Building a routine

6/26

This morning I tried yoga for real for the first time ever with another girl here thanks to the cheap yoga episodes I purchased on iTunes. I'd still prefer a nice run, but with that being out of the question due to my inherit blanness and lack of a male companion, I am determined to be a yoga champ by the time I get home.

This afternoon in the back I got to try Haitian grits. I've never eaten grits back home, but I doubt that they're as good as these. Now I'll have to try. After munching on the grits-like substance

After dinner my stomach turned on me, which made me instantly nervous. I have a relatively sensitive stomach to begin with, but it's been holding up pretty well since I arrived here. Another person in our group had parasites, which isn't a big deal if you get on the meds. I'm waiting until the morning and if I get sick after breakfast I'll get all checked out. Perks to living at a hospital.

Tonight I had my first English class at the hospital. While there has been widespread interest, organizing and meeting in Haiti seems to be difficult. We ended up as a group of five. Myself and one of the med student interns, along with three staff members. I was pretty nervous going into it, I had no idea who was going to show up and how much English they would know. Luckily, everyone at the hospital speaks French so I was easily able to communicate with the group. We sat in the office and spent an hour going over introductions, greetings, asking for help, body parts, the difference between do and does, and they all wrote down each word or phrase diligently. (I had planned to make the informal class all oral, but they wanted to write down everything!) Pronunciation was the best. I began to realize how ridiculous my butchering of Creole must be to their ears. One woman was determined to have everyone pronounce “twenty-three” correctly before we could move on (I had used my own age in an example of how to say one's age.) It was really exciting to watch them work so hard on practicing, and to hear them respond “Have a good night!” to my “pi tard” (see you). I'm really looking forward to meeting with them again tomorrow night and I wouldn't be at all disappointed if it's still a small number of people. It was a great opportunity to really get to know some more people here.

6/25

I finally got to use a knife to cut open the fruit to make the juice. This is a big step. There aren't any cutting boards here, you simply use your hand. It isn't nearly as dangerous as trying this at home since the knives here are extremely dull. I had to prove to the ladies that I was fò (strong) enough to handle it, so even though after I peeled one large grapefruit and my right pointer finger was numb and began to swell I still cut up three others, otherwise I wouldn't have been allowed to try to cut again for at least a week.

Nanu gets it. I love her. While we were making juice she asked me if I'm chagren (sad) that the other Americans will all be gone soon. I said yes, a little bit. She informed me that I had no reason to be sad because I have so many friends in Haiti, and proceeded to list all of the women in the back. It put the biggest smile ever on my face.

Some pictures that took a while to get on the computer:

Doing laundry for the first time out back!

Day at the beach!