Chili and a Shipping Container

Met these kids yesterday.  The had a blast wearing my hat and playing with my water bottle and phone.

The coolest thing happened, too.  Growing up I used to wondering what it was that made black people's hair different from mine.
Turns out these kids had the same reaction to mine.  They kept running their hands through it, laughing and being confused at the same time.  They crowded my personal space and crawled over me and were endlessly amused by swiping the icons of my iphone screen back and forth and back again.  I enjoyed every minute of it.

Today was our first full work day. I'm exhausted.
We worked from 6am till 5pm.  Cleaned out lines, then checked flow on the plumbing for the guys' and girls' bathrooms and future staff quarters.  Insulated all the walls. Installed showers in the girls' bathroom.  Then this afternoon they let me drive the bobcat to pick up some rocks to lay down as filler between the sidewalks and the dorms.  That bucket list item is now scratched off my list.  

After work we took showers and reported to the dining hall to be greeted by a fresh batch of incredibly seasoned chili with cornbread and snicker doodle cookies. Talk about having meals I didn't expect...

Right when we sat down though, we got the request to help unload a container that had just arrived.  It strikes me as odd that it would basically catch everyone by surprise that an 18-wheeler with a shipping container full of boxes was going to arrive.  But we're on Haitian time here.  Things happen sometimes, and sometimes they don't.  Time is different. Dictated by the sun, and that's about it.  Wake up with the sun, have dinner when it goes down.  Everything in between simply happens or it doesn't. Schedules aren't important. 

Speaking of happening.  I saw something happen tonight that I did NOT expect to see in Haiti.  I expected to see poverty and destruction.  Naked children and voodoo.  These things I expected.
What I didn't expect to see was what happened after we unloaded the 18-wheeler.  The only way time matters down here is when the truck drivers charge by the hour.  The quicker you unload and get the container off their truck, the better, and the cheaper.
After we unloaded the container, Art backed a flatbed truck up to the 18-wheeler, and the fork-life and the bobcat (with fork attachment) moved into position on either side of the container, close to the cab of the 18-wheeler.  Right then it dawned on me what was about to happen.

Sure enough, the forks, albeit with a bit of accident nudging of the container and wobbling back and forth, lifted the front end of the container in tandem, the the flatbed used its winch to pull the container partially onto it.  Once the container was supported by the bobcat, the forklift, and the flatbed, the 18-wheeler drove off. It just pulled right out from under the canopy of metal hovering above it.  Doug wondered what OSHA might think about this operation when half the workers were wearing flip flops, and I haven't seen a hard hat the whole time I have been here.  I managed to nab a picture, but it was toward the end of the operation.

In other news. I have ants in my pants.  More specifically, my underpants.

I guess I should have figured that the pre-packaged snack that American Airlines gave us on the flight would not be ant-tight.  Combine that with the unpremeditated placement of said snack in my bag next to my underwear, you can now understand my plight.

Oh yeah, and I took my malaria pills.  And after the chili dinner, the boys' dorm is going to be one interesting place tonight...

A Lot to Learn

Got to sleep in today since it's Sunday. Normally no work is done on Sundays at the complex, so today will be the last day that I have the privilege of sleeping past 5:30am, which feels like 4:30 New Orleans time.  I woke up a few times, but for the most part my body was a champ and let me enjoy the rest.

After a perfect combination of corn flakes topped off with 4 tiny cups of coffee, I finally settled on what to play for church this morning, with some wonderful insight from Mike to assist my decision:
"Some of those songs have notes that I just can't sing..."

I settled on Paul Baloche's classic, "Open the Eyes of My Heart".  No big deal. Oldie-by-goodie.
After about 45 minutes of worship, they invited us to sing our song.  There were about a dozen of us and we chugged through it in true American fashion, thanks to Chris for holding the microphone by my guitar because it was too heavy for the clip on the stand.  I think we sounded pretty decent over all, but there was simply no comparing our song to what we had just heard from the congregation there.  We heard a variety of some neat locally flavored music, but also a surprising number of classic American pop worship songs, with most of the lyrics in Creole, I think.  Once the band dropped out, though, is when the music really happened.  200 Haitians singing "How Great is Our God" in Creole completely a cappella, and a dozen of us white folk sometimes singing along in English.  It was so incredibly moving, to the point of tears, to see how genuinely these people worshipped.  Many of them didn't have amazing pitch, but
it
didn't
matter.
We have a lot to learn from these people.
It's like Mike put it today, "These kids are playing around in broken luggage for hours, and our kids have every toy under the sun, and they still get bored."

Granted, it's a different world. A different culture.  What I'm suggesting is not that we all learn to live on nothing, although I'm sure there could be some good to come from learning what we really NEED versus what we want, and furthermore to figure out why we want it at all.  What I AM suggesting is that we learn how to be content with what we have, no matter what that is.  We could learn to live on what we DO have, instead of demanding more and more from everyone and everything around us.

