WTN Haiti Partnership

The last 48 hours have been incredibly busy, including climbing waterfalls

Alricka Hannah and Ruth at Saut D'Eau

lunch at Hotel Woze with a wonderful swim in the pool, shopping for metal art work in Village Noailles and then a THREE HOUR BUS RIDE through Port au Prince.  An inside view of Port au Prince night life, complete with RaRa band and the most incredible traffic you've ever seen.  Cars making 5 lanes out of two.  Cars driving on the sidewalk against traffic.  There's nothing quite like looking out the RIGHT side of the bus and seeing a car driving on the sidewalk next to you in the opposite direction.   Taps (brightly colored/painted trucks used as taxis) which are lit up at night like floats in a Mardi Gras parade, sliding past each other with inches to spare.  Sometimes not even that much space.  Motorcycles with goats tied on either side. MACK trucks stopped dead in the road, or piled 15 feet high with sacks of who knows what, and often people perched on top of that.   Our Haitian guide and driver said they  had never seen the traffic so congested.  The Kreyol word for traffic is blokiss, ("block-ees"), an apt term. 

There is much to say but it is 11:00 PM and we must leave the guest house tomorrow at 6 AM to catch our plane to Atlanta.  I hope to use the long layover to post some more stories.   

Until then may I say this has been one of the best weeks at St Vincent's.  The children are happy and healthy, they love Pere Fan Fan  and they are being fed 3 meals a day. They have clean water and clean dorms and bathrooms.    They have a new library stocked with books, donated by Brian and Susan Donnelly, by way of their friends in French Canada.   

Note the Canadian stamp

 I have a bunch of new friends on What's App, so I teased Pere Fan Fan he cannot let anything slip by because the children will tell me.  He laughed and agreed that the children, especially Dieumene, tell him what to do and give him a list every day.

So happy to see them doing so well.  It was hard to leave today, but as I have learned to say in Kreyol, "A la pwochen!".  Until next time.

Hand prints on the wall with children's names