We walked through the narrow streets uphill toward Titi's neighborhood. There were no sidewalks, so the storefronts were mere inches from passing traffic. The air smelled like laundry detergent and freshly filleted fish. As I observed the local architecture, I began to notice a pattern. Between the larger multi-story buildings were smaller impromptu structures, wedged together like mismatched books on a crooked shelf.

The pastel green booths sold lottery tickets and exchanged currency. Scott called these the "National Banks of Haiti". Apparently they were all owned by the same outfit, because the signage above each one was identical: Titi Lotto.

"Why is your name on all these little green stores?" I asked the shorter, older guide.

Titi looked confused.

"It's his last name," Scott interpreted, "like Smith or Jones – or Patel."

We stopped long enough to change some American money. The Haitian dollar no longer exists on paper. They have reverted back to the gourde, except in the minds of the Haitian people. If you ask someone how much something costs, they will tell you in Haitian dollars and expect you to calculate the price to gourdes in your head. This is not an easy assigment for a first time American traveler. All you really need to know is that everything is done in increments of twelve-and-a-half cents. For example, a handfull of rice is twelve-and-a-half cents. Two cigarettes equal twelve-and-a-half cents. A recharged transistor battery cost twelve-and-a-half cents. From there it goes to the dollar twenty-five level, then twelve-fifty, and so on. Bottom line being, twenty-five American bucks will buy you approximately one thousand gourdes in Jacmel on a good day.

The pink dispensaries were called boutiques. They dealt in convenience items – mostly rum and tobbacco, masked by imported bags of corn chips and cans of energy drinks. The most popular brand of rum in Haiti is named Bakara. It is most commonly sold in half pints for one dollar and twenty-five cents. Cigarettes come in half-packs of ten each. There is only one selection, Comme·Il Faut, which translates to: "As It Should Be" – and only one choice: regular or menthol. They cost one dollar and twenty five cents. Most boutiques also offer a limited variety of household items, like candles and cooking oil. But the big sellers are beer and water, and sometimes even ice. The primary beer in Jacmel is called Prestige. It comes in a short-necked bottle, like Red Stripe in Jamaica, but it tastes more like Imperial from Costa Rica, or Carta Blanca from Mexico. In any case, it is the Budweisser of Haiti. Prestige beer has won several international brewing medals over the years, and that fact is proudly printed on every lable.

Water from almost any hydrant in the town should be used only for bathing (at best). Drinking water is sold in small sealed plastic bags about the size of your hand. They claim, in English, to have been decontaminated by process of reverse osmosis through a system of semi-permeable membranes. You simply bite off one of the corners with your teeth. Ice, or glace, is made by freezing these same little bags, should the proprietor of that boutique have access to electricity. Most do not. A beer costs a buck twenty-five. Water and ice are twelve-and-a-half cents each. Do the math.

I purchased some smokes, a flask of rum, three bags of water (one of them frozen) and a Prestige beer. The cashier spoke only Creole. He told me the the total in Hatian dollars.

"Four-hundred gourdes." Scott offered impatiently, when I began counting on my fingers.

I paid the merchant and turned to leave.

"And you have to drink the beer here." My brother added. "The deposit is almost half."

"No problem." I turned the beer up and drank its entire contents without stopping for air. "Merci beaucoup." I stifled a belch and handed him back his bottle, still cold and sweaty.

My butt was already aching again as we jerked to a halt directly in front of Guy's (pronounced: Giēs) Guest House. Downtown Jacmel was the epicenter of recent siesmic activity. Scott told me that after the initial quake and subsequent tremors, Guy's Guest House was the only establishment in the whole city without significant structural damage. Though everything around it was toppled, they were open for business the very next day.

The café downstairs was open and facing the street. A heavy iron gate discouraged loitering. Guy himself sat at a table in the corner under a ceiling fan. He was almost eighty, and palsied from Parkinson's, but he still remembered my brother.

"Scott." Guy tipped his straw hat, and motioned for us to sit. "Welcome back."

They shook hands, Hatian-style, which is hard to put into words.

