LE COURS D'ANGLAIS

Every Tuesday and Thursday night a small group of people from our church meet in Portsmouth (at our church building) and teach English as a Second Language classes. They are open and free of charge to everyone, but most in attendance are from Haiti. There is one female who attends the class I teach every so often, but it's mostly just me and the guys. I teach the intermediate class and now have help from one of our church's senior missionaries, who is here serving a religious mission with her husband. When I first started teaching, I was extremely intimidated but I now look forward to teaching and interacting with such a funny, hard working group of people. Props to them for leaving their families in Haiti behind to come and work as hard as they do, study English and improve their lives. I really am grateful for the friends that I have found in these guys and the laughs that they provide every week. (Including the times they try to teach me French--I'm just not cut out to be bilingual!)

Here's most of our class, but we are missing a few people.

(Double click on the pictures for a better image)

They were supposed to pull a funny face in this picture, obviously they didn't all go for that.

If your face can be seen in this picture and you are reading this, "Faites vos devoirs!" :)

"Rain Day"

Thursday morning I woke up and it was pouring rain. Not too much of a surprise, as it's rainy/hurricane season. The rain got pretty crazy and sometime around 10:00 am, Keith called to tell me that campus was closing because of a storm surge. The Prime Minister ordered that every thing on the island be closed and people return home. So, naturally I put all of our buckets outside to catch rainwater so that we could flush the toilet if the water went out, turned on the AC to cool the apartment, because I knew the power was going to go out, and jumped in the shower. I'm not sure that was the best choice, seeing how it honestly was liquid mud, but---what do you do?
Ironically, the rain stopped and the worst of the storm had hit before 10:00. It was Hurricane Omar, which was somewhere up by Puerto Rico but we caught a little of the tail end of it. Later, our landlord stopped by to see how we rode out the storm and told us that in Portsmouth (just down the road) some ships and barges had washed up! BIG ships and barges! He said that everything was a mess and some of the roads were blocked off. So, later that afternoon, my friend Natalynn and I walked down to see what all the fuss was about. Turns out, Nick was right. Everything was a mess!

Here's a look at some of the waves. The Caribbean Sea is normally VERY calm, but here it looks more like the Atlantic during a storm.
As you can see, hours after the worst of the storm, the sea was still crashing up onto the road.

This was on the street that runs along the bay front. The streets were covered in sand and small fishing boats were washed up everywhere. They got washed up and over the street, the waves were crazy!
(Check out that pile of sand and debris that was washed up--they had what looked like a small snow plow scraping sand off of the streets)


All of these boats had washed up, from small fishing boats to great big boats!


All of these boats are beached on the shore---not a good thing! We heard that you have to hire a tug boat from Miami to get boats like these pulled off shore! (not cheap!)

Luckily the bus stop is here, or else this boat probably would have been sitting in the street!

So, instead of a snow day, like we are used to back home, today we had a "Rain Day." Awesome.

Operation Rescue

Thursday morning I woke up and started getting ready for a hike I was going on. I walked out to the kitchen and found this little gecko guy hanging out in the corner of our kitchen counter. I was in a hurry to get going on the hike so I didn't bother catching him and figured he could be in charge of bug control. That night, he was no where in sight. Um, that was a little nerve racking and I was hoping that he wouldn't come and find me in the middle of the night. Fortunately he stayed in our kitchen and I finally found him again today, up on the top of the window. I made Keith rescue him and take him outside because gecko-man was not looking good. (And he did nothing by way of bug control)

Keith to the rescue!
Gecko-Man jumped onto Keith's hand but then onto the ground and ran into an ant trap. Bad News! Do you know what are in ant traps?
We quickly took it outside and pulled it apart to free Gecko-Man.

He ran away and hopefully he's doing better now. Good luck little Gecko-Man!

3rd Semester Beach Bash

Every semester after the first big test Ross puts on a Beach Bash Party. They serve free hamburgers and fresh local fruit juice and give out free T-Shirts. I had to work until 5:00 so we didn't swim, but as always, we had a good time and the sunset was absolutely beautiful!

Cute Kids With Big Imaginations

Today I babysat our neighbor girls during the lunch hour (on campus). Here are some cute pictures of them with some of our other friends kids. Everyone could see a black object out in the Caribbean Sea and they were SURE it was a baby whale and they did not want anyone to miss out on it. (Don't get too excited. To me, it looked like a coconut)


It started out with just 3 kids. Sitting on a bench quietly, talking amongst themselves.

Then the girls I was babysitting and a few other friends got called over to see the "baby whale."

They were all occupied for quite some time, (and very intently) watching the black object, deciding whether or not it was actually a whale.Almost everyone had a theory as to what it could be that they were seeing. They finally narrowed it down (between garbage, a monster fish, a sinking boat, a person swimming (if it was a person, how good would they feel to be confused with a baby whale?) a buoy and a baby whale.) One girl said "Okay. So, it's either a buoy or a whale. That white thing over there could be a buoy, but the black one has to be a whale." It was so fun listening to them weigh out the different possibilities.

They finally decided that the black thing out there was a whale. The object was really small, but their big imaginations made up for it. Aaahhh (sigh), the joys of childhood.