Haiti - Day 2

6:10am - Well, I've already been awake for at least an hour, and the electricity is off again, so I just decided to get up. Honestly, I think I might of slept a couple of hours last night, and that's being generous. I laid there forever and just sweat and sweat and sweat. There are two rooms here, separated by a door. The little window ac unit is in the back room with a queen size bed and two bunk beds. I'm in the front room with two twin size beds...and no ac. I kept telling myself to just suck it up, but I was so wide awake and hot. Sleep just wasn't happening. It could of had to do with the 6 inch gap at the bottom of our door letting light and sounds in, the giant bugs, the Haitian heat, or probably the entire bag (yes, BAG) of watermelon licorice I ate for dinner right before I went to bed. Anyways, I got so hot and frustrated, I drug my plastic mattress (like the crunchy sounding ones they have in cribs) on to the floor and over in front of the doorway to the other room where the cool(er) air was - sometime around midnight. It helped a little, but then Samson (the dog) decided to murder some small animal right outside our window, then someone was blowing an air horn (seriously, what's up with the air horn??), dogs started barking, roosters crowing... Yea, it was a rough first night - and a rought day yesterday. I'm struggling today for sure, but I am still really excited to be here and see what interesting things this trip holds for me. I also wonder how many bugs crawled on me last night? I woke up to the biggest cocroach I've ever seen just hanging out on the wall. Seriously, its huge!

The gap under our door...

The seriously huge cocroach on our wall

Okay, well I'm going to change clothes (no running water = no shower or anything) and head outside to get some breakfast. Its pancake day, and some people who have been here before say they are amazing! This morning we're going to head in to Port Au Prince to see a little bit of the city, then we're going to an orphanage in Leogane (an hour or two on the other side of Port Au Prince) which was the epicenter of the earthquake. I've yet to play with, or hardly even see, any of the kids here at this orphanage. But I do hear some of them playing soccer outside now!

The balcony right outside the door to our room

The boys playing soccer this morning

10am - After breakfast (pancakes with peanut butter - yum!), we got a little mini tour of the orphanage. There is a water filtration system in a building that Living Water International built, two boy dorms, two girl dorms (the cement rooms have triple bunks), a boys and a girls bathroom/shower house, a school, a little medical clininc kind of thing that is really just a room with medicine in it, a newly opened sewing center, and a church that they also use for storage.

Breakfast!

The one-room 'clinic' full of medicine

The water filtration system the Living Water International built

One of the boys' dorms

The boy's shower

One of the girls' dorms

Inside the girls' dorm

The school in the distance (the roofs are to the girls' dorms)

I really didn't excpect the kids to have much, but I was kind of surprised that they don't have one single thing to call theirs besides their bed and the clothes on their back for that day. That is IT. Nothing in the rooms. No closet of clothes or shoes, not a toy around besides some soccer balls. No bright paint on the walls, no soft rug on the floor, no cute bed sheets. It was so hard to see so many beautiful kids who don't have anything - not even a family to love them. :(
We all had kids hanging on us during the tour. Literally hanging - they'd grab your hands and just hang until you either drug them or picked them up. And they all wanted pictures taken!

Laying on the floor, just begging to be held

She really wanted to show me her bed

Hanging on me until I picked her up

After the little tour, we went in the church, where we all sorted through our big bags of donated items (even though we are missing SIX of our bags still.) We brought a LOT of stuff down here! I was impressed!

Then we got about another hour or so to just play with the kids. I printed out the letters to spell THANK YOU on paper before I left, hoping to get the kids to hold the letters for a picture to turn in to a 'Thank You' card to give to everyone who donated items. It sounded easy enough. Turns out its not when you don't speak any Creole! The kids wouldn't sit still or hold the letters the right way - or in the right order. They were fighting over them and trading letters - it was NOT working. I finally got an older boy who knew a little English and he got some of them to sit still long enough for a couple pics, but it wasn't quite what I had in mind. Maybe I'll try again later!

"No, no.  You sit here and hold this letter!"

This was as good as I could get - cracks me up :)

With a little translation help, this was the final product

Mesi is "thanks" in Haitian Creole

We played a little more, took a few tons more pictures of the sweet kids, and now we're just trying to cool off a little and waiting for our van to come so we can head in to the city and then to the other orphanage in Leogane.

"Can I please wear your watch??"

Kimberly's mom is a 14 year old orphan and former restavik (child slave) who was raped...I can't even begin to imagine what her life was like until she was found the day of the earthquake.

Kimberly LOVES sunglasses and cameras

Jamison might be the cutest and sweetest little guy at the orphanage.  He is half white, so some of the kids pick on him and throw rocks at him.  Just breaks my heart...

