"It was two weeks ago this very day, on a day much like this day, and the murky skies spilt upon the valley ground a rain not uncommon for the season, for monsoons were predictable and the years of erosion made them painfully so, but this one was laden heavy with a sense of doom the youthful had in their life time never felt, or would again, a doom the wise knew and, staring upwards as if glaring into the very eyes of something crooked and muddled… and familiar, a doom they feared was now back."

I found this sorry excuse for writing in one of my folders while looking for some article I was sure I'd need for that thesis I was sure I was going to work on. Well, I didn't work on it, but the writing got me thinking. Reading back to myself something I had written on a rainy, and very unproductive day in Porte-au-Prince last summer, I'm actually pretty surprised I had even that much insight into the economic/environmental crisis that continues to cripple Haiti. I knew next to nothing about this country.

What I would later learn, after getting back to school and ordering every book I could find that dealt with the Political Economy of Haiti-all 3 of them- was Haiti's sensitivity to weather, to put it mildly. Because of unchecked deforestation in the region, which itself is something of a Rubrik's Cube of fun to try and understand, Haiti's mountainsides have been stripped of trees which anchor the topsoil to the bedrock below. If you know anything about avalanches, you know that most slides are caused by some shift between two layers of snow that have different densities, weights, and so forth...it's science. Well, in cases of deforestation along hillsides, the topsoil "shifts" off the bedrock below when it rains, effectively causing mudslides, flooding, and usually thousands of deaths. Moreover, all of the nutrients have washed away and the fertility of the land takes a nose dive. This seems much less severe than "thousands of deaths", but in truth, the lowered productivity of the soil only leads to more deforestation, and thus more cataclysm (it's all part fo that Rubrik's Cube I mentioned). To touch on it a bit, deforestation here is caused by food insecurity and a steady charcoal industry, and when productivity falls, one option is to cut down more trees for more land, continuing a cycle of poverty and disaster.

So it's been raining pretty steadily for the last few weeks, every evening for about an hour or so, and it cools the air a bit and the sound lulls me to sleep like a warm glass of milk and honey. In July and August-the hurricane season- the valleys are going to flood again, goats and chickens will be washed away, and people will die. Many people don't know that in 2004, a year before Hurricane Katrina made landfall and killed some 1500-2000 in New Orleans, Tropical Storm Jeanne brushed passed Haiti and killed 3,000; 2,800 in the city of Gonaives alone. At least I'm in the mountains.

"... a doom the wise knew and, staring upwards as if glaring into the very eyes of something crooked and muddled… and familiar, a doom they feared was now back.

Sidenote: I'm going to start writing happier things, I promise:P