Goats, Painting, Roosters, Haiti Stats

Roosters. Contrary to popular belief Roosters don’t just crow at dawn, unless dawn is from 11pm to 8am. You know how in a movie one dog will bark and then all the other dogs in the city chime in and it’s utter chaos? Roosters are just like that, except they do it in the dead of night! It’s very interesting that laying in bed I pick out the different ‘voices’. Last night, by rough count, there were about 18 roosters involved. There’s the deep ‘cock of the walk’ COCK A DOODLE DOOO, there’s the ‘higher pitched adolescent’ cock a doodle doo and even the chain smoking grandfather ‘Cock a ack doodle ac d’. Every time he starts I lay in bed totally cracking up cause he actually sounds frustrated that he can’t finish it without his ‘voice’ cracking. Since I can’t sleep I may as well be amused!

Kabrit (Goat) Update. So far 30 have been delivered to HATS compound and 23 have gone home with their new families. We’re expecting more on Friday. We need another 17 goats to come and go before I leave on Monday since it will be too much for Mom to do without me here.

It’s not so much the handing out of papers, it’s the moving them around, the feeding, the watering, getting their horns freed from the fence, keeping the kids out of the area. The goats spend a few hours during the day at the school field where there is lots of vegetation and then back to the side of the house for safety, water, etc. Today was the first day I wasn’t involved in the moving of the goats and left it to the kids. When I ventured out late this evening to make sure they all had water I discovered that 3 of the 7 weren’t asleep. That’s weird! Then I realized that 3 of the ones delivered today had ropes too short (this is new!) to allow them to lay down once tied to the fence and 1 wasn’t tied on at all (if we don’t tie them on they eat mom’s garden). So there I was in the mosquito infested dark with some wire that was on my painting tarp (can’t find any rope) trudging through the goat poop to fix up my poor babies. Two peed immediately upon my fixing their ropes (they couldn’t get into squat position with the short rope) and they all immediately started eating since their heads could now touch the ground. Goats take up about 3-4 hours of my day and mom doesn’t have 10 extra minutes!
Okay, after that rambling missive about housing the goats… after we get them, then we need to find the families the goats are going to. It’s not like you can just pick up the phone and call them! You need to ‘send word’ through people who know people (that is Luckners job) and then hope they show up quickly although they won’t own a vehicle so will grab a tap tap to come pick up their goats. Coming home from Market today, sitting in the back of the truck of course, I hear this extremely load goat crying (I finally know the difference between children and goats) and realize it’s a whole bunch of goats tied onto the side of a tap tap. They’re dangling by their ankles and every time the tap tap goes over a ‘Police Kouche’ the goats would get jarred and start crying. Police Kouche is a sleeping policeman, which is actually a speed bump.
Once the people come we get their name, take a photo, rename the photo with the receivers name, match that to a gifters name and then email the photos. The first goat photo emails for goats requested up to Dec 13th are being emailed out Thursday. The rest will follow as soon as we can source the goats.

Goats on a tap tap

Paint Update. Despite popular expectation from those of you reading the blog… I haven’t been fired. I guess when you’re desperate for good help you take what you can get! Jessie doesn’t come back for 3 weeks so in the meantime I’m all mom has. I need to redeem myself after my painting fiasco’s, so I hope to have at least 6 benches done before I go! I painted a lovely bench today. Here is my one complete bench. I better step up the action!!

One bench done

Stats about Haiti.

The country of Haiti is on an Island in the Caribbean called Hispaniola. It’s south of East Miami, and just to the east of Cube and Jamaica
The island was claimed by Christopher Columbus in 1492 and became the base for the conquest of the Caribbean
In the 1700’s the French formed a plantation colony in the West. The French plantation owners brought in slaves from Africa and in 1804 the slaves revolted, the French fled, and the country became Haiti
The remaining 2/3 of the island is known as the Dominican Republic. The Haiti side has no tourism like the DR has. The DR side of the island is still Spanish
Haiti has a very small, very wealthy elite. They have walled residences along the water and large plantations. Haiti also a very large very poor majority population
Haiti is about the size of 2/3 of Vancouver Island or 2x the size of PEI. There are 10 Million people here and it is considered the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
Haiti has been ruled by Dictators for years, which is one reason the country is in such bad shape
The main language spoken is Kreyol (Creole) although the language of official documents and the language spoken at University is French. The slaves learned the language phonetically and mixed the French in with some Africans and Spanish, so Kreyol is shorter and more efficient than French. Sil vous plait is soupla. Sou Play. Merci Beaucoup is Mesi bokou (or Mesi anpil). I can cobble together a sentence in French although often it’s understood only by the older children who learn French at school.

After that little history lesson I’m going to end this blog with some random photos!