Check me out...

At cjlotz.com now. It's getting a makeover soon, but it's where I'm blogging.

My relationship with numbers. And rats.

There are few experiences like moving to a new place to make you feel lost, humbled, and hungry for a little capability.

We've been here almost four weeks, and I'm still celebrating the little victories: The right Kreyol phrase at the right moment, knowing the name of all the fruit on the breakfast table, constantly switching between Haitian Goudes, American dollars and the ever-present but technically non-existent "Haitian Dollar."

Haitian Goudes are the official currency here. They come in bills: 10, 25, 50, 100, 250, 500, 1000 and coins (I know there are other coin amounts, but I've really only seen 5 goud coins).

There are 40 Haitian Goudes to the American Dollar.
Haitians usually ask for things in dollars. BUT the trick is, they mean the "Haitian Dollar" which means 5 goudes. It would make their week if you accidentally paid in American dollars.

Still, I know we usually get charged more for being foreigners, no matter the currency. The fact is, we can pay more. Just by having a home, food, and a small income for teaching, we are well-off in Haiti, and we can pay a few extra goudes for our Sprite or fresh green coconut.

So we're constantly doing the math in our heads. "Ok, 6 dollars, that's 30 goudes or basically 3/4 of an American dollar which is like 75 cents oh crap what are these numbers, what currency am I in again. My name is CJ, I don't know math, I am learning Creole I like coconuts!!"

Yes, I just devolve into a squawking lunatic, spouting numbers and random phrases. I'm cool.

That's been happening for the entire four weeks, and Nathan's knowledge of French has saved us in every mathematical situation. He knows French numbers, which are the same as Kreyol numbers. Also, Nathan knows more than numbers; He knows French. All of it, it seems like.

In every language I've tried to learn (German, Italian, Kreyol), numbers have been the most difficult thing for me. I'll be able to talk about family, food, and God before I can count to ten. I remember being in my fourth year of German and still looking over my friend's shoulder when the Frau told us to flip to a page in our textbook. 176? What is that again? Hundert sechs und...?

I don't want to be like this in Kreyol. Last night, I asked Nathan to drill me on numbers with flashcards, hand signals, math, counting, written tests, everything.

Bail (say Bye) and Gracieuse (say Gracias with a U), the women we live with, found our lesson to be more entertaining than the night's chores, so they also yelled numbers and cackled when I messed up. Bail was washing clothes on the porch and Gracieuse was cooking dinner, but both were happier to hurl numbers (and sometimes joking insults) my way.

Graciuse called me "thick-headed student" or "etidyan tèt di" because it took me so long to remember four, five, fourteen, fifteen, forty and fifty. Something about those fours and fives, I can't explain it.

Now add to this scene a few rats that kept running between our living room and the back door. I was fixated on scaring them, and stomped my feet every time I saw one (about every 2 minutes).

"Karant senk (45) AHHHHH" I yelled, jumped up and screamed at the rat. Bail peered in from the front porch and yelled, "ou dezòd anpil" or, "you're really disordered!" Which means she was telling me I needed to be institutionalized. I'm happy to be the entertainment.

I'd rather be a blan who speaks Kreyol than a blan who screams at rats in English. I'm learning to curse them in Kreyol, and I can count them too (as long as there aren't more than 100).

Gelée Beach spectrum

Les Cayes, Haiti (where I live) is next to a few public beaches, and they can be crazy party hot spots or relaxing vacation destinations, in turns.

Gelée Beach is one of those places.

Last weekend, the town and people from all over Haiti came to Gelée to celebrate the Assumption of Mary. This Catholic holiday celebrates Mary's (as in Jesus' ma's) rise into Heaven. Catholicism is the official religion of Haiti, and I'm learning that Catholics and non-Catholics in Haiti are always excited for a reason to party. 

This event put the craziest shindig I attended in college to shame.

Digicel (Huge cell phone company in the Caribbean) sponsored much of the party, and there was live music, hundreds of people swimming in the ocean, mobs of dancers, drinkers, and people walking around selling whatever liquid courage you wanted. We went with some friends (including their toddler, MoMo, who was fascinated by everything) and sat at a restaurant overlooking the water and the party.

