Quick Update

Just a quick update to let everyone know that we're fine here. The rain came yesterday around 1:30 pm and stayed through the night with only about an hours break. It's still drizzling, but it's let off nicely. 

From talking to people and what I was able to find online this morning it looks like Port au Prince is a bit of a mess. There are definitely times when I'm grateful we live in the provinces. 

Hope you're all dry in your neck of the woods.

~Leslie

Non-Bullet Post

Since orders seemed to have died off for the clutches I decided to move the post down. It's still there, you just need to scroll down if you're interested. I didn't want to take it off completely because I know some people are still looking. Just a reminder that the order deadline is September 4th.

On my lap as I type is a very squirmy Miss O. She doesn't like when I type and she can't. Sometimes I let her say hello to the grandmas on MSN, but that's about as far as it goes. 

jhhj b,,,,,,,,,,,

There, her very first contribution to the blog. I fully expect to have her writing this thing before the year is out. 

I just looked at the calendar and realized that in two weeks and two days I'll be getting on a plane and flying west. I remember when I would get so excited I would count sleeps and such. Now the trips seem to sneak up on me. 

Today we have students arriving for a training class. We haven't done a class in about a year for various reasons. I keep feeling like we're not ready, but then I do the mental check and find that we are ready. The nice thing is that the material is the same each time we do it so it actually gets easier each time. Should be interesting trying to teach with a wee one...

Speaking of the wee one. She's a super crawler now. We had just gotten used to her crawling, and that it took her a bit of time to get her bearings, and then she went and got speedy on us. She's exploring new territory too. Yesterday she found the diaper pail. We're trying to teach her about stairs. Thankfully no crashes yet. Today she found some gyneps - this little fruit that we have here that has a shell on the outside and a pit inside covered in slimy sweet stuff. Yesterday she figured out how to open the shell on the gyneps with her teeth. That was, of course, after she would take them out of the bowl and throw them on the floor. I guess she found a stray today and when I saw something resembling snot on her chin I got suspicious until I found half a gynep, pitt still attached to the shell, with all the pulp chewed off. I'll give her credit, she figured out how to eat the things, and she's only 7 months old. 

My back is giving me problems again. We went to Port on Friday and hit some really bad bumps. When I say really bad I mean that we hit a series of them and the truck just started going. It's called harmonics and the closest thing I can say to give you an idea about what it feels like is being double bounced on a trampoline, repeatedly. Once the truck gets going through the first couple holes, and starts bouncing, there's nothing you can do to stop the momentum. I was trying to hold down the car seat and myself and still managed to bump my head on the inside of the cab. I'll be honest. At that point I was cursing Haiti and it's bad roads and the fact that our van is already three months past it's original delivery date. It was just sort of a cracking point. By the time we got home from Port I felt pretty beat up. Now I'm trying to keep the ibuprofen flowing to take the edge off. Thankfully I can go see the chiropractor in a couple weeks. 

Well, I'm going to sign off there. I'll try to post something this week, though I know it's going to be busy for us. 

~Leslie

GOODIES FOR SALE

Note: This post will sit at the top for the next few weeks. Scroll down for new material.

I'm going to try something here on the blog that I've been curious about for some time. I normally wouldn't be able to sell any of the things that I make simply because we don't have access to a postal system where I could send them out. BUT, I'm going to be heading back to Canada in just under a month and it'll be a great time for me to do that.

Enter THE CLUTCH.

This handy little beauty measures 8"x6" closed and 8"x10" opened. It would make a great little clutch purse, make-up bag or other little catch-all. Maybe a nice little re-useable gift bag for that special person that can get stuffed with little treasures...the possibilities are endless. There are several layers of fabric so it feels substantial, not floppy. The elastic and button closure give it a bit of give, unlike those unfriendly zippers. You know the ones I'm talking about. It's also completely washable and cute to boot. As a nice little quirk the buttons will all be different and unique, but will coordinate well with the fabrics chosen.

This would be a great opportunity to do some early Christmas shopping (yes I said it) and get something handmade and unique for those special people on your list, or just stash them away for birthdays and other special events coming up. Or heck, just buy one for yourself and call it a day!

