Week 13

"Li pa gen nen nan figi li."

- "He doesn't have a nose on his face."

- He doesn't understand what he's talking about.

It feels strange to feel like now that I really have my bearings here I'm about to leave. I can speak Creole semi-fluently, ride public transportation, and cook semi-decent plantains. And yet in just two short weeks everything will change again! Everyone keeps telling me they're going to miss me and asking when I am going to come back to which I respond: well have more marriages and babies so I can come back! I already plan to come see Tamera and Raoul's baby when he/she (Raoul and I are thinking its a girl) is born in December and Rea officially becomes a grandma! And then of course there's Dana and Franc's wedding next year.

This week I tried to shake it up in our English class: we played English charades and everyone got VERY competitive. In the first round teams pulled paper with common nouns in English and had to describe it to their group in only English. The next round was verbs that they had to act out and guess in English. And the final round was verb conjugation, where verbs were conjugated in present, past, and future simple or continuous. So give it up to Team All Stars for a hard fought win.

Wednesday was off for "Agriculture Day" which I can only akin to Earth Day. So we spent the day relaxing and hanging out together. I did some of my laundry while Rea laughed at me because apparently I don't scrub hard enough. But hey, if it smells clean and it looks clean, thats good enough for me.

I also got to spend a lot of time with the girls, and my new pup Hadley! Haitians are commonly terrified of dogs, given most of their experiences have been negative ones with starving strays. I am slowly teaching everyone that dogs and pets can be integrated into the family too, and shouldn't be feared. The girls absolutely love Hadley but definitely having 10 young girls all vying for your attention wears her out, I know it wears me out! Hadley is coming back with me to the states and while getting all of her paperwork and shots done this week I also had the dog at the orphanage vaccinated since she's around the girls all of the time. Except we couldn't vaccinate her just yet because, surprise surprise, when the vet came over we learned - Bolia's pregnant! Bato was so excited (Bolia is his dog and he took her to a breeder several weeks ago).

Well that's pretty much it for now -- oh and you can check out this cool article the Los Altos Town Crier published about the current situation in Haiti and how my work fits in!