December 2016 – The Pilots of the Caribbean

The Day of the Dead

Inspired by the James Bond movie Sceptre, Mexico City recently tipped a sombrero to Hollywood by holding a Day of the Dead parade for the first time. The Mexican parade, while spectacular, is all Disney, a tourist temptation. The real thing happens in a cemetery.

Nowhere is the fusion of Christian tradition and local culture more symbiotic than in Haiti where, according to legend, Haitians are 60% Catholic, 39% Protestant and 100% voodoo. Haitians traditionally celebrate the Day of the Dead much like anywhere else, by visiting their family tombs, offering gifts to the departed and remembering those that they have lost. But voodoo adds spice to the soup.

On the 1^st November, a public holiday in Haiti, the people of downtown Port-au-Prince descend on the single square kilometre of housing estate built for the dead, not far from the football stadium.

Stallholders and hawkers clog the road between the stadium and the cemetery, taking advantage of the crowds. A tinny voice blares from loudspeakers on top of a pickup truck, vainly competing for attention amongst a cacophony of konpa music that blasts from every stall. Closer to the cemetery a bass beat from speakers near the entrance shakes the ground and drives air from the lungs of the revellers. The crowd roars, encouraging a half-dressed woman onstage, who is gyrating hypnotically to the music, thrusting herself at the crowds and rolling her possessed eyes until only the whites stare blankly out.

People jostle across the bridge that crosses the river of garbage into the cemetery itself. White-clad mourners move quietly to their family tombs, the only island of calm amidst a sea of drunken revellers. Rum flows; people shout, spill, stagger and canon about on random trajectories. A line of crones sit on a low wall eating from tin bowls, their faces smeared with the lumpy beige gruel that drips to the ground at their feet. Further along, a knot of gawkers surround a small ceremony targeted more at the watchers than the dead.

Two human skulls lie haphazard atop a pile of bones littered with burning candles and offerings of coffee, food and rum.

The tombs that fill the cemetery are as grand as the relatives of the departed could afford; offering them, in death, a house that they might only have dreamed of in life. The coffins are not buried, but are placed in crypts built into the tombs, secured by locked steel doors. The locks are no match for the grave robbers, who raid the coffins for whatever lies within: trinkets for the thieves or perhaps bones for the voodoo priests.

An abandoned coffin in the Grand Cimetiére

Broken locks, doors smashed from their hinges suggest that the dead have little rest. Many of the desecrated crypts are empty; others are strewn with rubble and garbage. Inside one of them, a coffin bears scars from a crowbar, a corner bent down for easier access. Nearby another coffin lies open, lined with yellowing lace. There is no trace of the former resident. An overgrown patch is littered with rib bones and vertebrae. A tibia (or is it a fibula?) protrudes from the detritus. A few meters away lie a bundle of pin stripe rags; bones spill from the bundle, a suit than can no longer contain its owner. One crypt still bears token remains of the previous occupant; a small scapula hints at a younger victim. And all around the revellers keep revelling, staggering about, swilling rum and pulling on joints: dancing, swirling, laughing, shouting and singing.

Back at the bridge, a group of drinkers dribbles offerings of rum onto the sticky ground and chugs the rest. The dark rum flows like blood into the gutters. A man walks by, gnawing on a chicken bone, turning something ordinary into the macabre.

Naked woman dancing and rubbing chillies into her genitals in the Grand Cimetiére

The beat from the band outside the cemetery swells to a heart-stopping crescendo. The woman is more naked now than clothed. Her black dress hangs from her shoulders and her breasts, unfettered, sway to the music. Her pants are around her knees as she rubs fresh chillies onto her genitals proving to any doubters that the spirits really do possess her and she feels no pain.

It’s nice to have a parade. But if you want a raw and real Day of the Dead, Haiti’s the place to be.

