Vacation

Life has been more than stressful over the past few months. CNP has undergone severe cutbacks due to a financial crisis. They scaled up rapidly post-earthquake, were forced to compete with the other larger NGOs that are now in Leogane, and were reliant on subgrant money from Save the Children to fund many of their programs. Now, they have learned they will not get any funding (compared to the $1 million they received post-quake) from Save the Children in 2011; therefore, they have to scale back rapidly in order to stay afloat. As a result, they made major cuts, both in programs and in employees, including myself. They terminated my contract early. Luckily for me, I was able to go full time for the month of December with the other organization I work for. However, the not knowing what was going to happen and the stress of seeing employees being cut back, etc. on top of dealing with the poor way it was all handled on the ground, was all very stressful. I ended up getting sick and getting shingles, so it was definitely time for a break.

My friend, Elisa, learned that her contract would not be renewed after November, so we decided to take some of our vacation days and travel in Haiti together before she returned home to Italy. We ended up going to the Southwestern part of Haiti, where the beaches were supposed to be beautiful. Let me just say, we were not disappointed.

We began our trip in Port Salut. All of the hotels around were very expensive for Haiti (at least $120 a night), so we decided to stay in a little hostel we found. It ended up being a perfect little place to stay. It was a nice change of pace to not have electricity all the time, to take bucket showers, etc.

Elisa inside our hostel

The view from upstairs

Our room

I fell in love with Port Salut! It was such a cute, quiet, clean city to live. The beach even had a sidewalk that was donated by the Taiwan government. It was refreshing to get away from the NGO infested beaches near Leogane. There were times where we were the only two people on the beach. We ended up spending 4 days there. We went to bed super early, I went for runs on the beach, read two books, watched the sunsets and best of all, we had no internet or computers with us, so we couldn’t do work at all. One of my favorite parts was the amazing dinners we had each night - grilled lobster. It was by far the best $10 dinner I had ever had!

Port Salut

Our nightly lobster dinner

The town of Port Salut

We ended up making some friends while we were there and took a day trip to Les Cayes and then to a waterfall. I found Les Cayes to also be a busy, but clean city without trash everywhere. Then, we left to find the waterfall. After driving for several hours through some very rocky roads in the mountains, we finally arrived at the waterfall. We had to find someone to open the gate and walked down to the waterfall. It was amazingly beautiful! I couldn’t help but go for a swim. The water was freezing, but it was totally worth it. I am so glad we were able to go. It was quite the hidden treasure!

Saut Mathurine

After leaving Port Salut, we went to the island off of Les Cayes called Ile-a-Vache for a night. We ended up taking a taxi boat over with a bunch of Haitians and an entire boat full of wooden boards. It was quite comical. There are two resorts on the islands and we stayed at one, Abaka Bay. As we pulled up, we were met on the dock with a drink. We could only afford to stay for one night and it turned out that Elisa and I were the only two people staying there. The place was built by a Haitian man and his wife who had lived in the states and returned to Haiti after years of working. It was amazingly done! We definitely got spoiled from the nice rooms to the amazing food to the hot shower. It felt like we were on our own private island. However, I felt guilty about being waited on hand and foot. Sadly, the time to leave came entirely too quickly. The weather was perfect on our whole trip and I definitely didn’t want to return to Leogane after such a relaxing 5 days.

Elisa and me at lunch

Our view from lunch

Our room

The view from our balcony

The dining room

Sunset at Abaka Bay

Elisa and me on the pier

I don’t think I realized how much I needed that vacation. