The women at reception and the nurse who administered my shots were all very helpful, friendly and kind. I had heard good things about the clinic- and they are all true. The nurse talked me through all of the necessary and recommended vaccinations, inquired about the work I will be doing in Haiti and was altogether fantastically pleasant and smart. I promised to send her a link to this blog.
Tomorrow I start Typhoid pills and I need to pick up Malaria pills this week. My new passport should arrive early next week. I still need to purchase a ticket from San Francisco to Ft. Lauderdale and expect to do so this week. Otherwise, I think I'm on schedule.
Here's what I am reading right now:
The White Man's Burden: Why the West's efforts to aid the rest have done so much ill and so little good -William Easterly
The Uses of Haiti -Paul Farmer
The End of Poverty -Jeffrey D. Sachs
Creole Made Easy -Wally R. Turnbull
A Small Place (fiction) -Jamaica Kincaid (I read this 6+ years ago and am rereading it now)
Krik? Krak! (short stories) -Edwidge Danticat (I have read this book as well, but some time ago. If you haven't heard of Edwidge Danticat, I highly recommend her books especially The Farming of Bones. She is a brilliant Haitian-American writer).
The Black Diaspora: Five centuries of the Black experience outside Africa -Ronald Segal
I better get back to it! More soon.
Peace.
2 more books to add to your excellent list: "On That Day Everybody Ate" by Margaret Trost. The book is an insightful, and honest account of the struggles of the author, a middle class American, to come to grips with the gulf between the poverty she saw in Haiti and the comfort we have here. In the end it is hopeful. Just out in September.
ReplyDelete"Damming the Flood" by Peter Hallward. Updates the analysis in "The Uses of Haiti", especially the US role in the 2004 coup.