We Survived Week One!

A hot and sweaty "bonjou" from Haiti! It's been over a week since we left home. Time is flying by but also going by quite slow. The days here feel super long, but there's less daylight (it's nearly pitch black by 8:30). The days seem incredibly long when it's so hot that all we want to do is sleep and drink water. We sweat all day and sweat all night.

Last Sunday we arrived on Haiti ground. After waiting for nearly 45 minutes to collect our luggage amidst Haitians pushing and shoving to grab their own luggage, Paul and Bethany (the other two missionaries living at the compound; Paul is going to be the principal of our school) treated us to a day and night at a little hotel in Port au Prince to help us adjust to our move. Looking back, we are so thankful for our time there.

Monday morning at 6:30am we headed to the bus stop for a 4 hour bus ride in what Bethany likes to call "The Arctic Tundra". She calls it this because they have the air conditioning blasting so high that sweat pants and a sweater are necessities when riding the bus. One would think that after being in the Haitian sun for a short amount of time, you would be happy to be in cold air, but think again.

The bus took us to Cayes which is the nearest large city to our village. When we stepped off the, we were swarmed by people asking if we needed a taxi, or if they could help us with our luggage. We got really good at saying no thank you - non, messi in Creole.

When we finally reached the compound, we got to see our finished housing for the first time. We really are spoiled; they built American bathrooms for us, complete with a toilet, sink and shower. Up until this point, any missionaries living here took "bucket showers" which is exactly what is sounds like, and use an outhouse. We even have a sink with running water in our house, all of which we are thankful for every single morning when we wake up.

We don't really have a set routine in place yet. We've slowly been adjusting to life here, and every day it seems we are faced with something new a different. We usually sleep until about 7:30, eat breakfast, do devotions, and head downstairs to start some task or project. And by eat breakfast, I mean either taking a few bites of a granola bar or drinking some water. Towards the end of this week our appetite has seemed almost normal, but at the beginning it was so overwhelmingly hot that our appetites seemed to have stayed in Canada. We have a pretty good variety of breakfast food here. Some is shopped down from the States with mission teams, some is bought from a market in Cayes, and some is bought locally in the village. We have bread, eggs, pancakes, peanut butter, oatmeal, apple sauce and dry cereal. Our main project for the past few days has consisted of going through the room of stuff for the new school that Mission Haiti has been collecting over the past few years. It is an overwhelming mess but we cannot express how thankful we are to have so many supplies to use to teach here. The kids at this school are going to be so blessed.

Lunch during the summer is cooked by Kanal, who is a Haitian hired by Mission Haiti to cook one meal a day. During the summer he cooks lunch, and during the school year he will cook dinner. So far he's made us strew, vegetable rice and chicken, pate (fried dough with stuffing in the middle), Haitian spaghetti (which is just noodles with vegetables in it), and soup with dumplings. After lunch in the afternoon we've been having naps because the heat has been draining us of a lot of our energy; the humidity is horrible. For dinner we have to fend for ourselves. Some days we don't have an appetite for dinner and we'll have something really small. Other days Paul and Bethany will cook something big and ask us if we want any. We haven't really figured out how to be decent cooks here yet. It's gong to take some imagination to use the staples we have and not get tired of having the same things over and over.

This place is slowly starting to feel like home. We have met some of the people from the village and all of the youth guys that come to the compound on a daily basis. Seeing familiar faces is one thing that has made it feel more homey. We can hold small conversations with them in Creole, which in all honesty is mostly, "Hello, how are you? I'm good and how are you? What's your name? How old are you? We are Canadians." We have learned a little bit more Creole from Immanuel (the security guard on the compound), and we started Creole lessons yesterday. Stay tuned for a post about that...
The language barrier has been one of our biggest hurdles so far. Sometimes we can get by with the French that we know, but sometimes the Haitians don't speak any French. Patience is becoming something that we are being forced to learn very quickly. A lot of the time, our communication consists of a smile and a wave, and that's always good enough.

Everywhere you go in Haiti, there is a different smell... well, at least that's what it seems like right now. We can be driving along the same road for 30 minutes and experience 30 different smells. There is a lot of garbage here and they don't have a garbage system so they burn all of it. The smell of burning garbage is becoming a regular smell to us by now (which I'm not sure is a good thing). Some mornings we wake up to the smell of burning garbage, sometimes waste, sometimes food cooking in the village, sometimes a smell that smells like rotten eggs (we still haven't figured out what it actually is). One of the worst smells you will ever smell in your life is the smell of rotting seaweed. We are living by the ocean, which is amazing and not so amazing all at the same time because there is an overabundance of seaweed that washes up on the rocky shore, and it bakes in the sun all day, creating this nasty smell that fills your nose and mouth and makes you want to gag. We can never really smell it from the compound, just if we are driving along a certain stretch of road leading out of the village. When it is really quiet on the compound and in the village, we can hear the crashing of the waves from the ocean. We sometimes just sit on our porch and listen and soak in the peacefulness of it all.

Stay tuned for more details and pictures soon! We have so much that we want to share, but it's hard to fit it all into a blog in a way that will make sense to all of you. Thank you again to everyone who has been praying for us. We need and appreciate it more than you will ever know!

Sending love from Haiti!