My trip to Haiti

So last month I went to Haiti. For anyone that knows me this was a huge step. I don't like being in strange situations or meeting new people or eating strange foods. Somehow I always manage to get myself into these types of situations. Once I took a road trip out to the Grand Canyon and back all by myself. I still wonder how I did that!

Anyways, Haiti. First off my friend Ryan and I had to fundraise. We needed about $4000!! That was for plane tickets, buses, food, all sorts of stuff. We also had to get Typhoid shots and Malaria pills. Ick!
I made a whole bunch of friendship bracelets to sell, and Ryan hosted a Trivia night. Mainly Ryan raised all the money. Me not wanting to talk to people, our church didn't even know I was going, they thought I was just helping Ryan fundraise for his trip not our trip. That's what I get for not talking to people.

We had been planning this since January of this year, and finally July 5th and we were off. We had to Be up at 2am because our plane left around 6am. (We were joined up with Living the Adventure with Matt Henson, look him up!), anyways.... we get to Haiti and a whole bunch of adventures happened.

On the drive to Millet

First off it should be mentioned that I was taking Probiotic pills. They're supposed to help with digestion. We were going to be eating fresh food and since in the U.S we're raised on greasy death food, our bodies would be in shock from the healthy food, so we needed probiotic pills to protect our tummies. The first time I took the pill I farted World War 3. That should have warned me what was to come next! [Enter dramatic music]



We drove to a Methodist guest house where they put us up for the night. It took us about 2 hours to get there. It's only 15 miles away from the airport, but Haitian distance vs. time is a lot different than our distance vs. time.
The next morning we drove to our work site (we were going to be helping build a church), the country side was beautiful! We were in the town of Millet ( I hope I spelled that right, it's so small it's not even on the map so I couldn't check to see if I got the town name right)

Basically our schedule was we'd wake up eat breakfast, work on the church, eat lunch, break, then play with the kids and have VBS, and then eat dinner. After dinner we would have a group meeting and talk about how were were doing physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. We all ended up crying. It was Awesome!

Remember those probiotic pills I was talking about? Well on Monday, four days into the trip. I got sick. Bathroom poo sick. Right, ew! We're not allowed to drink the water there because it's contaminated. And if you did you would have poo problems then be dead in 24 hours. So I went and told our leader, which means the whole team knew. Embarrassing. He gave me some Imodium which is to help stop the problem and prevent furtherness from dying. So here I am pooing myself to death. I mean it felt like someone took an axe and decided to stab me over and over again in the gut. It hurt so bad I didn't feel like walking, but I had to walk because how else do you get yourself to the bathroom?

Day after day I'd be in constant pain, then I got nauseous. I knew that since I didn't die the first 24 hours that I probably didn't get sick from the water, (I mean, I didn't even drink it! There was a risk of accidentally doing so while taking a shower, but I was careful) Anyways, here I am, paranoid Joy, thinking that maybe my kidney exploded, or kidney stone, or perhaps my appendix ripped apart!
Turns out that it was the probiotic pills. They add good bacteria, and too much of a good thing causes poo problems! I stopped the pills and within 4 days I began to feel better. So basically I didn't feel better till I got home, but by then I had the stomach flu and a head cold. Awesome luck I have.

Aren't you glad you read that? Now on to fun stuff and non-poo related!

Now Haiti is poor in the way that minimum wage is about 3 dollars a day. They have small homes, and individual homes don't have electricity. The town may have a generator that the sometimes turn on. Each town has a water pump and you have to walk to get it. Water is used for cooking, cleaning, showers, laundry, and drinking. You need a lot of water to survive therefore each day one must walk to get water. But with all that, Haiti is the richest country I have ever seen. They are rich in love and kindness. They are family and church based. They have pride and take care of who they are. They look out for their neighbors. They are united in friendship and rainbow goodness. It's truly amazing to see.

In 2010 after the Earthquake, the media took photos. They were awful. The people of Haiti, they were exploited! Through their darkest hour they had strangers come in to their home and take pictures of their grief and plaster them in their weakened state all over the world.
I'll tell you now, they took a fall, but they're standing up stronger than they ever have before. Haiti now is much improved.