We ate goat, fried plantain, avocados, and piles of pikliz (my favorite food in Haiti-- a very spicy coleslaw-type topping). We drank Prestige, the beer of Haiti, and watched people trying to push through the crowds on motorcyles.

Just a few days later, this Friday, we returned to Gelée and had dinner with the director of our school. It was just us, a few couples, and small groups of teenagers on the beach.

I loved feeling like locals here--we were there for the party, and the chill of the week after.

 

Nathan looks over the water (and at the piles of trash left over from the fun of last weekend).

 

Boats on the shore at dusk.

Me with boats. Forrest Gump would say, "Thats ma boat," but I couldn't because it wasn't ma boat.

 

Sun casting colors on the clouds.

 

 The best dinner in Haiti so far: I had lobster seasoned with lime and peppers. Nathan had conch.

 

Places like this remind me of Haiti's beauty. It could be a tourist destination, not just for people wanting to "help" or "evangelize" but for people who just want to see a naturally gorgeous place.

Kreyol Vocab learned:
Lanbi: Conch
Woma: Lobster

Nonprofit lesson planning

Nathan and I have arrived in Les Cayes, where we will be teaching at the Bishop Tharp Institute. We both signed up to teach two English classes, as well as a special course each: Nathan will teach micro economics and I'll teach Nonprofit management.

A great teacher of mine from IU had her class donate some Nonprofit books that I'll be using for lesson planning and articles.

I also just finished a brutal book about that topic. It's called "Travesty in Haiti" and gives examples of how aid (especially thoughtless food aid) has been a disaster in Haiti. If you want to hear another side of the aid story, read this book. It'll make you think again about where you put your money.

I hope to use examples in this book as discussion starters in my NGO class. For example, is foreign food aid a helpful way to feed more people in Haiti, or does it destroy Haiti's own system of farming and selling?

I've been warned many times that Haitian schooling is based on an old French system of memorization and repetition. Teacher talks. Students listen and write down everything. They regurgitate it for the test.

I'm not crazy about this method. There needs to be discussion, especially for students learning about NGO power in their own country.

I'm trying to plan lessons that will allow for some memorization--terms, policies, etc. But I'm hoping to think of engaging discussion questions and group activities. That's one of my tasks for today and this semester and would love any advice from friends and teachers.

Yon Papiyon

Yon papiyon = a butterfly

While visiting Okap (Cap Haitien) Nathan and I worked with a nonprofit organization called Meds for Kids. It's St. Louis-based and creates a thereauputic peanut butter (In Creole, medika mamba) for severely malnourished children.

One of the days we traveled to peanut fields and learned about varieties of peanuts. We also helped irrigate a farmer's field, and two brothers followed us to watch. The boys would carry hoses or rope, get tired, and then run around in circles, eventually sitting down to keep an eye on us.

The older brother caught a butterfly, and suddenly something was far more amusing than us.

Ok, it might have been a moth, but it was the prettiest moth I've ever seen.

The Citadel

Here's how we got to the Citadel, Haiti's impressive fortress built to fight off France in the early 1800s: Take a car into Okap. Catch a tap-tap (public pickup truck. Known for it's get-off signal: hitting the side of the truck). We pay a few extra gourdes to sit in the front seat. And because we're obviously tourists.

Tap-tap, photo from Wikipedia.

Take tap-tap to Milot, a charming valley town in the shadow of the Citadel. We meet our tourguide there, a man named Johny Remy. We pay for three horses, and ride them 7 miles to the Citadel, stopping for water and fruit breaks.

It's amazing the Citadel isn't more crowded. We saw few other people.

It's this historical gem that you can just roam around. You can touch the cannons, run your fingers along the walls, climb on the breaking stairways. If Haiti were to increase its tourism, this would be a place to invest in and protect.

 Fun for a rock-climber. Sitting on top of the Citadel. Nathan has more photos on his blog.