HOW THIS WORKS

Below all the important information are photos of the fabric combos that I have and how many clutches/pouches can be made with each combo. The inside fabric is on the left, the outside on the right so you can see them together.

To place an order simply email me at leslierolling@yahoo.ca and tell me which fabric combo # (as in #2) you want and how you'll be paying for it so I can keep an eye out for your payment and get your mailing info. I won't start sewing until the orders have been placed so I don't use fabric to make something that might just end up collecting dust :) 

All of this is on a first come, first serve basis so if you're interested I would recommend getting in there quickly. As things sell off, if they sell off, I'll update this post so you can see what's still available. I will keep the post up until the order deadline or things are completely gone.

COST

Each clutch is $15. This includes shipping to your doorstep. So yes, you are getting a lovely handmade, practical, very useable item with shipping included for $15! Sounds like a screaming deal to me, though I might be biased.

ORDER DEADLINE

I will be arriving back in Canada on September 10th. To allow enough time to whip these up, and still keep my sanity with everything that needs to be prepped and done before I leave I need to receive all orders no later than midnight Thursday, September 4th. Do you like that I added midnight in there? It makes it sound so official.

PAYMENT

There are two PayPal buttons on the left, one for Canada and one for the US and that's the fastest, easiest way to pay. If you don't have a PayPal account you can email me at leslierolling@yahoo.ca and we can make other arrangements.

SHIPPING

As I said, I will be arriving back in Canada on September 10th and will be there for about a week. I will be sending these off during that time so depending on where you live they should arrive not too long after that. I wish Haiti had a postal system so I could do things like this more often, but it doesn't so this is the option I have. Sorry I can't get them to you sooner.

If you have any questions about this please email me at leslierolling@yahoo.ca. 

Thanks for looking!

~Leslie 

***********************

FABRIC CHOICES

Note: I took the pictures outside in natural light hoping to get the best representation of the fabric. The fabric is actually brighter than the pictures make it look. Brighter in a good way. Not in a 70's pantsuit way. 

#1: Butterfly - SOLD OUT

#2: Yellow Cabana - 2 AVAILABLE

This is a nice mustard yellow background. One of my faves!

#3: Aisian Garden - SOLD OUT

#4: Pink Posies - SOLD OUT

#5: Pink Wallpaper - 1 AVAILABLE

This looks like someone peeled if off the wall in an attic bedroom. It's just pretty.

#6: Pink Toile - SOLD OUT

#7: English Garden - 1 AVAILABLE

The background is a nice beige, as is the liner fabric, which is hard to tell in the picture. Kind of "antiquish".

#8: Red Dots and Teenie Flowers - SOLD OUT

This background is a nice cream color and the red is a nice "apple" red.

#9: Blue Flowers - 2 AVAILABLE

These patterns remind me of china. If you would like the bigger pattern on the outside, just let me know!

#10: Blue Bush with white - 1 SOLD, 1 AVAILABLE

This one is a nice baby blue sort of color. Looks really nice and crisp with the white. Makes me think of sheets on a clothes line in the summer.

#11: Blue Tapestry with white - 1 SOLD, 1 AVAILABLE

This makes me think of a damask napkin. There are touches of cream and white and it too looks nice and crisp with the white liner.

#12: Black Tropical with black - SOLD OUT

#13: Chocolate Swirl with white - SOLD OUT

#14: Lotus Garden Dots - SOLD OUT

#15: Denim with one of the following inside...

A. Red Plaid - SOLD OUT

B. Orange Print - 1 SOLD, 1 AVAILABLE

Mmmmm, if I had a name for this it would be "creamcicle".

C. African Print - SOLD OUT

D. Blue Flowers - SOLD OUT

E. Green Stripe - 2 AVAILABLE

I LOVE this fabric. The combo of aqua, lime/olive green, grey, cream and chocolate brown. Mmmm. 

F. Brown Print - 1 AVAILABLE

This print has a great hand-painted quality to it with a bit of baby blue and a bit of pink too. 

