Woush!

Woush. (Wow.) What a weekend!

Saturday morning began like a typical day of work here in Leogane, I took a taptap with two other volunteers to a school site that we have been putting a mural on 3 of its walls. We were doing the finishing touches in the early morning sun, and everything was going wonderfully. Some local children had come by to watch us work, to color flowers for us and to help us paint. At lunch time, I took a moto back to base, ate some rice and beans and then dressed for a meeting. The meeting was a local womens' cooperative, and we went to discuss how best we as an organization could assist them. The meeting progressed from 85% of the women saying that they could easily handle 100 chickens each in their current living situations, to telling me in individual interviews that for their 5 kids they buy 3 eggs a week, they don't have any jobs or skills, they're unmarried and they eat chicken when they can find the money. They had waited all day in a makeshift conference room of tarps and thin tree trunks salvaged from the nearly treeless mountains and here we were asking them if they cared about how much food was being imported into Haiti each day. (Rough estimates put egg importations from the Dominican Republic and one million eggs per day). It was a heart-wrenching afternoon to ask these women personal and potentially embarrassing questions and then walk away at the end of the day with them thanking us for the little installation of hope in their lives. We came home to base to dinner, which of course, was chicken.

Haiti is a difficult place, but there is beauty in gratitude for a simple thing like a plate with a piece of chicken on it, and the opportunity to talk with people and give them a taste of hope for a better future.

Sunday, I went to church, a Baptist service (that I understood about 75% of) on love and the verb tense in John 3:16. God loved us and still does. Good stuff.
After returning to base, there was a group who went to the beach, the 5 other people I went with decided to go as cheap as possible by walking across Leogane, to take a taptap to Gran Goave, to take motos to Paradis Beach. When we arrived, the other people who had left after us by machinn prive (private car) were there waiting, but out quite a few more goude than us. We spent a wonderful February afternoon floating in the beautiful Caribbean and soaking up too many rays. I had borrowed two mismatched sandals and we had quite a a good laugh walking up and down the beach looking for other sandals that might fit and match. No such luck but we caused quite a scene and entertained quite a few of the locals. Silly blan.

The afternoon was winding down and we were getting tired. We tried calling the motos who had brought us but the number didn't work. Instead, two of the girls I was with went and asked the restaurant to call motos for us. They said that they did but 15 minutes later it was a taptap that arrived not 3 motos. The chauffeur was less than friendly and wanted to charge us an absolutely ridiculous rate. A friend of some of the local volunteers, a wealthy man who was admittedly rather drunk, decided to step in and help us barter, even though Robinson a volunteer from Gonaives, was there already bartering for us and soberly. So here's what went down: drunk man called already-angry chauffeur some nasty words people didn't want to repeat, and then angry chauffeur man decided to go to his taptap and take out a tire wrench to start beating up drunken man. It got bloody very fast and loud and rather scary. A crowd gathered and broke up the fight, another local volunteer, also a little drunk, arranged for us to ride in the back of an NGO's pickup, but promptly after pulling out of his parking spot got the fastest flat I've ever seen. Eventually we crammed 10 people in the back of a short-bed pickup and drove back to Leogane.

When we got to Leogane, I thought it would be a good idea to go to a local restaurant with music and food. We walked over there, there wasn't any music and the food came very slowly. I messed up the order, and when my ham and cheese arrived it was soaked in mayonnaise and far less appealing. There was also a drunk man in the streets who kept pestering us for food. Meanwhile the music had started and we couldn't hear ourselves think, so we walked the rest of the way home, I was exhausted and it didn't help that I was trying to speak French with the two Canadians who were there. Woush. What a day.

This morning, the exhaustion continued with a conversation with two of the local volunteers about values and politics and the problems with NGOs and the need to be paid for work done. A similar conversation at lunchtime, about Haiti's need for a dictator who can kill people who are opposed to development, the problems with NGOs, and the exhaustion kept mounting, weighing my heart down. Thankfully, this afternoon I got to go "rubble" (sledgehammer and shovel) for 3 hours, and this made everything better.

Praise the Lord for physical labor.

Woush.