Arrived in Haiti!

The first time we were all together in Miami

No pictures, because I can't quite get the internet in the guesthouse to keep it together enough to actually write and publish a post.  (But the pictures are pretty cool.)

Haiti is hot.  I had forgotten what hot really was.  After getting off the plane, I went from being happy to be someplace warm to feeling happy to actually be hot for a change to wishing that the Haiti airport was air-conditioned in the space of about a minute.  About five minutes later I was sweating like I was back in Samoa.

Haiti is one of the most densely populated places that I have ever seen, with the smallest airport that I have also ever seen.  Someone had fixed it since the earthquake (probably so that aid could get in) and made a nice little walkway.  There was a band playing for us as we moved down the  walkway into the main terminal.  Throughout our trip, we would pick up various people from various places that were in our group, and this was honestly the first time that I saw us all together.  Most of the people that were on the plane were Haitian or of Haitian decent, and all the white people that I talked to was there with an NGO.  We gathered in the main terminal (which was slightly smaller then the woman's bathroom at LAX) and tried to figure o Tut how to fill our our customs forms that had been written in French and Creole.  I think that this was one of the first places were English was not an option.  I wondered why this was, since there was such a strong (and highly dysfunctional) relationship between the US and Haiti.

From there, it was a pretty long walk from the terminal to the truck, even with our bags (50lb each x 2) on carts.  Some guys that were identically dressed swooped in to take the carts, I found out (too late) that they didn't work for the airport.  I tried to get rid of mine, and handed him a dollar.  He said "Give me five dollars" and refused to take it.  It turns out that "give me five dollars" is a common catcall for Americans here, there was a kid that called to me from the other side of the gate "Hey, sister!"  When I looked, he requested this distinct dollar amount.  Fortunately, but this point, the guy who is in charge of Mountain Top Ministries, Willhelm, told us not to pay and the haggle was over, although I was out my dollar.  I didn't feel to mad about it, I was temped to give more to the kid at the fence.  But I also know that such handouts are not helpful in the long run.

We left Port-au-Prince in a huge traffic jam.  I was in the back of a pickup truck, and I am not going to describe driving in a third world traffic jam except to say that if you've even been in a third-world traffic jam, you know exactly what I am talking about. It's not for the lighthearted, and the danger was compounded by the fact that we were climbing up mountain roads along cliff sides.  I had been nervous about my stomach-- I don't do well on windy roads, but after just a few minutes I forgot about my stomach and would have taken the chance just to get the car to move and generate some breeze.  I was wearing a hat, my face was burned just a few minutes later anyway.

The area that we are staying was not directly affected by the earthquake, but a lot of people fled Port-au-Prince and came back to these villiages, so they are going to be the people that we are helping as this area isn't well set up for medical help.  Our first job, after lunch, was to sort the bags.  We had a ton of bags to sort, and Linda had packed them in a way where the necessary supplies we spread out rather then in one bag.  As the bags were lost or pilfered, this made for a extensive re-sorting process.  We scattered all our pills on the table and made then into little 30-day packets.  We bundled them into baggies and slipped in a little piece of paper saying what the pills were and how they were to be taken.  We are thinking that we sorted 30,000 pills as we went through about 1000 bags.  It wasn't a bad job, very zen.

Tomarrow, we will go to the clinic.  I will be drawing blood for the iStat.  Tonight, I took my first bucket bath since leaving Thailand and loved every bloody second of it.  The ambian is start to really kick in, and as much as I would like to write in my soon-to-be-forgotten ambien high, I think that I will turn in.  Talk to y'all tomorrow!