Day 10

After last nights Bastille Day soriee waking up was a bit rough this morning. Today most of the group left at 5AM to drive to Port-au-Prince to do more shopping for the visitors quarters. I elected to stay here in Hinche and continue to work on the orphanage and help with construction. Shopping really isn’t my thing and neither is waking up at 5AM and driving to PaP so I was happy to stay here, and plus last time we went to Port to do shopping I spent most of the time sitting doing nothing or sleeping in the van. I will miss the fact that I won’t be able to eat at our usual lunch spot in Petionville though. I'll be missing out on the Penne au Poulet..


I rolled out of bed about 7:30 this morning and headed for breakfast. I had the usual spaghetti, along with nuttela spread on bread. After breakfast I headed to room to pack up for the day. Today is going to be my first day working with our construction crew at the orphanage. I was pretty excited to be able to do some outside work instead of being cooped up inside buildings working all day. Wisney our driver for the day picked Davidson and I up around eight and we picked up some water and headed to the orphanage. Wisney drove his car today being that the rest of the group drove the van to PaP. Wisneys car to my surprise was an automatic! The first automatic I have ever seen in Haiti. Most car’s are stick shifts and from what I know its difficult to find mechanics who know how to work on automatics. Anyway we arrived to the orphanage about 8:30 in the morning and got to work.

Working with the Haitian work crew is alright. It’s made up of a couple older men and the rest are local kids that working along for the summer. All the workers do basic manual labor jobs and some are masons. The kids do most of the tough work, shoveling rocks and pushing wheel barrels. The men do most of the masonry work and landscaping.

Today we broke up a huge concrete slab located in front of the orphanage gate. The slab that we broke up accumulated because of all the concrete work the crew does. They have to mix the concrete and after a while it builds up and they are left with a huge concrete slab of concrete that has dried and has no use. This is how it was explained to me, and it doesn’t make sense to me so if you are confused so am I… But anyway the older men use pick axes to break up the slab and the kids shovel it up into wheel barrels and transport it to a dump pile. I helped shovel and push wheel barrels today. It isn’t difficult work just tiring and its extremely hot out. I even helped break up the slab when the older men took breaks. I did this for about 3 hours and it was finally time for lunch.
Breaking up concrete is a blast!


After lunch I had to take care of some work in the visitors quarters and administration buildings. All the locks needed to be changed, the previous day we had put some new locks in the visitors quarters but after looking at them today some were put on backwards and wouldn't lock correctly so they needed to be redone. Davidson took care of fixing all the locks in the visitors quarters and he and I both installed new locks in the Administration building. All the previous locks needed to be replaced because some of the key sets had been lost. Around 3PM we finally finished all the inside lock work and called it a day.



Once we returned to the hotel it was about 3:30PM. We had placed our diner order this morning after lunch and set a diner time of 4PM… Wisney informed me after we got back that they had pushed our diner time back to 6PM… no surprise there… So I took a shower and a much need nap. Around 6 I headed to our diner area and of course the table handen't even been set. So I hang out there for a while and eventually someone comes over and I order a coke. Eventually about 7:30PM all the food arrives and its time to eat. We went from setting a 4PM diner time to eating at 7:30PM I asked Davidson if this is normally how all hotels in Haiti work and he told me no that this hotel just has terrible service. None the less I am just happy to have food and dug into my ususal tunariceandbeansfriesketcup plate. I have had the same thing for diner ten days in a row and to be honest I am so hungry here that it doesn’t bother me one bit.

After diner Davidson and I sit and talk for abit and I head back to my room after a bit. The group that went to Port-au-Prince this morning hasn’t arrived back yet… Someone said something about them bringing back domino's pizza so I’m hastily waiting for their arrival.