The Motorbike, The Jeep and The Bitch Who Tried To Kill Us

With Matthew gone, it was time for us to get on with the business of living and working in Haiti. The company had provided us with a car and a driver to get to and from work, but also to take us to the shops or out for dinner in the evening. We like Sanley, the driver, quite a lot as it happens, but we don’t necessarily want him with us every time we go out for dinner; and having him wait around while we do our shopping just doesn’t feel right. There are also two other people sharing the house who need to get to the airport at different times, so the car isn’t always available.

Before we arrived in Haiti, we had researched the possibility of buying a motorbike so that we could have our independence. We were looking for an old BMW or Honda but couldn’t find anything for sale. In the meantime, we learned that one of the crew that was leaving had hired a motorbike, so we took it over when we arrived. More than 90% of the motorbikes in Haiti are Chinese and they are all pretty much the same: 125cc road bikes. This one was no different.

I took the bike out for a spin straight away; it worked pretty much like any other, except, instead of one-down-four-up, it was down-down-down… It also came with a sound system that pumped out Haitian konpa music, complete with a remote control. The only thing that it didn’t come with was a helmet.

You can buy anything in Haiti, as long as you know where to find it. But even Sanley, our resourceful driver, struggled to find a helmet that would fit my head, which is on the extra size of large. Unfortunately, and unusually, all the helmets in the shop were too big for Nicky.

We were longing to get out and start exploring, but a few things gave us pause: the state of the roads, the traffic and the driving. Imagine for a moment, every driver on the road as a Jo’burg taxi driver, without inhibitions. Then Ian, the swimming coach at the Pétionville Club, heard that we were planning to get around on a motorbike. He told us that it was far too dangerous, that we should reconsider, and that if we fell off, we would probably get bubonic plague from the road rash. So, we decided to limit our first, helmetless, trip to a nearby gym, about three kilometres away. The trip went well, for me; but when we hit the first speed bump, Nicky discovered that the rear suspension was set to unyielding.

A couple of days later, emboldened by our first adventure, we decided to go the local supermarket, just over a kilometre away and outside the gated suburb where we live. As a precaution, we parked the bike inside the gates so that we wouldn’t have to negotiate the twenty meters of bedlam known as Route des Frères between the gate and the entrance to the shop.

It was on the way back that things went wrong. We were only a few hundred meters from the house. Nicky was on the back, clinging on to the shopping. I was navigating between the potholes, not looking far ahead, when Nicky screamed. A red Jeep shot through the intersection without hesitating, and was right in front of us. I jinked left in the hope that the driver had seen us and would stop, but she hadn’t and she didn’t. I laid the bike down instinctively, not wanting to tee the Jeep. We slid a short way before crunching into it, just behind the front wheel.

I was okay, thought that we’d got away with it. I killed the screaming bike, got up. Nicky was sitting in the road behind me, hunched over, holding on to her foot.

‘Are you alright?’ I asked.

She shook her head.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘My foot.’

I checked her over to make sure there weren’t any other obvious injuries; all seemed okay, but there was no mistaking the claret leaking from her foot.

By then, the Bitch That Tried to Kill Us had noted our presence and offered excuses, then assistance. I asked her to take Nicky back to our house, so that we could deal with her injuries there. It was a bit of a squeeze as there were four children and a nanny in the car. Fortunately, none of the children looked up from their cell phones for long enough to be traumatised by the sight of the blood.

Back at the house, the Bitch That Tried to Kill Us dropped Nicky off and gave us her telephone number and fifty dollars. Fifty dollars? WTF?

When Nicky finally let me had a closer look at her foot. She had a nasty open wound on her toe that looked like it had some gravel in it. A delve with the tweezers revealed that the ‘gravel’ was the end of a vein and it was about then that I decided that the limit of my medical skills had been exceeded; that, and the distinct possibility that the toe was fractured.

With the help of an Argentinian officer we had befriended, (yes, he does know that Nicky is English, but doesn’t hold it against her) Nicky was admitted to the Argentinian Hospital casualty department. Not taking any chances, she told them that she was South African, which was a first.

X-rays showed that there was no fracture, but the wound was very deep and could not be sutured. That meant a loose dressing and no flying for a few days. Fortunately, flight operations were still in the recovery phase from Hurricane Matthew and there was no flying for us to do.