While I'm sitting here, I think I will share with you the new thing I learned today.  Do you know how to flush a toilet if there isn't running water??  I DO!  Well I do now anyways...but I had no idea that you could actually get a toilet to flush by quickly dumping a lot of water in it!   How cool is that!?  I mean all of us girls peed in that toilet plenty - it is dark yellow and smells nasty now.  But when someone has to go #2, I mean you can't just let that sit there.  "If it's yellow, let it mellow.  If it's brown, flush it down."  Isn't that how it goes??  So anyways, they gave us a lesson on how to flush the toilet, and I was enthralled.  You have to hold a 5 gallone bucket, half full of water, about waist high, and then just dump it really fast in to the bowl.  I partially missed the bowl the first time, and plus when you do that, the nasty water splashes out anyways.  So yea, our bathroom floor is wet, but there isn't any #2 in our toilet!  I've gotten better at flushing now, and I don't really miss that bad.  But we still have a towel on the floor in the bathroom anyways (soaked in nasty toilet water, ha).  So yea, that is what I learned how to do today:  how to flush a toilet with no running water. :)


3pm - Its raining and we're just leaving the orphanage in Leogane. We ended up leaving the Jumecourt Inn a little before 11 and went in to see Port Au Prince. It was pretty eye-opening and shocking honestly. Tent cities and crumbling buildings everywhere. I think Haiti might take the cake for the poorest living conditions I've seen, next to Africa. This place beats the favelas of Brazil and the villages in Nicaragua. I think what really sets Haiti apart from all of the other countries I've been to is that there is NO PLACE nice here - not that I've seen anyways. I mean everywhere else I've gone, there are like little pockets of nice places. A nice hotel here, a nice house or school area there. Not in Haiti. This whole place, as far as you can see, down every alley way and up all the hills, is poverty. Buildings half falling over, people living under tarps from Samaritans Purse or in plywood homes. I just kept waiting to see something at least decent, but I never did. Trash lined the roads and they just burnt it right there when it got big enough I guess. I couldn't take a lot of pictures for several reasons. First, I was in awe and really just wanted to take it all in myself (selfish, I know, haha). Secondly, our team leader really cautioned us against taking too many pictures, especially ones with people in them. (Just for the record, its almost impossible to take a picture in Port Au Prince without a person in it. There are people EVERYWHERE.) These people have been exploited by so many nations, and they've had cameras in their faces for 18 months now. If the roles were reversed, if I was just struggling to survive, would I want a van full of white people to drive by gawking with cameras hanging out? Probably not. And third, I had an 9 year old girl on my lap for the majority of the trip! We took a momma and her two kids to their home, and since I was in the front seat and the van was full, she got to sit on my lap! Traffic was stop and go for awhile, per the usual in Port Au Prince, so I got out a bottle of nailpolish and painted her nails green!  She wasn't so sure what to think about me in the beginning (as I anxiously grabbed her and plopped her down on my lap), but by the end of the trip, she had slid her little hands in to mine and leaned back against me. Made my heart melt. :)

A 'tap-tap' - or Haiti's version of a taxi

They have some serious barbed wire in Haiti

A beautiful old church that crumbled during the earthquake

The government palace - still in ruins

Green fingernails!  I was impressed with how well they turned out for being done on a moving bus!

The closer we got to Leogane, the worse the conditions got. There were giant cracks and crevices in the roads from the earthquake. There were even MORE dilapidated buildings and people living under tarps (not even tents). Its just.not.fair. We pulled down a bumpy dirt road for a mile or two, then turned down an even smaller road (more like a path) and came up to the Leogane orphanage.  I guess most of the buildings were damaged in the earthquake, so a team of Canadians built these temporary shelters that the kids sleep in.  GOP is building new, nice buildings and a bathroom, but they aren't finished yet. There isn't any room to play here (just rocks), but then again, there aren't any toys to play with. This orphanage has over 100 kids, and they were all sitting down (boys on one side and girls on the other) when we pulled up.  You could see the excitement in their eyes. 

Getting closer to the orphanage...

The kids - all patiently waiting for us

The boys dorm

The girls dorm (outside)

The girls dorm (inside)

The new buildings GOP is building

The new bathroom - nicest one I've seen in Haiti!