On the way down, we visited the ruins of Sans Sousi, a regal palace. Here, leader Henri Christophe had a printing press, among other luxuries (I sat on his running-water toilet! One of the first of its kind). Indiana University's Lilly Library has a book that was printed at Sans Sousi, and a few years ago, I put it on display for an exhibit I created for the Haitian Studies Association annual conference.  I loved seeing where it was printed, and how far it traveled.

Check Nathan's blog for more.

A soccer game.

 

Our first night in Haiti, my boyfriend Nathan and I stayed here: The Matthew 25 House. We stayed in a brightly painted room on two cots and were thankful for the breeze moving the curtains. From this deck, we watched a soccer game between two local teams.

The self-appointed ball guy was the most fun to watch. He wore a pink ball cap and a leisure shirt with boats and anchors on it. He ran around collecting soccer balls that got kicked out of bounds and threw in new ones.

 

The goalie of one team needed a break in the 100-degree heat. A friend poured a plastic pouch of water over his head.

Finally, a breeze picked up and the flag waved above the crowd.

Haiti

I'll be spending about 10 months in Haiti starting in... 14 hours. I'm grateful for the chance to learn and live there. I'll post more about that once I get my new website finished soon!

The best place for ideas.

I'm addicted to craigslist. I don't even want any of the stuff posted on there, but I love looking at the low-resolution photos of couches, apartments, and beat-up lawn mowers.

But my favorite part, the part I check obsessively, is missed connections. It's the place where people post about their instantaneous crushes, the girl whose number they lost, or the man who walked by and whose face is stuck in their head:

"I was pretty sure that you winked at me. Maybe you have a weird eye twitch, or maybe it was a brightness issue. Maybe I imagined it."

Some people are wistful:

"i wonder some things, like...
why do we only hold hands when we're alone?"

and others are just raunchy.

Either way, these moments make for great scenes, characters, and writing ideas.

My favorite, ever, is this one:
"The Clunker" from Ithaca
Ron here, used car salesman. I sold you a d-mn old car that practically needed horses to pull it out of the lot. I've been up nights, thinking I am a criminal for selling a woman a car like that. Just what in tar-nation are you planning to do with it? I got more words than pleases most people, but I try not to mince em. I'd like to take you out to dinner. If you can make something of that soot-bellied clunker, I'd like to see what else you have up your sleeve.

Hops.

In 2010, there were 1,753 breweries operated in the US, which is the highest total since the late 1800s. (That's from The Brewers Association).

I'm researching craft breweries. 

This weekend, I'm covering Bloomington's first craft beer festival (Saturday). Stop by if you're in town.

Vodka tinctures.

I've been making vodka infusions out of delicious things.

Just pick a fruit/root/flower/herb and cover it in vodka. Put it in a jar and give it a shake once a day, then add it to your favorite drinks.

From left to right:

Habanero vodka (for ass-whomping Bloody Marys)
grapefruit
black pepper, lemon, cardamom
sassafras root
wood sorrel (will be mixed with other things to make bitters)
chicory flower and root

close up on sassafras, sorrel and chicory vodka.

Back up to speed.

This has been happening lately:

I graduated.

Me and Erin, who will be teaching in Colorado Springs with Teach For America.

I started freelance writing for Indianapolis Monthly, Golfweek.com and St. Louis magazine. Here's the first article I did for Golfweek.

My backyard has a tire swing, hammock, trampoline, and puppy. It is also my office this summer. (When a source doesn't call me back right away, I nap in the hammock. It's rough.)

My friends Chaz and Chet on the trampoline.

Tire swing, Piper, hammock.

The peonies bloomed. I love peonies. Sometime I'll write a blog post about why I love peonies. And then two storms came and destroyed them, as well as houses and trees and cars.

This is a tree that fell in front of my house and didn't hurt anyone or anything.

A few friends and I planted a garden. Now we're harvesting mustard greens, bok choy, spinach, and basil.

That's Laura putting compost in the clay-filled beds. Now, the garden has grown and we just added cages around the tomatoes:

A personal essay about being terrible at golf.

