Moun bel yo

Bon swa (good evening)! Exactly 3 weeks in Haiti now…they have not exactly flown by, but we have been super busy so there really is not time to be homesick. Today some of us took a car ride up to a quite nice suburb of Port au Prince to pick up a couple of the director’s kids from some family friends’ house and were fed chocolate truffles and cupcakes; it made me pause and realize that I had not had any chocolate in three weeks. And it was gooood. This morning was pretty amazing food-wise actually, as we went to Mass at a nearby seminary celebrated by an Italian priest who then shared some homemade gelato with us afterward, yum!

Because we have been working so hard during the week (this week featured me wielding a pickaxe and a machete), the weekends are a much looked forward to event. The only jobs are cooking and kitchen clean up on a rotating basis, and otherwise we are free to do pretty much anything we want. This weekend was the best yet for sure. Friday afternoon most of the volunteer yo and some of the Haitian staff played sport together for a long time. It was hilarious trying to convince some of the young Haitian women that they would not die if they ran more than two laps around the basketball court. I was surprisingly decent in the following pickup futbol game (and I have not played any sort of soccer since 6th grade), and then Jon and I won in a game of half court 2-on-2 basketball that was relatively intense under the beating sun. Yesterday I successfully did all of my own laundry for the second time – finished before 9 a.m. – got some more lesson planning done, busted out Betsy’s water weights for an afternoon workout, and officially received my first Haitian sunburn after sitting outside reading for about an hour. My arms are already browning up nicely, but my legs are still tomato colored, unfortunately.

I have been getting a lot of reading done here. So far the pace of life reminds me of high school (which maybe makes sense since I am working at a high school?) when I put in a reasonable amount of effort and did my work well but always had plenty of time for things like eating and exercising and reading for pleasure without ever feeling guilty about not studying. Lavi se bel (life is beautiful). So far I have read The Uses of Haiti (Farmer), The Botany of Desire (Pollan), Sense and Sensibility (Austen), Night (Wiesel), Blink (Gladwell), and am almost finished with The Sparrow (Russell). I think I am going to tackle Atlas Shrugged (Rand), which should slow me down a bit. The jokes about my ridiculous reading speed are already rampant…I had forgotten in college how fast of a reader I am because I never had time for non-school books.

Last night I was invited over to Patrick’s family’s home (the director and his family who live right across the road from the school campus) to meet some alumni of the school. There were four grads total, two of them were physicians, and they were all good natured and fun to be around and successful and completely fluent in English. It was quite inspiring to see the long term results of being educated at this school. One special thing about LCS is the scholarship program that they offer to graduating students, paying their tuition for college or professional school – all four of these young men had received a scholarship after graduating 10 years ago. The scholarship program is in a period of expansion right now, with the goal of sponsoring 150 graduates every year by 2011. I spent time talking with the doctors, who were great. One is simultaneously the director of a hospital in a rural part of Haiti and is working on his MPH (Master’s of Public Health) and the other is working for a French non-profit group that sends physicians to especially violent and war-torn areas; apparently they are leaving soon since Haiti has become relatively stable (good news).

I was pretty successful in lesson planning this past week, but I still have a way to go. Other highlights of the past week include killing a tarantula that I found in our room (actually less gross than the cockroaches, in my opinion), micromanaging students who are sent to the school to help clean up the grounds (seriously, if you turn around for one second they stop working…teenagers), and a sobering visit to a local orphanage run by the Missionaries of Charity (it was wonderful to hold babies and play with young children, even though the situation was sad). Also, the phone is apparently fully functional so if anyone wants to call next weekend email me and I will send the Rhode Island number!