Bad mothering

On Maundy Thursday Osh came home from school armed with the goodies he had made - a lovely necklace for me (and Nicky to share, apparently, but Nicky let me wear it!), a basket with a cupcake in it decorated with a blue marshmallow chick (pictured, just before he devoured it) and 2 fridge magnets.

Easter was a marvellously old fashioned affair here. Most of the West Indies is, in fact, rather conservative (for a region that makes a pile of money from scantily dressed girls and is awash with alcohol) and wonderfully old fashioned. There was no alcohol for sale anywhere on Good Friday, no shops were open on Easter Sunday (in fact most places – except IGA! – are closed on Sundays) and everyone was decked out in there Sunday best for most of the weekend. Oh, and the Haitian preacher turns out to be in a church just behind the Liquor Store down the road….

We woke to the sound of cheeping on Easter Sunday morning. A lovely bright sunny day (a huge improvement on the 3 days of torrential we’d had before) and there was a mummy hen and 5 wee chicks – one of them a Hallmark (inc) yellow. Which, when you think about it, is not the most evolutionary sensible colour to be in a bush made up of browns and greens. Osh was seriously excited about the chicks but that excitement was then superceded by joy at the discovering of a rash of chocolate eggs about the farm (see, if you feed hens chocolate they produce chocolate eggs!). I think Cadbury’s might put different stuff in to their crème eggs which stay remarkably solid in the heat….

Easter Monday was not such a happy morning. Out there in the bush behind the kitchen was the cheep cheep of chicks. They only make this noise when they are looking for Mum. Mum was nowhere to be seen and we think she is either sitting on more eggs (they lay 1 a day, each egg takes 28 days to incubate so the clutch will not all hatch at once) or got eaten by wild dogs Sunday night (there was an awful lot of barking going on outside). Whichever the answer, the 3 chicks (only 3 in evidence) have little chance of surviving – it has been chilly the past 2 nights and they are still pretty clueless about how to find food. Nicky kindly went into the bush and managed to rescue one chick which we put in the enclosure but by the end of the day all three chicks where back together wandering all over the farm still looking for Mum. Osh has accepted, with sanguine, the inevitably that they will die. But we still have 11 other chicks who are all alive and well!

Other excitement yesterday was a monstrous bonfire. There are vast amounts of garden trash here – big stuff, the sort of stuff that takes ages to rot (palm leaves, coconuts and so on) and although we have 15 acres of land much of it is still native bush and the trash is using up valuable space. So, we burned it – the fire started at 10 am and is still smoking this morning (Tuesday) but has made a huge difference. Thousands of cockroaches came scurrying out of the pile, along with some HUGE spiders and a couple of snakes (very, very small glistening black ones). Talking of snakes Osh came running down the hill last week all excited that Nicky had found a venomous victor….turns out what he meant was a boa constrictor (which of course is not venomous). It was very small and had been hiding in a pile of wood. We took a photo of it and then released it back into the bush. First time I’ve ever seen a live snake in the wild – Nicky has seen much, much larger boa constrictors here.


Last weekend we went to the dump and I remembered to take the camera with me. I met my first ever real life garbage picker there. Having lectured on poverty and garbage so often it was rather surreal to see one in the flesh, as it were. If there were a world prize for recycling the Republic of Haiti would win it hands down. This garbage picker was Haitian (and an adult, not a child, thank heavens) and went to each car as it arrived sifting through the garbage for useful stuff – broken computers, bottles, plastics, tyres and so on. There is no recycling at all on the islands although vast amounts of garbage do find their way back to Haiti where they are put to good use. After the dump we went to Malcolm Beach at Northwest Point - the most norwesterly point on the island and very remote. Utterly beautiful with cacti growing on the beach, and you'll see from the photo that Osh has gone quite blonde!