"This is my brother." Scott took a seat.

"Same muddah?" Guy inquired.

"Same father, too." Scott assured him.

The old man arched his eyebrows and looked at me in mock disbelief. "He is much biggah."

I was still standing, so we all laughed at his joke. "And better looking.." I added.

Guy crossed himself and signaled to the waitress. "Have a seat, Scott's bruddah." He nodded at the other chair, without ever asking my first name. Then he and Scott began speaking in Spanish, for no apparent reason.

The Creole language is a jigsaw puzzle. French and English and Spanish are dumped out of the box, onto the table and scrambled brusquely. Bonus pieces of local idiom are added to the mix and re-shuffled to create a vernacular which can never reach completion. It is a strange dynamic. Luckily, you do not need to put the whole puzzle together, unless you really want to learn Creole. Guy spoke French and Spanish, but not English. Scott understood English and Spanish, yet no French. Therefore, they logically settled on Spanish to avoid the use of hand gestures.

My brother told me later, that Guy was raised in the Dominican, and that was his native tongue. Scott also told me that he had seen Guy's health deterioriate drastically over the course of his last seven visits since the earthquake.

Though I also speak Spanish, out of respect for our patron, I pretended to be preoccupied. The walls were painted orange. The tablecloths were green. Primitive Nubian paintings hung slightly askew and totally at random around the small lobby. It was hotter than blazes.

The waitress handed me a menu, and I squinted to read the foreign print. The only word I recognized on the whole page was: Omlette. That's because Omlette is just French for omlette. So I ordered an Omlette and a Coca-Cola, then excused myself to further investigate the hotel.

"¿Con su permiso?" I nodded at the owner. He seemed amply impressed with my espaňol.

"Estás bienvenido." The proprietor croaked hoarsely. "Es tu casa."

"Sure, take a look around," Scott added, "there's a balcony upstairs – got a great view."

There was one main hallway with communal bathrooms on either end. I stopped in the closest one to pee. It had a sink, a comode and a shower, but still no hot water.. The maids were changing linens at that hour, so the doors to several rooms were wide open. The furnishing were basic: twin cots with crude nightstands between them, no air-conditioning, no phone, no TV.

I climbed the stairs at the far end to find the exact same layout on the second floor, except that the exterior wall and half of the roof were missing. I could see right into the building next door. Doubling back toward the front of the inn, I eventually found the balcony that Scott had mentioned.

I was expecting a view of the ocean, or at least something tropical. Instead, a tilted veranda with no railings hung directly over the downtown district of Jacmel. I pulled out my camera and snapped several photos facing both directions. Most of the buildings were badly damaged, some were visably leaning. It was nine o'clock in the morning, and every curb was lined with vendors peddling their peculiar wares – fresh exotic fruits and grilled mystery meats, cheap used cellphones and pre-paid calling cards, purified drinking water and pure cane liquor, baskets of ripe breadfruit and bins of grimy charcoal. A businessman in a dark suit and tie, carrying a briefcase, dodged to avoid several barefoot children splashing in a puddle and begging for alms.

When I returned downstairs, two other men had joined Scott and Guy at our table. They were introduced as Danyan and Titi – our official tour guides for the duration of our stay in Haiti. Danyan was about twenty-five years old, and Titi was probably twice that age. Danyan was a loan shark, and Titi carved clipper-ship replicas out of pieces of driftwood.

"Dis is Scott's bruddah." Guy motioned with his good arm.

Both Danyan and Titi stood to shake my hand. "Hallo, Scott's bruddah." Said the shorter older one. "How are you liking the Haiti so much?" Asked the taller younger one, referring to a pocket-sized 'French-to-English' dictionary. "You come back soon, like Scott then?"

"I just got here." I tried to explain.

Titi was looking over Danyan's shoulder at the miniture lexicon. A bold bluff, because Scott told me later that Titi was illiterate in any lingo. Danyan however, understood some English and French. Plus he could perform basic arithmetic.

