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| June 2008 |
Sarah's Haiti Journal
| Wednesday, June 25 It's the last day here; we leave tomorrow on the first flight to Port au Prince. The students are taking the test for my history class now. Gusman, the youngest member of the class, and the one who lives the farthest away (near Port au Prince) took his test early this morning and is headed home. He received a call last night, and he believes his mother has died. Relatives wouldn't tell him much over the phone: they told him it would be good if he came soon, and he could hear wailing in the background. He knew his mother had been ill and had been to the doctor, but had not idea it could be so serious. I read an interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor about Haiti this morning. The gist of the article is "UN data indicate that the country could be among the safest in the region". Here's a link to the article: http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0620/p04s01-woam.html If that doesn't work, I'll make a page of it on the site here. Tuesday, June 24 I'm feeling well today and it has been a good day. We're having a tremendous windstorm right now, and will probably be blasted with rain shortly. The students are out running to the mango trees to pick up ripe mangoes. Unfortunately, this may cause problems for our plans to spend the evening with the Cyphers and Amy at LaKay. This is later. An amazing storm did blow through here. There was a lot of wind. We have branches (and mangoes) down all over the neighborhood. Our yard is a real mess from limbs, bark, leaves and mangoes. It seems to have blown every mango from the tree. However, it was just for about half an hour. After that, we had some rain, then even that quit. We went to dinner at LaKay just as planned and had some time to visit with Ron, Dianna and Amy. Amy had been tie dyeing with the kids, and her hands were an interesting "wicked witch of the west" color of green. Monday, June 23 Sorry to say that today has been another sick day for me. I did manage to stagger down to class and teach for about an hour to finish off my class on Ancient History with the Medes and Persians. We'll review for the test tomorrow, then test on Wednesday. The next time I come, Lord willing, I'll cover Greece and Rome. David, on the other hand, got up at 4 to take the group to the airport (yes, there was no one there when they arrived an hour before their flight, as instructed). Then he cleaned up after the group, went to chapel, translated for me, gave his test, and has been grading tests this evening. (I slept through most of this). We're starting to wind up our projects for this trip. We didn't get everything done that we'd hoped, but the classes and spending time with the students were the main things, and we did do that. I wanted to show some photos from Saturday, when the artists came to sell their wares to the group. That's Mdm. Duchange in the orange, Tabita in the hat, Suzette is the older lady, and Ronald in the shorts. Sunday, June 22 This morning we went to the Hertz congregation, obviously next the Hertz rental car place near the airport in Cap. We decided just to skip Bible class and go for the main service, remembering Dennis getting ill in the heat two weeks ago when we went before. We did catch the last of class, and the questions afterward. The class topic was marriage and divorce. There were many interesting questions afterwards. One was about polygamy, since it was acceptable in Old Testament times and in Africa. Another was a man who travelled to the Dominican Republic for work -- was it all right for him to have a wife here in Haiti and another in the D.R.? There was in interesting proverb about drinking from your own water bottle. After class, service started right on time... then lasted for 3 hours. David was the preaching part, so that wasn't long at all. It was all good, but we were very tired for the rest of the day. After napping and lunch, we just hung around with students and the group for the rest of the day. David climbed the big mango tree to knock down mangoes to Gusman (who is a great catcher). It was really cloudy and windy, so it was a wonderful day for sitting around on the lawn. The students were studying for their Joshua test today, and we were just lazing around. The group had gone to church here at Galman, then to town to eat at Mont Joli, then back to do a tiny clinic for 10 people at the Galman church. They leave Monday morning. |
