Welcome to Haiti....

Too much swirling around in my head to write anything that would make sense to any of you so here's a few snippets of what's been going on...

1. We moved into our new house on Wednesday afternoon. Yay!! I'm finally unpacked. We walked to a local restaurant Thursday night to celebrate.

the house 

2. We're connected to EDH (Haiti's power company) at the house. EDH only turns power on for 5 or 6 hours at night. So no power at the house any other time until the inverters get set up (basically car batteries that charge at night when EDH is on and then provide enough power during the day to keep the refrigerator running). Looking forward to having a refrigerator hopefully soon! Beyond thankful for the power we have at night so that we can sleep for a few hours with fans running. Last night EDH didn't turn on until really late. There wasn't any work I could do in the dark, so I just went to bed super early and got some much needed extra rest! 

my bedroom

3. We're having water issues at the house. We're manually filling the toilet tanks with water so we can flush. Thankful that we have running water in the sink to fill the toilets and extremely thankful for the little bit of water we have running in the showers. 

afternoon view from the roof

4. Our neighbors have several chickens. The roosters must be a little confused b/c they start their wake up call at 2:30 am. 

5. I have 2 kids in my calculus class, 11 in pre-calculus, 7 in physics, and 21 in chemistry. Ready or not, schools starts Monday!!!!

6. No internet at the house yet, so I walked over to school this morning to get some work done and check email. No power or water at school today either (apparently they don't run the generators on the weekends)

7. We have the sweetest guy who is our night security guard at the house. He also works as gate keeper at school during the day (weekends too). I need to hurry up and learn creole b/c I would love to know his story. Does he have kids and/or grandkids? Is he working night and day so that they can go to school and eat and have clean water and shoes and a roof over their heads ... 

8. Even with our little hiccups at the house with power and water and a few other things going on, we're still living better than 90% of the people here.

9. We walked to Epidor (Haiti's version of fast food) for lunch. We've been there a couple of times and every time there have been a few ladies begging on the street. The other day 1 of the ladies had a small toddler with her. She has already taught him how to stick his hand out and beg for money when he sees a white person walk by. He's barely walking, but knows how to ask a white person for money!! Today another lady, who has been there every time we've walked by, had 4 kids with her. They chased us down the street trying to take our drinks from us and begging for money. This is the hard stuff here. If I give them money this time, then what? They'll tell all their friends and I'll have 50 people chasing me down the street next time. Or it'll buy them bread today, but what about tomorrow and the next day? How do you help empower these beautiful people so that they don't have to beg on the street. I've been blessed, therefore it is my responsibility to bless others, but how? In the states, I would have just bought them lunch and went on with my day. Here it's so much more complicated than that. If others see me give them money or buy them food, it could put them or me in danger. How do I help those in front of me in my everyday walk here without doing more harm than good......