Day 17: We work hard for our..? Oh wait we don't get money

We had gone to sleep very late the previous night but had to wake up early today to go to work with the guys. We didn't know if we would be any use to them. We wanted to go to help if we could and as always to learn whatever we can. As a side note we have been learning a lot, but right now we are trying to catch up with what we have done. Probably the wrong way to go about writing it...but such is life. Later we will fill you in on all we have learned.

The day started off slow for us and we weren't really doing anything. We walked to the ladies who were cooking lunch for all the workers to see if we could help them. They clearly weren't interested in that. haha. We then went to check out what everyone was up to. Avery was teaching all the guys how to do trowel work properly. It was actually pretty exciting. Later we too got to take a crack at it too. It was harder than it looked. During the day I was Averys, "Right hand man" those were his words by the way. I walked around with a clipboard marking down his comments on whether the worker passed or not. It was great do that because then I got to see how Avery sees things. He was so good at seeing the potential in people! Becca got really bored and decided to get down to business. I kid you not she was in her skirt picking and shoveling the dirt. YAY Becca.

We finished out the day playing the game "Down by the banks" If you don't know this game you stand in a circle with your hands together. You slap the hand of the person next to you all around the circle. Anyway a bunch of the workers played with us! It was sooo fun!

We were all really tired and hungry by the time we were done with work. I don't know how people here do it. The heat destroys us. We tried to convince everyone to go to dinner with us but they were all too tired. So "The Brits", 2 translators, Becca, and I went to get dinner. It took FOREVER to get. I met a guy in line for food that lives in Miami who said, "This girl who works here is rude! If we were at Subway she would be fired!" Too funny. While we were eating a Haitian guy started taking all these pictures of us. It was super weird. We asked him many times to stop. Our translator friend almost got in a fight with the guy. Not wanting there to be trouble I tried to talk to the guy. A lady who was friends with the guy told me that when Americans come here they take pictures all the time. I told her that if a Haitian asked me not to take a picture I would not. Guess it didnt translate to the guy. I just posed for a pic and I think he was happy. Then we headed home.

Amy

La Gonave

A little girl at the Orphanage in La Gonave that I wanted to take home. She was sooo sweet! I asked if she was sad and she said yes. I asked why and she wouldnt reply. After I held her for 20 min I asked again why she was sad and she told me but I couldn't understand :(

Becca and I when we got off the boat in La Gonave. We were SOAKED!!

Day 16: Orfalina

We got to sleep in on day 16 which we definitely needed. The British guy we met the day before had set it up for us to visit the orphanage that Matt's organization helps. It's run by a wonderful woman named Madame Soliet (sp?). Two kids from the orphanage were supposed to pick us up to walk us over to their house so we waited outside the compound for them at 11 a.m. We waited for about 20 minutes but they didn't show up. So we started to ask the people walking by if they knew about the orphanage. One guy told us he'd walk us there. He was a guy who worked with an organization called WISH who are associated with the Weslyans. He was a super nice guy and ended up staying with us at the orphanage for a while. He tried to help us translate what the kids were saying even though he didn't speak that much English. Madame Soliet wasn't there when we showed up but we talked to several of the workers there and The orphanage was really cool to see especially because it was the first one we've seen that is run the way it is. Madame Soliet stays there 5 days a week with the kids and we could really tell that she loves them a lot. She works for free!! All of the kids looked really healthy and there were a lot of chubby ones! I loved it. I was sitting next to a little boy who looked like he was not feeling well at all. He had a fever and felt really hot. One of the girls went and got him medicine! Yay! Amy and I are still talking about how nice the kids skin and hair looked.

That night we went with Pierre, the Brits, and another translator to the store and to get some food. It was really cool to walk around the town with Pierre because he taught us a lot of things about Haiti and we asked him a lot of questions. He was super excited to eat goat soup which is one of the things he misses about living in Haiti. (p.s. It was safe to walk around La Gonave at night so don't worry people.) We stayed up kind of late that night with the Brits even though we were shway tired. I talked the whole night in a British accent and Andrew (Brit #1) talked in his version of an American accent. Amy almost peed her pants. Also, the Brits made us tea a lot and we miss them for that because it was very delicious.

xoxo
Becca

Day 15: I'm on a boat!

