Day #5–Already Halfway Done

It has been another good day in Haiti, right now I’m sitting out on the second-floor balcony at the guest house about two hours after sunset.  Other than the light on the patio, there’s very little other light outside since most other places don’t have much in the way of electric lighting.  The birds are chattering constantly, and every once in awhile I can hear a dog barking and the occasional rooster (well, the broken ones that haven’t quite figured out that this is the night and not the early morning).  However, right across the riverbed, the MTM church is all lit up, and is one of the few things that can be seen that isn’t complete blackness.  They’re having their Wednesday evening worship service, and right now, I can hear their singing and praising God from all the way across the valley. 

Yesterday was the last day that the medical team was here, so the clinic was closed up and we said goodbye to all of them before bedtime.  They headed out to the airport at 5:45 this morning, much too early for me to be up, so I woke up to a much less crowded guest house this morning.  It was really cool that we were able to have the overlap with their team, because many of us were able to help in the clinic in some capacity.

It rained again last night and into the early morning so it made for a relatively slick walk down across the dry riverbed.  I’m one of those crazy guys who likes to “walk to work” every day (there’s about four of us that have walked every day).  Usually we take a shortcut trail that we like to call the “goat path,” where we have to descend a pretty steep grade to get to the riverbed, but we thought it would be a little too muddy for us to safely traverse so we took the main road down instead (however, on the walk home, a native Haitian told us that he walks the goat path every day, rain or shine).  The rest of the walk consists of about half a mile of very steep ascent up an old, paved, one-lane road.  It was good the road had grooves this morning because they were the only things that kept us from sliding down due to all of the moisture.  We also had an ATV that had a little bit of engine trouble, so there was plenty of excitement to fill the commute this morning.

Today our group painted some of the school exterior, worked in the computer lab, and taught three different science and math classes.  I started out the day with a brief spell of painting, and then helped as a class aide for the math class.  The main goal of our classes is to supplement what the students are currently learning in their classes, and to expose the students to topics that they have never covered.  The students have never had a science lab so Bryan has organized introductory lab classes for them and we have had great success.  In the math portion, we used graphing calculators to teach the students about solving algebraic equations graphically.  None of these students have ever solved equations this way before, and it has been a great experience teaching them how to do basic functions on the calculators.  What is even cooler, is that there has been a little bit of a buzz on the school campus about the calculators, so it’s good to know that some of the students are excited about using these new tools.  We don’t really know if or how they may be integrated into the math curriculum, but at the least, we have been able to expose these students to tools that they will run into sometime in the future, because some of the students are dreaming about becoming doctors and engineers. 

For dinner tonight, we had meatballs with rice, spicy red sauce, and black bean sauce.  The combination of spicy red and black bean sauce has been a favorite among us, so it was a very good dinner.  That’s all for now, so take care!
-Kirk