I was dressed and outside by 6:00am, so I missed the construction team's wake-up call. I spent an hour lying in a hammock between two palm trees, looking at the ocean and thinking. A few goats, with ropes trailing behind them, went past... probably headed to the river for drinking water. I also saw the three older men work their way up the beach with their plastic water buckets. A group of eight or ten Haitians wandered to the concrete pier and waited for about half an hour before moving on around 7:00am. I thought they were waiting for the fishing boat to bring a net to shore, but the only boats that I could see were rather far out from shore.


At 7:00am, I headed back to the eating area to meet the team from Ohio for breakfast. After Dave was up and the entire team was ready, we loaded into a truck for the long drive to Lahatte. This school was far enough south to suffer extensive earthquake damage, but that was the least of its problems. The school itself was up in the mountains, on what can only be described as an arid plateau. Sand, dry river beds, cactus, dry wells... it looked more like africa than the Haiti I had thus far come to know. After a fifteen minute drive south on National Road 1, we turned onto a dusty side road and drove past numerous homes and plantain plantations. After a time, we turned off the road into a drive river bed and followed it for another twenty minutes or so to reach LaHatte. I took a considerable amount of video, but the trip as so rough that it was almost entirely useless.


When we reached Lahatte, the students came out to great us with their teachers.  After a short time we setup in the shade of one of the buildings to take sponsorship photos, but as only a couple dozen students were being sponsored this was an easy job.


I was free to play with the students, take photographs and video, and explore. While exploring, I managed to step on a thorn that was long enough to go right through my shoe and into my foot! Considering the squalor and disease situation, I was a bit concerned to get stabbed by something on the ground... but it also hurt enough for me to limp for the next few days.


The above photograph shows the basic layout of the school, with two long concrete buildings housing classrooms. In the middle is a set of temporary classrooms built because of earthquake damage. The near room can still be used, but the rest of the building is unsafe-enough for the classes to be held outside in the dust and wind.


In the next photo, I am showing some students how they look on video. In some cases, the students were shy and just looked, but more often than not they mugged for the camera in some way! The boy in the blue shirt has lesions on his face, which you can just see in this photograph. I had seen evidence of skin problems in other schools, but it was more common at Lahatte... further evidence of the poverty and lack of medical access despite all the work of Mission Possible.


Still, even with the poverty at Lahatte, appearances of disease were an exception and most of the students were healthy and seemed happy.


After we had finished, we were taken on a short walking tour of a nearby village. All of the homes appeared to be woven stick and mud construction with palm-leaf roofing and dirt floors. If I had been watching a video instead of walking through this arid village of stick huts, I might have thought it was in africa instead of Haiti.


We continued on to see something called a Moringa oleifera tree. This plant is fast growing, nutricious and is almost entirely edible for humans and animals. For an impovrished community like this village, moringa trees have the potential to change and save lives. After viewing the tree, we returned to the truck for the arduous trip back to the compound.

I spent spent some time with the Ohio team members at the compound, then we headed out for a trip to St. Marc to see Pastor Herve's church. Two members from the construction team came to do a presentation on cholera and hand-washing techniques. 


Afterwards, we loaded into the truck and returned to the compound in the dark. The roads seemed chaotic during the day, but were just as bad after dark. I spent the evening talking with team members at the compound.

I was shaken by my experiences the previous day (actually walking inside some village homes), but visiting Lahatte and the church in St. Marc helped a bit. Life goes on, we get over shocks... and I should have been better prepared.