The ride of my life...March 23

Port au Prince is a very big city.  It has a population of over 2,000,000 and it is situated in a natural bay that shelters it from most of the effects of hurricane season.  Port au Prince is a pirate town. Jean Lafitte, the last of the great pirates, was born in Port au Prince during the time of the American Revolution. Port au Prince is also a city of contrasts, Pétionville is very rich and modern section boasting shops and restaurants  while Cité Soleil is very poor and destitute with slums and tent cities.  A little of everything can be seen in Port au Prince. 

The biggest thing that I noticed when we left the airport was the tent cities. You pull out onto the main road and immediately there are tents.  Blue tents, white tents, grey tents, pieces of tents that go on for miles.  Tents stacked on top of each other, open sewers, living conditions that seem almost inhumane. People everywhere!  Children in dirty clothes with both sad and smiling faces.  Adults sitting and talking in the shade of garbage piles. This is daily life in Port au Prince. It is a hard life that is full of injustice.

We traveled for what seemed like hours in the back of the truck watching the scenery slowly creep by.  It became monotonous.  The same views over and over - tents and rubble.  I checked my watch and realized that we had been traveling somewhere around an hour.  We continued on and the scenery changed from broken buildings to more grass and trees.  Haiti was starting to look tropical.  We finally made it to the edge of PAP and there was a slow down - A Traffic Jam!  We crept through the back up and finally got to the front of the line where I was able to see what the hold up was.  There was a truck off of the road to the right side.  It appeared that the truck had hit a pedestrian, who was now lying on the ground covered by a sheet with just the top of a head sticking out. People were going on about their business while this poor person's life had just ended tragically.  It is a sad statement on daily life in Haiti.  Conditions are so harsh and people are so used to the difficulties associated with life that death is just another traffic jam.  No sadness, no sirens, no lights, just cars backed up on a highway.

We finally made it to the mountains and the world changed.  Everyone's spirits started to lift and you could tell that each parent was counting the moments until he or she would see their daughter.  We continued up the mountain occasionally passing by kids on their way home from school dressed in different colored uniforms.  Men, women, and children were moving around going from place to place.  Sometimes carrying large loads on their heads, sometimes just walking.  There is no hurry in Haiti. Life is definitely slower and simpler.

We made one final stop on the way in and Alfred, our driver, got out and went to a roadside stand where he bought a bunch of "figs" at the urging of Stacy. Figs are finger size bananas that grow wild in Haiti.  They are gathered by the locals and sold at stands along the road.  The figs were delicious. Sweet and soft, perfectly ripened!  What a treat.

And we were off to the orphanage at Camatin.  We rounded the last bend, started down the hill, and there it was...the fortress on a hill side.  The place I had longed to see for months.