■ 22 April 2010 | 9:52 AM
Earth Day in Haiti
From Nancy Young
This morning I made my orange juice from concentrate.
That's because of Haiti.
It’s been exactly a year since I went to Haiti for the first time – I spent Earth Day there last year, though it didn’t occur to me then. Haiti is the perfect place for Earth Day, a paradoxically utterly beautiful and environmentally devastated.
The first time I took a walk in Port-au-Prince I saw ravines that served as the front yards of the poor. And lining the ravines, melting into the slope, was trash. Not official landfills, just nowhere else to put it.
It was the first time I became truly conscious of trash. I actually brought mine home with me because I felt like it would hurt people less here. The garbage guy comes to my house and takes it away. Out of sight, out of mind…except, not really. Haiti has a way of showing me that my illusions of protection are, well, illusions.
Haiti is one of the world’s canaries in the coal mine – this is what happens when you don’t take care of the earth, this is what happens when you sacrifice the many for the benefit of a greedy few, this is what happens when you take too much and don’t give enough back.
High falutin’, mostly ineffectual thoughts in my hands, I’m afraid. The only concrete thing I can say I’ve changed is that I make less trash.
It started several months ago, inadvertently, with making orange juice from those concentrate cans that my mom used to use when I was little. It’s been a couple of decades since cartons of “not-from-concentrate,” with its illusion of fresh squeezed juice, became the norm.
I first bought the cans because they were cheaper – and Haiti has made me feel sheepish about paying more for illusions of fresh squeezed. But the main reason became that they make for less trash than a carton with those plastic spouts.
I use four cans of water, rather than the recommended three, to make it last longer. I shut the faucet off in between cans.
I’ve noticed, too, I tend not to waste food – I finish the loaves of bread, even if they’re a little stale, and cartons of milk instead of throwing half-finished spoiled ones out, which I did regularly before...which is kind of amazing to me now.
And, I’ve pretty much stopped eating frozen dinners, which used to be a staple. It was always a goal, they have too much salt, homemade’s better and less expensive, yada, yada, yada.
But, since Haiti, I’ve felt bad putting all that packaging, those plastic compartmentalized trays, in the trash. I feel like I may as well be flinging them into the ravines where people are trying to live – really makes it difficult to enjoy my Lean Cuisines.
On the other hand, I’ve gotten good at making diri ak pwa – Haitian rice and beans – with fresh garlic and onion. The other day I made some fish with lime and pike pimon (hot peppers) and dreamed of the beach, and the mountains you can see from the sea, and the pwason fre (fresh fish) of Haiti.
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