Day 4

I woke up this morning at my usual time and decided to go back to sleep. I wake up every morning about 6:00am when the roosters at our hotel start making noise and it is usually day light in Haiti around 6AM any how. I normally wake up and decide an extra hour of sleep is way more important than breakfast and go back to sleep only to have to get up at 7:15 and scrabble to be ready to depart for the day at 7:30am. I usually roll into the break fast area about 7:30ish to sit long enough for a banana and coffee while everyone else finishes up their breakfast. We then head out to the orphanage to do our work for the day.

We had finished cleaning the visitors quarters yesterday so, we started on the administration building today. Same deal as yesterday we had to clean each room top to bottom. Four rooms and two bathrooms. I usually work with Daryl and together we clean out two rooms. It’s more fun to clean with a partner because you have someone to talk to. Daryl and I have become fast friends and always have a good laugh while cleaning. We spent the whole day cleaning out the administration building, skipping lunch again in the process. I have to come to find that while we are working here we live like fortunate Haitians, eating before and then after work. Two meals a day… After work we pile into the van and head to the hotel for diner. We get to the hotel and I grab a shower and head for diner. We eat breakfast and diner everyday at the hotel. Diner is always late, we order our diner everyday before leaving in the morning. Rice and beans or spaghetti… huge variety of choices I know but this is Haiti. I usually stick with rice and beans. Even though we place our diner order at 7 AM every morning we never eat diner on time. If we tell the hotel staff we will eat diner at 4PM we wont get our food until about 5:30PM, tell them 5:30PM and we are lucky to get the food by 6:00PM. It hard to explain to situation but we run on Haitian time here, and Haitian time for our hotel staff means when ever they want to get diner ready then that’s when we eat. Diner is basically the same thing every night. We have the choice of rice and beans or spaghetti. We also get a plate of french fries and if you order the rice and beans you get a meat option of chicken. I stick with the rice and beans and bring a can of tuna along with me to add. I also add french fries and ketchup to all of this making, riceandbeanstunafriesketchup. Its not bad:


After diner today we go with our construction manager back to the orphanage site to check how well the generator works and how well lit the orphanage is at night. We go and check out the orphanage at night and everything seems in order and we head back into town. On the way we stop off at a market store in town. Now this is like a supermarket in Haiti but it looks like a convince store in the US. It even has a real register that scans items! This is Darlys last night with us in Haiti so I deem it fit to get a couple bottles to celebrate. I pick up a bottle of a Chilean wine called Valdivieso and Darly gets a bottle of Haitian rum. We get back to the hotel and Darly and I immediately kick off the celebration. Valdivieso is a sparkling wine and isn’t too strong so we kill that in the first 15 minutes of our soiree. The Haitian rum on the other hand was quite strong and after a cup of that I was about ready for bed. Tomorrow we head back to Port-au-Prince to drop Darly off at the airport and do some shopping for appliances for the orphanage. We are leaving at 4AM so I’m not too thrilled.