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."