Back in Haiti Again

Hello again. For those of you who don't know my husband Steve and I were back in Haiti during the end of May beginning of June. The intent of the visit this time was to clear up some administrative and organizational things, see a number of recheck patients and frankly enjoy the place for a couple of weeks. Which if you are thinking of asking, we did. So much so in fact it has taken 2 weeks after our return to post to the blog.

We had a rather interesting start due to a severe thunderstorm system covering the whole of the country. Our plane north from PAP, after many unannounced delays, took off into whatI can only describe as holy crap that is a very large, dark and ominous looking cloud. After a little bumping we must have been in sight of Cap, if you could see it through the aforementioned cloud, when the pilots announced, in Spanish of course so that no one on the plan understood what was happening that we were heading back. Steve asked the pilots in his best pidgen Spanish what the plan was only to discover that they were shut down for the night and that we would be rebooked at 6am in the morning. As for everything else we were on our own.

We linked up with an Trinidadian engineer from Digcell and hired a 4x4 to go hotel hunting, which for those of you familiar with PAP is a challenge. Through the deluge we went turned away at every inn and working our way up the hill and price range into Petionville. We finally pitched at Ibo Lele way up in Petionville after spending $60 ride and almost 2 hours. We were happy to have somewhere to spend the night. Oh yeah and the rain stopped and it was a beautiful starry night.

Nothing exciting on the way out in the morning. Almost made the whole thing seem anticlimatic. However we now have a list of business cards for hotels in PAP should this ever happen again.

We spent the next day and the following morning in Cap getting a number of admin things done. Simple things like getting a used filing cabinet (they sold it out from under us before we could pick it up the next morning), meeting the Minister of Health (once again he was not in), buying wheelbarrows, rakes, shovels and picks (took 4 shops). Ah Haiti land of opportunity.

Off to BML with our booty. Did I mention the 8 ft sheet of plywood and the mattress that we would have to tie to the roof of the boat?