So like we said yesterday we woke up really early aka didnt sleep. We gathered our stuff, Pierres brother picked us up, we met Pierre and headed off to catch a boat to La Gonave. It didn't take as long as I thought it would to get there. We rode in the back of a truck and we got very cold. By the time we were finished with our ride our faces were tingly. Becca and Pierre got some coffee, and I got some weird SPICY tea for breakfast. Then we got on the boat. When we were getting on the boat I was happy that I didn't fully understand Creole because Pierre told me that if I did and I was in the US I would sue the boat owner. Boat owner pa renemen gwo moun pou boat. The boat ride over to La Gonave was very exciting. I'd say Becca and I got at least 10 gallons of water splashed on us. We were soaking wet. At first we laughed a lot but then our eyes started burning from the salt.

We got off the boat and a guy named Matt picked us up. Our first impressions of La Gonave was that it looked similar to the rest of Haiti. Later we changed our minds about this. We went to the Weslyan Compound to see everyone and see where we were staying. When we arrived the Extollo guys Avery, his brother, a canadian guy named Randy, & Tom were having a training session with the La Gonave workers on the back porch of Matts house. We went and sat with them for awhile but we were way sleepy so we ended up going into the house and passing out on his couch. When we woke up we decided to walk around. We saw a white guy who we had previosly seen on the porch sitting by a building. We had assumed he was a Californian but were very wrong. He was British. He told us he was from London...in England. lol. Next we all headed off to the worksite. Becca and I were barely hanging on.

Around lunchtime we started to get hungry and thirsty. We didnt want to be a burden to Extollo so we took a walk to see what we could find. This was one of the first times we noticed the difference between La Gonave and the rest of Haiti. We were kinda in the middle of nowhere though. We couldn't find anything to eat or drink. We did however, find a family that had 15 kids! Wowee. We chatted with them for about half an hour then headed back to the worksite. We ate food with the workers then couldnt take it anymore. We bummed a ride back with Avery to the compound when they needed to pick up supplies. We hung out for a bit and chatted with Avery while one of the guys went to get gas. After he left we passed out for 2hours on Matts couch again. We only woke up because they came back from work.

Nothing else memorable happened that day. Writing a blog about a day that was a few days ago is wayy hard.

-AMY

Day 14: Talkin' Walkin' and Ridin'

Today we slept in (except for a slight interruption at 5 am from Fifi knocking on our door to give us Pierre's number which we already had). We drank some coffee, had some breakfast and took some extremely necessary showers (it's been REAL hot). We intended to unpack all our stuff from our trip to Jacmel because we had packed up all our stuff to get it out of the container for the high schoolers, so everything was unorganized. We gave up because we obviously hate doing anything related to packing, unpacking, cleaning, or organizing. We went to the doctor in Leogane with Jr. and Vanessa to get the blood work back from the kids visit with the high schoolers. Jr. also took us to his the house where his English teachers live. They were really cool girls from the U.S. who are staying there for a couple weeks this summer. They do English classes and orphanage visits to teach English to kids. We talked to them about maybe coming with them one day to see what they do. Hopefully that can help us teach our girls. We continued to the doctors where I found a guy selling Haitian movies. We bought two so that we can have a movie night when we get back to the states and miss Haiti. Our qualifications for the movie was that it is filmed in Haiti, in Creole, and that there is no sex (we hear that there's no rating or editing when it comes to things like that..) It was great because everyone in the waiting room was helping me pick the very best movies. One lady was really into it so we got the movies she recommended. As we were walking back to get food and go home we heard a guy in a truck with a loudspeaker talking about drinking coke and how hot it was. He was saying "enjoy coke! It's hot!" In English so it caught our attention. Turns out he was talking about us because we were drinking a cold coke and looked really hot. All the people on the busy street were looking at us and it was really funny. We went to get our normal blan diri ak sauce pwa (white rice and bean sauce) from our favorite cook Miglise. We joked around a lot today and felt like good friends. I even helped her mash some garlic. We also got chicken for Jr. and Vanessa but they didn't want it so we brought it back for Wichmie and Kimberly (smallest at the orphanage). While we were waiting for our food I went back and forth talking to Tom and Pierre about coming to visit in La Gonave. I worked it out with them and Pierre was sending his brother to come pick us up in an hour or two. We had to hurry back to the orphanage to pack our stuff for the trip.

