Free time

Tonight we are out on the porch of the guest house just chatting and enjoying the evening breezes. Work has been completed for the out patient staff and we are waiting for the Italians to cook dinner. There are about 100 of them in a tent city although not the tent city you see on TV- these are nice tents. There are US folks, Germans, Canadians, Slovakian and Bangladeshi. That last one surprised me. People have come from all over to help in the wake of the tragedy and while I am seeing "medical" folks, there are carpenters and engineers and all kinds of other "just want to help" people. Very impressive.
This area of Haiti shows little damage even though it is so close to the epicenter. Some time this weekend we will go out to the surrounding community and I suspect that will be difficult but I would like to see where all these patients came from. And not the one we saw today who has a neck injury from being hit by a military truck. That is a whole different type of "friendly fire" .

On the way in today we did see tent  cities and US AID giving out huge bags of rice. The line was very long but orderly. Those bags had at least 2 people carrying them- I suspect they were 50 lb bags.
The border was quite a mess. All these huge trucks trying to go on a 1 1/2 lane road 2-3 abreast. Our driver left the road to drive parallel on a a dry road (lake bed) like a bat out of hell and then scooted back up to the main road bypassing at least 10 minutes of waiting. If I met my demise in Haiti it will be in a car accident.
It turns out they do cookie distributions at night. I want to go on that just to see. I will let you know if I can work it out.