Here is a picture of our work cite. It will soon be a church. The United Methodists, for every volunteer sent to work, through our payment, they will hire a Haitian to work too. This involves the community. It also helps the workers to get educated in the construction work force, and working with us white English speakers, they get to pick up English. As we know, the more languages one knows, the better job opportunities one can have. See in the picture the concrete mixer? A few years ago no one had machines to help build, the government would seize them. The fact that we had one shows improvement! YAY.

See those polls sticking up? Those are rebar to help keep things structurally sound. They would hand bend the rebar too! A fascinating process if you ask me.

Hopefully the video uploaded and works. It's a video of our team working and shows the process of how stuff gets done. To us it's a slow process, but it works! And even though the hours are long doing the same thing, and it feels like nothing is getting done....progress is being made!
[video did not load, sorry, it was truly cool]

Here is a photo of a woman transporting her laundry. This amazes me. I cant even balance a book on my head, and here is a woman who can balance a load of laundry! They would also balance 5 gallon buckets of water on their heads too. They would use a towel and wrap it up and put it on the top of their head, I guess so it doesn't hurt and maybe it helps with stabilizing.

Mainly it's the women who balance things on their heads. I didn't see a single man do that, nor did I see the boys get water. I guess the men work and the women to the chores. I would see a lot of young girls get water. I saw one girl she had three five gallon buckets and she filled them all up to the brim, loaded them in her wheelbarrow and took off walking them back to her home!

Here's an image of the landscape. The second image there is picture of one of the rebuild houses.
The city looks very much different, we even saw a almost skyscraper building. The city is clustered together it's packed and busy. Think New York City.  We were in the country, so things were spread out and houses were smaller. The people in the country were a lot nicer than the city folk, somethings stay true no matter what country you are in!

This formatting of the pictures and the text here is making me mad. Hopefully it's making since to you because it's driving me crazy.

Anyways. Let's talk about the market and let's also remember that I get nervous around people I don't know and blah blah.
So market day, we told the village a certain day that we would be buying things and not to come before then. So they all showed up on the same day. Matt, our leader, has been to Haiti many times before. He also has been to this church work cite before. The night before market day he told us that it would be calm and maybe about 10 people will show up. Did 10 people show up?  No, more like 20! Now in the U.S, you walk into a store and someone asks you if you need help. Usually we all say no, and they go away and leave us to look and buy. In Haiti, not so much.

Market view from second floor of church.

They all come up to you and let you know that you are welcome at their shop.
"Sister" they say, "Sister, come look at my shop! Everything here is yours. This is your shop. Please, sister, touch what you like. Everything here is yours, you are welcome here"

Now do you have just one person saying this to you? No. You have all 20 people saying this to you. And let's put this into further perspective shall we? We as a team were going to go out into the market together as a group. This would have been fine, except who had a poo problem? I had a poo problem. So while my team went out to the market together, I ran to the bathroom to pray. "Dear God, I'm in pain, help" Though I'm sure I used more colorful words...and poo related words!

So after that lovely experience I wish none of you to ever have, I went to the the Market. I got swarmed. I could barely make it to where the rest of my team was, which was on the other side of the ally. "Sister over here" "Sister you haven't looked at my shop yet" I was overwhelmed. So I did what I do in most situations. I panicked and randomly bought things. I didn't even want half the stuff I bought I just got in and out as fast as possible. And to top it off you had to barter with them over the price. I don't know whats a good price or not. I did the best I could, but I feel like I failed. I went back to where we were sleeping and wanted to cry.

It was a 30 minute experience that probably did me a life time of good. Learn from your mistakes type of thing.

Alrighty then. On Sunday we went to church, and then we went to the Beach, but before the beach we went to Léogâne, the epicenter of the 7.0 earthquake. Out of all of which we saw, this is about all the destruction we saw. From the media we expected so much more, but most of it is cleaned up now.

This is where the road dropped. Basically if your car can fit through the left side of the road, then go for it, if not then find a different road. It is what it is and it's been incorporated into everyday life. 

