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On the final installment of Boukannen Dlo, we discuss the question we inevitably get when we return home to visit with friends and family: “How’s Haiti?” We’ve used the podcast to try to answer that question by presenting a few small slices of our own lives in Haiti, and this week we tackle that question head-on in our eighth and final episode.
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Thanks to Haitians’ love for soccer and the late rounds of the Champions League featuring top European clubs like Barcelona, Chelsea, and Bayern Munich, life in Port-au-Prince seems to stop and start with the whistles of matches being played thousands of miles away. This week we bring you to a small soccer stadium in our neighborhood to discuss Haitians’ love for the game, talk about how the sport manifests gender divides, and get a sense of Haiti’s sports culture.
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People visit Haiti for plenty of reasons—doctors on medical missions, volunteers on week-long trips, and friends of expats like us who come just to get a sense of life here. But when we heard a troupe of Norwegian circus performers were sailing toward the island to stay at our house, we figured it merited an interview. This week we speak with two of Haiti’s most unusual visitors about how their two years sailing the high seas led them to Haiti and how their purpose here differs from those of others who visit.
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One obstacle that prevents foreigners from understanding what’s going on in Haiti is how difficult it is to visualize everyday Haitian life. Joining us today is Jon Bougher, a documentary filmmaker in Port-au-Prince and instructor at Haiti Reporters film school, where he helps train Haitian students in the art of visual storytelling. We’ve witnessed and admired Jon’s ability to connect with his subjects despite the various challenges of filming in Haiti. On this week’s episode, we hear about how he does it.
Download [Run Time: 15:46]
On this week’s episode we take a three-day trip from the mountains above Port-au-Prince to the sea near Jacmel as we discuss Haiti’s tourism potential. We hike up the beautiful mountains of La Visite national park to camp out at Kay Winnie (“Winnie’s house” in Haitian Creole) in the small town of Seguin. Then we trek down to the beautiful sand beaches on Haiti’s southern coast. An interview with Winnie, who has been hosting travelers since 1996, offers an insider’s perspective on what it would take to draw more tourists to Haiti.
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On this week’s podcast we talk to two Haitian friends from our neighborhood, Jonas Pierre-Louis and Jean-Marc Vassa Joseph, about Haiti Positive, a book they’re working on that presents positive aspects of Haiti. We ask them about the book, their impressions of Americans and Europeans working to help Haitians, their thoughts on foreign journalists who cover Haiti, and their organization, ODUN, a Haitian-run scholarship program they helped establish to pay school fees for children.
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Claude Adolphe is a middle class man who lived through the goudou goudou—the Haitian onomatopoeia for the sound the earthquake made when it struck in January 2010. Claire Payton is a historian who interviewed Adolphe and more than 100 other Haitians who agreed to share their stories from that day and describe their lives in post-earthquake Haiti. On this week’s episode, Claire returns to Port-au-Prince to reunite with Adolphe and other subjects of her Haiti Memory Project. She helps us understand the earthquake as a ‘point zero’ in Haitian consciousness—an unequivocal dividing line between what now seems like Haiti’s distant past, and its present.
Download [Run Time: 11:03]
In our first episode, we introduce readers to Club Abner, a gym in our neighborhood where we go a few times a week to pump iron—and lift whatever other heavy scrap metal the owner can find to serve as weights. The guys at the gym love to talk politics, and the topic du jour is whether Haiti’s president, Michel Martelly, holds American citizenship—which would disqualify him from serving as president. The conversations highlight how important patriotism and sovereignty are to our fellow gym-goers and offer insight about why the debate over Martelly’s nationality continues to captivate Haitians and their elected leaders.