Nicky’s toe has recovered, but the motorbike never went out again. We decided that quite apart from the risk to us, our ability to work here relies on us both being healthy. Just as well. Since then, we have seen two dead motorbike riders lying in the road. Sometimes in the face of all good advice, one has to learn the hard way.

Hurricane Matthew

Matthew turned out to be the most powerful storm to hit Haiti for a generation; but it left Port-au-Prince relatively unscathed. The communities of Haiti’s south-western peninsula weren’t so lucky. While people in Florida were preparing for the worst by boarding up their premises and making plans to retreat to hurricane shelters, the residents of Les Cayes and Jérémie had little choice but to brace themselves for the onslaught, and hope for the best. Matthew crashed through their lives, left them homeless, destroyed their crops and killed their livestock.

In Port-au-Prince, the airport was closed as a precaution. With our aircraft safely tucked away in the hangar, we were left to watch helplessly from the fringes. Matthew drenched us with torrential rain but only ruffled the leaves in our garden, leaving the trees firmly rooted. It took another day after the storm had passed for the airport to open, and still there was little for us to do.

Because we were new to the UN mission in Haiti, we were required to do a familiarisation flight. So while a US Navy aircraft carrier steamed into the bay and disgorged relief supplies from a steady stream of helicopters, we went on a flight to Cap Haïtien in the north and Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. It was an unusually clear day. The hurricane had mopped up all the atmospheric detritus revealing that the province to the north, Artibonite, was relatively unscathed. And, although there was some flooding around Cap Haïtien, it also seemed to have escaped the worst.

It was only the following day that Nicky and I finally joined the response effort. We still couldn’t land anywhere in the hardest-hit south-west, as the only runways that were long enough for us to use were waterlogged and had been inundated with helicopters from the UN, the US Coast Guard and Navy and a myriad of other agencies.

We were tasked to fly a Civil Defence team to the north and, from there, along the coast back to Port-au-Prince to assess the coastal damage from the hurricane. A flight like that is a dream come true for most pilots. With much of our time normally spent trying to keep the blue side up while not spilling the passenger’s gin and tonics, this was an opportunity to fly low over the sea while hugging the coastline and exploring all the coves and inlets.

Once airborne out of Port-au-Prince, we climbed to nine thousand feet to clear the mountains of the interior on our way to Fort Liberté on Haiti’s north-eastern corner. When we were over the ridge, we started a shallow descent past the imposing Citadelle Laferrière, which squats on top of a tall peak, with a commanding view of the northern shore. The castle was built shortly after the slave rebellion of 1804. The new ruler Henri Christophe built the citadel, which looks more like a Crusader fortress than a Caribbean stronghold.

We left the castle behind and circled the floodplains to the northeast of Cap Haïtien, before following the coast westwards.

We rounded the peninsula to Labadee, a resort leased by Royal Caribbean Cruises. It is yet another curiosity, totally removed from the reality of Haiti, where cruise ship passengers are disgorged onto palm-fringed beaches where they play in the surf without a thought of what lies beyond.

After Labadee, we changed course for Île de la Tortue (Tortuga), a turtle-shaped island off Haiti’s north coast that was once a major centre of Caribbean piracy in the 17^th century. Not much has changed. We were told that the island is still a no-go area for the authorities, as it is now the centre of the Caribbean drug trade. It looked peaceful enough, with a small settlement on the southern shore and sailing boats gliding though the turquoise shallows.

With no hurricane damage in sight, we skipped back across the Canal de la Tortue to Port de Paix and continued along the coast, before slipping inland towards Bombardopolous, which belied its grandiose name.

When we reached the coast again, we followed it south past Gonaïves to mangrove lagoons speckled with flocks of pink and brown flamingos that splashed into the air as we passed overhead. Just beyond the mangroves, the small town of

Grande Saline lies at the mouth of the Artibonite River. Its salt pans were flooded and much of the town seemed partially submerged. It was the only significant hurricane damage that we observed during the flight.

