Hope everyone is doing well and that the weather hasn’t been too unbearable.  Today was another travel day, as we moved from Mare Rouge to Seguin in preparation for the next clinic site.

This morning we packed up and breakfast was spaghetti… Jasmine was less than impressed after only being able to eat one meal in 48 hours.
On the way out we stopped at Carola’s house (which was fairly impressive as it had been renovated to encourage tourists to come to the reserve to visit). She offered us coffee, which though is grown in Haiti, is all exported. The coffee drinkers were very enthused. She would have sold us some, but we decided to wait until our next trip and actually visit the area to buy a bunch (dreaming of course!).

The road was… watch the video.  There is really no description for it. Those with a queasy stomach may want to take gravol beforehand. Remember those IMAX movies from when you were a kid? Welcome to ours…. Our 30km drive today took us 3hrs.
Arriving at Jim’s house in Seguin (Jim is our contact here from the Fondation de Seguin) we were all glad to get out of the vehicle – and were again impressed as we stepped into his home. It feels palatial compared to what we expected to have originally (we thought we would be camping). After unloading and saying goodbye to Denel, we threw everything into the house and headed off to check out the clinic site for tomorrow. After some intense discussion, including some belligerent refusals to work on a slope (by Phillip), we finally managed to decide placement that should work so long as none of the animals are too excitable.
After all of this excitement we wandered back to the vehicle eating freshly picked bananas… yum. It was a nice treat.

Back at the house we discovered that lunch was ready, so we headed down to the cook’s house to eat. If we were impressed by Jim’s place, this was even more amazing. While there, the 3 girls were distracted by a litter of tiny kittens that obviously needed treating, and so spent the majority of the afternoon debating appropriate protocol and dosages since all we had to use were large/food animal drugs that didn’t have any small animal doses listed. It didn’t help that the rainstorm prevented looking things up on the internet (which supposedly we have access to here!). Thankfully, Amanda’s colleague helped confirm our protocol for these wee little kitties!

Given the intense rainstorm, Rick and Phillip opted to read, while the girls played a new game called Qwirkle with Jim. It started out incredibly confusing… as no one really understood the rules. So we invented our own and had a grand old time!

Once the rain stopped (of course after dark), the girls wandered back down the hill to treat the kittens and give instructions to the owner. Then it was back up the hill to eat protein bars and nuts for dinner before turning in to bed. It is 8:30pm… We get up with the sun and go to sleep with the dark here. It is a good rhythm… and we get lots accomplished before the stress of the rest of the world weighs in.
Lots of love,
TRAJ