After we walked around and saw the place (pretty small area, especially for so many kids), the kids sang songs for us.  (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ4UKaI7r8Y).  Then they did the hokey pokey in Creole - it was too cute!  Here is the link to my YouTube video of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGEYRxdXYuU.  When they finished singing, we all walked out to the kids to play, and I got "picked" by a whole row of little boys.  It's interesting how the kids just choose one person and latch on to them.  I was actually heading to the girls side of the tent when several little boys attacked and climbe don me.  We made little sun visors that they could decorate with foam stickers, and then we blew up balloons and tried to make things out of them.

When I was sitting there with my boys, I saw a pretty little baby just crying by himself.  His name is Paticko, and he is obviously sick.  His belly just jets out of him and is all swollen - the poor little guy obviously doesn't feel good (and he has a wet diaper).  I couldn't get him to smile at all, but he did warm up to me a little bit after awhile.  I finally had the translator ask one of the older boys why he was so sad.  The little boy said, "He is new here.  He is sad because his momma left him and isn't coming back."  Ugghh - seriously, I don't know how many more of these awful stories my heart can take.  No one could ever make him smile the whole time we were there. :( 

Before we left, I had the kids take another "Thank You" picture with the help of the translator - it turned out pretty cute I think.  These will make great cards when I get home! 

So we're off for the 2.5 hour drive back to Croix de Bouqetes (the orphanage we are staying at).  There is a big truck in front of us and the side of it is just lined with LIVE chicken hanging by there feet!  Holy cow - I can't imagine what kind of a wild ride that must be, ha!

The side of the bus is lined with live chickens!

You can see the big cracks in the road from the earthquake...

5:30pm - We just got back to the orphanage / inn...and our bags are here!! Yay! I've got the rest of my food! I'm off to play with the kids for awhile now before dinner. And I'm taking my green bottle of nail polish - I'm sure it will be a hit!

6:40pm - A storm rolled in so its actually somewhat cool. There is a breeze and the sun is down, so I am NOT sweating! We just had dinner - some sort of corn meal hash casserole thing, some rice, spicy cole slaw, some beef, and mango. My dessert is some fruit snacks and a nutter butter thing that Amy brought. We're sitting up on the top deck enjoying the evening breeze now. We're having "movie night" tonight with the kids. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - in French I guess! Should be interesting. I kinda just want to go to bed honestly, but I'd much rather go spend a little more time with the kids!

Dinner

10:15pm - Movie time just got over. It wasn't Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, it was some super cheesy American made sing along videos with sweet dance moves (kids singing Christian songs) and then a low budget Haitian film in Creole, that I have no idea what was even about. Those poor kids are so tired! Most of them were falling asleep in our arms before it was even over. Once I sat down, a girl came up behind me and instantly latched on to my hair. I've been lucky enough to escape that up until this point. She grabbed a dirty comb from some girl next to her and started just yanking on my hair clip and hair band in my hair. Ugghh - they are certainly NOT gentle, but I guess all those years of my mom yanking on my hair when I was little paid off tonight. I only cringed a couple times with all the pulling. And all she ended up doing, after ripping half of my hair out with that stinkin' comb, was pulling most of it up in to a pony tail and one piece sectioned off in front got twisted to the side and clipped at the base of my neck. I was SO happy she didn't start braiding and twisting (and breaking off) my curly hair. Definitely lucked out! Once my hair was done, a little boy came up and crawled in my lap and wrapped my arms around him. The kids here are so sweet and cuddly. They just want to be touched and held and loved. I have to remember, these kids are ORPHANS. They don't get attention and love all day from parents. And it breaks my heart to know that when I go home in three days, they will still be here...still without a family.

They used a projector and a wall to watch the movie outside

That reminds me of one of the things we talked about tonight while sitting up on the deck tonight... Do you think God is maybe smiling down on the people of Haiti more so than on us Americans? I mean if maybe their lifestyle almost makes him happier than ours does?  They have less barriers, less layers of distractions to deal with in their lives.  They don't have cell phones to text on and emails to check.  Most of them don't have jobs.  They don't have houses to clean.  They hardly have anything to get in the way of or to distract them from their relationship with God.  They literally don't have anything else to put their trust in.  All they have is their faith and hope.  I mean they wake up in the morning and literally have to say, "God, please provide food for my family today."  I don't think we have that kind of trust and faith back home.  We have other things to distract us and other ways to provide for ourselves...  Maybe the people in Haiti have it right and we'v got it all wrong, trying to live our fancy lives with all the material "things" that don't matter one bit when we're gone...  Anyways, I'm going to stop - that's too much deep thinking for tonight. 

Please God, keep the dog from murdering other animals, and please keep the air horns to a minimum. Oh, and if you could keep the electricity on tonight too, that would be fantastic. So would running water and a toilet that we don't have to flush ourselves. Thank you. Good night.