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.