On a lighter note, I got to meet a pretty cool cat (the expression for "dude", not the animal) named Clerice.  He's learning how to play guitar and it sounds like later tonight I'll get to show him a few more of my "how to play guitar well enough for non-musicians to think you're good" tricks. (hush up, all you musicians...the muggles don't know you can't play any worship song in the world either in the key of G or E by simply using a capo...let them continue in their bliss.)  Oh yeah, and we had some pretty good soccer exchanges too.  So far I've played soccer every day I have been here, and this makes me very happy.

Going to miss the friendly guys and gals that left today.  Wish we could have had more time to get to work with and know them.  But there's plenty of neat people here still, and still plenty of work to do.

A Different World...

Yup, I made it safe to Haiti.  Had to lose the jacket as soon as I got off the plane though.  It's pretty freakin' warm here.

It took about an hour to dodge through traffic on roads that were roughly wide enough for 3 narrow cars squeezed side by side.  How we managed to overtake a dump trunk while passing a tap tap (the local cabs, which are remarkably reminiscent of truck-style Mardi Gras floats), with motorcycles weaving between us and oncoming traffic and woman walking with their finely balanced loads on the side of the road, I'm still not sure.  Amazingly enough, with no speed limits and drivers that would make New York cabbies blush, there seems to be far fewer wrecks in Haiti.

The compound has a warehouse made of shipping containers with all sorts of construction goodies in it, there's a dining hall with a  super-fancy water filter so that I can drink water from the faucet (in that building only), and thank God they'll have coffee in the morning.

Once we all settled in we got to go see a local village and visit with some of the families there.  I brought along one of those cheap, undersized, bouncy rubber balls that was painted to look like a soccer ball.  Turned out that was a hit with the boys in the village.  For a group of kids that doesn't own a soccer ball, they're pretty damn good at it...certainly taught the white guy some lessons.

The village was destitute.  I mean obscenely poor.  Children walking around with no clothes at all, covered in dust, playing around on old tires buried in the ground and using broken luggage as wheelbarrows to lug their little brothers around in.  Some of the kids apparently attend the school on the compound, and many of them will be at Sunday school tomorrow morning. Clint even had one of them reading the Lord's Prayer pretty effectively before we left.  Neat stuff.  They have no idea what they don't have.  It's eye-opening and heart-breaking at the same time.  Bouncing the soccer ball off tin-rooved, cement-walled hobbit-sized huts where they lived, all I could wonder was what would happen if one of the kids running around barefoot sliced himself on a piece of rusty tin, which was not scarce.

Once we got back to camp, I started to get really excited about the sunset through the mountain tops, and more importantly, dinner.  Right about when I had gotten to the roof of one of the buildings to see the sunset, one of the workers asked if we'd mind helping to unload a container.  Hey, why not...I haven't done any manual labor yet...I might as well do an easy 30 minutes before I eat.  Before I knew what was happening, the 30 minutes turned into an hour of unpacking boxes upon boxes of food that was sent here.  We had an assembly to move these little buggers from the palate they were on into a shipping container for storage.  WOW.  My back now hates me from practically tossing these boxes full of mostly rice into stacks.

Finally, after exhausting my youthful strength on the last few boxes that were left, we finally went in to eat, which was incredible.  Now I'm here covered in dust, wondering what to play for church tomorrow, because apparently the guests are always asked onstage to lead a worship song.  But I'm quite content, having seen another part of the world today, knowing that I'm going to make some tangible (no matter how small) difference in the world.  Plus there's a really cute white kitty roaming for scraps from dinner, keeping me company.

Oh, did I mention one of the girls in another group here does acupuncture???

Oh yeah, and I remembered to take my Malaria pill.

Call me the pants-less man...

Okay, consider this a warm-up post.  Consider that I haven't written narratively (google tells me that's not a word....whatever.) or introspectively for public perusal in a long time.  I'll get more into the meat of the trip in other posts...this was just a quickie.

I was informed that if I had any tattoos or piercings, it would be wise to find some way to cover them before getting to the compound where we'll be working in Haiti.  Thankfully, I don't have to worry about that. (which begs the question: do I not have either?  or do I simply not have them in places that people can see?  I'll leave that to your imagination.  Be careful.)

It did occur to me, however, that I may not have sufficient pairs of work jeans for this endeavor.  I'll figure out what to do about that later...but for now I'm left wondering the obvious:
what's worse?

The reason it's preferred for us not to have tattoos and piercings is because the local population where we'll be working would very easily associate them with forms of Devil worship.  I get that.  I respect that.

What about people who don't have pants though?

playful banter is welcome...

First Post

just a test. don't get excited...