The Speedy Blog Update

Hi Everyone,

Sorry for the quietness on the blog. I appreciate that you keep checking in even though I've been lame with the posting as of late. Thanks for your patience.

In an effort to get upstairs, curl up on my bed and read for a bit before I go to bed I'm going to do the super speedy blog update, aka you're getting this in point form.

• Had a great weekend up at FURCY with friends. It was blissfully cool, even cold when FAY swung by for a visit and left us wet and rainy for most of Saturday. Would you believe that it was 14C that day. That's around 57-58F. It was mid 90's at our place the day before. Crazy.
• Spent Sunday night with friends in Laboule. Got to have our very first real "play date" with Cara and Angeline. So fun to see Olivia's personality emerge more. We're realizing that she needs time to warm up to a situation. So. Very. Interesting. Had a great time, stayed up way too late, and talked soooo very much. Thanks again friend ;)
• Had a great meeting at the Embassy on Monday morning. Thanks for prayers around that. We got a lot of information and got things started to get the last few documents that we need for our dossier.
• This week was pretty busy as we're getting ready for a class next week, are working on our solar panel aray which is feat of engineering, finished off the dorms (yay!) and...and...man, I can't even remember. 
• Ate and are eating TONS of bananas. I just forgot how to spell bananas. We had two regimes come out of the garden late last week. One was HUGE. As in almost as tall as me. And I'm 5'10".
• I'm camera shopping. Wheee! It's actually kind of stressful because it's a big purchase for me.
• Olivia turned 7 months old on Tuesday. She's such a big girl now. Sigh.
• Today we did something we weren't expecting to do for another 10 months...we dropped of our DOSSIER! There are still a few things that need to be done with Olivia's transfer papers, but then we're going to start and submit stuff to IBESR. We were told to wait because of Haiti's laws etc, but nothing is changing there and they're still passing adoptions so we're going to start. It's very exciting and scary all at the same time. The thought that we may get to go home next year, as a family, is just baffling to us right now. But, we're being totally Haiti about it and expecting it to go s-l-o-w so that if it goes faster it's that much better and we don't get our expectations up. 

In closing, I want to send a big THANKS out to all of you that purchased clutches from me. I had a personal goal of selling 10, just to see if it would happen. So far 19 have sold. There are still several great fabric choices available and I know some of you are still thinking about them, so if you'd like to order please let me know. 

Okay, this has taken me 5 nano seconds longer than I wanted it to. Have a great weekend. I'll try to surface at some point to post some pictures and touch base.

~Leslie

O Canada Baby

Olivia got this Onesie on Monday as a gift from our friend Theresa who is here visiting her husband Ronel. She figured Olivia needed a little bit of Canada here :)

Olivia has been a busy little bee in the last week. Last Monday she cut her first tooth and her second one followed on Thursday. She was such a champ. The same day the first tooth popped up she also figured out how to "scoot" forward on her hands and knees, AND she started babbling things like "ba ba ba ba" and "da da da da". So fun! 

This Monday, because she likes to do things in a big way, she started crawling. She just woke up and decided it was the day. I looked over at her from the kitchen where I was making breakfast and realized she was definitely not in the same place that I had put her down. Since then she's been having all sorts of adventures. I'm not used to having to look down while I'm cooking dinner...

Chris and I got some great news that we would love prayer about. We were told when we met with the lawyer back in February that we shouldn't file our adoption paperwork until next summer because of the new adoption laws that were supposed to be going into effect. Well, the laws haven't gone into effect and Haiti's government is going to see a turn over with the new Prime Minister, so who knows if they'll ever go into effect. Adoptions are still being processed and exceptions are still being made.

Yesterday Junior, who works with the McHouls and does most of the adoption paper pushing and leg work, told Chris that he wanted our dossier because he wants to file our papers! Yay! We need to go to the Embassy to get a letter from Canada and the province of BC, as well as finger prints done. These things might take a couple of months to process and return. We have our appointment on Monday morning, then it's out of our hands and we just have to wait until the documents come back. Once we have those two things we can go ahead. We didn't do them earlier because they can expire and we weren't going to be able to file for almost a year.

