Just your regular Saturday night in Haiti

I am sitting on my bunkbed, at the end of a long-ish day, with a giant fan cranked on high blasting my face. It is 9:15pm on a Saturday night and it's already time for bed. But I decided it might be an interesting idea to blog about my experiences here in Jacmel, Haiti. I have already been here for a week and a half, but will try to go back in time and capture everything that has already passed.

For a long time, and for many reasons, I have been wanting to volunteer somewhere, anywhere. Finally, in January, life happened (you know what I mean?) and made the circumstances and the timing right for me to gather up all my vacation time at work and leave. Leave my life to do some good. Tragically (or coincidentally), life and fate came together on the same day that the devastating earthquake hit Haiti. Despite my doubts and fears, I knew I would end up in Haiti.

It is actually not as easy as one would think to volunteer for disaster relief. But, as it so often happens, I knew someone who knew someone who knew someone that needed someone. On March 2nd, I packed my bags and hopped on a plane and headed for the Dominican Republic (as commercial flights directly into Haiti were still few and far between), without quite knowing how I was actually going to get to Haiti. As I arrived in DR, I got a text message that I should be ready to catch a small plane to Jacmel at 7am the next morning. That's how things are done here. Pretty last minute. It's exhilarating (especially for someone like me....I like to have things planned out).

After many delays (also how things are done here), I finally arrived in Jacmel, on March 3rd, stepping into a blaze of heat, if not glory. The airport, which was to be my home for the next month, was a tiny building with a tiny runway that was accepting international planes (but tiny ones) packed full with humanitarian aid. The Canadian military was stationed at this airport to help get it up to full working capacity (this is an uncontrolled airfield, ie. no control tower, and with 70 planes landing a day, it was getting dicey). I walked in "the terminal" to find a little desk set up for our NGO, with Cdn military swarming all over the place. Behind the desk was a blackboard with a big "Welcome Namita" listed under March 3rd - what a great way to start my month here. I left with a fellow NGO worker, Jo, to take my suitcase to our guesthouse. We stepped out of the airport (ie. down a gravel path and through a little gate) and onto a busy street, full of motorcycles, diesel-spewing trucks, loud honks, roosters walking everywhere, and Haitians talking at top voice (there really seems to be no other volume here). As he hailed a random motorcycle to take us to the guesthouse (motorcycles are the Haitian form of taxis.....everyone here is a potential cabbie, just flag them down and pay them $3), we heard of a big motorcycle accident up the street. For some reason, Jo and I were required there. Before I knew it, I hopped in a military truck, my suitcase getting thrown back to soldiers inside the airport, and I was off to the scene of the accident.

I had been in Haiti for 15 minutes by this point. I knew this was exactly where I was supposed to be.

More soon....bedtime!