Driving in Pignon

Hello All!

Here's a short clip of us driving in the back of a gator through the hectic streets of Pignon. It sure beats riding a donkey!

A Morning in Pignon

1:30 a.m.

Bark, bark, bark. I roll over in bed and cover my ears, hoping the noise will stop. Then after several minutes of hearing the incessant barking, I groan, roll over and push open the side of the mosquito net. There’s no power on, so I reach clumsily for my flashlight and then stumble my way into the kitchen to find the pan of leftover sphagetti noodles that I had put on the counter the night before. The light from the flashlight is dim and as I open the door and step outside into the cool darkness, it does nothing to lighten my path. Blindly I make my way to the outside camp kitchen area, and finally my flashlight illuminates a small, pathetic dog. I dump, the pan of old noodles in front of him, tell him to stop barking, so we can sleep and then make my way back to our “camp house”. I shut the flashlight off and crawl into bed, then I close my eyes tightly and listen. Quiet, not a sound can be heard. I sigh with relief and then drift back to sleep.

4:30 a.m.

Bang, bang, bang. Jayden is awake and is banging the sides of his pack and play to make sure everyone knows it. I pretend I don’t hear, but after a little while I crawl out from under our mosquito net again, and carefully fold open his. “What do you want Jayden?” I say. He looks up at me hopefully and says “ba”, meaning bottle. I grab the flashlight again, stumble into the kitchen, grab a bag of water and search for the can of milk powder. I give him his bottle and he lets out a contented sigh “aah”. After he’s finished he calls for me again, so I take him out grab some blankets and cuddle with him on our makeshift couch in the kitchen. I hug his little body close and sing softly to him in Dutch, till he falls asleep again. I lay him back down and crawl back in bed.

7:30

Cock-a doodle do.. Cock-a doodle do... Roosters are crowing, Bark, bark, bark… Dogs are barking.. Swish, swish, someone is sweeping outside our window. Bang, bang, bang, Jayden is awake and ready to get out. Since Jason took him out the last two mornings, it’s my turn today. I quickly put on his shorts, boots, and jacket and then get dressed myself. Once I step outside all thought of returning to bed leave me. The blue sky beckons, the sun kisses my cheeks and the breeze gently pushes the hair out of my face. I smile and look at Jayden and as I hold his precious little hand we walk side by side to the meadow. The goats are excited to see us and we pick hand fulls of grass which Jayden holds carefully to their mouths. Every now and then a tugging contest ensues and I smile. Then together we hike to the river. The path is small so Jayden walks up front of me and touches the plants that are leaning onto the trail. We carefully make our way down to the river and stare into the fast flowing water. The vegetation is amazing. A half an hour later we make our way back our stomaches rumbling.

8:00

Breakfast consists of a peanut butter and jam sandwich. We finally got a stove we could use but we don’t have any pans. After breakfast we feed the chickens and then look for one of the camp workers. In broken Creole and sign language we explain we need a pan, finally he understands and brings us three.

9:00

Jayden is in bed and we are studying. We are learning body parts in Creole and are having a lot of fun. Who knew that your tongue was actually your lung? And your chest your stomach? And your neck was a koe (dutch for cow)? We study till lunch time, and that ends a beautiful morning in Pignon.

Update ...

Hello everyone! How are you all doing? We’ve been enjoying your comments, but haven’t had time to reply yet since our access to internet has been very limited. I’m typing this at the camp where we are staying right now, (Camp de la Grace) and Jason hopes to go to the school this afternoon to post this on our blog. We are thankful to say that Jason is feeling much, much better. He completed taking the malaria medication on Sunday and is now feeling a lot more like himself. Jayden has had an upset stomach for the last two days, but seems to be doing much better today. I got sick last night, so I’m not functioning too well right now, but I can still sit behind the laptop and type so I guess it’s not too bad. It seems like we’ve been here much longer then 5 days! We’ve been adjusting well and had some neat experiences. Since we are living in a small isolated village, we are able to observe village life all around us. We’ve also seen all types of interesting little animals and bugs. Just the other day we found a giant tarantula. It had been hibernating in a rock pile, but had come out when the sun peaked through the clouds. The Edgerton children had been waiting for just this thing and had their bug aquarium ready. It was gross looking at the big hairy spider, but also very interesting. We took all kinds of pictures and hopefully we will be adding those to our picasa picture gallery, if the internet connection is strong enough to let us upload pictures. If you want to check, just click on our website and then on photos. Every morning Jayden wakes up early, like 4:30 and although we try to keep him in bed till 5:30 he’s raring to go outside. He chases the chickens around, feeds the goats, and picks up all types of interesting rocks, pieces of mud, etc and tries to eat them! This is a little disturbing, so one of our Hatian friends recommended a muzzle. Apparently they use them on their little kids here. Although that idea at first really appalled me, today he was picking up goat terds, thinking they were droopies (mmmm...droopies.....), so I don’t know! No wonder he had an upset stomach!
Yesterday was our first day of language school. Our instructor’s name is Jacquline, but she speaks almost no English. Our book is also very ancient, mice have had a few dinners out of them, and they smell like moth balls, but oh well. We’ve been learning a lot of new words, and it’s amazing how much we can understand Creole already! The weather today is nice. Although it has been cooler then we expected, its probably around 20 degrees today, with some clouds.
Besides learning Creole and bug hunting , we’ve also had time to go on some beautiful hikes. The vegetation, rivers and mountains are beautiful. Along the mountains wild potatoes grow, which we eat for dinner. Cows graze along the river banks. Tall sugar cane plants sway proudly in the breeze, and majestic palm trees reach up high to touch the ever changing sky. Jeroen, you would totally love hiking around here, and Jaap you and the girls would love all the unique bugs! I miss all of you and hope to write more soon!