Please pray that things will move as quickly as possible so we can get our file in there. I'm still telling myself it'll be a long process, so if it happens sooner it'll be a blessing. The biggest thing about starting earlier for us is that we might finish earlier and that means we might get to travel home with Olivia a lot sooner than we've been thinking we could.

Thanks!

~Leslie

Taken at Moulin Sur Mer while my aunt was visiting.

Comments

I just wanted to let everyone know that I love getting comments, but also recognize that I'm not that stellar about responding to them. Many times it's that our internet connection is really poor and it's hard enough to get online just to post the comment, let alone wait for the page to load so I can respond to it. I do love that you want to interact and am going to make more of an effort to do the same on my end in the future, so bring on your thoughts!

That said, I have received several comments from companies or individuals that are solicitous in nature. For the record, I will simply delete your comments if you leave them as this is a personal blog and won't post anything that seems inappropriate or out of context. For those of you in the water industry that might consider contacting me regarding promotion of your filters or systems etc, I would invite you to visit the missions website at www.cleanwaterforhaiti.org to read more about what we do before you contact me. 

What's cooking

It's been a while since I've posted anything about food on here, and I know that people often enjoy the recipes I share and what not.

If you had been at our house for dinner on Friday night you would have been eating rice, beans and homemade tortillas. We went to visit friends last month and they made us this simple meal and we all loved it. So much that I had to give it a try at home. I had been wanting to make my own tortillas for a while, just hadn't had that push. They're expensive to buy here. Actually, I think tortillas are expensive wherever you buy them considering what's in them. I looked around online a bit, found a few recipes, then gave it a whirl. I've made them a few times now and Friday night I found the variation to the recipe that I liked the most. It has just the right amount of everything. 

Homemade Tortillas:

3 c. all purpose flour (you could use whole wheat if you wanted, or half and half)

1 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. salt

6 Tbsp. oil

3/4 c. hot water

1. Mix flour, baking powder and salt in a good sized bowl.

2. Add oil and using a fork mix well. Squish the oil into the flour mixture until it's crumbly.

3. Add water. Use fork to mix until almost combined. You should have a dough at this point. Using your hand knead the dough around the bowl to pick up all the little bits. This only takes a minute or so. You just want a nice, soft dough. No need to knead it for any length of time once everything is combined.

4. Move dough out of bowl and start breaking off golf ball sized pieces. Roll into a ball and place back in the bowl. Once all the dough is rolled into little balls cover the bowl with a lid or towel and let the dough rest for at least an hour. 

To cook the tortillas:

You need a large skillet or even a griddle. I use a cast iron skillet turned upside down over the burner so I don't have to "dig" the tortillas out and it works really, really well. You want to heat the skillet/pan for about 5-10 minutes on medium (depending on your stove) before you start cooking.

I have a Silpat (silicone cookie sheet liner) that I roll my tortillas on, but you could use parchment paper or even those thing cutting sheets that you can get for meat, fish etc. (Check out the dollar stores. I love these for rolling out pie crust because you don't need to fold it or anything, just lift up the mat and turn it over your pie plate - the crust peels right off and no rips.). You could just roll them right on the counter too, but I like to have something down just because my counter is a wooden butcher block thingie.

Using a rolling pin roll out the tortilla. It took me several times of making them to get them nice and round. They'll still taste the same if they're square! You want them pretty thin, but not so thin they're ripping. You see that you can sort of push the dough around a bit if it's too thin on one area. The dough is very pliable, but doesn't do well with being squished back together and then rolled out again. Just gets really elasticy, which is why I make the balls before letting it rest. 

Once your pan is hot and your tortilla is rolled, you can lift it up by the edge. You'll see how easily it comes up. Flop it onto the pan. You can move it around a bit if it gets wrinkled. You want to cook them for about a minute and a half on each side. You want light brown bubbles, not dark brown. If they're dark brown just reduce your heat a bit. It'll take some playing with to find the right temp. I just slide a fork under the edge and hold the tortilla with my finger, then flip. 

While one tortilla is cooking you can roll out the next one. 