When we got back we found Wichmie and Kimberly to give them the chicken. There were like 7 other girls sitting around too so I sneakily had them come "help" me return some coke bottles to the lady we buy cokes from. They were so excited and we were skipping and jumping and giggling the whole way. Amy said that Wichmie and Kimberly were so excited for the chicken and that they tore it apart. She said they kept looking sideways at each other and smiling. They even cracked the bones with their teeth to eat the marrow in it. There was only a little pile of remains when they were finished with it. We packed our bags up and waited for Pierre's brother to arrive to take us to Pierre's hometown near Port Au Prince. We stayed the night at his friends AMAZINGLY beautiful house. It had the best kitchen ever. We'll post pictures later. But it was the hottest night Amy and I have spent together. We slept in the same bed because there was only one mosquito net and one bed. (and we're OK friends). Basically we sweat the whole night and got no sleep. At one am we woke up and hoped that it was 4 am when we were supposed to get up.

The end. Thanks and bon nwi!! xoxoxoxoxoxoxox

-Becca

Day 13: Cookin, busin, unpackin, & repackin

The pictures we posted were from our 13th day. We went to VBS(Vacation Bible School) with some white people and the Pye's. We helped with prep for the food as you saw from our pics. Then we headed downtown to go to a fancy restaurant in Jacmel. On the way there we stopped into a cool art shop where a french woman named Paul lived(Later we were telling our friend Pierre who is Haitian but lives in the US about her and he said he knew her as well!). We went to eat at the Hotel Florita Restaurant. It was beautiful. We had trouble understanding the menu as it was in french. We asked a white woman sitting near if she spoke English. She laughed and said yes. We talked to her later and found we had a mutual friend as well. Thats right JEREMY MAURER we met someone who knows you from J/P HRO. She told us she was '

there in August and I asked if she knew Jeremy. She said, "Of course I know him" what a small world. We ate some yummy food and drank coke with ice! (Don't worry, it was safe) sorry the laptop has been hujacked by a british man. the thing about blogging is it is utterly random that is where i come in for i am the random british man "i wish his accent was in it" said she thus speak thee in the sound of England apparently I am rinsing the bandwidth with my incessant typing i write at the speed of light you see and for now that shall be all from me then harry waved his wand and hocus pocus datsum maleeroi and she turned into a toad.

Back to whatever we were talking about. After eating we headed back to VBS, got back on the Pyes bus, headed back to their house posted the pics then headed out. A guy who works for the Pye's took us to the "bus station" where we squeezed into the front of a van then headed to Leogane. The van actually goes from Jacmel to Port-Au-Prince. We payed 300gds which is like $7.50! The ride was quick, it only took 1 hr and 20min. It was soooo beautiful!

When we walked into the gates of the orphanage we were so happy to see our girls. They were also very happy to see us. We didn't do a very good job of unpacking because we were sleepy and missed the girls and wanted to talk with them. We spent a lot of time singing with them from the book of songs that the high schoolers had brought for their devotions. We refilled the girls water tank. Then we went to the container for some air conditioning relief when Coi-cou knocked on our door to tell us that Pierre was there to get more tools from the container. We left our lovely air conditioning to go say hello and to help. When we talked to him we found out that he was going to go to the island of La Gonave where Tom from Extollo and our good pal Avery (aka Pops) were doing a building project. We were talking to Pierre about how we wanted to go and he said that he could help us get there if we wanted. We said we would talk the next day and went to sleep.

-Amy

Makin' food for the kids at VBS

Today at VBS Amy and I got to help cook! Amy cut onions (I hope you're proud Rodrigo!) without a cutting board and with the sharpest knife in the world. She's still alive don't worry. I grated coconuts on a grater made from an empty can of tomatoes cut in half. Inventive. Amy and I also wanted to mention another reason why we love Haiti. We notice here a lot of ways that people are inventive and not wasteful like we see in America a lot. At the orphanage in Leogane a while back we saw Pastor Coi-Cou taking apart an iron that was broken. Amy said "remember when people used to fix things that broke instead of going out and buying a new one?" We see so much cool stuff here and it makes us think. WE LOVE HAITI.

-Becca