Two Miracles in one day

Tuesday 3/22 

After two weeks here, and the tantalizing promise of a working shower some day “soon come”, today that much anticipated event finally arrived. Jackson finished hooking up the sink, shower and toilet, the cistern barrels on the roof got filled with water and Voila, we have running water. Taking a real shower for the first time in many weeks was an almost spiritual experience, or at least a material pleasure. Only a few problems: the sink drains onto the floor, the shower doesn’t drain at all, and the floor in the bathroom slopes away from the shower drain, making a deep puddle right in front of the door. Why have the floor slope towards the drain if the drain doesn’t work anyway?

For people who might have never seen or been in a running water bathroom, much less built one, it is coming along remarkably well and I have faith it will work well soon. 

Visited the fish ponds to see the men working to dig them deeper, doing a great job working out in the hot sun. 

The other minor miracle was that after giving out more than 25 sails, supposedly to fishermen with boats, supposedly in exchange for fish, we finally got fish for dinner, and it was delicious. Boney little things, but very tender and tasty. 

Today was my father’s birthday. He would have been 103 this year, but only made it to 89. I honored his memory with a swim in the lagoon, something he would have enjoyed if he were here.

The fence around the library was a bit too Haitian for me to fully appreciate. Some places had six strands of wire, some seven and some eight, one section even had nine. Some places the rows were even and straight, some they were very cooked and uneven. Of course it is not really important, but we decided it might be a useful lesson for them to make some adjustments to make it more “foreign”. It seems that foreigners, probably mostly North Americans and Europeans, like things straight and even, so I showed them how to make it more foreign. It might be good for them to learn a few foreign ways as most of the opportunities for jobs and money that might come their way in the future will most likely come from foreigners who like things straight and even.

Today we also learned about the deep well of good water that has been repaired two months ago. It seems that someone, some unknown NGO, put in a deep well with a hand pump that produces good fresh water from an underground aquifer about 10 years ago. It was broken for several years until just recently but is now fixed and works again producing the best water on the island up to a rocky hillside from and deep rocky aquifer.