I heartily endorse the omelette at Guy's Guest House. But for the record, fried plantains do not taste anything like bananas, and they come as a side dish on every plate. Luckily, there is nothing better than an iced-cold Coca-Cola, in a foreign country, first thing in the morning.

"We rent the scooters today?" Danyan asked Scott, licking his fingers. Titi, though perturbed that he had not thought of it first, nodded his head vigorously in agreement.

At around three in the morning, something fell from about eighty feet in the air, directly onto the tin roof above my head. I sat bolt upright, my shirt soaked in sweat, convinced it was another earthquake. "What the hell was that?"

"It was a mango." My brother assured me. "Go back to sleep."

I needed to pee. I wanted a cigarette. I had no idea where my lighter was, much less the bathroom. So I lay there until the roosters started crowing. The bedroom had no windows, but there was a gap between the top of the concrete walls and the beams of the roof. I watched that slot of space lighten, and listened to the early morning activity. A goat bleated, a pig squealed, a donkey brayed, and Scott snored. Native children gossiped in some pidgin dialect on their way to school. A big truck sounded its horn out by the street. It was officially morning in Jacmel.

"Do you want to shower?" My brother stretched and rubbed his eyes.

I looked over at him. If you have a brother, then you already know the look.

"Follow me." He stood and headed back up the narrow hallway. "I'll show you where."

In a crude stall made of scrap tiles, there was a five-gallon bucket of cold water and a sliver of blue soap. A drain in the floor led directly to the ocean.

"Are you for real?" I thought he was joking.

"Hey man," he returned me the same look I had just given him, "the less we spend on accommodations, the more we have to distribute to the people."

I had not yet met the people. But I was pretty sure they were not all showering with buckets of cold water. As it turns out, I was wrong about that too. I had brought my own toiletries, but there was no mirror in which to shave – no shelf to place my dopp kit. My travel-sized bottles of hair conditioner and body scrub were rendered useless. So I stripped and poured half the container over my head all at once. Then I washed my entire body with that tiny chip of soap, and rinsed with the other half of the bucket. It was invigorating.

I had packed seven cotton t-shirts and seven pairs of short pants. I pulled out one of each and slipped back on the only pair of sandals that I brought. The front porch of Marco's house was only three feet wide. They move plastic chairs inside at night and bring them back out in the daytime. This was the only furniture in the whole house.

Marco's new wife, Willetta, served us coffee. She is Hatian.

Hatian coffee is like no other – not just the beans, but the preparation. They pound it in a contraption much like a butter-churn until it is finer than esspresso. Then they steep that crushed umber powder with sugarcane and bring it to a boil, so that it is already sweetened. On the tray, there is only a can of condensed milk with a hole punched in the top.

"How will you spend your time today?" Marco's English was not so perfect.

"We're going to Titi's place first." Scott answered. "Do you want to come?"

"No, I must spend this time with my bride." Marco blushed, but Willetta did not. "I have to fly back to Quebec on Sunday." Marco is a horticulturist – a purveyor of botany. He grows stuff. Origionaly, he came to Haiti to cultivate hydroponically raised lettuce. Sadly, there were not enough nutrients in the produce, nor interest from the Hatians, to turn a profit. So he breeds weed. "Can I give you ride to town?" There was no car, only one enduro-styled motorcycle.

"We'll just catch the Tap-Tap." Scott thanked Marco for the hospitality. "See you tonight."

We climbed the cement stairs back up to sea level. It smelled like blooming flowers and rotting fruit. Smoke wafted from several small fires along the street.

"I'm starving." I reminded my brother.

"We're going to Guy's Guest House for breakfast." He promised, then he raised his arm to hail a ride back into town.

Besides the motor-scooter, the Tap-Tap is the most popular means of mass-transit in Haiti. Picture a small pick-up, with benches welded along either side of the truck bed and stuffed with twelve, sometimes twenty people at a time, all facing inward and staring at each other. You can't mistake a Tap-Tap, because they are all hand-painted in swirling psychedelic colors, and they all proclaim: "Mercí Jesus" across both sides. I climbed aboard and sat between a blind, pregnant woman and a very old man holding a gamecock in his lap. "Bon Jour." I nodded at each of them. It was the only French I could muster.

