so many different kinds of mangoes), and it’s so wonderful to live in a place where you can eat fruits like avocadoes and starfruit that are grown locally instead of imported from far away.  I’ve also been able to try some new delicious fruits like kanep (a sweet a sour shelled berry that seems like a cousin of the longan), breadfruit (tastes like a potato when cooked), abrico (like a less sweet mix of mango and papaya), and soursop (a strang-looking but delicious fruit with white, squishy flesh that kind of reminds me of peach yogurt). 

Rice, mashed vegetables, and beef stew

Needless to say, I will really miss the food here.  Ironically enough, and shamefully, I’m here to do a malnutrition study yet I can’t stop stuffing my face.  I am happy about the fact that there are a lot of Haitian eateries in parts of Boston.  Now I just need to see how many mangoes I can fit in my suitcase…

:)

Dousman...

Meaning “slowly” or “gently” in Creole, which has become the word-of-the-day every day here in Milot.  It’s not only the rule for dancing Haitian-style, but also the theme for everything we do here. 

Speaking of dancing, we had to get just one more night at the roofless club yet again on Tuesday night, right before the med students left.  A friend had arranged an “American Night” as a send-off for the med students, where they said I could bring my Ipod with American music and they would play it for us.  However, our American classics are not quite dousman enough for the local regulars, so we settled on an American song after every two Haitian songs.  We could tell that the locals were cringing at the sound of Bon Jovi and Carly Rae Jensen – and couldn’t wait to return to the slow rhythm of their own music – but we were still able to squeeze them in (along with some Montel Jordan and Springsteen) and own the dance floor.  Before we headed out though, we announced our group superlatives, in which the guys decided the awards for the ladies and vice versa.  And the winners were: Rose – Best Techie Timekeeper, for fixing computers as only a MIT grad can and being extremely prompt to meals; Julian – The Poetic Justice Award for mastery of the English language; Shelley – The Blankest Award, so that she may choose her own superlative at will; Logan – Finest Undulation of Pelvic Girdle; Amelia – The Chick Magnet Award; Alec – The Shirt Monster Award, for meriting rights to toplessness; and me - #1 MOM :)

And then there were two.  The med students have flown away and things seem to have gotten much quieter around here.  We miss them, although on the plus side, I have since been mistaken less often for Rose, the other Asian.  We’re looking forward to reuniting the Tufts in Haiti family on the flipside!  They moved Shelley and I out of the chicken coop to make room for some incoming nursing students, so we are now in our own little room – I call it the honeymoon suite.  We have our own sink and a table to put some of our stuff! 

Shelley and I have since been focused on trying to get lots tiring data collection and field work done – going to surrounding villages, through Milot, and to the hospital’s peds clinic to make as many babies cry as possible.  Just a couple more days of aggressive field work before we wrap up the dirty work and move on to the other hard part this weekend – data analysis and report writing. 

The weekend was quite relaxing, mostly spent around Milot except for when Nadia, Shelley, and I ventured into Cap-Haitien on Sunday.  We took a tap-tap in to the city to take a stroll through the big, hectic, sensory-overload outdoor market.  I love going through outdoor markets everywhere I go. We then went to a hotel to send out emails (since we’ve had no internet on the compound or hospital grounds for almost a week – I’m borrowing a broadband key right now) and cool off in a pool after some long wandering around Cap to find the hotel.  To get home from Cap, you have to leave before 7 pm or so (when the tap-taps stop running), walk a mile or two to find a tap-tap going your way (where the first mate hanging off the back is yelling “Milot Milot Milot!!”), then wait a while in the truck sauna until the first mate is able to pile at least a dozen people in. 

  

Every day since the med students left, Shelley and I have been checking in on a patient that they were following, going by her home in Milot to see how well she is recovering and report back.  She had a massive surgery procedure on her entire leg, and the surgeon here says that Shelley and I get to help remove the staples on Friday! :-/ 

An orthopedic surgery team came over the weekend and brought some wonderful gifts – infant formula and a plethora of feeding bottles designed specifically for babies with cleft palates.  Shelley and I studied a DVD on how to feed cleft palate babies with different types of bottles on Sunday night, and then Monday morning we were able to bring the formula and a new bottle to Rosie at the nutrition center.  We went through the new instructions and the formula with the mother, and watched the baby happily chug down her first serving of formula (she must have been so hungry) using the specially designed bottle.  We’ll have to monitor her closely every day to make sure she is on the right road to recovery, but she has an enormous amount of catch-up ahead.  It makes me wish I could stay longer to watch her hopefully get better. 

