Monday September 29, 2008

Finally, I got to get off the home front for a while. Today Frer Jal, AJ and I took a trip into LaPointe to the House of Hope to bring Isaac, the twin of Hannah, to stay until he will be adopted out. We also took one of the boys from the hospital for an xray of his arm at the hospital there. It was quite an adventure, again. Any time you venture to transport anywhere, it is bound to be so. The travel involved tap tap, boat, mototaxi (riding on the back of the motorcycle holding on for dear life) and tap tap again. And that was just one way. Sometimes I forget how odd all this is, but I got a glimpse of it when I looked down and saw mysel,f holding Isaac (almost one month old now) sitting in the boat crossing the river because the water is too high to cross via tap tap, feeding him a bottle in one hand and bucketing out the water in the bottom of the boat with the other hand and looking out at both shores seeing the crowds of people watching (I mean that would be pretty entertaining). I'm just glad Frer Jal carried Isaac on the moto and all I had to hold onto was my bag and the motorcycle. It was a successful day though. X-rays done, showing the House of Hope to AJ, talking with Jenny about how they are treating malnutrition there, and returned in one piece. I also wanted to go just to see the land outside of PC and see the effects of the hurricane first hand. It looked that the area around PC was the worst. The three rivers you cross to get here looked completely different. Hardly any green around them now, but just a wide river surrounded by clay clifts and rocks. One the other hand it was a little uplifting because the rivers are passable by car now and all the gardens I saw now have banana trees growing about knee high or higher. There is hope. I hear perhaps in January the gardens that were just replanted after the hurricane will begin to produce crops.