The view from the back of a pick-up

So day one in Haiti, we visited the Haiti Y, which is a nice new clean building with a computer lab that I'm using now, and meeting and office space. The kids mainly play outside at the front of the building and do their homework. To get from place to place with 11 or so people we often have to not only cram into a car, we also have to cram into the back of a pick up truck. So I have had the opportunity to do something I would never do at home!
Buildings are in ruin here. Tent cities everywhere. Rubble and trash everywhere. Pigs eat garbage in the street. The Y is a safe clean place for these kids.
For dinner we walked to the Olifson- an old mansion converted to a hotel and restaurant with open porches and decoration. I tried some Conch. Everything is good. And again, there is such a discrepancy between those who have money and those who don't. We walked to the hotel through streets covered in sewage and trash, walk up the stairs and we're in a different world. It's not like there's a bad part of town and the hotel is in the fancy part, they're right there together. It's hard to understand why it is that we can eat a fancy dinner where we throw food away, when the people outside probably only eat two meals a day that they cook over a little stove or fire on the street. It's not like we deserve it more, we were just born in a more privileged position.
People here aren't as accepting of us taking photos- who can blame them? Where they're living isn't always a pretty scene and it is again treating them somewhat like a zoo. Although, despite the unsanitary conditions they live in, most of the people are clean and neat. The little girls have their hair in braids and bows and are just beautiful.
Day Two, we heard from a professor about the history of Haiti, including some politics. Then we went to visit the tent city across from the Presidential Palace. It is an amazing image- imagine the White House caved in, collapsed and destroyed, still that way a year after the destruction. And then imagine the yard in front of the White House covered in a city of tents, one after the other, each leading to the next, a maze. No sanitation. 6 people living in one tent, but where else do they go? Their buildings and businesses are still in ruin. They don't have the machinery to remove it. And if you were to stay and work on removing the rubble from the site of your home- first of all where do you put it and second of all, if you're doing that all day how would you ever earn money for food? So homes are abandoned for tents and selling things on the street seems to be the way to earn an income. And the hillsides here are just homes built up up up one after the other so that if any catastrophe comes they all come tumbling down.
The kids jump rope in front of the Y with a simple piece of rope, like something we'd use to haul something. But they dance and laugh and enjoy life. The Y has an area at the back that was donated to them because it was a tennis court that was damaged in the earthquake. So we painted it all together. Us foreigners and then the kids quickly took over, all pitching in to paint different parts.
We went for dinner that evening at the Plantation, a french restaurant. I tried a snail. Super fancy. The Haitian staff joined us, they are inspiring in the passion they put into their work here. Some of them only volunteers. We spent four hours at dinner, just enjoying conversation and one anothers company.