Days 164 & 165 (03/29 – 30)

Thursday – This morning Tom and his wife Wendy, their friends Mike and Terry from New York and I had Spana drive us up to Moulin to catch the ferry to La Gonave. La Gonave is the largest of Haiti’s satellite islands and at 287 sq. miles is about the size of Hawaii’s Molokai. About 130,000 people live on the island and the EMH has 12 churches there. We only send teams there if they specifically request it because of the extra time and expense of getting there. However, we do have a couple of sites there that Tom and I need to look at.

The boat dock at Moulin (near St. Marc) is a busy place, being 1 of only 2 debarkation points for the island. (The other is in Petit Guave). The ferry only makes one roundtrip a day, so the boat  fills up with people and supplies – including chickens and goats on the return trip. There are several smaller boats that also make the trip and they fill to overflowing, much like the tap taps. The Coast Guard would have a heart attack – way overloaded and not a life jacket in sight. In typical Haitian fashion, the noon ferry left at 1:00 PM.

The Bay of Port au Prince was very calm and the trip took about 1 ½ hours. However, having been on the boat since 10:30 AM we were thoroughly sun baked by the time we got to Ansè a Galèt on the northeast side of the island. We were met by a truck from the Methodist church and school and taken to the guest house on their compound. We refilled our water bottles, took a quick tour of the church that’s being built there then went off to look at 2 more remote sites. I’ve been over some very rough roads going to remote sites in Haiti, but the roads on La Gonave were the worst. Portions of the roads are built right on top of lava beds and they are torturous – I know ‘cuz I road in the back of the truck for most of the trip.

The first church we visited was being built right on top of a lava flow. It consisted of 4 partially built walls with a tarp over one corner. The people said they had been working on the church since 2002. After another painful hour of travel, we arrived at the 2^nd church. Like the 1^st it was unfinished, but did have a roof. However, when I climbed through a hole in the wall, part of the wall came with me. And when I picked up one of the blocks it came apart in my hands. It was the worst construction and material that I have seen in Haiti. The pastor said that the people in the community had been building it since 20006. I would not let a team near this place.

It was dark by the time we got back to the guest house in Ansè a Galèt and the pastor’s wife had a delicious dinner waiting for us. The drumsticks were so big we couldn’t decide whether they were turkey or chicken. Turns out they were chicken – big chickens. During dinner we got a text message from Sarah saying that it was raining very hard in Petionville and they had flooding at the Guest House again. After dinner I took a bucket shower and put my bruised and battered body to bed. We had to be up at 4:30 AM to catch the ferry back in the morning.

Friday - The morning was dark but beautiful and not a Starbucks in sight. At the busy dock, the boat rapidly filled with people and some animals. The passengers included an 18 person medical team returning home to Scotland. Their organization has been sending teams to La Gonave for 20 years working at the only hospital on the island – one hospital and one doctor for 130,000 people. Not a great place to get sick. It was a total shock to everyone when the ferry left promptly at 6:30.

The heavy rains and flooding last night had washed out some areas of road, creating some traffic jams, so Spana was a little late picking us up at the dock. But it was interesting to watch all of the activity of passengers unloading all of their stuff and scrambling to get everything aboard one of the tap taps queued up on the road.

On the way back, we stopped at Arcahaie and Thomas to check on work progress and then stopped at Titanenyen so Mike and Terry could see the mass gravesite. By the time we arrived back at the Guest House, the mess from last night’s flooding had been pretty well cleaned up. I hope my next funding request gets approved soon so we can take care of the rain water run-off problem.