Golfweek.com sponsored an essay contest about golf. They encouraged you to write about playing or visiting the Masters. I wrote instead about my family and how I don't fit in as a golfer. Still, golf has been formative for me. Here's what I wrote:

Golf runs four generations deep in my family. It soars like a long drive through the family tree, then lands on the green, rolls, and stops abruptly at me. I am the one who grew up around the greatest game ever played and chose instead to write.

My family owns St. Louis’ most popular driving range and I’ve worked there my whole life, filling baskets, judging yardage, and helping customers pick the right driver. But don’t ask me to swing the club.

My greatest golf memory does not involve playing. It’s a memory of an entire night hand-picking golf balls out of thick mud. Because I love my dad and my dad loves golf.

Squirp. Squish. After a week of rain, we couldn’t run the ball picker across our 390-yard field. Doing so would press the thousands of speckled white orbs into the goop, losing our family’s investment in other people’s recreation.

The last of the night hitters gone, my dad and I walked into the wet field, each with a scoop on a club shaft and a bucket in hand. It was after midnight and we turned off the range lights so we could see by moonlight. I never knew a golf ball was so bright by night.

My dad’s rhythm mesmerized me. Scoop a ball, flick it up, hear it whir into the basket. Scoop, flick, whir. My rhythm was more like scoot, scoot, plunk, as I shuffled the balls around, tossed them into the air and missed the basket.

But I did help, dad said. We dumped basket after basket into the back of a truck, until the field looked like a row of cotton picked nearly clean. The night turned into a pale pink sunrise, and dad shouted to me that the first hitters had arrived.

We drove the balls to the washer and our night’s labor meant brimming baskets the rest of the day. Our customers could practice and my family could earn a living.

Dad handed me a $20 bill over our pancake breakfast. He told me he had been picking the field by hand since he was a teenager with his dad. Any skill takes practice.

I went home and napped all afternoon while he went back to teach lessons. Dad must have been tired, but he taught me about the work that must be done even if you hear no praise.

I didn’t take up golf like my dad and his dad and his dad. I chose instead to write and report for my career. I don’t include on my resume the summers handing out buckets of balls. I’ll drive a ball every once in a while, but I’m not a player. I’ve always thought of the range as just a family job.

But when I think about it, golf was the first place I learned to pay attention, obsess about accuracy, and value a learning process.

Golf taught me that language is power. If I wanted to get by in my family, I needed to know the difference between a slice and a hook, I needed to understand par, and above all, I needed to be silent sometimes.

When I write an article, I prefer to observe rather than bombard my source with questions. Like in golf, the biggest moments of truth come through stillness.

My memory of golf taught me about characters, about people. There’s the Zen golfer, the dedicated golfer, the retired golfer, and the snuck-a-six-pack-on-the-back-nine-of-a-family-par-3 golfer.

I’m grateful for every one of those characters, even though I was never great at golf myself. I’m grateful that they taught me to observe, to pay attention to the details when I speak and write, to tee up again, and to correct my strokes.

My interaction with the game of golf is not about country clubs and holes-in-one. My memory is behind the scenes, looking at the industry of golf as it shapes the lives of individuals and families across the world.

My family speaks golf: the language that taught me to tell true stories. I learned how to look someone in the eye, have a firm grip, and respect rules even if no one is keeping score. At the driving range, I learned how to wipe the mud off my shoes and keep walking.

Australia

I visited Australia for Spring Break.

It was wet where it is usually dry.

Our journalism group learned about Aboriginal media. Here is an excerpt from a paper I wrote about the trip: Where political action, the education system, and employers have affronted Aboriginal Australians, the radio does not. Never forcing Aboriginals into a white mold, the radio instead allows the indigenous population to express their oral culture throughout the country. There are no whitefellas to tell them how to be Australian.

The class also blogged about the trip.

The Olympic torch.

Rain in the desert park, where everything is usually dry and red.

Camel teeth.

Bo's is where all the locals and travelers gather. The American group of girls was a spectacle.

I loved these creepy masks at a market in Sydney.

The trip showed me how media outlets like TV and radio stations can be a source of pride and power for marginalized groups. If you're curious about the places we visited, check out CAAMA and Koori Radio.

