Today = awesome. First things first, it feels about 10 degrees cooler here than in Dallas (sorry Dallas friends). There is a really great breeze blowing that seems to cool everything off. I’m going to enjoy it while it lasts!
Last night was interesting. The school usually operates on a generator from 7:30am – 9pm. After this, the inverter kicks in. On the inverter you have to be careful what you use because some things really suck the power out of it. Hair dryers, microwaves, air conditioners are all off limits. On the inverter though, you can use a fan, which I brought. One problem last night though…the inverter was out of juice so…no power. I was lulled to sleep by the sweet soothing sounds of car horns, loud car engines and motorcycles, and the general merriment of those walking up and down the streets or leaning against the wall of the school. All in all, it wasn’t bad. It wasn’t terribly hot and I was able to sleep through the noise.
This morning I woke up bright and early and began to think about how I can get my coffee fix. I brought Starbucks VIA packets to use until I was able to get to the store to get coffee, so I thought making coffee this morning would be pretty easy…wrong. There was no power, so no microwave, but I thought I could heat water on the stove. Easy enough, but our propane thing was empty…no stove, no hot water, no coffee. The electricity came on a few hours later and I was able to nuke some water so, crisis averted!
The shower was another situation entirely. Miquette warned me that sometimes there will be water available, but it won’t come out. This happened this morning. So, being ever resilient against what Haiti is attempting to throw at me, I used a cup and took water from one of the four full buckets in the shower (saved for this very situation) and took a very short, chilly, cup shower.
This afternoon I went with my principal, Rod, to the grocery store. He was going anyway and asked if anyone needed to go so I took the chance for a ride up to the large grocery store, Giant (yes, the name of the store is “Giant”). It was really overwhelming. I walked in and was surrounded by American food and luxury items. Cheese, meat, frozen pizza, peanut butter, even cookies and cake mixes! You could get pretty much anything you wanted. I was a bit overwhelmed, but walked away with enough food to last me for a while…all of it was pretty American, only because that’s mostly what there was!
After that we went to the phone store to get me a Haitian cell phone. We walked past a few men outside hawking their phones and into the store. I chose a phone but was told they were out of that one. Rod said we should check with the men outside. They had the phone I liked and Rod talked them down to a good price. They sold us the sim card and we were on our way, easy as that!
There were no minutes on the sim card, so I needed to load it. I could get a card from a vendor on the street and set it up or I can set up an account online and charge it through paypal. When you do it online, you get almost double the minutes for the same price! The only problem is, the website is only in French and I know approximately three words in French. So, unless the entire process consisted of “Good Morning”, “Good Evening” or “Yes”, I was going to have to employ the help of google translator. I decided to give that a try and was successful! Thanks google!
This evening, Kellyanne, Irene & Robbie, and Tiffany & Jarrett, and myself went over to Steve’s (the school’s director) house for dinner. He and his wife and their two kids live about a 5 minute walk from the school down winding back roads that are anything but paved. I hiked the Inca trail this summer and it was smoother than these roads. Steve is a fantastic cook and made way too much pizza and we stuffed ourselves silly. We sat on their back porch eating and talking and it felt like we were somewhere very not Haiti. It was strange when we left the house to the same streets we walked in on. It was like we had popped into another world for a while. A very enjoyable evening.
My room is finally unpacked and everything put away. Here are a couple of pictures for you. I’ll put more of the apartment and the school grounds up at some point.
This post turned out a little long, oops.
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