Day 3

Thursday January 18th, 2018

Bon Swa!

Today was a long, but great day. We spent the majority of it familiarizing ourselves with the island in preparation for the Kennedy’s arrival in just a few days.

Our day started with breakfast at 0800. After we were done eating we met up with our two translators Thiery and Zute who are both from Ile a Vache, and Captain Lennon. We left Vacation Village (where the students stay) and hiked an hour and a half to Abaka Bay where a man named Ellie owns a resort. He has a beautiful resort right on the water.

While we were at Abaka Bay we checked out a well where the well pump was broken. Captain Lennon explained to us how detrimental not having a working well pump is. We all know the value in clean drinking water. It is something we often take for granted. Not having a functional well pump means that people must lower buckets into the well to get to the water. This process leads to all sorts of water contamination because they bucket is not sanitary and it is then touching the clean well water. The most common type of water contamination is e coli which can be extremely dangerous and make you very sick.

After learning about the well, we headed back towards Ellie’s resort. We were given some down time to work on our co-op projects and hang out on the beach. For our co-op project we are responsible for maintaining a daily journal narrating what we do everyday. While we wrote our journals on the beach it was around 85 degrees and sunny! We joked about how cold it must be back at home!

After spending our down time at the resort we hiked back to Vacation Village and explored around Cacor which is the village next to where we were staying. The day was relatively casual. We finished with dinner which was beef with rice and beans.

Tomorrow we will be meeting up with Ailish. Ailish is from Ireland and has worked for an Irish NGO, Haven which operates out of Ile A Vache for the last five years. Ailish was able to visit Mass Maritime this fall and sit in on one of our international relief classes taught by Captain Lennon. She will be hiking with us to Madame Bernard. Madame Bernard is the largest city on the island and is also where the supplies from the ship will be offloaded. We will spend most of the day in Madame Bernard familiarizing ourselves with the area as well as visiting the orphanage there. It should be a long but good day!

Talk to you soon,

Kaylene