Regular Sunday....almost

What began as a fairly uneventful Sunday did not end up that way. The day started pretty normally (well, as normal as I know. It’s only my second Sunday here), coffee, church, Epi’Dor for lunch, grocery store, lounging. Jill and I had planned on going to a basketball game held at the court on campus around 4:30. We met Josiah (another new teacher) along the way and walked over to the court. When we got there we found out we had to pay to watch the game, only 60 gourdes ($1.50), but 60 gourdes more than we wanted to pay for just a time killer. I’m so glad we are all cheap because the experience that followed was free and also priceless at the same time.

Josiah asked us if we had had the chance to walk around much. We haven’t mostly because we don’t know the area and aren’t 100% sure it is smart for two young American girls to walk around knowing very little about the streets and knowing even less Creole. So, he decided to give us a tour around the neighborhood. We walked down the streets about 5 minutes to the house of a teacher who lives here, but she was sick so we kept on moving. We ended up walking through a ravine filled with homes. Mostly broken, covered in tarps or spare sheet metal. Kids running around, flies everywhere. As we are walking, Josiah stops at an area where a group of men are playing a sort of Haitian domino game and several women and children are hanging around watching. He appears to know everyone. We keep walking, a couple of kids in tow and end up in a small tent village in the middle of what looks like an old parking lot. A building could have been here before, but right now it looks like an open lot. He knows kids and people here too! We keep walking a little ways, more kids in tow, and end up at a make-shift soccer field. Make-shift makes it sound more rudimentary than it was. They had smoothed an area that, I’m sure had been filled with large rocks or big holes, ground up old pieces of burned wood to make lines for the field, and had fashioned goals with old poles and chain-link fence. I was impressed. We stayed here for a while and attempted to talk with the kids and just play. My Creole is very very poor, but if you point to something a child will give you the name in Creole and then you tell them in English. We stayed here for a while until the sky started to get darker. It wasn’t too late in the evening, but the clouds that had hung overhead all day grew a bit more ominous. We began the slow walk out, with about 15 kids hanging on to all parts of us, asking us questions, and us (well, me) staring back blankly “pa konprann” (I don’t understand).

Then the rain started falling. And falling and falling. We went out the way we came only losing a kid here and there who had reached the end of his “wandering zone”. By the time we turned on to the street where our school is, all of the kids turned back and we ran in the downpour back to the campus.

Such a simple thing. Playing for a couple of hours with kids. I’ve done it so many times. I’ve done that in Brazil, America, Haiti too. But, the thing that was different about this experience, the thing that made it mean so much more to me. The thing that turned that hour and a half into something so much more awesome: I get to go back. I can go back and play with the same kids. Josiah knew these kids and this area because he had played soccer with the kids often after school and had gotten to know them and they took him to their house. He developed a relationship with these kids and their parents. I’m not, and don’t want to be, just another white person here for a while and then peacing out back home only to be replaced by another new white person next week. I can learn the language, learn the games, and learn the names because I’m not here for only 7 days. That reason right there is why I wanted something longer. Why coming back on short term trips just wasn’t what I felt was right for me.