Time and fuel were getting short, so we made a quick detour across the bay to Île de Gonâve, the largely barren island that dominates Haiti’s bight. We found little damage and turned back to Port-au-Prince for a long final approach to the easterly runway.

After two hours of virtual silence, the airwaves filled with chatter from all the helicopters ferrying supplies out to Jérémie and Les Cayes.

It was an amazing flight, but we couldn’t help feeling somewhat inadequate. We were longing to join in with the relief efforts in the south.

Haiti

The alarm went off at two the following morning for our our five fifty-three flight to Port-au-Prince. We made our way, bleary-eyed, to the airport and found ourselves in a sleepy departures hall with all the shops firmly shuttered and not a cappuccino in sight. With Hurricane Matthew making its way steadily through the Caribbean, we checked the weather channels to see if it would make landfall in Haiti. It was veering towards Haiti’s south-western peninsula and was expected to arrive within forty-eight hours. We began to wonder if we would get there before the airport closed. But boarding commenced on schedule and we were soon on our way.

I had an aisle seat and Nicky was in the middle, so when we started our descent, there wasn’t much for us to see. I craned to get a view of the island, but could only glimpse patches of green, white and blues: the indigo of the Caribbean and the lighter blue of the sky. Reassured that the hurricane hadn’t arrived, I retreated to my book.

We touched down just before nine and emerged into a tropical clammy heat that felt like West Africa.

Neither the airport buildings nor the arrivals hall dispelled the notion that we might be in Africa. But the posters advertising Caribbean beach resorts just north of the capital gave away our real location. We were met by the base manager, Patrick and driver Sanley, who drove with a nonchalance that belied both the traffic and the state of the roads.

Dusty, garbage strewn roads with potholes that stretched all the way across and beyond provided a battleground for a helter skelter of cars, taptaps and motorbikes that weaved in amongst each other in seemingly random trajectories.

Port-au-Prince hugs the foothills of Kenscoff, the cloud-shrouded mountain that overlooks the city, and hugs them hard. Its many foothills are precipitous, growing in stature and steepness as they near the mountain, turning the twelve-kilometre journey from the airport to the crew house into a thirty-minute rollercoaster ride.

In its place was a voluminous six-bedroom house, situated in Belvil, a gated suburb, and one of the sanctuaries where wealthier Haitians, and UN staff, retreat from the mayhem. It seemed deserted, its doors ajar to take advantage of the breeze. We were shown up to our room, where we dropped off our luggage before exploring our new home.

Despite the obvious lack of a swimming pool, it was more than we’d ever expected from a crew house. Apart from the six bedrooms, there were two lounges, one with a television and the other on a lower level. The kitchen was a good size and seemed well equipped, if a little dated. When I had a closer look at the four-burner gas stove, I let out an involuntary shiver. It was wretched. The sort of wretchedness that eventually accumulates when something hasn’t seen a scourer since it was born: last century sometime.

The rest was typical of a crew house: stale food in the cupboards, bottles of water stacked haphazardly outside an empty cupboard in one corner and dirty dishes in the sink. In contrast, the garden was beautiful with a profusion of tropical flowers and a scattering of coconut palms. In one corner, a vine covered pergola looked like a good spot for Sunday lunch.

‘Where are the other crew?’ I asked Patrick.

‘In their rooms.’

Nicky and I looked at each other. ‘Here?’

Patrick looked at me strangely. ‘Yes.’

‘But it seems so quiet.’

Patrick shrugged.

One emerged a few hours later. He seemed to by a nice guy, but he soon retreated to the darkness of his room. The other didn’t emerge from his bat cave until the following day.

So once we had unpacked, with no-one to talk to, Nicky and I rolled up our sleeves, boiled up some water, dug out all the cleaning stuff that we could find and began the long and arduous process of dismantling the stove piece by piece and giving it the first thorough cleaning of its life.

By the time we put the kettle on, our first day in paradise was drawing to a close. And Matthew had yet to make landfall.