Now, this is a key thing. Once the tortillas are cooked they need to be kept moist. I use a gallon Ziploc bag for this. Take one piece of paper towel and fold it in quarters to make a square. Wet down the paper towel and squeeze out the extra moisture. You just want it damp. Open it back up to the small square and lay it flat inside the Ziploc bag. When I take a tortilla off the pan I let it sit for a minute just so I can touch it, then I put it in the bag. No need to seal it, just push it closed. The moisture from the paper towel and the heat from the tortillas keep a nice steam in the bag and stop the tortillas from drying out. I put them on the table in the bag, and after we're done eating just zip it closed. The next day, even after being in the fridge, the tortillas are still nice and pliable, not dried out at all. In fact, I almost like them better the second day. 

I took a picture so you could see how I set myself up. I have a very small kitchen and I just found doing a bit of an assembly line worked really well for me.

You can see the bubbles on the tortilla on the skillet. This is what you want to see.

This recipe is very flexible and I would encourage you to play around with it a bit. You can use shortening instead of oil, and you can omit the baking powder if you want. You'll just get a more translucent tortilla, but it tastes really good. If you want more salt you can add it too. 

You can really eat these with whatever. I make them with refried beans. The rice I made yesterday was yummy. This is what I did...

Tomato Onion Rice:

2 1/4 c. water

2 Tbsp. tomato paste

2-3 plum/roma tomatoes cut into small chunks

2 cloves of garlic, minced

1 tsp salt

1 c. rice

1/2 medium onion

In the pot combine water, tomato paste, tomatoes, garlic and salt. Bring to a boil. Add rice and cook until desired doneness. Turn off the heat. Cut your onion in half, then instead of slicing it like you would for rings, slice it the other direction to make small wedges. Throw onions in the pot and using a fork "fluff" them into the rice. Cover the pot again and let it continue steaming until you're ready to eat. The heat in the pot will continue to steam the rice and is just enough to nicely cook the onion without making it mushy. This also helps deepen the flavors in the rice. You may want to add more salt to taste at this point. Again, this is very flexible and you can alter things to your personal preference.

So, there you have it. Tortillas, rice and beans. Throw in some hot sauce, maybe some sour cream and cheese...so many options. A yummy, simple dinner. If you do your tortilla dough, then cook your rice while you're resting the dough, it can steam while you're cooking the tortillas. Refried beans can be thrown in a pot or done in the microwave, whichever is most convenient. We can get them in a can here, but beans are pretty cheap so I want to get an inexpensive pressure cooker and just cook them up ahead of time with a bit of garlic so I just need to re-warm them to serve.

For the record, Chris isn't the hugest rice fan, and he doesn't like tomatoes, but he loves this meal. In fact, when I was making the dough up he and Matt we're both in the kitchen and when the found out I was making this for dinner they we're both excited. Makes me happy!

Kay Jan Filip (Jan Filip's house)

On Wednesday morning we got up early and headed out with Jan Filip, our night guard, to go visit his family at their home in the hills of Pierre Payen. Chris had been there once when Jan Filip had just started working for us and had been wanting to take me to visit for a while.

Normally you would be able to drive a good part of the way up, but as we headed up Corridor 2, the road that takes you to the turn off to Jan Filips house, we found we could only go so far. A big rain last Saturday had pushed a bunch of water down the valley and caused a lot of damage, and the river was too high to drive across. So, from that point we walked, which was fine because the corridor is flat. 

When we got to Jan Filip's turn off I tried to keep my spirits up. I hate hiking straight up, but that's what the "road" did. It was pretty steep, and nice and muddy from the rain the night before. I'm always amazed at what Haitians are willing to walk up and down. Usually it's nothing more than a donkey trial. I even saw several people carrying their shoes because it was better than sliding around. I was starting to think they had the right idea. I eventually got my second wind and the road eventually flattened out and we found ourselves walking along banana and papaya fields. I love getting into the mountains of Haiti because it's so beautiful. The people are different too, they seem more friendly and cordial.

As we walked we dodged mud pits and walked through blown over banana fields. Jan Filip told us that Saturday, before the rain came, the wind blew through and knocked over many of the destroyed plants that we saw. The wind was so strong it even blew down a giant Royal Palm, and when it fell it almost killed Jan Filips donkey that was tied up nearby. It missed the poor thing by about one foot.