Sweet old world.

Lucinda Williams played in Bloomington at the Buskirk Chumley last night.

It was my second and favorite time seeing her play. Instead of a full band, she treated us to a simple set of one woman and her guitar.

Here's the setlist.

4 things.

1. Horseradish > regular radish, especially when it comes to sandwiches from The Runcible Spoon.

2. This article is sharp. It discusses what it means to show actresses eating huge portions of burgers and fries while interviewing them.

3. It's getting warmer!

4. That means a few friends and I are planning a vegetable garden for the summer in Bloomington. Hallelujah.

A film I hope you'll see.

This is the trailer for a film.

This is the trailer for a film made by two people I love.

My brother (humble, patient, my best friend) is the editor.

His girlfriend, an ass-kicking activist, Rhianon Gutierrez, is the writer, director and passion behind the piece. A bit on Rhi, from her website:

"Fiercely committed to fostering an inclusive society in which all people are treated with respect, Rhianon uses her film background to produce and direct intimate, character-driven narrative and documentary films that educate about social issues on a greater scale."



Thought I'd share a little of their joy with you. They're hoping for a July release date in LA. Click for the film's page.

Mississippi John Hurt

Oh man, where have I been? This guy is incredible.

3 things.

1. Dream point-of-views are wonky. I had one last night that looked like an interview and my friend Andy looked right into the camera/my eyes and said, "Pretty face, hairy little arms." That's a great line.

2. @CJ_Lotz, learning this twitter thang.

3. I had fun with leftovers today. In the big pot, veggie odds and ends simmering for soup stock. I also sprinkled in celery salt, basil, rosemary, and olive oil. The little pot is leftover rice plus milk, sugar, and butter for some rice pudding. Mmmm.

Beer bread.

So delicious, my roomie and I have made it 3 times this semester, using this recipe. We used Blue Moon, but what about Guinness for a darker bread? An IPA might give it a really strong, hoppy flavor too. I'll have to try it out.

The butter on top makes the crust crunchy, but the inside stays soft for days. It's perfect with soup. We had it with venison stew one cold and snowy day:

I'll have it with leftover chili tomorrow.

My friend Larry ...

... is an incredible designer with a ton of ideas. He's started a "visual column" in the Indiana Daily Student as a way to comment on life visually and redesign the world as he sees fit.

Check out his first column, and check out his clean, cool website too.

Just a little approval.

In high school, I used to wake up early with my mom on Saturdays in the summer, eat breakfast, then drive west on 44 to the flea market. We weren't stellar thrifters but we knew what we liked when we saw it. A necklace with a bumble bee for me, a funny marionette for her.

One time I came across a simple enamel bowl with goofy medieval figures around the rim. I remembered one of the first rules of haggling: don't act too interested early on. I loved that bowl, but I placed it back on the table without seeing a price tag and looked over the other items. I was guessing it was 10 or even 20 bucks, now that retro was chic in the boonies of Missouri.

"Want that bowl? Take it for a dollar." The seller man had been watching me from his lawn chair. A dollar? For something I loved for all its weird charm? I joyfully paid in quarters.

I now use that bowl for mixing cookie dough, salad greens, and vegetables when I make spicy Haitian pikliz:


The other day, I was looking at a favorite blog, Design*Sponge when I came across a beautiful kitchen that featured products the editors love. And then I saw my bowl! It's selling for 85 bucks on etsy, and it was a piece by a famous Finnish designer Kaj Franck. Good instincts, yeah? I'm keeping them, and my bowl.

To read.

I met Thomas Lake at a Poynter writing conference and was completely blessed by his humility and perceptions on writing, life, and stories.

And then I read one of his articles.

This story is an amazing piece of work, about a high school football player who ran himself to death at practice.

The things I love about this article: Christ figure/perfection/power/surrender motifs throughout; The organization of the article leads you through with a chugging "engine." You want to know what happened at the practice and afterward, but you don't get all the details at once. Also, the mini profiles of all the main players/personalities. And the ending.

So purdy.