Hey it's me! I have been absent for a while, apologies for that. Golly where do I start?
I've been workin for three weeks now and I am enjoying it a lot. It helped that I already knew my way around the embassy when I started, and that I knew a decent amount of people. There's a few other summer hires here, and they're all really nice. (Guys that means I have friends again WHEEEEE!) as far as my job is concerned, I have some projects to work on and my own desk, which I think is pretty cool. I mean, I had desks at my other jobs but still. There's only been a few minor hiccups, including one last week.
The embassy is always really cold. And I mean cold. You'd think it would feel good, given the heat outside during the day, and usually it does feel good for about an hour. Then I get goosebumps and wish I had a blanket. So I started bringing a pair of tights in my purse for the days I wore a dress and needed an extra layer. Last Wednesday, I went to the bathroom to put on these tights. I went back to my desk and when I smoothed out my dress to sit down, I noticed something.
"Hmmm. That doesn't feel like my dress," I said to myself. And no indeed it was not, my dress had been tucked into the back of my tights the whole damn time. So it's quite possible that I accidentally showed my underwear to the entire embassy. Great way to start off, right?
It's now the rainy season, which means that the roads are slowly getting worse. Last week there was a torrential downpour and the street in front of the embassy flooded. I wasn't there - thank god - but there were a lot of people stuck inside the embassy until about 11:00 that night. My mom and I went out to look at the street and it was a brown river. People were still driving on it, I don't know how, and wading through it with their shoes in hand. There was a considerable amount of damage done to the road and to some of the houses up the hill. I definitely feel lucky that we live where we do, even if it's technically in a floodplain.
The flood was on Thursday, and the next day my parents and I traveled out of PaP to an island called Ile a Vache. We caravaned with several of our neighbors/coworkers from the embassy. It took about five hours to get there, but it was worth it. In order to get to Ila a Vache, which is off the southern coast of Haiti, you have to drive through a red zone (meaning higher danger). Once you're out of there, the road takes you through the mountains. Let me tell you, the views were unbelievable. It was so incredibly green the whole way, and I kept thinking to myself that THIS is how the entire country is supposed to look. It's supposed to be this lush green tropical place, and instead it's been deforested to the point where parts of it resemble a desert.
Once we arrived at the coast, we loaded our bags onto a small ferry boat and headed out to Ile a Vache. Ile a Vache means Island of the Cow, and it used to be a "pirate island". Captain Henry Morgan used Ile a Vache - or Isla Vaca, as it was called by the Spanish - as sort of a home base. It's held onto a little bit of that pirate air. There are a couple caves that we explored, half expecting to find a trunk of gold or a skeleton or something equally pirate-y. The resort we stayed at was called Abaka Bay Resort, and it was right on the water. The bar played a constant loop of reggae music but the sound of the waves was enough to drown it out. We swam and soaked up the sunshine, went hiking up the hill. There was a tiny little village at the top, and it was so different from the houses on the mainland- clean (mostly) and tidy, with houses painted coral and green and yellow and white.
The island could have been a different country all together. All weekend I kept forgetting that we were still in Haiti and not in the Bahamas or the Phillipines or even in Greece.
It was an all around beautiful weekend, but very hard to come back and go to work the next day. However, we have today off which is nice.
A group of us went out last night to this place called The Irish Embassy (not an embassy. Just a pub) and had a grand time. While it's great to hang out with my parents, I really like being with other people around my age. I am no longer all by myself down here!
Right. That's all for now, I have a snoring pug at my feet who needs a walk. S'laters.
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