English Club

Hi! I’ve finally started working on the projects, and have gotten more accustomed to life in Leogane! Yesterday and today, we spent the morning with our interpreters. We recruited a total of 36 people for the focus groups that we’re holding on Monday and Tuesday. We also found a nice place to hold our focus groups. A man in the area had a nice yard with shade, and we asked him if we could hold the focus groups there on Monday and Tuesday. He agreed, even though he didn’t even know us! No one in the U.S. would ever let random strangers hold a focus group on their property. We spent today prepping for the focus group and practiced the questions on our amazing cooks Yvette and Lazeena and our cleaning lady, Jocelyn. I’ve been eating well and I get along well with my group. We have been playing cards, Taboo, reading, and just hanging out in our free time.

Today, we went to a place called English club. It’s a free club where the Haitians come together to practice their English. It was really fun and entertaining. Today, they were practicing their English by answering the question “How I conceive English.” We thought their choice of words was really funny, but it was nice to hear their responses. They said things like “I see English as money,” or “To me, English is like my boyfriend.” Another guy said “English is like a baby- you have to feed it and nurture it.” The funniest was a guy who said “When I speak in English, I feel like I am flying.” The funny part was that they said all these answers with such serious faces, and weren’t joking at all. They also called us to go up there and give our answers, and then they asked us questions. After one of the girls in my group had gone up, they asked her how she stayed so beautiful. It was so funny! She just answered them by saying that she washes her face and brushes her teeth everyday- haha.

Everything else has been going well! We have a free day tomorrow and Sunday, and then on Monday and Tuesday, we will be conducting our first focus groups! It will be exciting to see how they go.

That’s all for now!

 

Our projects

Here’s a little bit about each of the projects I’ll be working on this summer. We don’t have a lot of guidance or anything on them, so it will be interesting to see how they pan out. I think it will be fun and challenging to work out how to make them work!

I’m working on three projects. For the first one, we will work on it here and there, when we can.  We are working with some Haitian nursing students to make an education video on cervical cancer. The video will be in Creole, and will be used in health centers. The second is improving the post traumatic stress disorder diagnostic survey for Haiti. Right now, when you literally translate from English to Creole, it doesn’t make sense to Haitian people and isn’t culturally relevant. So we are doing focus groups and asking Haitians questions about the old survey questions to see how we can make them more relevant. The last project is one that I am kind of excited about because we get to interact with kids. We will be walking around and surveying children in the area to see if they are undernourished. This is to see if there is a need for a nutrition program at the local clinics for the kids. They have this stuff called Medika Mamba which is a fortified peanut butter. It is packed with tons of nutrients, and just 2 spoonfuls of it can improve a child’s health. It’s pretty cool, so we’re trying to see if there is a need for this stuff in Leogane, which is where we are.

The projects all sound good in theory, but like I said, it will take a little while to get into a pattern, because we’re just walking around and talking to people that are available and sitting outside of their homes.

In Leogane!

Hi everyone, I finally have reached Leogane, and have better access to internet. We have a 3G stick that plugs into our computer to get internet, but we have to share it between the 7 of us, so we don’t get too much internet time. The past few days, we’ve been travelling and getting oriented to the country. On Thursday morning, we met with a guy named Jean Marc, a pretty wealthy Haitian. He owns the company which is building Family Health Ministries’ guest house in Leogane. He took us to a country club-type place for lunch, and it was really nice. Then we walked down from the club and saw a refugee camp, and a few UN soldiers. It’s not really clear what the UN soldiers are doing in Haiti, but walking through the camp was a cool experience. It’s crazy that there’s a refugee camp just a short walk away from a country club.

Then we went to Jean Marc’s beach house, which is just south of St. Marc’s beach. It was beautiful and we definitely got spoiled at the beginning of the trip. We swam and had our orientation there. Jean Marc has a nice big boat, so all of slept on the boat on Thursday and Friday night. On Friday, we had more orientation and we also met Jean Marc’s wife and their cute little baby boy. They also brought the US ambassador’s wife and daughter and we got to talk to them. The ambassador’s daughter goes to UVA! She’s a rising junior, but didn’t know Nikita.

On Saturday morning, we left the beach. We went back to Port-au-Prince to do some grocery shopping, then we came to our guesthouse for the summer in Leogane. The guest house is really nice. It looks like it could be a house in the U.S. We are definitely fortunate to be living here for the summer. I share a room with the 3 other girls, and we have one bathroom.

As I’m writing this, it’s Sunday morning, and we’re all just blogging/journaling/reflecting. The food is pretty good here and the rice and beans are really good. They also cook lots of vegetables and make a lot of their spices from scratch. Our cooks work all day long to prepare our three meals, because they have to wash all the vegetables carefully and they have to make a lot of things from scratch. I have had a lot of down time so far, and it’s pretty boring because there isn’t much to do and we can only talk to each other so much. It’s kind of hard, not being connected to everyone whenever I want to be, but hopefully once our projects start and we have more things to do in the next few days, I won’t think about that as much.

I hope things pick up soon. That’s all for now!

Made it!

After a little bit of an adventure, I made it to Haiti! Since my flight out of DC was delayed, I missed my connection to Haiti so I didn't get to travel with the rest of my group. Landing in Haiti alone was a bit scary and super chaotic (worse than India) but I found my luggage pretty quickly and kept saying no to all the people trying to help me with my luggage. I found my group and we headed to Matthew 25, the guesthouse I'm staying at tonight. Haiti is really hilly and looks kind of like India in terms of the buildings and how people sell things on the side of the road, but the roads are much worse and there is still a lot of rubble from the earthquake. The guesthouse I'm at is pretty cool, and dinner was all vegetarian. I had a cornmeal/bean combo (kind of like a moist upit) and some veggie curry sauce with it. We also had cooked vegetables and beetroot, so everything was yummy and filling.

The mosquitoes are already biting! The bathroom status, which was my biggest question before coming here, is not bad. There's toilet paper but they tell us not to flush unless it's really bad (ew). There is a normal shower, with just cold water, and we have to work to conserve that too because it hasn't rained here in a while.

Headed out to a beach house for orientation tomorrow! I will be there until Saturday, when we will head to our guesthouse in Leogane!