September 5th and 6th

Sunday was pretty relaxed, after some (very hot) yoga on the hill I spent the morning talking to one of the other interns about farming in Haiti. He said that about 80% of the land here is not arable anymore because of deforestation from when Haiti sought independence from France.  In order to pay off all their debts they had to use their forestry resources, which has caused much of their land to become infertile and sandy. Shane had also been doing work earlier in the year with Haitian farmers who had moved to the Dominican for work and because many of them are desperate they become trapped in a form of enslavement and are working for next to nothing.  Even after hearing his stories I still find it really hard to fathom but its obvious that living in these small communities has a lot to do with how resilient Haitians are.   

In the afternoon, I managed to tag along on a bus ride to the new property with one of the mission groups. We all piled onto an old school-bus and drove bout 20 minutes north. As soon as we rounded the corner for the driveway kids started coming out of the trees to meet the bus. Three boys not much older than 7 latched onto the back and rode behind us down to the beach and by the time we finally got there, there must have been about 80 kids!  

As soon as I got off the bus two young girls grabbed my hands and rushed me towards the beach. I did my best to speak to them in French but they mainly spoke Creole so we filled in the gaps with hugs and smiles :) One of the girls was particularly hilarious and had obviously been in the middle of getting her hair done when we arrived as she had a comb in her hand and only half of her hair in braids. She was giving two older Haitian boys trouble for trying to talk with me too much and encouraged me to say “sotu” to them which means leave me alone. 

We spent about an hour at the beach playing soccer and other games with the kids, but were rushed back onto the bus as the clouds started rolling in.  It started pouring as soon as we got on the bus and as we drove away the horizontal rain was coming in through the windows on one side of the bus and going back out the ones on other side. The storms here are really something else!  

When we got back to the compound I headed down to the Hope House Orphanage and coloured with the kids for a little while. I also met up with Richardson and Jean Marc again -Julia had introduced me to them on Wednesday and told me that they’re my ticket to fresh fruit and veg so long as I let them use my laptop so that they can keep in touch with the girlfriends they’ve met here on facebook :)   

 

They offered to pick up some groceries at the market for me so I told them to look out for some coconut oil because I was going to make them all chocolates with it later on this week… he came back with 3 coconuts today and laughed hysterically when I said I needed help opening them! 

 

Richardson teaching me how to open a coconut!

The cooks have Sundays off here so for dinner we go down to a local restaurant called Gwapapa Poul for dinner. I cut a sweet deal with Shane to swap my chicken leg for his plantain. (I think we all know who got the better deal there ) Yum!  

The clinic was absolute chaos today! As Nonu and I finished off the below knee socket we are going to deliver to the tent city tomorrow, two patients, who we weren’t expecting, turned up right at 8 so the prosthetist worked with them while I did some a follow up with Kevins who is an above knee earthquake amputee. He’s a pretty buoyant little 10 year old who put up with a lot of time consuming adjustments to his socket as there were some major alignment issues. Thankfully he left very happy and will come back in next Tuesday for a visit and checkup.  

Nonu showing off the BK we made

Thanks to one of the technicians, David, I now have about 20 oranges, 6 avocados (which are the size of papayas), 2 heads of iceberg lettuce, 6 tomatoes, a watermelon, another type of melon, 8 mangos, 6 carrots and about 30 bananas.  Needless to say, dinner tonight was great! :)  

Some of my yummy groceries!