Heavenly Goat

Heaven is a lot of different things for different people. And right now I am in heaven. The crunch of green leaves, with chlorophyll, antioxidants and vitamins bursting in my mouth. I feel like a goat. A heavenly goat.

When I am a visitor to a country I try to eat as close to local custom as possible, it is easiest and a part of learning about the country and the people. But with an addiction to vegetables and an allergy to wheat meal time in Haiti gets a little complicated.

Breakfast always included Kaiser size, Safeway bagel dense white flour buns. Included in the fare served would be alternately stew with meat and home made pasta balls, spaghetti in tomato sauce, deep fried egg omelette, boiled plantain bananas with a meat soup to pour over them, corn maize porridge with meat or sardine soup, and some fruit (usually a banana each or on rare occasion sliced pineapple).

The main meal in Haiti is lunch. Every day I would look at the table of food prepared for us in wonderment at how many forms of starch can be prepared for one meal; boiled plantain bananas, lam (a white starch that grows on trees), sweet potato and rice.

This assortment of starches were served with some kind of meat stew or broth to douse them in, as well maybe sliced tomato, boiled carrots, avocado and iceberg lettuce.There was always a huge mountain of rice at lunch. Plain white rice or rice cooked with some form of bean (black, kidney, navy…).

Ritualistically they eat the other starches with the meat sauce and vegetables first. Then their ‘bisse’ or round two was a mountain of rice as large as could be contained on their plates.

(This would explain why every day after lunch I had scheduled in a siesta before continuing to work.)

Evenings we would find a platter of buns with processed cheese triangles or butter (that they would slather on to the same thickness of cheese) and a drink, either hot chocolate, tea or Tampico (fake fruit juice). Sometimes it would vary and there would be pasta again or potatoes.

This time, I will concede that I ate a form of green vegetable five times on this trip (boiled spinach twice and green beans twice and one day we even had a few leaves of fresh ‘herb’). Iceberg lettuce (with a faint taste of chlorine) was served a few times, but my proficient addiction to vegetables cannot consider iceberg lettuce green – it is merely cellulose encapsulating water. So if we calculate that in 21 days, that’s 63 meals. (That’s 7.9% of my meals that included something green.)

With such a lack of vegetables and a culture with a penchant for all things wheat, I became known for my capacity to eat kassav, momba and bananas in unparalleled proportions; at least two times a day and sometimes as a snack in between. There really wasn’t anything else.

As I tuck into my first salad in three weeks, I can feel the nutrients barreling through my veins. And yet, as I sit here I can’t deny that regardless of how good the greens are, the people and the laughter that I shared for every one of those 63 meals more than made up for it.