Canal Walk, More Goats, Creatures

Canal Walk:Finally, today we had our Canal walk. One stroller wheel is flat and we’ve been waiting to get it fixed. Today we decided to go anyway and tilt the stroller so that the flat wheel was in the air and away we went. This was only Ti Luc’s 3rd walk on the Canal and right off the bat he fell right onto some big rocks. He kept going and a little later fell again quite hard and gamely kept going. We stopped enroute and enjoyed a banana cake I had cooked yesterday and then started our trek back home. Poor Ti Luc took a 3rd tumble although what a trooper! He only started walking at all 7 months ago and now going on long walks and climbing stairs! Amazing what the love of a great Mama (my mom) can do!

Kids on their walk

Tonight I had the great pleasure of gifting Leica, my meeting sponsor child, two new dresses. One was a dress I wore as a child over 30+ years ago and is very bright and Haitian colored (we got it in Hawaii) and the other was spring dress with lots of soft layers. She was so excited she buried her face in the dress and went immediately to put it on and model for us. She came back to Mom’s house twice in the next hour to hug me again and say thank-you. She’s very excited to have a new church dress!

Leica and her new dress

More little things that can also be big things:

Jared is living proof it’s possible to get Mosquito bites on your Mosquito bites.
The house either smells amazing from Martha’s cooking or smells like burning garbage or burning crops depending on how the wind is blowing.
Cooking 2 meals a day & cleaning up after takes Martha all day. Can you imagine that??
Mom’s house is not her own. She always has people in here, from Martha and Germaine, to people looking for tools, to photocopying, to finding tools etc. Her bedroom is her own place just for her. 🙁
Despite ‘North American’ brooms the ladies much prefer the straw brooms whereas I can’t understand how a straw broom cleans up anything. For a visual, Mom is posing with the Straw broom in the ‘mom’s hair reenactment photo’ from 2 blogs ago.

Goats: 10 more goats arrived today. We were expecting them to come to the house so a) they wouldn’t die from the plastic and b) it would be quicker and easier to distribute them when people arrived and c) they’d not be stolen by Machete wielding children who will scale the 8ft concrete block walls at sundown. We’re in the office eating lunch at our desks (again) and we hear they’ve arrived and have been let into the school compound. We both go tearing out of our chairs to get there before they can eat the plastic. We get there to discover the goats tied onto the trees in the school yard, just outside the entrance of the soccer field. I look at this and with the feeling of being a complete dimwit ask my mom ‘how come we didn’t think of that the first time?’ and she replies that Luckner asked her the same thing when she explained to him our goat dramas from 2 days before… There was some definite ribbing about the smarts of the ‘blancs’. In my defense a) I’m new here. b) I thought they HAD to go on the Soccer Field and didn’t know they could go on the school yard. Not sure what mom’s defense was. I think all the bleating of the goats and chaos of the Petite Petite Mwen (Grandkids) being here had her all confused.

How smart are those Blancs?

Creatures big and small: Still haven’t found a Tarantula although did find 2 great bugs. The cockroach found by Alexa in the office and was dead since Martha does a great job of spraying in here. Seldom do you ever see a live cockroach around mom’s house. If it wasn’t dead I’d not have been taking a photo, I’d have been running looking for Martha or Germaine to come kill it. LOL. The body of the cockroach was at least 2inches long (yes, just the body!). The beetle was stuck upside down which allowed me to get close enough to place a dime for sizing (learned that after the cockroach). It was outside so allowed to live. The poor horses and cows tied along the side of the canal were very malnourished and the horse had a oozing sore open on it’s back. Most are ridden bareback here or packed with goods without a proper soft padding (people lay on the dirt floors to sleep so a blanket for a horse isn’t a likelyhood)

A sizeable beetle, stuck upside down

Cockroach, body alone was 2 inches long!

skinny horse

Little mother Alexa has learned to mix formula & change diapers. Tonight she’s napping in Mom’s room (waiting for me to go up with her into the scary darkness of the second floor) and as she sees my mom she rolls over in her sleep and tells my mom ‘it’s time to change her’. She even changing Sandra’s diaper in her sleep!