Roasted Carsmallows

            The other afternoon I was settling in for a nice nap and did doze off for a good twenty-minutes, when all of a sudden I was awoken by a barrage of sirens. For a moment I thought we were being invaded by USSR the way emergency vehicles seemed to have been swarming from all over. I peeked out my window and saw a couple of firetrucks pass by, along with a police car. The firetruck needed to honk its horn every two seconds just to make sure I was fully awake at this point and had absolutely no shot at falling back asleep.

             Laying on my pillow in a feudal attempt to get more sleep, I kept hearing the sirens and would occasionally have a red or orange light flash in my window. I figured, whatever the cause of this is, it must be something big(and it better have been for my sleep to be interrupted). That all lasted for about a good two hours. I checked all the local news stations during the night to get an idea of what all the commotion was about, but nothing was mentioned. The following afternoon had decent weather and clear skies, so I decided to take my bike out for a little spin. At this point, probably with a dozen other things on my mind, I had completely forgotten the mysterious siren-issue from the day before. I rode about two blocks and I was rapidly coming upon a weird looking jeep. As I got closer, I realized the vehicle must have recently been on fire since it was showing signs of such damage; The front part of the jeep was totally burned, the windows were blown out, the mirrors were melted, and the hood was mangled. I took a look at the inside of the jeep and saw pretty much everything inside was burnt or melted. The only item to still be intact was the Chinese food take-out menu someone must have dropped on the driver's seat after the fire. My anger over losing sleep the day before subsided from the fact I was able to see something awesome out of it.

              Perhaps all those emergency vehicles were scrambling around to find a bag of marshmallows...

That Fire Smells Real Close

            For various numbers of reasons, people in Haiti like to set fires and burn stuff. One of the reasons is that there isn't many options for disposing trash in public places, or sometimes dumpsters get too full and there's nowhere else to put new garbage. If that's the case, a pile of garbage will be up in flames in no time. In other cases, craftsmen and curbside vendors need to keep small fires next to them for their businesses and the things they're building or cooking. The moral of the story is there's almost always the smell of smoke and fire in the air.

           The other day I was cooking lunch, and as usual was using a hand towel to help pick up hot items from the stove. Specifically, I had to dump some extra water out of a pot and place it back on the stove. No more than two seconds later I smelt something burning. Again, it's a common smell for Haiti, so I didn't think much of it as first. Then the smell got really strong like perhaps the neighbor's house next door was on fire. Then of all sudden my fingers felt really hot and I looked down and saw that half of the hand towel I was holding in my hand was up in flames. I reacted immediately by throwing the towel to the floor and stomping out the flame. For added measure, I even soaked the towel in the sink to make sure the fire was completely diminished. When I was picking up the pot from the stove with the towel, a piece hanging down must have caught the flame.

          So I guess I can add my cooking to reasons why Haiti smells like smoke...