Thursday, June 28, 2012

Cap Haitien + Cormier Plage

This past week, we took a little vacation within Haiti! We headed up 9.5 hours on extremely rocky, pothole-y, mountainous roads to Cap Haitien, where we say the Citadel and Christophe's Palace. The Citadel used to be a fort (it's the largest fort in the Americas) in the early 1800s. It was built after Haiti got its independence from the French in order to protect the country from any future attacks. The fort was built on top of a mountain so that it could overlook the entire valley below. We drove up most of the mountain, then had a little hike up to the actual fort. The views from the fort were amazing, and we were able to explore the fort. Henri Christophe named himself the King of the northern part of Haiti also around the early 1800s, and his palace was at the foot of the mountain that the Citadel is on. We got a chance to see that too, although the palace is mostly ruins. It was heavily damaged in a huge earthquake in the mid-1800s.

After we did a day of sight-seeing at the Citadel, we headed to Cormier Plage for a day at the beach! The trip to and from the hotel was kind of rough- we sat in the back of a pick up truck (it had benches) and headed up on some mountainous rocky roads. On the way up, I got whacked in the face by some tree branches, and on the ride back down, we hit a pothole so hard that we all flew up from our seats and came back down onto the seat really hard- I'm still recovering. However, the hotel was beautiful, and the private beach was amazing as well. It was definitely worth the rough drive up. We all just spent time in the warm water and enjoyed good food at the hotel restaurant!

In summary- we traveled up to Cap Haitien all day Monday, stayed in a guesthouse near the Citadel on Monday, visited the Citadel and the palace on Tuesday, went to the beach on Wednesday and stayed there overnight. Today, we made the long journey back until Port-au-Prince and are staying here overnight. Tomorrow, we'll be doing a little bit of sight seeing around Port-au-Prince and then we'll head back to Leogane in the afternoon!

Enjoy the pictures!

View during the ride up to the city of Cap Haitien
On the walk up to the Citadel
View from the Citadel

More mountains!

View of part of the fort from the roof

Tons of cannonballs- they were never used because the fort was never under attack

Christophe's Palace- also known as the Sans Souci (carefree) Palace

The hotel


Me and Priscille at dinner after getting dark all day in the ocean

View of the beach


Saturday, June 23, 2012

Mountainside Photo shoot + My week in pictures

Hi everyone!

Today we all decided to go on a hike. You can see the mountains in a haze from our guesthouse, so we figured we could make it to one of the mountains. We walked for about an hour and a half and finally made it to the base of a mountain. We started following the mountain road and eventually found a dirt path that went straight up one of the little mountains, so we followed that path up. The view from the top was amazing. We could see most of Leogane and the ocean! We had a little photo shoot at the top of the mountain- here are the pictures!




Lasya-style picture


We ended up taking about 4 hours for our whole trip and we were exhausted  by the end!

Here are more pictures from this past week in Leogane!
Salil, Amber, and I went to work at the Hopital St. Croix Pharmacy. We got a chance to count pills to put into the bags for the patients. We spent the whole time talking to the pharmacist, Jojo. He was a really nice guy and was very smart. He told us he wasn't married and didn't have a girlfriend, so we decided to set him up with our cook, Yvette (we told her we'd find her a potential husband). We described Yvette to him and told him she was pretty and was a great cook and everything. When we got home and told the cooks about Jojo, they said that they knew him and that he was married! Jojo had facebook friended us, and we checked his Facebook and indeed, there was a comment on his wall suggesting he had recently gotten married. We were shocked that such a nice guy lied to us about his marital status, and even let us try to set him up with our cook. Turns out that lots of Haitian men aren't really truthful about this kind of stuff- don't really know why!
The hospital pharmacy- they sell medication at a subsidized price (flat rate- about a dollar per medication you get), because most of the medication is donated by missionaries. 
Buster eating some bread we brought him!

Buster with his adopted mother, and his friend, Arthur-ina (we think she's a girl). So today, when we went to our dance lessons at Mon Petit Village, we went looking for Buster. I saw him looking down at the ground about 20 feet away from me. I called his name and HE ACTUALLY LOOKED UP!! I called his name a few more times, and he actually came over to me. Amber and I gave him some Rice Krispy Treats to reward him. We were so happy that we actually managed to make the name stick! It was a great moment :)
Visiting the school at Mon Petit Village! The kids were so cute! They were running around and playing, and they sang songs for us!
Posing with the kids in the school
A view of the classroom

Monday, June 18, 2012

Buster the Puppy

Today we had another round of focus groups. We started around 10, with 7 women. About halfway through, at around 10:30, another 10 women showed up. They run on super IST time- we had told them to come at 9! We ended up finishing the first group of 7 women, then did another focus group with the 10 women. Both groups went well, and we'll eventually find out what they're saying. Translating has been taking a really long time because Family Health Ministries wants every single word of what was said. This is problematic because during the men's focus group last week, the first 20-30 minutes was totally irrelevant. A bunch of the men were saying things that didn't answer our questions, and they were asking us all kinds of random things. Still, we were told that we had to translate that, which is kind of frustrating because I doubt anyone will get anything of value out of that and it's time consuming. Anyways, during the focus group, my friend Amber and I befriended a little puppy. This puppy lives at Mon P'tit Village, the school/activity center where we had our focus group. He had lots of little brothers and sisters but they all died :( What we heard is that one of the puppies accidentally bit the mother while drinking milk from her so she stopped feeding her babies milk, so they all died. The only one left drinks milk from another mother dog that lives there, but even she runs away while he's trying to get milk. Amber and I decided to name the puppy Buster and we fed him nutrigrain bars and rice krispy treats and he seemed to like it. Then, during the focus group, he fell asleep on our water cooler bag and was kind of shivering. He looked so cute and peaceful, so we put an old sheet that we had for people to sit on over him. We felt bad that we couldn't touch him, but we weren't sure if he had his vaccinations and he looked like he had fleas. But he was still really cute! We felt so bad when we had to wake him up and take his bed away from him. Hopefully we can let him nap on the bag again tomorrow when we go for the men's focus group!

