I left off with the Ghana blog way too early. So many more stories to share, but now is not the time. Hopefully I can write up a summary of the last few weeks of my time there soon (and fix all of the pictures, cause they apparently all died when I deactivated Facebook. Oops).
So yeah, if you hadn't noticed, I deactivated Facebook. That's not really what this blog is about, so I won't go into detail, but if you want to know more, just ask. It's been a refreshing change.
BUT
There was a point to this post, so I'll get to it now. I have a new travel plan! I got accepted into a small class here at Yale called Haiti: Sustainable Development in a Post Disaster Setting that spends 10 days down in Haiti during our spring break. Competition was tough, but I won them over, somehow. I'm in a project group that will be working on issues related to water and sanitation. In the fall, several students participated in an independent study that came up with a few project ideas, and I took a separate class that prepared a final paper about latrine issues and designs. We'll meet as a group this week for the first time to discuss the kinds of directions we want to and think we can take.
A little background: I've been wanting to go to Haiti for a long time. Maybe not until everyone else who is interested in health/post-disaster/development work wanted to go (basically, after the earthquake in 2010), but it's been in the back of my mind since then. But I didn't want to go in some frivolous way, having no context to work within or any background about what would be helpful. Last year, I heard about this class, and I attended an information session, but decided that last year's projects weren't really something I was interested in. But one of my roommates took the class and went on the trip last year and loved it. So when a group of us from my water and infectious disease class had the opportunity to create a final paper that would be highly relevant to the class and the Albert Schweitzer Hospital (HAS) that the class works with, I jumped on it. One of the girls in my group for that project took the Haiti class last year and is the TA this year, so she got us set up to actually work on something that would be useful.
So at long last, I get to go. It's a small class, and so each of us is covered for all of our airfare. I just need to get on renewing my passport (which expires in June, as it currently stands). We'll spend some time in Port-au-Prince, travel up the coastline to St. Marc, then work our way inland to the HAS catchment area and work on our projects for a few days. We also get to spend a day with Partners in Health and see their fabulous hospital. If you haven't read Mountains Beyond Mountains, I highly suggest it. It's so inspirational. It took me several months to get though, because every time I started reading it I felt lazy and thought I should be out DOING something and not reading.
So yeah, I'm stoked, and I guess I can bring this back as a way to talk about plans for the trip. I don't have high hopes about fluency, but I'm going to try to learn some Creole (or Kreyol, as I think it's actually spelled by them).
And maybe, just maybe, while I'm working on this, I'll find a job that will get me travelling again.
