Today is Mother’s Day in Haiti. Janine, one of the women who cooks for the guesthouse, invited us to her house for lunch. She lives in a village not too far from the hospital. We arrived around 9:30am just as everyone was starting to prepare all the food for lunch and decorate the house with balloons.
(Picture: Janine’s house)
Janine’s house is cute. It consists of a bunch of concrete/wooden rooms (each with a bed or two) and a small living room. The backyard housed 2 pigs – each with their own mud piles, a bunch of chickens, the outhouse, and a section with old rusted weight lifting equipment. The outhouse did not have a squatting toilet like I had hoped. Instead it had a normal toilet seat over the hole. The seat was almost too high to squat over (and not physically sit on), but I managed. Until now I haven’t had the opportunity to use an outhouse in the village. We’ve been peeing in the bushes!!
I hung out with the women while they cooked for a while. There was a separate little building that functions as the kitchen. It had a little table and three coal stoves. (Most people use coal to cook and I’ve occasionally seen open fires.)
(Picture: Jolina, the other woman who works in the guesthouse, in the kitchen preparing a spicy tomato sauce for the meat dish)
(Picture: The rest of the women preparing food outside)
(Picture: The food waiting to go out to the table)
While we waited for the feast we all enjoyed some Haitian beer and an appetizer of “croquette lam”. Lam (short for lamveritab) is a breadfruitl. This was actually my first time ever eating it. The croquettes are made of pureed breadfruit, spices, and usually meat and cheese (but these were left out for me), shaped into little balls, and deep-fried. They were really good despite the lack of meat and cheese (although I do think they would have been great with the cheese).
(Picture: Frank and Sylvestre, Janine’s son, hanging out before lunch)
Lunch was incredible and there was so much food - rice with beans, two kinds of fried plantains, more lam croquettes, avocado, salad, pasta salad, a vegetable platter with broccoli, carrots, beets, string beans, and potatoes, goat meat, fried fish, mango, papaya, oranges, bananas, pineapple…and champagne to wash it all down!
After lunch we hung out for a bit. I worked on my Spanish comprehension while the Cubans chatted a mile a minute. Little bits and pieces from the year of Spanish I took in college are coming back!
After taking a bunch of photos we hopped in the truck to head back to the hospital.
(Picture: Janine and her mother – Happy Mother’s Day!)
(Picture: right to left – Maria Elena, Kara, Janine’s mother, Frank, Dania, Sylvestre, Janine)
The rest of the day has been relaxing. I napped for 2 hours, there were no major problems at the hospital, and it’s now raining and cooling everything off. The frogs that sound like ducks are out, but I think I’ll sleep right through their quacking tonight.