Buster the puppy!

Sunday, June 17, 2012

1, 2, Cha Cha Cha

The last few days have been great! After our focus groups on Monday and Tuesday, a few people worked on translating the focus groups with the translators for the rest of the week. The rest of us visited pharmacies to start gathering information about contraceptives. We went without translators, so we had fun trying to communicate with our broken Creole. I'm far from fluent but I'm getting better! I try to practice with our cooks at the guesthouse. Using the information we gathered from the pharmacies, we are going to work on understanding what views the women in the area have of contraceptives. We then plan to create a brochure/comic strip/video to educate them on contraceptives. We are working with some of the nursing students from the nursing school nearby to create these materials in a way that the Haitians will actually understand, since education here doesn't work the same way it does in the U.S.

On Saturday, I worked at a local pharmacy with one of the other girls. We spent a few hours there and learned a lot about the medicines and the doctor/patient/pharmacist relationship in Haiti. The pharmacist told us that there is virtually no relationship between the pharmacy and the doctor, which is a huge problem. People come with prescriptions that are barely legible, so the pharmacist has to guess what the doctor prescribed based on the medical problem the patient has. It's crazy that this problem has such a simple solution- doctors writing neatly- yet it's still a problem The pharmacist also told us that preventative care is still not where it should be in Haiti. He told us that because people don't clean their toilets and don't take basic sanitary precautions when going to the bathroom, many women get infections that they then treat with medication, until the infection is gone. He told us that the women could simply throw a little bleach on their toilet to keep it clean and prevent future infections, but unfortunately, women just don't take these preventative measures. We plan to work on emphasizing prevention in our education materials.
The pharmacist's son, Webster
Amber, Jean Guy, and me
Saturday afternoon, we went to Mon P'tit Village, a school and activity center near our guesthouse. It's a really nice area with lots of plants and trees, grass, a school area, a soccer field, a Voodoo temple, a restaurant, a guesthouse, and a huge gazebo where they hold free dance/art/music lessons for the children in the area. We went to take some dance lessons, and we learned the cha cha. They had two groups- advanced and beginner. We all took the beginner lessons and he taught us really well! We learned enough to dance to the music and do a couple different moves. At the end, everyone from both classes mixed together and everyone danced together. We all just kept switching partners, and it was really fun. The Haitians are so friendly and open- they're not shy about coming up to us and dancing. When I was standing and watching, a little girl came right up to me and started dancing with me and she was so good- she led the whole time.



 Pictures of the guesthouse (interior):
Living/Dining Area


Kitchen

Hallway- leads to laundry room, guest bathroom, 4 bedrooms and 4 full bathrooms
The girls' bedroom
Our bathroom


The worst part of Haiti....tarantulas and other big spiders.

Mama Duck and her ducklings







Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Focus Groups!

On Monday and Tuesday,we started doing our focus groups for the PTSD project! On Monday, we ended up getting 9 men out of the 16 men we had recruited, which was the perfect amount. They gave us good feedback on the questionnaire, and it was successful! For Tuesday, we had recruited 21 women, and were expecting about half, but were prepared for more, just in case. We were sure that we'd have many more women because they seemed more eager than the men during recruiting. Surprisingly, only 1 woman showed up! We then went back out to recruit whoever we could in the area, and ended up with 5 women for the focus group. Even though it was a little small, we got some great feedback and they were all very willing to share their personal stories about the earthquake. The women definitely have gone through a lot of stress as a result of the earthquake- many women talked about how they do their daily duties because they have to, but they don't find the same joy in their daily activities and never feel like dressing up or doing anything nice anymore. However, it seems like most of the women have turned to religion and they all said that it is God that keeps them alive and functioning every day, and that without God, they would be lost. It was really interesting to see how they cope with their stresses and what a huge role religion plays in their coping mechanisms. Today we are translating all the recordings from the focus groups. We'll be recruiting more people at the end of the week and we'll do 2 more focus groups on Monday and Tuesday of next week. I'm excited to read the translations and see what else we find after the focus groups next week.

Pictures!

Creole Lesson in a very hot house!

Another picture from the canoe ride on Sunday


The group with our translators- Eunid (front center) and Valery (front left)

Taking a quick picture before our focus group

Sunday, June 10, 2012

Church + Beach!

Hi everyone!

Today, we went to a Haitian church! We had to leave to go to church around 6:45 because church starts at 7:30. The whole sermon was in Creole, but they sang hymns in French and we had a book so we could follow along. There was lots of music, and they even had 2 guest choirs that came to sing from Port-au-Prince and they were really good. The whole service lasted about 2 and a half hours.

After lunch, we drove about 15 minutes to the shore to go to a beach. Missy's friends own a guesthouse on the beach, so we spent the afternoon there. We went on a small boat ride in a canoe-like boat (it was carved out of one tree). A guy named Rodney paddled us out, while me and two of my friends sat on the floor of the canoe. The water was really clear and pretty, and we were able to see the coral reef. There were tons of sea urchin (thought of you, Amma!). Take a look at some of the pictures!

The Family Health Ministries Guesthouse- Our home for the summer!
 
The canoe- the whole boat is carved out of one breadfruit tree

The view from the canoe

More from the canoe

Reading on a hammock!

Friday, June 8, 2012

Our Group!


The amazing views from the beach house we stayed at during orientation!



What we do for fun around the house :-)