Now here's a picture showing the creative side of Haiti. I loved all their buildings. I fell in love with the designs and the colors and the fences! Here is green brick with white mortar (if that's what it's called), but then they'd have houses that have white brick and blue mortar. They would just play with colors like that. And the result was amazingness. Some buildings would be painted bright orange, and next to it would be a building bright yellow. Each building had a personality. Here in the U.S with our cookie-cutter houses. We don't have any life in our houses the way the Haitians do!

And here's a picture of the beach we went to. Now it's not typical for Haitians to go to the beach. They are far to busy with work and supporting their families. Only the rich go to the beach, it also cost a lot of money. How much I don't know, it was part of our money that we paid to go. Our leader Matt took care of all our finances, minus the hectic day at the market!

The water was so warm. But it was shallow. The water only came up to our knees at the deepest. It wasn't safe to swim out any farther.

Another Joy is dumb story. Here we all are in the water. We're nagging one of the boys to go back to the beach to get the beach ball so we can play. Finally he gets out to get the ball, brings it back and throws it at me. I then proceed to smack it away from me and behind me where the ball floated out to sea never to be played with. Awesome!

Do they have Coca-cola, why yes, yes they do. Is it made with sugar cane, why yes, yes it is. Is it the best tasting thing in the world...indeed it is!

On the way back home I ordered a coke on the plane. One of those Olympic celebration coke cans, it was disgusting. So nasty! I don't understand why we have to use artificial sugar flavors like that, it tasted like cat sick. Not that I have experience in cat sick, I'm allergic to cats anyways!

Okay, what type of foods did we eat while we were there, well GOAT! Goat is so good, so yummy and tender and gamey tasting. So yummzz.  The yellow things around my plate are plantains. I didn't like those, there were bland tasting. Everyone else in our group seemed to enjoy them though. They're like fried banana slices or something.  Other things they had us eat was
   spaghetti for breakfast. They'd have fried spam in it. Spam. I love spam! At every meal we would have fruit, like three different kinds, then were was usually a meat dish and a veggie dish. My favorite was the noodles. They took noodles and baked them with peas and cheese. Most everything had a spice to it, so that was interesting too. We were spoiled. Part of the money that we spent to cover our costs was for food. They hired a lady to cook for us too. I guess I was too selfish or too self absorbed to notice what the Haitians eat at a typical setting. We were spoiled, it was a feast for three meals. I think I heard that most Haitian eat only two meals, most of it rice. I know people had fruit trees so I imagine that helps too and you can sell your fruit to buy things like meat. I know the women are the ones in charge of finding the food, getting the food, preparing the food, and making it last so that their children don't starve.

Schools often provide hot meals. I'm not for sure what Red Cross does, but what I was told, the United Methodists, when you donate to help them help people help themselves, or however that goes. There's a fund where all the money goes to making sure kids get a proper balanced meal at lunch!
For some reason in Millet, the schools stopped giving hot meals. I didn't understand a lot of the information we were given. I did what I was told, and when needed I sat on the toilet and prayed!

Forms of travel. Many own motorcycles. Some own cars, and then there's the Tap-Tap.
It's a colorful bus that people ride to get from point A to point B. And when you want off you tap on the back of the driver wall (there's a wall separating the driver from the passengers) and then they stop and let you off. I'm not sure how paying works. I'd imagine that you have someone driving and someone sitting inside the bus who takes money. People will jump on the bus while it's moving and if you don't pay you get kicked off. Traffic in Haiti is different than in most parts of the world. Sure there's lanes to drive in, do people pay attention to that? Nope. If they can pass you they will, everyone drives like 80mph. Sometimes they'll pass you and they're only be like an inch between your vehicle and theirs! It's a crazy system, but it works! The cars and buses don't have air conditioning, but all the windows are open and driving crazy fast, there's always a nice happy breeze.

So much more happened than what I've written. It was an experience of a life time. I'm truly blessed to have been able to had the chance to experience something like that. I learned so much and fell in love with the people I met. I made friends to last a life time, and I got out of my comfort zone!

Sister's being cute. Lisa (Or Melisa) and Annane. They have an older sister named Melisa (Or Lisa).

Well thank you for reading all that, I'll probably mention more stories in future posts, so apologies if you get tired of it.