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Sparkle (1)
I have a new best friend. She's cool and smooth and adaptable. Kind of like a Dragon-Tattooed-urbanite who can deal with any situation, from a tweaking guest at a rave, to the post-modern gut-angst of intellectuals. She's slow to rile too - give her a nudge and all she does is gurgle at you.
She's the toilet in my house.
I've been feeling the love ever since I recently got back from Haiti. At night, when the rooster began his panicky crowing at 3am, I got up, pushed through my mosquito netting and stumbled past sleeping co-workers to our iron-gated front door. Everything in Haiti is locked behind metal. I'd fumble for the key on the nail in the dark (thinking, yet again, about how we'd all die if there was a fire, locked inside as we were), to open the doorway's Adams'-Family-creaking gate. Then, once outside in the still-hot Caribbean night, I'd turn on my headlamp and weave my way to the "bathroom." Despite being closet-small, and covered, over every square inch, in unspeakable fluids, and reeking worse than an ancient, abandoned alley-side Port-a-Pottie, it too was tightly locked behind a metal gate. After fumbling with keys and getting the deadbolt to slide, I'd do my business by hovering over a deceptively-normal looking toilet. Perched on a ledge was a pre-sliced SkyMall magazine thoughtfully provided by our host - to be used as toilet paper. I got, from the experience, a new perspective on in-flight gadgetry ads, once I had the opportunity to choose several times a day which one to use to wipe my bottom.
And after the unavoidable juggling act of keys, paper, and hand sanitizer, came the bucket pour. You couldn't just pull a handle. Well, you could, but nothing would happen. Instead, you had to scoop a bucket of dubious water out of a large plastic bin (while trying to not think about what might be growing in that much-handled bucket). And then you needed an aggressive pour to get the water from the bucket to force the contents of the toilet bowl down a pipe to who-knows-where. No one warns you that splash-back is an inevitable fact of life. Hence the perpetually damp, unspeakable floor. Since sewer pipes were almost non-existent (and "water treatment plants" a thing of myth) BEFORE the earthquake, there's no telling where your bucket's dump goes. Perhaps back up under your floor somewhere. And, keep in mind, our toilet facilities during this trip were, by far, the best that I'd seen Haiti offer, either in February or now.
But in the best of homes, there was at least, in February, a sense that the bucket-dump into a rocking shell of a damaged toilet was a temporary approach to sewage and sanitation. October's trip (and its cholera outbreak) proved that assumption wrong. Even knowing there hadn't been "much" progress, I still went nine months after the earthquake hoping to see change. So was there change? Or was my toilet experience symbolic of all Haiti's lack-of-progress?
Turns out, Port au Prince was different. But not exactly the way I'd envisioned it.
For a start, the city was heart-breakingly neater. Port au Prince looked as though a million women with twiggy brooms had, together, swept the dirt of this entire San Francisco-sized metropolitan area. Literal canyons of dust and rubble had been brushed away or tucked into corner lots.
And walls were dismantled. By hand. We saw a man taking down one listing concrete-block wall with nothing more than a broken piece of rebar. There was nothing else for him to use, not even a hammer, much less a sledgehammer. Since there's no heavy machinery at work, the dismantling can only go down as far as the owner is able to bang it out, leaving behind sturdier triangular corners. The roofless homes marching in a line across a hillside, originally shaped like rectangles, now looked like jagged broken-off teeth.
It is still clear that the city had taken a solid punch. And now it's swaying under the on-coming battering of cholera and a storm, both of them threatening to undo what progress has been made.
You see, the other signs of progress were more social than structural. Since February, people now thronged the sidewalks, weaving like schools of fish, the motion and conversations constant - where before there were only random flat-faced becalmed groups, drifting here and there like untethered seaweed, so abnormal