When we arrived at Jan Filips home we were warmly greeted by his family. He's brought his sons to work with him before so I had met them, but I had never met his two daughters. His whole family are wonderful, kind people. 

*The wee one is ours.

As we sat on their gallery (porch) we enjoyed the shade and the company. Madame Jan had fun cuddling Olivia, and the boys went off the fetch a bunch of sweet coconuts for us. In Haiti there are two kinds of coconuts - yellow and green. The yellow ones are sweet and used for drinking, and the green ones aren't sweet, and the meat is often used for cooking (making coconut milk). We were each given two coconuts to drink. They were young and FULL of coconut water. It was just what I needed to quench my thirst. After we were done they cut the coconuts open so we could eat the jelly inside (The coconuts you see in the store are old and dried inside. Young coconuts have lots of water and the meat is like jelly). I felt so blessed by their hospitality.

When we were getting our shoes on to leave Madame Jan brought out a HUGE sack of fruit that she had bought for us as a gift. I was so humbled. I know that every penny in a Haitian home counts and this family had used some of their resources to bless us with a cadeaux (gift). I asked Matt if he could carry the bag, but Madame Jan refused to let him do that and told me that she was going to walk back down to the truck with us and carry the bag. As we set out she hoisted it up on her head and started down the road. 

While we walked I asked Madame Jan how many times she walked down to the market each week, about an hours walk in each direction, at least. She told me she goes every day, except that day. That day she was just walking with us because she wanted to. 

As we said our good-byes at the truck I was so thankful that we had gone to visit. Jan Filip has been such a blessing to us at the mission because of how he takes his job seriously, and just his whole disposition. It's so easy to get discouraged with relationships here because we often end up feeling like we're always looking for what people are trying to get from us, or that people feel uncomfortable around us because of the deeply ingrained class issues. It was so refreshing to visit Jan Filips family and enjoy our time with them. Their hospitality was truly humbling to me and was such an encouragement. 

Throwing this out there

I'm wondering if anyone out there in blogger land might be able to help me with something.

I've loved taking pictures for a long time, and have a film SLR camera, but buying and developing film here in Haiti isn't feasible. I have a digital camera, but it doesn't give me the quality of pictures that I would like to take (it was a hand me down and has some issues). I'm looking for a digital SLR camera, 6 MP or higher. I've been looking on Ebay for the last couple of months, but I'm on a very limited budget and haven't been able to find that amazing deal yet.

What I'm wondering is whether any of you that are reading know of anyone that is looking to upgrade their digital SLR and is considering selling their old one? Like I said, I'm on a limited budget and would only be able to pay about $175 for it. I know that sometimes people know people that don't worry about that as much and just like to bless others so I thought I would throw it out there. 

If you are one of those people with a camera that you'd like to pass on, or know someone who is, can you email me at office@cleanwaterforhaiti.org? I'm going to keep cruising Ebay and I'll let you know if I find anything. I just wanted to put it out there to see if the grapevine would come up with anything.

Thanks for your help!

Why things are always interesting around here

Yesterday Olivia cut her first tooth. Today it's all pokey and definitely coming out. Looks like the other bottom one is going to make an appearance soon too. Lucky girl.

Yesterday also marked the first morning following the first sleep through the night in three months. Yay!

There was also good progress made into the world of crawling. How to move the hands forward has been figured out. The legs, well, the legs will come. Until they do scooting will have to do. 

Chris went to print something from his computer yesterday and the second he hit "print" the printer started yelling error messages at us. After some investigation and trying everything the website recommended our option was, "Your printer may need servicing." Yeah, that's special. The warranty ran out at the beginning of June. And warranty is only good when you're in a place where there is somewhere to take the printer to. Taking the time to find someone that might be able to fix it here, and then the cost of what they would charge to do it (probably twice as much) would just not be worth it. Taking it out and bringing it back in isn't really an option either, so basically we're getting a new printer. In a month. Because that's when the next person that can bring stuff in for us is coming. Did I mention that we have a training class coming up and I need manuals for it. Manuals that I had already spent a few hours revamping? Sigh. We'll just have to photo-copy the old one and use that, and make changes where needed. We call that degaje here. You just make it work. 

