Saturday, October 25, 2008

I'm gonna need some bigger tweezers!

I had been here for maybe a week. Things were going well and nothing catastrophic had happened, so I was fairly comfortable in my daily activities.

And then one morning I was in my skirt ready to go clean my would-be office and Monique stopped me with an intersting look on her face. She said somethingI didn't understand in Kreyol and pointed to a girl with blood on her face.

"Bwa," she said. That means "wood". I thought she got cut by a branch or something, so I took a closer look.

On my way over I told her it was okay in Kreyol and that it was only a splinter in English, then I saw it. This piece of wood was about 3/8 of an inch in diameter, sticking straight out of this little girl's temple, only a little stub as far as we could see.

My reply in English was, "I'm gonna need some bigger tweezers."

And they brought some big tweezers! Me and Monique had to take turns trying to pry the little sucker out of there. All I could hope for was that the other end of the bwa didn't have gray matter on it.

Half an hour later, after pulling, cutting, pulling and cutting, squinting and wondering what in the world we were doing, there came a "splinter" between 2 and 3 inches long.

We gave her a few stitches and I was finally able to get around to eating breakfast.

Then the day began.

And that was just the beginning. Wait until next week, it only gets crazier.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

My Apologies

I hope that few, if any have been waiting for me to update this thing. In all the first times I could get on the internet when I moved here, I had so little time, I could only e-mail.

Well, I hope to get back into this and share a few more specific stories than those I do in my e-mails. Hopefully they're a good supplement to the updates you get already. I also want people to get a little more of the humor of this life in Haiti than what I can describe in a short and very important update.

Love you all so much and hope that you enjoy the following stories. They're a window into the strictly random nature of this country and her people. As random a my life was even in the States, I actually feel very at home.

More soon...

-C