Lazy Sunday

Saturday is the last workday of the week so everyone is usually pretty worn out – yesterday was the same deal. While I was in the tool shed in the morning getting the tools for my crew I dropped a sledge and it feel and grazed my hand. Now just 24 hours later its become infected. Luckily there is a nurse volunteering here so she’s been giving me advice. Anyways I went out in the morning to the site and attacked it. We had a HODR Bobcat come in and help us for much of the morning. On top of that, another organization called CHF alongside this work-for-pay program run by USAID helped us clear more of our site. We had another, more mobile Bobcat help us along with a giant Caterpillar taking away huge piles of our rubble, which was all getting hauled away by giant dump trucks. So I ended up spending most of the morning doing something I wasn’t expecting to do in Haiti – directing traffic. Now drivers in Haiti don’t tend to follow “traditional” driving rules as we know them, so this tasked proved to be somewhat difficult and somewhat dangerous, but it had to be done. So basically I’d stop traffic while the Bobcat came in and out. We got a whole lot of work done in the morning but it’s still going to be another week or more to finish the site entirely.

After lunch I went back to the site with a slightly smaller crew (which is ok since the site is pretty narrow and there isn’t room for many people). We didn’t have heavy machinery so we were just running wheelbarrows. At this site there is a lot of stuff and an especially large amount of broken electronics. In the afternoon there was a point where things almost got bad when like eight or ten Haitian guys were crowding around the stuff and fighting over it. Dealing with all the stuff we salvage is a really big problem. People like to steal everything from rebar and bricks to broken electronics. There is only one woman who I’ve met from the site that I believe actually lived in the house so I’m directing the questions to her. When all the people were fighting over the stuff I asked her if that was ok with her and she said no so I had one of the translators say, essentially, that we were working, they were in our way, and they had to leave right away. Things ended up ok and didn’t get too out of hand. We finished up the afternoon work and returned to base. For dinner there were lots of fried plantains (among other things), which are one of my favorites. Saturday night was fun – I stayed up a little late (as in 10:30 instead of 10). It was Salsa dance night at Joe’s next door and I met a couple of women who work at a child nutrition program at the hospital next door. What caught my eye was one of the women was wearing an Elon shirt. It turned out she had graduated from Elon in 2009 and one of the other women she was with lives and works in Durham when she’s not in Haiti. I had a nice time talking about southern food and how underrated a state North Carolina is.

Today was a relaxing day. I did some computer stuff in the early morning then took a walk with my friend Brian (an architect from Seattle) around Leogane. We took some photos and I bought a sim card for my phone. I can now call the US at the price of 15 gourde per minute (about 20 cents). It’s nice to know I can make calls but the internet is still the best way to keep in touch for sure. The walk was really nice – we went to a bakery and got Haitian croissants and we ended it by checking out the market. The rest of the day was spent watching episodes of The Simpsons on my computer. I just had a hotdog on a stick for dinner. Tomorrow it’s back to work. But I have my trip to look forward to on Friday!

Hope everyone had a nice weekend.

Love,

Daniel