After an exciting week with our friends from Holy Name Junior and Senior High School in Worcester, we are rolling into the last week of April and we can’t quite believe it! Holy Name sends a group down each year, and we love the dynamic that having high school students on hand brings to Be Like Brit. Indeed, the group worked very hard on their build-a-home project and was eager to get out in to the community and experience some of what Haiti has to offer. Even still, the time that the group had to spend with the children, I suspect, is what they most enjoyed, and being young and full of energy certainly has its advantages when you are here with our very energetic children!
Even after almost three and a half years of living and working in Haiti, I continue to experience so many “firsts” that keep life interesting and exciting. While it may not seem like a big deal, I recently started driving myself to places around the country, still accompanied by a security agent, but minus the luxury of having a driver take me to Port and other places. It is important to me for my own sanity and my own sense of normalcy that I not only live in Haiti, but actually live in Haiti. That is, experience in my day-to-day that which I would be experiencing if I were at home, working in the USA. Driving included.
Twice this past week I was able to put myself to the test and drive from Grand-Goâve into parts of Port-au-Prince I had not yet been to. The beauty of Port (and many cities) is the seemingly endless number of motorcycle taxi drivers, all of who are prepared to drive you to a location while you follow behind, for a very reasonable fee! Getting lost used to be anxiety inducing for me, especially in Port-au-Prince, though now I have no problem calling a moto driver over and paying a dollar to get where I need to be! The first trip was especially exciting, but for different reasons. It is easy for me to forget that the majority of our children here, along with so many people in rural parts of Haiti, have not likely been to the capital city of Port-au-Prince. While Port in and of itself isn’t your metropolitan, sky-rise, postcard landscape, it is in fact a bustling city of activity and excitement, danger and uncertainty. It has great beauty, and of course great sadness, too. Either way, the city of Port is an exciting place to go, especially when you have never been! This past week, Kervins (Shasha) had the exciting experience to visit his nation’s capital for the first time…
We set out on Thursday morning at around 6:30am, mostly in the hopes that we would beat the school and rush hour traffic that clogs the only road from Grand-Goâve to Port-au-Prince. We also had a 9:00am appointment to make, and if there is anything that gets me worked up in Haiti, it’s the total lack of attention to keeping good time and respecting appointment times here! Everyone is either terribly late or terribly early, and the simple excuse “there was traffic” doesn’t do much for me. If we are able to keep an appointment on time coming from more than 2 hours away, I don’t see why others can’t as well. We plan accordingly, and that’s why we left so early on Thursday.
Shasha had himself so worked up with excitement that Madame Gina and I could’t help but laugh as we drove out of Grand-Goâve towards Port, while Shasha pointed out the window and said, “oh, look!” about a thousand times over and over. Every sight for him was a new one, and he couldn’t contain it in the least. Once we arrived in the city, Shasha asked for me to put his window down so he could really see things well – which I hesitated to allow but ultimately compromised on a half-down window instead. The ultimate for him (and for us) was the look on his face when we brough him into a toy store in Port-au-Prince! I think you can see he had a good experience there!
Finally, we ended the trip to the doctor and to Port by taking Shasha to what I call the Haitian equivalent of a fast food restaurant. Yes, we know that chicken nuggets and French fries are not the best thing in the world, but come on, everyone has to try them at least once! Shasha thought he was king of the world on Thursday, and the opportunity to experience that first for him, with him, is a memory that I’ll keep in the front of my mind for a long, long time.
While the political situation in Haiti remains in a transition and temporary status of sorts, the fact is that the frequency and intensity of the protests we had seen have really decreased. While the U.S. Embassy still sends out regular warnings and notice emails for traffic, gatherings, etc., we really have not had any issues in this regard. Of course, as I was driving to Port on Friday ahead of our friend Debbie Pallatto-Fontaine’s arrival to BLB, I met a small protest of high school students who had dragged their chairs and desks out into the road in an area called Turgeau (near the new Marriott International Hotel). To be honest, the gathering really lacked any kind of serious protesting. It appeared to be just a handful of students upset that their teachers hadn’t been coming to work (because they hadn’t been paid) and they were doing their best to call attention to their pleas.
As I was the first in line in traffic, I stopped the vehicle and sat for a moment, wondering what I should do. After a few minutes, I called over to one of the participants and asked quite politely if they would just let me pass, as I didn’t know another way around them and they really were quite unorganized in their protesting. To my surprise, the young man was so impressed that I spoke to him in Creole that he promptly had his friends pull a few chairs out of the way and let me pass! I couldn’t help but laugh as I drove through their “blockade”, at the same time thanking my lucky stars that I found a reasonable and polite protestor with whom to reason!
All in a days work here at BLB in Haiti! With Debbie here this week for professional development and Len’s arrival later this week with another new friend, we’re sure to have lots of exciting updates for you! Please keep up with our work by following our facebook and twitter pages!
As always, thank you for helping us help the children of Haiti at Be Like Brit!
