Haiti

Day 5 – We woke, met everyone for breakfast, and waited for Charles. It turns out he and Lucia had met at 6 AM to go out and get supplies for the day. As if we couldn’t feel guilty enough for taking Charles away for 4 hours. We all got in the truck – Charles was taking Lucia, Jan and the men to the bus station / yard, where they would catch a Haitian gua gua, called a tap-tap (these are incredible – a variety of vehicles and sizes, brightly painted, always overflowing with people ) to the school, with Charles meeting them there later. We dropped them off in the same location where I had freaked upon our arrival, only this time I was hugging people instead of fleeing. We took off from there - me, Amy and the kids in back of the pickup, Charles and Jonnot in the front. The trip back to Ouanaminthe was much smoother, although we were being jostled around in the back of a pickup truck on a dirt road for 2 hours. (My back took a couple days to stop feeling as if I’d been hit repeatedly with a baseball bat.)



Before our argument with Lucia and Charles about transportation to Ouanaminthe, we had been told by the hotel that there was a bus going from Cap Haitien to Santiago, DR. We asked them to look into that for us, and they told us a tree had come down on the border bridge, preventing all vehicle traffic. We hadn’t noticed this on our way in, but it was clearly there – a huge section of the bridge was missing, and one of the several felled trees – a huge tree like the one in the Roi Cristophe yard – was laying next to it.

When saying our goodbyes, I asked Charles for his name and contact information. He said his name was actually Joseph Charles, but he had been called Charles for so long that his official name was now Charles Joseph.



It was Sunday, and Ouanaminthe was less crowded than our first time through – either that or we had snuck in and no one knew there were blans coming. Also, the border crossing closes early on Sunday, so traffic is lighter. We made the stops at the respective customs locations, and headed to the express gua gua stop in Dajabon. The DR looked like the suburbs to us at this point.

On the gua gua ride back, there were several checkpoints. We would stop, a military type would board, and he would point at all the Haitians and ask them for documentation. At one of the checkpoints the man took the people’s ID cards and left the bus, which caused much consternation and arguing among the Haitian riders. He returned, but one person didn’t get their card back, and we had to wait while he went back for it, while the person yelled on the gua gua. Only one of the 3 checkpoints asked us for any ID – the guy looked at us, said “Americano?,” We said “Yes.” He said “passports.” We pulled them out. He never looked at them.

We arrived back in Monte Christi, had a sandwich at a café, and headed back to our desolate hotel. There was a birthday party going on in the restaurant and pool – we went swimming for awhile, then went out to a pizza place in town, where the mosquitoes were so bad that we got the food to go and went back to our rooms.