Days One & Two

It’s hard to even start typing this blog because I already have done so much in the past two days that I feel like I’ve been here a week at least.  I think a bullet point list of activities will cover it best right now:

Day 1

• Arrive in Port au Prince Airport at 8:10 am yesterday, breeze through customs, and get into a tap tap with Chris, and Elain (I cannot be held accountable for spellings of any names in this or any future blogs) who is one of Chris’ good Haitian friends.
• Visit Elain’s family to see their new house, his adorable wife and young children.  The 3 year old has had a rash for a while and Elain wanted Chris to take a look at it.

• Head to the home of some of Chris’s American friends who live here doing medical work (and raise their 8 children, 4 biological, 4 adopted), to pick up some medical supplies from a storage unit they let CHI use.
• Pick up Rigan on the way, a former employee of CHI who is still very interested in working on Community Health Worker programs in different communities.  His English is incredible.

• Arrive at the house (they had two beautiful mastiffs) and spend the next hour or two sorting through medicines to bring back to Mission Matana.
• Take the tap tap back through Port-au-Prince up to Arcahaie and arrive at Mission Matana.

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• Meet Liz and Abbey, the two other Americans who will be here the whole time I am. More on them later.
• Go walking for several hours around the nearby villages for a full tour of the latrines which are still being constructed; the river, canal system, and dam; the decrepit road which needs major work to be functional for vehicles; and crop irrigation system.
• Best part of the walk for me was the little girlfriends I made—I think they deserve their own post though—soon to follow.
• Home to dinner at the mission (lots of great stories of the happenings from the last month told to us by Liz and Abbey), then a skype conference call with a fellow CHI’er, and then to bed.  (Oh, I did end up having to pack back up and switch rooms with Chris around 9 pm because we discovered my door did not lock.  Well it locked, but the door frame could very easily be pulled off the wall, definitely not leaving the room secure.)

Day 2

• First moto ride (of my life).  As nervous as I was, it was not only super fun, but I felt pretty safe.  And, as weird as it sounds, sitting between Santho, (my translator, creole teacher, and good friend after today) and the moto driver, not holding on to anything (and yes, sorry parents, no helmet) I felt really secure.  I also heard that moto drivers are extra careful when they are transporting “blan,” and I definitely experienced this to be true today.
• The trip was so I could go into town to exchange money, buy a phone sim card, and get some internet card minutes—and also get over the hurdle of my nervousness to leave the mission without Chris or the girls.  Santho and I were fairly successful on these errands, and I am just so glad to have gotten to know him, had him with me, and very excited that he will be my translator and companion doing the water surveys in the coming weeks.
• Next, Chris, the girls, Santho, and I went into the village to visit with Peterson, who is now going to be running the Gadyen Dlo program.  He was awesome.  And, he drove us around in his tap tap the rest of the day.
• We went into Debak to visit a hospital to make connections there for Abbey and the next time there is a CHI clinic team down here.
• Then, onto the coast road, Route 1, and went to Kaliko, the resort. We went there so Chris could introduce us to the manager, a Canadian former Olympic wrestler, who invited us to stop by anytime during our stay.  We also wanted to talk to him about real estate around Arcahaie because we’ve come to the conclusion that getting CHI it’s own “office” type of space may be slightly more productive to our projects and causes than always staying at the Mission.  We’ll see what happens and I’ll explain more about this at some point.
• Next, we head home, after stopping by a former clinic patient on our way.  Most memorable for me was meeting the patient’s brother, who was a 50 something year old Haitian who had lived in the US for 25 years.  He ended up telling us about his 19 children, “some with white women, some with black, some in Haiti, some in Florida, some in Minnesota.”  Oh, and that he’d be into the clinic next month for his hernia.
• Then home for more beans and rice, and a nice early night so we can get up early to see off Chris L