Sunday, February 21
- We were supposed to fly out of Port au Prince at noon. I spent time with the kids in the morning, and then around 10am, Germaine came to take us to the airport. When we got there, we waited in the line for 20 minutes or so before we made it to the front. We showed out passports to the lady checking the passenger lists, and she couldn’t find us. I showed her a copy of our reservation (which was with Spirit), and she said that she just had the lists for American Airlines. She pointed us to another guy, who was with AirFrance, and he said that Spirit had cancelled their flights. We tried to still get inside the airport to figure out what to do, but they wouldn’t let us in since we weren’t on any of the passenger lists. The AirFrance guy just told us to “go home” and then take a bus to the Dominican Republic to fly out from there. I was a bit amused by the “go home” part—yeah, that’s what we’re trying to do!
- We called Gertrude and let her know what was going on, and she sent Germaine to come get us. At first, finding out that our flight had been cancelled was kind of like a punch in the gut because I’d already said good-bye to the kids and had it in my mind that we were going back to the States. But I knew that God had a reason for changing our plans and that He’d work out a way for us to get home. I actually was kind of curious/excited then about what else God had for us on this little adventure.
- We went back to Gertrude’s and I spent some time online figuring out how to get back home. Gertrude told us about Capital Coach Line, which is the bus that she takes when she goes to Santo Domingo. So I looked it up, and it turned out that it was a little cheaper than the Caribe Tours bus that we’d taken to Port au Prince. We decided to go with that, getting us to Santo Domingo Monday afternoon, and I also got us a flight from the DR to Fort Lauderdale via Puerto Rico for Tuesday.
- I spent the rest of the afternoon playing with the kids, which was fantastic. I’m so thankful for that extra time with them. I sat on a mat near the tent in the yard for a long time with Gabi, Carly, and Christina. Carly was having such a fun time picking up rocks and giving them to me—she’d yell “whoa!” every time she put them in my hands. It was neat seeing her playing like that. I also spent some time teaching several of the boys some English phrases. We worked on “What is your name?” and “How old are you?”. They had a lot of fun with that. Later they tried their English out on Kery, which was really funny, because after they used up their two questions, they would come ask me how to say a word (hair, star, airplane, MINUSTAH, etc) and then go tell Kery that one word. They were cute.
Monday, February 22
- It took me a long time to fall asleep Sunday night—a lot on my mind, I guess—and I woke up several times throughout the night. Sometime around 3:30am, I woke up and couldn’t fall back asleep. Around 4:30, my bed started shaking. It probably only lasted about 10 seconds or so, and I kind of wondered if I was just dreaming or if it really was another aftershock. When I got up a few hours later and went downstairs, several of the Haitians were talking about it. Apparently it was a 4.7 aftershock. They kept saying, “Li te fó, fó, fó” (it was strong, strong, strong). A little while later, one of the nannies who had left for the night came back and said that near where she was in Carrefour, another house had fallen.
- I didn’t really have time with the kids before we had to leave to go to the bus, but I did bring Christina upstairs and held her while I ate breakfast. Then I said good-bye to Gertrude and the kids again, and we left. We got to the place where you buy the bus tickets around 7:30 or so; there are currently US troops staying at the bus terminal, so we had to buy our tickets through the fence and then go across the street and a little way down the road to get to the bus. When we got to the bus, we found out that though the bus was scheduled to leave at 10am (according to the website), it was actually going to be leaving in just a few minutes. We just made it!
- At the border, they told us to get off the bus and take our luggage to be inspected, but since Kery and I both just had backpacks, they just waved us away. Which was very good, considering my backpack is absolutely stuffed full and it’s not easy to make it all fit back in again! We were at the border for about an hour or so. My US cell phone started getting service again, so I was able to see several texts that had been sent to my phone over the past few days.
- I got to see more of the Dominican on this bus ride since I wasn’t exhausted like I’d been when we came. It’s a pretty country, especially the mountains J. It reminded me a lot of Ecuador as far as roads and houses and towns go. It’s much cleaner than Haiti.
- We got to the bus station in Santo Domingo around 4pm. We didn’t really have a plan, besides hopefully finding a not-too-expensive hotel. We actually ended up getting a Haitian taxi driver, who was very helpful. He took us to the Hotel Mango in Boca Chica, which is a little town over by the airport. And then the guy that helped us at the hotel was Haitian, too, so that was fantastic. I was much more comfortable with that—being able to speak Creole—than having to try to figure out Spanish! Our taxi driver even gave us a $10 discount on our ride and then arranged to come pick us up in the morning to go to the airport.
- After we checked into the hotel, we went in search of pizza. We ended up with a little Dominican man named Enrique who spoke a little English and decided to be our tour guide. Reminded me of a certain experience in Jacmel several years ago… So he had dinner with us, and since we were in a touristy area, we went into a few of the shops. Then we went down to the beach for a few minutes. The stars were beautiful.
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