1er SEMAINE
I feel like my soul is still catching up with my body. At night stretched out in the heat under my mosquito net, I question my decisions again because I know I’ve made bad ones. But perhaps these are growing pains. Having just finished a week of classes I can breathe a bit easier because of the familiarity with the environment and enthusiasm of the students.
Here’s where teaching takes place: an open air classroom under a bamboo roof holding about 40 students resplendent in their cine institute t-shirts of red, green or white, their mandatory uniforms worn proudly every day – watching a movie on a big monitor with big rap speakers – “Baraka” an anthropological film about nature, technology and humanity in all its fragile beauty. Twenty metres over and twenty metres down is the sea pounding the high rocks with its rhythmic roar, in close vicinity over the compound walls come sounds of farm animals tied to low bushes or grazing in sparse and uneven fields; a cow or a goat, always dogs, and only five kilometres away rise the mountains with their incessant rolling thunder sounds a constant reminder that catastrophe is never far away. Put all this together and you have a moment in time of my new environment.
In my first class I spoke about the language of images and tried to make a link with spoken/written language – had each student write their name on the blackboard saying it was their first expressive act in words -mirroring their first expressive act in images. I then showed a short clip from the Finnish film, shot in Helsinki called, “The Man Without A Past,” a masterpiece by Aki Kaurismaki, about losing and then finding identity. It must be strange for these students to see the deep musings of the white Europeans about their own tragic existence. My other class, the visual aesthetics class I had on Thursday would seem at first, to be either too complicated or abstract for young first year Haitian students, but I found quite the contrary. Making parallels to personal aesthetics and visual art made sense to them- they were then asked to watch in silence a long slide show of photos of world architecture, paintings from the ages (including Haitian paintings), photos and abstract visuals that I compiled. Allowing these images (that they’ve never seen before) to wash over them, they seemed to be inspired.
Here, respect for nature is a priori. Swimming on this turbulent rocky shore of the Caribbean Sea is dangerous and tropical creatures abound. Mosquitoes always require precautions; the 3-inch geckos running everywhere (I had one of these friends in my room) eat the mosquitoes. In one of the two kitchens, I saw a roach the size of a quarter. One morning I had a tarantula the diametre of the bottom of a bottle of Bordeaux on the wall above my outside door. Security came and killed it in case it was thinking about slipping under my door. Oh yeah, I bought a “moto” (a scooter actually) with the help of my colleague. Now I need to learn to ride it… It’s the best way to get around here and to make excursions out of the compound which are welcomed.
