Electricity

Electricity in Haiti is 110 volts, 60 cycle, similar to that in the U.S. To say that Port au Prince has rolling blackouts would be to put a very favorable face on the situation. The electricity may go out for a few hours, many hours, a day or more. It would be quite rare to have uninterrupted electricity for two days in a row. To cope with the situation, most houses have large generators, banks of lead acid batteries and an inverter. Here at Dottie's guest house, the generator happens to be right outside my window. When everything works as it should, the changeover from one to the other is seamless. The generators run only periodically as needed, so that often one does not know which power source is being used. At night however, there are no street lights when the power is out. 

Haitian chickens are ubiquitous; free range chickens live in the ravines, and it seems as though most houses keep a few. These are not well-behaved chickens; whereas roosters crow in the U.S. at daybreak, Haitian roosters crow all night long, loud raucous crowings that are answered by other roosters in a virtual crow slam. I at first attributed it to the intermittent street lights; when the lights would come at 2:00 a.m., the roosters would be confused and think it daybreak. But I have now come to believe that they are just genetic freaks that crow all night just to keep me awake.

Pastor Karl, his wife Ann, Gene and Jan, and I drove up the mountain to the Baptist Haiti Mission for Easter dinner. It was a potluck affair in a lovely setting on the high, cool side of the mountain.

A bank of batteries.

The rogue rooster who lives on the edge of the ravine next to the guest house.

Pastor Karl's Land Cruiser. This vehicle is identical to UN and many NGO vehicles. There are thousands of them in Haiti. The black assembly on the right front fender is an elevated air intake; the V-8 diesel can travel in water up to the windows. That intake is also useful in dusty environments to draw cleaner air into the engine.

Dessert today

The view from the Baptist Haiti Mission