Tegay's Place, Graduation, Pizza Amour & Errands

Yesterday morning we went to Frank's friend Tegay's place on the water (in the bay). On the way we stopped at the Olympic Training Center. It's a beautiful facility! 500 kids participate in an after school program there Monday-Friday. Saturdays are open to the public. 100 of the best athletes are given the opportunity to live on the campus full time, attend school, eat, and train! Tegay has a little house where he lives with his 9 kids. We got to meet and love on his kids, along with some others from the community/village. We brought juice and cookies for them...which were a big hit, as usual! The water was B-E-A-Utiful! We got to go out on one of Tegay's boats and found a red starfish in the water! We also found a sea cucumber...what a squishy,slimy, unusual creature! We got to walk the beach and play in the water with some of the little ones as well.

We headed back to the Guest House to cook out for lunch. After that we headed over to the OK for the Women's Education Center graduation ceremony. It was advertised to start at 2:30 but didn't start until closer to 4:15-4:30 or so...they were waiting for the sound system and speakers to arrive...and that truck didn't even pull in until about 4! The decorations and women's outfits were beautiful. The colors this year were royal blue and white.

We left the ceremony at 5 to head over to Pizza Amour for dinner but got stuck in traffic for nearly 2 1/2 hours. We arrived at Pizza Amour and shared pizza, salad, sourdough bread and pesto, and chocolate cake. Yum!

I'm including a short video of driving through a small market on our way to Tegay's place. The main road we turn onto is paved (which is rare). There are about 4,000 km of roads in Haiti...but only about 1,100 of those are paved (that's only like 25%). The rest are bumpy dirt/rock roads with pot holes and drainage ditches that small cars could fall into...all of this makes traveling over 15 miles per hour rather difficult. The only reason traffic seems to be smooth in the video is because we are heading away from Port au Prince. Eventually I will upload some video footage of driving in the dense traffic of PAP! The file was too large to upload to this blog page, so I'm including a link to it: https://youtu.be/M0tqBB38qDc

Everyone packed up and headed back to Colorado today (well, for the most part). There was a mother and son from Charlotte and another woman from Florida. This group was so much fun and so gracious! We got up early to take them to the airport. We pulled out of the driveway just after 5AM! After dropping them at the airport we came back to the Guest House for breakfast. Then John and 'P' (Pierre) came over and asked if I wanted to tag along with them for the day, so of course I said yes! We loaded up all the chairs from the graduation ceremony and headed to the tire place to fix the tire on the canter (because we stopped on the way to the OK, but they were not open yet). Once we got the tire fixed and dropped the 144 rental chairs off (which was an event in and of itself...it was the parable of the lost chair, but we found it at last!), we headed to Corail to one of Heartline's sponsorship schools to drop off another 70 chairs for their graduation ceremony tomorrow. The road to get back into this village is unlike one I've seen anywhere else. You literally cannot go more than 5 mph and must follow the "smoothest" path possible. Easier said than done! Running those few errands took us from 7AM-2PM (a little different than back home)! It was great to spend some time with John and 'P' though! I got to learn a lot from 'P' sitting up front in the canter. We stopped and got some drinks/snacks to hold us over along the way. I got to try John's favorite Haitian potato chips...they reminded me of kettle cooked chips back home, but extra greasy! :) 'P' stopped along the road and got some fresh sugar cane for us...it was very interesting and something I had been wanting to try! I didn't realize you don't just eat it...you chew it/suck the juices/sugar out of it and spit it out. I also had a chicken pate from the bakery!

Once we got back from running all over PAP and the surrounding areas, I took a shower and laid down for a little rest. Didn't get to sleep much because of the heat, but it felt nice to lay down for a bit. We are getting ready to eat some dinner soon and then head back to the airport to pick up the next group!

Love, love, love!
Sarah/Ms. Poling