Day 2: The village committee

4. Afternoon: status meeting with the village committee. The committee, a rather large group of people (10-15), is the liaison between Prodev and the village. The purpose is to help the village push forward the things that they want and answer concerns. The committee prepared a festive meeting in honor of our arrival. We arrived at an empty room with some benches. There was a table in the middle of the room with a table-cloth and some flowers on it with 3 chairs for the honored guests. After a few minutes of setting up a light (it was cloudy, so the room was dark) the meeting began with a prayer (amazingly well sung. The Abu-Gosh choir festival has a competitor in the committee of Les Oranges), then another prayer (spoken this time) wishing us all a good calm meeting with no disagreements and great results. One of the two secretary generals of the meeting welcomed us and wished us to learn from each other, work together for good education in Haiti, and share information about the Israeli and Haiti education systems. Each person in the committee introduced him/herself and then the meeting began. This was an amazingly pleasant surprise and made us feel very welcome.

In the meeting itself there was a discussion of hiring teachers and the hiring process (one of the benefits of being in the committee is the power to attempt to provide work for people you want), what the school will bring (official Haiti curriculum + sports, arts, science and music), etc.

To wrap things up we thanked God again for guiding us through a good meeting.

By now you’re probably wondering how my Creole/French improved so much in such a short time. Our interpreter was a 4th year medical student that is waiting for his medical school to reopen. It has been closed since the earthquake.

5. Dinner at a up-scale restaurant. Pizza/Pasta/Salad. Took us ~1.5 hours to get there due to a traffic jam. Apparently this is not really a traffic jam, but rather the expected traffic behavior in PAP at certain hours of the day.

End of day 2. To the concerned readers: I will not keep posting in this level of detail. Expect some kind of a routine to form soon. It’s hard to believe that I’ve only been here for two days.

The committee