Day 5

4AM couldn’t have come sooner… I finally passed out last night around midnight and took a short nap and woke up about 3:30AM and jumped in the shower and got ready for a long drive. We left the hotel about 4:30AM and drove to Port-au-Prince. The drive is long and mostly on roads that aren’t paved. Driving through Hinche we could see kids, standing under the few street light posts available here, studying. 4:30 in the morning and these kids are up studying under a street light for their exams. After we get outside of Hinche I took a nap until our car broke down going down a mountain:


We stopped for a short time while Gaston fixed our car and I snapped some pictures. Finally Gaston got the car running and we continued to Port-au-Prince. Once we finally reached the city we headed for a furniture store in Delmas a section of Port-au-Prince. Once we got to the store Jenna, Dustin, and James started shopping for the items on the list for the orphanage while the rest of the group kicked back and hung out.

As you can see I love to shop.

While we continued to shop Darly and one of our drivers headed for the airport. It was good getting to know Darly he is a cool guy and I wish he could have stayed longer but I know he was excited to get back to the states, hot showers and three meals a day.


Once we finished shopping we had to find a truck to transport the items we just purchased. So we got in the van and cruised around Port-au-Prince looking for a delivery guy to transport the items to Hinche. This is basically done by driving around and looking for big trucks and asking how much they will charge to deliver some items to Hinche. After some negotiation and many offers we picked a driver out and got him to follow us back to the furniture store. In looking for a driver we drove around Port-au-Prince for about 20minutes. We passed by the slum of Cite de Soilie in the process. I have always been curious about Haiti’s most notorious slum but it didn’t look too rough compared to the rest of the country on the outside. It is positioned next to a huge landfill. Once we met up with the truck driver we had a list of storage buildings we had to drive to, too pick up the merchandise we had bought. This task like many other tasks in Haiti took forever and it was filled with lots of sitting around doing nothing. I stayed in the van through most of the process and slept. Finally though we were done and ready to get lunch. The van broke down again right after we had left from loading the truck. Now that the van was broken down most of the group piled into our first van and headed to the van dealership, while Davidson, Pascal and I stayed with the broke down van and waited for everyone else to come back with a new van. The first van could only hold five people so Davidson, Pascal and I volunteered to stay behind.


We hung out for about 30minutes in the heat for everyone else get back with our new van. Then we loaded into the van and headed to the restaurant for lunch. We normally eat in Petionville for lunch if we are in Port-au-Prince. The restaurant is an upscale French restaurant that is one of the best in Port-au-Prince I’m told. I order the same thing I got last time we were ate there which is the Penne au Poulet, which basically is pasta with chicken. It is cooked in a spicy sauce and is very good. After eating their we pile back in the van and head back to Hinche. We spent that whole day in Port-au-Prince and I got some pretty good pictures of the Delmas, Cite de Soilie, Petionville sub cities of Port-au-Prince. They can be viewed by visiting my facebook account.

The ride back to Hinche sucked to be honest. I don’t even want to blog about the experience but it wasn’t fun being crammed in the backseat of a van on a 4 hour bumpy ride in the dark. But anyway we arrived back to the hotel sometime around midnight and called it a night.