Saturday, November 24, 2012

Trip to D.R. Border


November 1st and 2nd were holidays here in Haiti. On November 1st we went on a trip to the Dominican border. Once we got out of the flooded area the roads were dry and we enjoyed the drive out to the border.


The large STOP on the barrier was the entrance to the customs/douane area located at Malpasse. We didn't go into Malpasse and stopped outside the gates to look around.


The lake has been growing the last few years. You can tell where this tree is standing is now in the lake. People have lost homes and land to the growing lake. The road also has had to be raised up.


Calens and Benson are walking up the road away from the gates.


And heading back to our vehicle.


Manu said he had to go to the washroom and he headed out to find a place.


Far in the distance you can see the direction he headed :)


The Haitian government has been raising this road in a fight against the growing lake.


People use boats to ferry sacs of charcoal across the lake and to the road.


The man in this boat was busily bailing out the water from his leaky boat :)


A lot of churches held service on November 1st and 2nd.


Lots of people are waiting on this corner for a tap-tap.


After our trip to the border we drove back to Port-au-Prince and went to Epi Dor for french fries, sandwiches and burgers.


The highlight of eating at Epi Dor is their ice cream :) the children enjoyed their outing :)


Delmas 31 has been a flurry of road construction activity. Steadily over the last couple of months paving has been done along the entire length of Delmas 31, a section at a time. The road was closed for a couple of weeks at the Delmas 31 bridge. Instead of paving this area cement was poured.


In the distance a motorcycle driver is advancing along the new cemented section of road.


And then drove over the rubble pile to continue his journey up Delmas 31.


This is a view of the ravine running across the Delmas 31 bridge.


The children spent some time looking at the sights.


It sure is good to see infrastructure work being done in our area. Other small bridges are being constructed as well to connect roads from the Delmas 31 neighbourhood to the Delmas 19 neighborhood and then connecting with Airport Road.


We spoke to the man pushing a load of salt in his wheelbarrow. He proudly explained his life living in the Delmas 31 area.


This road leading from Delmas 31 to a side street in our neighborhood is being constructed using cement. When done this road will be solid.


Amos had a small accident with Kimosabee a few weeks ago and side swiped a Toyota Land Cruiser. The driver of the other vehicle pressured me to pay for his repair. I told him we would go together with him to the Haitian insurance office and he didn't want any part of it .


I drove over to the insurance office and made the claim. The vehicle belongs to a larger mission. They didn't even bother following up with insurance. Now I have the phone number programmed into my phone of the police and the insurance company for any other problems we may have with drivers. I hate it when people try to strong arm me.


Pastor Pierre has been busy with the construction work we have had going on in the yard for the last few weeks. I have lots of happy surprises to show in photos coming up :)


Here are a couple of newborn chicks that are only a couple of days old.


Saturdays are wash days here at Coram Deo.


We also had a community clean up day in front of our house. People sometimes dump their garbage near our house and we took a day at bagging the garbage and driving the loads of garbage to a local dumpster.


Many bags were filled that day :)


A future project will be cementing the ground and putting up metal stands to stop mechanics from using our front area as a garage.  Pray for funding as we still have quite a bit of repairs to do here at Coram Deo. Things sure look a lot better when they are clean :)

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