Day 12

I woke up today and headed to breakfast about 8:00AM. The hotel normally provides spaghetti or hard boil eggs for breakfast. Today was a hard boiled egg day, so I just ate nuttela and bread. We left the hotel today about 8:30AM and headed to the bank. Dustin and Jenna had to withdraw money to pay the electricians and other members of the work crew working on the orphanage. The bank is located here in Hinche and is a short drive from the hotel. I haven't been in it but from what I hear it pretty basic. Anyway Dustin and Jenna come back out of the bank after sometime with $3,000.00 USD in ten dollar bills.


Why the bank gave it to them in ten dollar bills, I don’t know, but this is Haiti and one is just happy the bank actually had enough money to give out. A short while after Dustin and Jenna returned to the van and our money exchange guy shows up with his bag of money. When I say bag of money I mean a good size bag full of gourdes.



We pay all the workers in gourdes because it’s the countries main currency and if they had gotten paid in USD it would be easy for a money exchanger to give them a terrible exchange rate and rip them off. The exchange rate for USD here fluctuates, its best to give Haitians money in gourdes because many are not educated enough to understand the math involved in exchanging money. I’ll have to admit it has taken me a while to get use to the exchange rate and I frequently use a calculator to make sure I pay what I am suppose to when buying things. Back to the story our money exchanger shows up with his backpack full of Haitan gourdes and we exchange $3,000 USD for gourdes in the van. I needed to exchange some of my own personal money also so I have him $20.00 for 800 gourdes.

Once at the orphanage we checked the progress of the electricians and how far along they had gotten on installing the inverters for our generator. They were laying pipe to get electricity to the visitors quarters and administration buildings. After checking the progress of that they informed us that they need more supplies from town. After a while Dustin, Jenna, Wisney, the electrician Dudu, and I headed back in the van to go to town to run more errands.

First we headed to the the various stores the electrician needed to go to, to get his supplies. After that we headed to get water and ice, then headed to appliance store to look for a USB cable for the printer we had bought several days ago. The printer we purchased didn’t come with a USB cable and of course we couldn’t find any store in Hinche that sold USB cables so we will have to get one next time we go back to Port-au-Prince. After looking for the USB cable we went to several Internet cafes to try and get on the Internet. The first one we visited was closed, and when we arrived to the next one the men told us the Internet connection was slow today and that we should try back tomorrow. We explained to him that we only needed to send off one email and he said we could try. Well after about 20minutes Jenna and Dustin couldn’t even log into their email account to try and send the email so we left and headed back to the orphanage.


When we got back to the orphanage we dropped off all the electrical supplies we bought in town then headed back to the hotel. Today we didn’t really do any work on the orpahange just ran errands and paid workers.

When we got back to the hotel Dustin, Jenna and I deiced to walk to the supermarket to do some shopping. Everyone is starting to get low on snacks… I only have about 6 cans of tuna left that I had packed with me. So we walked through town to the supermarket. The walk wasn’t too bad. Few streets are paved here and live stock are more popular than cars. This leaves the streets smelling like animal feces because the animals defecate in the streets and rarely anyone cleans it up. That combined with the absences of sewers and drainage systems leaves green stagnate water on the sides of streets makes for what I like to call a: garbage truck juice shit mix smell. It’s the best way I can describe the smell… Its stronger in certain parts of the city and is rough enough to give you a stomach ace if you breath in enough of it.


Once we arrived at the supermarket I grabbed a basket and went to shopping. Going to the grocery store hungry and starving is a terrible idea. Its even worse in a country were everything is overpriced due to the fact that almost everything in the supermarket is imported from outside the country. But I shopped anyway, I got 2 cans of sour cream and onion pringles, a small loaf of bread, two Gatorade's, two cans of tuna, and three cans of corn. I wanted to try out two new different brands of tuna being that I will be out soon and will need to purchase more from the supermarket. The tuna I brought with me from the states cost about .58 cents from walmart while similar tuna here in Haiti costs $1.63. The pringles I bought are my favorite, the pringles combined with a tuna sandwich, and a coke is heaven here in Haiti. I’m not joking you appreciate simple things like this when you stay any extended period of time here… The Gatorade's were a big surprise to me, I found them in the back of the store laying on the ground, they were like many things at the supermarket extremely expensive and I don’t even want to share how much I paid for two small Gatorade's. The corn I was glad to get because I haven’t eaten any vegetables since I have been here in Haiti. The corn will be a good addition to my tunariceandbeansfriesketcup mix now making it an: tunariceandbeansfriesketcupcorn mix. I spent about 800 gourdes on my mini shopping spree, this is about $21.00USD. After we got done shopping we headed back to the hotel and got ready for diner.


To our surprise tonight diner was actually on time. As in we told the hotel staff we would like to eat at 4PM and we got our food at about 4:10PM. What a surprise!! The corn added to my usual diner was a big boost for my appetite. I have eaten the same thing for diner the past 11 days and adding something as small as corn really made a difference.


After diner we played a couple games of cards and then met up in James room to share movies. Dustin, James and I all brought our laptops on the trip. Dustin and Jenna had a pretty good size movie collection on their mac so James and I perused through their movies and pick out about eight movies. First we uploaded the movies from Dustins mac to my ipod, and then from my ipod to James’ mac. I can simply just plug my ipod into my laptop and watch the movies on my laptop from my ipod. Tonight I watched Invictus and it wasn’t too bad.

Tomorrow we get a bit of the day off. We have church service at 9:30 and have a lot more things to pass out the church congregation. After that we have the rest of the day to relax.