CHECK OUT OUR "LIFE IN PIGNON" PHOTO ALBUM
http://picasaweb.google.ca/jwkrul/LifeInPignon#
We hope to update it regularily.

Life in Pignon

Hello All,

We are doing well in Pignon! Jason is over his malaria -PTL! We had our first Kreyol lesson today which was pretty cool. We have uploaded a few pictures on our website of Pignon so you can check it out. We hope to write more tommorrow.

Blessings!

Pignon!

Hi Everyone! I have about 10 pages of stuff I would love to write but i only have about 5 minutes. We arrived in Pignon although we almost had to turn back because of the cloud cover over the village. Fortunately we found an opening and the 3 MAF planes made it through safely. Our surrounding our extremely poor. We are sleeping on a mattress balancing on a couple of bricks on a dirt/cement floor. Very little electricity, cooking over a fire etc. Jason apparently does have malaria so he had a rough first day in Pignon. We visited the hospital, but it kind of freaked us out (we only saw the public ward and there were just people all over the place). Apparently the private wards are better but we didn't get a chance to see it. Since Jason had all the classic symptoms of malaria, and you can only be tested when you have the fever, which is in the middle of the night, Caleb, our helper decided just to pick up the medication. Jason has taken some already and feels a lot lot better! I do too, because I felt really bad for him coming to a new place with a lot of adjustments, and having to lay in bed, in the dark, under a mosquito net, not sure of what kind of bed bugs might be crawling out of the mattress in any second! ;) Anyway the people here are so friendly, and the stories they tell of life in Pignon are amazing. Now that Jason is doing much better we are much happier too. :) One funny thing was that Jayden woke up in the middle of the night and thought he was a chicken. Suddenly we heard "tok tok tok tok tok". When I told him to be quite since it was 3:00 in the morning and there was a work team sleeping the building with us as well he just giggled and kept on going. I really kicked myself for teaching him the chicken noise. There are lots of chickens here and I guess my love for chickens rubbed off on him! I will write some more soon, probably Monday. Please pray for us as we adjust here.

Our last night in Port-au-Prince!

Hello everyone! How are you all doing? We are doing fine! Well Jayden and I are doing fine, but Jason is a little under the weather. He spent the day in bed today with a fever, aches and chills. I keep teasing him that it’s just a man cold, but our program director said it could be Malaria. If it is, we will find out tomorrow. We hope to leave tomorrow for language school and cultural training in Pignon and there is a hospital close by there. Apparently you can take a simple test and find out if it is malaria or not. There is a treatment available there too. Today was a very busy day for me. With Jason in bed, and Jayden getting into all kinds of trouble (J) I was left to pack for the next 3 months. Good thing for me I have become a pro packer. With all the moving around in the last year, I barely have to think about what we need and how to pack, so that’s a good thing. Except this time we have to bring flashlights, mosquito nets, bug spray, powdered milk, etc, all those things we didn’t need to take on our other moves. I just noticed I have spots all over my arms and legs again. Apparently it’s fairly common to get minor allergic reactions to some of the plants and insects here, since we haven’t come in contact with them before. It doesn’t bother me that much though. If it does I just take some Benadryl and that takes care of it. Tomorrow we get to experience our first MAF flight and we are very excited about that. Our language studies will be done in a small village. I’ll write more about it when we’re there! There is a school nearby where we can check our email and write blog entries so we hope to keep you posted what life is like in Pignon.

Acclimitizing!

Here we are in front of our new home!

This is the family who is living with us, and are taking care of the house. Their names are Anoud & Denise and their two children are called Nicolas and Sabboule.

Here is Jayden sharing his toys with his two new Haitian brothers!

Another picture of us, this time with a larger view of our house.

Nicolas & Jayden.

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Hello everyone! How are you all doing? We are doing fine! How’s the weather here? Well warm as usual. I think every day it’s been around 30 degrees or so and we’ve been acclimatizing pretty well! At least we’re not sweating so much anymore! We are thinking of all of you shivering in cold Canada and the USA. ;) It’s hard to believe it’s actually November and Christmas is just around the corner!
The Edgerton family arrived today and we were very happy to see them. They are the other family that’s joining MAF Haiti. Their names are Todd and Jennifer and they have two children Kyle and Meagan. Jason and Todd, always joke about being “the other half”, since all the career staff in MAF Haiti are both Pilot and Mechanic. In our case Jason is the pilot and Todd is the mechanic. We’ve done several classes with them when we were in Nampa Idaho and really enjoyed spending time with them. We’d better because they are now living in the same place we are! The house we are staying at right now, is actually their house, since we are still waiting for electricity and a few basic appliances to be installed. It’s really nice having them here. I guess we are just used to our little one bedroom apartment, and the house we are staying at now seemed big and empty but now that the Edgertons are here and unpacking their things it feels more cozy.
Except for the couch, stove, fridge and two beds, which are all sitting in Customs, we’ve unpacked and set everything else up in our own house. It’s a lot of fun, finally being able to unpack after being on the move for the last year. However, next week we move again, this time to a small village in Pignon for 3 months of language and cultural studies, but at least our things are unpacked and most of our house is set up. As we mentioned earlier, a family is currently employed as care-takers of our home and we have included some pictures. They live on our property and Jayden plays with their two little boys. Their names are Anoud and Denise and their two children are Nicolas and Sabboule. We’ve included pictures of them and our home and hope you enjoy.