Haiti's Picture of the Day : Playing Cards

This picture was taken in the cemetery of Jacmel. I had gotten it into my head that we had to visit it (maybe after reading Edwige Danticat's After the Dance), but we took a longer route starting from the beach, and when we reached it, the sun was already low in the sky. This was during our last visit to Haiti, in July 2008. We went in, anyway...

The place was quiet, beautiful, and mysterious, an abundant vegetation growing over the tombs and climbing the walls of the family vaults.

A group of men was playing cards, maybe "bézigue," which is a card game that my husband has tried to teach me, quite unsuccessfully. They were using a tomb as their table.  See the second man on the left ? He has a wooden cloth peg pinched on the top of his nose, which means he had lost the last game. The next player to loose will inherit the cloth peg.