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| A few of my roommates |
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| Hunter with Simon |
On the first of September this past year I went to Haiti for fifteen and a half weeks. I flew to Port-au-Prince where I stayed the night and met up with four guys from Australia who were taking a semester off to volunteer in Haiti. From there we flew in a very small passenger plane to Hinche in central Haiti whose airport had a very short and very unpaved runway on which both people and livestock like to spend time. The guys (Lachlan, Jaedan, Hunter, James) and I began our training and orientation in Hinche. The man who ran our orientation, Dr. Jean Caleb, also directed an orphanage for boys between the ages of 5 and 13 so that is where we stayed. Jaeden and I became the newest roommates of sixteen 9 year old boys for a week and a half. While the boys were in school, we did our training and when school ended for the boys we helped them with their homework, helped to prepare dinners, and played soccer with them in the field across the street. In our training, we learned basic Haitian first aid and how to administer vaccinations. Once our training was completed we traveled with Dr. Caleb to many different villages in central Haiti where he offered free health care to those in need and Hunter, James, Jaeden, Lachlan and I went to the primary schools or orphanages and gave children vaccines for typhoid and hepatitis A. In the last three weeks that we were there, we left Dr. Caleb and went to another village in central Haiti close to the border of the Dominican Republic to begin work on a high school. A local man was in charge of the project and we met with him for a day where he handed us some plans, explained how to dig and pour a good foundation and then left and said that he would come back if he found time and we didn't see him again in the three weeks we were there. The biggest problem with building the school was that a lot of the supplies like the loose gravel and the concrete needed for the foundation and the lumber and cinder blocks needed for the actual building could not be delivered to our site because the road was not equipped to handle the truck. Thankfully, we had a lot of help from the young guys who would attend the school when it was complete; after we had marked out the area that had to be dug out for the foundation and showed the guys how deep they had to dig, Lachlan, Hunter, James, Jaedan and I started hauling the 60 pound bags of gravel and cement down the very muddy 10 kilometer path from the truck to the site of the high school.
I flew back home and my dad picked me up at the airport and drove me back to my home. I walked through the front door and my fathers wonderful girlfriend Izzi came running to the foyer to welcome me but stopped about ten feet away and told me that I stank, that I had to stay there and that she would get a garbage bag so I could throw the clothes that I was wearing away before they got any farther into the house. To be fair I did smell and me and my clothes were covered in a good layer of dirt and other things, I only could bring three sets of clothes with me and they never really got washed and the closest that I had gotten to a shower in the past three weeks was when it rained. After I threw away my shirt and shorts, nearly the entire contains of my backpack and, my backpack, Izzi decided that I still smelled too bad so she made me walk around the entire house to the back doors in the gym and then shower in the bathroom attached to the gym because she never uses that one. It made me angry that Izzi made me walk around the house in the cold without much clothing on and that I had to shower in the worst shower in the house.
And then I realized, my house has nine bathrooms. I traveled all over central Haiti and I did not see one flushing toilet, in Haiti, many of the people I saw had to bathe in the stream where they get their drinking water and I was angry that I had to shower in the worst of the seven showers in my house. I live in that house with my dad and his girlfriend, there are seven bedrooms, seven rooms that are reserved for nothing but sleeping. Sixteen 9 year old boys made room for two more people in their one small shared bedroom. I saw extended families of ten or twelve people all living together in a one room home. I have five extra bedrooms with five extra beds that stay empty nearly all the time. Not surprisingly, reverse culture shock hit hard but I am still glad to be home.