The old man looked at me like I was a zombie. "Blond." He told the pregnant, blind lady. She nodded and crossed herself. Several other passengers performed similar rituals.

I looked across at my brother for reinforcement.

"Relax," he explained, "it just means that you're white." Scott smiled and waved at the other fourteen black people already crammed into the back of the Tap-Tap. "You're an enigma." He made it sound like my duty – not an award or an honor – but more like an obligation. "Half of them have never even seen an Anglo-Saxon."

Our Tap-Tap stopped every one hundred yards, the entire eight miles back into downtown. People got on, people got off – the truck never quite came to a complete halt. The obvious reason they named it the Tap-Tap, is that you tap the fender-well repeatedly with your palm when you are ready to disembark. Then you shout: "Mercí Jesus". "Thank you Lord."

THE MOST INTERESTING WEEK OF MY LIFE

by

James Bryan Cornelius

I never said it was the best week of my life. I'm not even sure that I would do it all again, but that doesn't really matter. Because once you have been to Haiti, you will never be the same. Whoever you are, wherever you are from, you will come home a slightly different person.

Go ahead; I dare you.

We landed in Port-au-Prince at dusk. I lit a cigarette immediately, right there on the tarmac. Looking around, I saw several other people doing the same thing. It had been sixteen hours since we left San Antonio, including the layover in Miami. My brother says that I am one size too large for world traveling. He is correct. I am six-foot-five and two-hundred-thirty pounds. The chairs in coach are getting smaller every year, not bigger. To the contrary, my brother is of medium build, perfectly constructed for riding on top of trains and sleeping in hammocks.

"Be cool," he whispered, '"this is the part I was warning you about."

He had warned me about a whole lot of things. I shrugged and shouldered my backpack. We just cleared customs and were stepping from the safety of a terminal for the first time since our departure. Two dozen negro porters approached us, all of them wanting to carry our luggage. Behind them, a black woman held up a placard that read: SCOTT. My brother's first name is Scott.

"If they even touch your bags, they will want a tip." He raised his voice. Suddenly it was getting very noisy. Everybody was trying to touch my bags. "Just follow me," Scott grinned.

"Je Vais." He shouted. They gradually stopped touching our baggage. He gave them all some money anyway, and we climbed into the cab. It wasn't actually a taxi, more like a micro-SUV. Now that I recall, it was a Geo Tracker, rusty, with a vinyl roof and very bad shocks.

Producing a pinlight, I consulted the map. We were headed for Jacmel, a small coastal town about forty miles away. On paper, it was only one more inch. But it would take us over two hours to get from Port-au-Prince to Jacmel. There is a sizeable mountain range between the two.

The first observation I made, was that my brother and I were the only white people in sight. The second thing I noticed was all the garbage. I don't mean litter, or even trash. I'm talking about raw refuse everywhere. Piles of it, pushed into mounds by the wayside, smashed flat in the streets like some lithospheric layer, drainage ditches completely dammed with plastic bottles and other sundry debris, gray water running in rivulets along either side of every road. Our taxi driver swerved to avoid hitting a burning tire in the middle of the street.

Traffic in Haiti requires more blind-faith than bungee-jumping. There are no police, no stop lights, no yield signs – only big lumbering trucks carrying materials, and a million motor-scooters all jockeying for position in between them. Everytime we came to a standstill, dozens of teenagers rushed our vehicle to sell us something. Everyone was honking their horns at the same time. There were still tent cities on either side of the road, and I was aghast at the sordid living conditons. Port-au-Prince was flat and sprawling. All the buildings looked like concrete bunkers recently shelled by artillery. Filth and squalor baked in the tropical heat. The smell was putrid.