Today my computer started giving me the line of death right down my screen. 

See what I mean about it never being just one thing? 

Swimming

Splashing, splashing and more splashing. Warm Caribbean sun beating down. It was the perfect afternoon for a dip in the pool. Mommy even made room for herself ;)

Thoughts from the ground

I haven't done a "Haiti" post in a while. What I mean by that is a post that is just about Haiti and things here, not about what Olivia did or didn't do in a particular day, or where we went, or what I cooked...you get the idea. 

It struck me as I was walking across the yard to go check on the generator actually. We have a little dealy on the wall in the house but I can never remember how to read it to see if the batteries are fully charged, so I decided to wander across the yard and check the inverter. There are little lights on the charger and inverter that are orange if the batteries aren't charged and green if they are. It was all orange lights. 

As I was walking I noticed how much heat was coming up off the ground. In the middle of summer the amount of heat that comes radiating off the ground is amazing. The sun is often reflecting off of the dirt right back up at you. The mission property has many trees. So many that if you find us on Google Earth, you can't actually see  the mission, because it's all trees. It's so nice to have that much shade, but it makes me forget just how hot it is outside. And, it turns me into a whiner when I do have to go out in direct sunlight. Last night we had rain too, so the heat that was coming up today as I was walking through the sunny parts was nice and humid. The sticky kind of heat that makes you feel like someone coated you in slime. 

The rain we had last night was good and hard. We can usually tell that the rain is coming because it starts to get overcast, but often the humidity will settle in hard right before and it can be quite obnoxious. Last night was a little gentler because it had been over cast and breezy for most of the afternoon. We like to sit on the deck and watch the storms move in. Being on the ocean we see the change in water currents, the cloud movements, the lightning hitting from all directions (for some amazing lightning pics you need to go visit Matt's blog), and even the rain move and change. When there isn't much else to do, and it's such a nice reprieve from the heat, it makes for good entertainment.

The rain that we've had over the last couple of months has been mediocre at best. I was starting to feel like we were the boy who cried wolf because we kept telling Matt about all the amazing rains we get through the summer, and then when it would rain it would be a "sprinkle" which really means a normal rain for most places, but for the tropics it was nothing to go getting excited about. Last night was one of those rains where water really started to move through the yard. It got so cool that I had to put pants on and Olivia was in jeans, long sleeves and slippers. 

We watched the water in front of our house turn from shades of blue and aqua to brown as the neighbors canals and yards emptied their catchment into the sea. Today as I was walking back from checking the batteries I looked at the water and saw the distinct color breaks that I so love. From the beach out several hundred feet the water is one shade of aqua. Beyond that is a darker blue, and way beyond that another shade of blue. Sometimes we see 4-5 different colors present and it is always beautiful to me. I don't understand the dynamics, but I love it. 

This time of year always gives me clothing dilemmas too. It can be cool in the morning and I want to wear one thing, but then I have to remind myself that by 10 am it will be very warm. By noon it will be obnoxiously warm. Some options just feel like self inflicted torture. Other times I think it would be nice to wear a particular ensemble, but then I have to mentally think through everything that I'm going to be doing that particular day to account for how much I might sweat and weather the clothes will stand up to it or not. Denim, even shorts, usually aren't a great option, but until I fix the button on my other shorts and drop a few pound that snuck back on, they seem to be the only option. Capris can even be too much most days, and I need to make a few more light skirts so I can have some sanity while wearing them. I don't know how women do long dresses here. I just don't. So yes, I spend way too much time thinking about what to wear in a morning, but what's a girl to do?

Haiti is a place of irony for many reasons. In fact there is no end of examples. Today's came when Thony, one of our staff, yelled in the window to tell me that EDH, Electricite de Haiti, had just come on. Yes, just come on after we had been running the generator for about 3 hours and just fully charged our batteries. Isn't that always the way it goes? 

~Leslie