Just about one week left in Haiti – and so much to do!

The Chicken Coop

New development in the ladies dorm this past week – one of the many chickens roaming the compound has been coming into our room and laying eggs next to Amelia’s bed.  When in Haiti!

So this past week, we went into the field for two days as usual.  The second day, Shelley and I got absolutely mobbed by a crowd of parents and children constantly shoving forward to try to get their child measured, plus other people in the village shoving closer to see what we were up to.  The curiosity is understandable, but trying to work in a square foot of space in the middle of a mob for an hour and a half gets overwhelming!  “Fè ba! (get back!)” works for about 3 seconds. 

Wednesday, Shelley and I went to Cap Haitien to meet with the director of Meds and Foods for Kids, an organization in Haiti that manufactures therapeutic nutritional foods for malnourished children.  We were so fortunate to meet the team at MFK soon after we arrived at the beginning of June and tour the factory, and now it was terrific to sit down with the director and just chat openly and honestly about child malnutrition in Haiti.  The organization is doing terrific work in an extremely challenging environment.

Friday morning, Shelley and I led a workshop on Child Nutrition for the community health workers that work for the hospital here in Milot.  This was the last of a five-part series of workshops that the med student organized on different health topics.  We had a lot of fun putting on the workshop, even though there is always so much to talk about when it comes to nutrition – our favorite topic of course – and so little time.  Promoting public health through community health worker education – check!

We’ve been checking in on the Nutrition Center as usual in between field visits and meetings.  Not surprisingly, once one severe case is resolved (temporarily, at least), there are always more to follow.  Just the week after little J went to the infant care center, we discovered two more difficult cases of malnutrition at the nutrition center.  And the more you talk to their parents, the more you unravel layers of their story that brought them to this severe state.  In the first case, we have an adorable little baby – we’ll call her Linda – who you can usually find sitting on a mat, looking around taking the world in, smiling once in a while.  She loves to be picked up, and she’ll just lay her head on your shoulder.  If she didn’t have the reddish hair and the infections on her skin, you might think she was a pretty good size 6-month-old baby.  But she’s actually 19 months old and a year behind in development. And if you didn’t talk to her mother (who appeared unusually old to have such a young child at 50+ years old), you wouldn’t know that she was actually a foster mother who rescued Linda when her own mother threw her in a dumpster at 5 months old.  Linda has had a very difficult health history since, and has been in and out of the hospital with different illnesses.  I had a visiting pediatrician come to take a look at her, who also realized that in addition to multiple nutrient deficiencies she had pneumonia and potentially scabies.  She went into inpatient treatment for a few days and was released early last week, but the last I heard was that her mother could not afford her medicines.  It is hard to predict how Linda’s childhood will pan out in the next few years.  It would be a triumph if we could get her to attempt crawling before we leave, but that may be hoping for too much.

In the second case, a mother started coming in to the nutrition center two weeks ago with a beautiful tiny baby - we’ll call her Rosie.  At 7 months, she is almost the size of a newborn, weighing just 9 lb.  She has a cleft lip and cleft palate, which causes milk to come out of her nose when she drinks.  A craniofacial surgery team came earlier this year and operated on her lip, but it is not clear when they or another team will return for follow-up surgery, and she may still be too young to receive surgery for her palate.  At first, we assumed that she is severely malnourished because she cannot eat and drink properly, so we have requested that a volunteer team coming this weekend bring special bottles designed for cleft palate babies.  This is definitely a large part of the problem, but another looming issue is food insecurity at home.  We realized last week that sometimes she can drink properly from a regular bottle if sitting upright, but also that she is the youngest of seven children and hardly eats anything after noon and on the weekends when she’s not at the nutrition center.  She needs to be on a diet of concentrated infant formula to build back her energy, but infant formula costs the same price here as it is in the US – which is expensive by US standards and thus completely unaffordable for most people here.  I’ve been in contact with the pediatrician who was visiting, and we are trying to figure out how best to help this baby.  In the meantime, it’s hard to come up with effective, sustainable solutions when I’m leaving in 2 weeks.  When I went by the nutrition center on Friday, Rosie wasn’t there, but her mom had heard that I was looking for the baby, so she actually came by our residence compound on Saturday to see me.  I had told her that the baby needs to go to the clinic because she is also sick with a fever and needs medicine, and that the baby ultimately needs infant formula to regain her strength, which was of course in vain because I know the mother cannot afford to buy it.  I said that I would keep trying to help her.  I don’t yet know how.