"It used to be a lot worse." My brother Scott told me, recognizing symptoms of sensory overload. This was his seventh trip to Haiti. It was my very first time. "All that stuff there is new." He pointed to a church, still under construction, surrounded by bamboo scaffolding. Scott had allowed me the front seat, but he kept leaning forward from the back, waving his arms between me and the driver. "And over there too." A portion of seawall, right on the bay, had been replaced with cinderblocks and fresh mortar. "And there, see?" A white U.N. steamroller was widening a sidestreet with hot tarred asphalt. To him, these were signs of disaster recovery.

To me, it was pandemonium. The whole island seemed smashed and broken and crushed. About five miles out of the city, we began our ascent. There were thousands of clapboard shacks and thached huts propped precarioulsy about halfway up the mountainside. Then it got really steep. Above the timberline, at the very top of the first ridge, I could see flickering yellow lights. I kept a small pair of binoculars in my daypack. Adjusting the focus, I could see many tiny campfires.

"They're making charcoal." My brother informed me. "It's too heavy to carry the wood down to the towns." He predicted my next question as well. "So, they burn it at the top," he could not shut-up, "and sell it at the bottom."

By the time we reached the first pass, it was pitch dark. There was no longer any electricity at this elevation. The route consisted entirely of switchbacks and hairpin turns, most at fifty degree inclines. It had been hot back in Port-au-Prince. Now it was quite cold, and we were surrounded by thick fog. The Tracker was a ragtop with no heater. I was in cargo shorts and sandals.

"It's a cloud-forest up here." Scott startled me, leaning over my shoulder and shouting in my left ear. "You should see it in the daytime."

I was grateful for nightfall. I would see it better on the way back, once I was acclimated. The only illuminations were the moon and the auto's headlights. I think one of them was broken. To my right was lush jungle foliage. Out the left window was a sheer drop-off. Then the taxi began to point downhill again. When we finally got below the mist, I could see the lights of Jacmel, in a cluster along the southernmost beach of Haiti. It was a grand view, even in the dark, but my ass was sore, and I had not stretched in over two hours.

"I'm hungry, "I told Scott, "and I can't go another mile without a beer."

We're almost to Marco's place." He leaned forward and shouted. "They're expecting us." Marco's house was by the beach. To get there however, we had to go through the middle of Jacmel. Downtown was a blurr of lights and sounds at eight o'clock in the evening (ten p.m. Texas time). World Beat music blared from every other building as we passed. Thousands of people stood in the narrow streets – all of them them black, most of them speaking Creole, and a few of them openly pracitcing Voodoo.. Ladies carried five-gallon plastic buckets of water on their heads, with no hands, and never spilled a drop. Children ran naked through the slanted neighborhoods. Grown men sat around folding card tables and played dominoes for points, just to pass the time, because they had nothing to wager and way too much time on their hands.

The sounds gradually subsided and the lights became less frequent, as we continued down mainstreet, south toward the ocean. The taxi driver stopped when my brother tapped him on the shoulder. "Merci à vous." Scott paid him, and we unloaded our luggage onto the side of the road.

Then the man drove off, leaving us in complete darkness. I kept waiting for my eyes to adjust, but that never happened. I could smell surf somewhere, mixed with just a hint of sewage.

I had this feeling that we were being watched, but I couldn't see a fucking thing.

"It's just down these stairs." My brother Scott pointed the faint beam of his flashlight toward a flight of cracked concrete steps. I could not even see the bottom. We were carrying two fifty-pound duffle-bags each. "I hope they're home, man." My brother knocked on the flimsy hollow door. There were numerous dead-bolts holding it to the jam. Then Scott knocked again.

The person who came to the door was Caucasian, Canadian actually, Quebec to be precise. He spoke fluent French. "Bon Soir." He looked sleepy. "We thought you had been delayed."

"Sorry we're so late." Scott apologized.

"No problem." Marco motioned for us to follow him. "The power has been off for hours." He led us down a narrow hallway and pulled back a tattered curtain. "Please try to be quiet." Marco nodded and then moved aside. "Mpiñata y daughter wakes up for school early in the morning." Then Marco pointed into a dark room with no beds – only blankets on the floor. So I went without any dinner on my first night in Haiti.