Haiti - Day 5 (Valerie Riley)

The day started off smoothly, compared to all the other days. However, the waitress was rude to us at breakfast. She never served our table, but she served the Haitians at the tables near us. Taylor said, “I felt like she was racially motivated”.

VBS is testing my boundaries, but it is absolutely wonderful. Just a simple greeting to the children puts smiles on their faces. Their smiles just melt my heart. Before crafts started me and Lucy visited “our” goat, who we named “led”, which is ugly in Creole. Crafts was a complete mess. The children colored angels and we put glitter on them. The kids loved the glitter. It went absolutely everywhere. As I speak I still am finding glitter on myself. A glitter fight broke out between the HCH kids and the “white people”. I think I got the worst of it. It was all over my face, arms, neck, legs, just everywhere. The huge mess we had to clean up afterwards was definitely worth it. Later on, Loudrige helped me attempt to get glitter off of me. It was similar looking to monkeys grooming one another.



When VBS was over I had to hold Chelsea Loomis’ hand to prevent her from slipping and falling down the hill like the previous day. On our way back to the home, we had a slight incident. A Haitian man had his truck parked in the middle of the road and we did not have enough room to pass. When the man moved his truck over, he did not move his truck over far enough and Danny took out his driver’s side mirror. Once we got back to the home, we cut out clothes for the next day’s VBS. We had a princess dress cutting out contest, in which I beasted Leann and Lisa at it. Lisa made a good second though.

After that I started to make origami boxes. Tina absolutely loved my boxes and made me create three more so she could fill them with paper scraps. When we returned to the hotel we noticed the maids had left our sliding glass door open. I definitely wasn’t very happy about that, because being on the first floor I didn’t want anyone to steal our stuff. Plus, they had done that to the room next to us the previous day. On the way back to the home, the same Haitian man who had his truck parked in the middle of the road, now had his truck parked farther over into the road and had large rocks in the road. Upon seeing us, he forced his wife and small children to move the rocks while he stood and watched. After observing them struggle, he finally joined in and helped them move the rocks.

We had another excellent Haitian meal, in which I only ate rice, but it was still delicious. Our evening was filled with music and devotions. Once done with devotions, we went upstairs and celebrated Rico’s birthday with cupcakes. When we got back to the hotel, we went swimming. While we were swimming, the power went out and it was pitch black. Travis and Spencer tried to sneak up on the girls and I ended up punching Spencer in the face. After about 2 minutes, the generator kicked in and we had power again. Overall, the day was exceptional. ☺

- Valerie

Here some pictures of our day!