This past weekend was the last in Haiti for the med students, who leave Wednesday.  I spent most of Saturday on the compound, except for when I went for a walk with another visiting volunteer to visit a family that she knows in the village with a bunch of cute little children.  I tried to give out some nutrition advice in my broken Creole to the mothers with young children.  In the afternoon, after a fruitless quest to find affordable infant formula in town, I went to visit a post-surgery patient in Milot that a couple of the med students have been monitoring, since I’ll be checking in on her after they leave.  Sunday, we went to the coast for one last trip to lovely Cormier Beach.  And then at night, one last night out at the roofless dance club before the med students take off.

Just a couple more weeks now for Shelley and I to furiously collect the last of our data, write up our report, and wrap things up here in Haiti!

The Haitian Float

 As demonstrated by Logan at a pool in Cap Haitien today…

We have noticed that many Haitians at the beach enjoy floating face down in the ocean to relax in the water. Meanwhile, foreigners like me start to panic because this is also the universal ‘drowned and unconscious’ look.

So little J was already doing a bit better last weekend when I went to visit him, which was great to see.  He’s in great hands and should make a good recovery in a few months.  On Sunday morning, I went to the big Catholic church in Milot for the first time, as a cultural experience – it’s intersting to see everyone in town fill the churches in their finest clothing, and I love the singing.

Last weekend, a big group of vets came to Milot – including Haitians, Americans, and some of my people (Canadians, the best veterinarians in the world) – to run a great spay and neuter clinic for all the dogs and cats in town for the first time.  What a fun change to have some non-human doctors around!  We had a lot of fun with them this week, including a 4^th of July celebration on Wednesday night for Americans and non-Americans on the compound.  We had a bbq again with the fresh chickens, rocked out to American classics, and then headed to the club to dance the night away.  Pretty unbelievable – we have found at least 4 night clubs in little Milot! “Club” is a bit of a loose term.  This new one we walked to on Wednesday night was basically a room on the bottom floor of a building with a bar and maybe 1 green light bulb, but we all just danced in the outside alley all night while a bunch of locals sat around us and watched us make fools of ourselves. 

Needless to say, getting up early the next morning for a hot day out in the field was a little tough.  We again spent two days in the communities collecting data, walking house to house, and Shelley and I spent one day at the pediatric clinic at the hospital to collect data there.  We've been in and out of the nutrition center as well all week - playing with kids as usual and also trying to find extra help for the few kids that are in very difficult shape, like a little girl that - while totally adorable - has the size and development of a 6-month-old when she will actually be turning 2 later this year, or another beautiful baby who is wasting away because she has a cleft palate and cannot feed properly.  Yesterday, Shelley and I ran a lesson for the moms at the nutrition center on nutrition and food safety basics.  It was of course a little difficult, since it’s never ideal when we can’t communicate in Creole and need to rely on a translator (who may turn your 5-word sentence into a 5-minute monologue and leave you a little confused) and have other nurses chiming in all the time.  But, overall, it went alright, and we got our ‘caregiver education’ in!  Look at us public health professionals. 

Across from our compound, there’s a big, lovely ridge, and a group of us climbed up a treacherous jungle path to the top on Monday afternoon.  Here’s a view from the top!

Last night, we went out in the “party bus” (i.e. a giant truck with benches in the back that were used to haul dogs and cats around this past week for the vet clinic) into Cap Haitien to hang out at a restaurant/bar by the ocean for the evening.  We returned to Cap today – this time riding in tap-taps, speakers blaring Haitian hiphop and flat tire stops included, as well as some nutso teenagers hitching a ride on the back of the tap-taps, holding onto the truck while on rollerblades at 40+ MPH.  Yikes.  We got to treat ourselves with a stop at a bakery before we walked to a hotel with a swimming pool so that we could lounge and swim for the afternoon. 

Time to project a movie now on the white wall outside, for more relaxing time on the porch!

:)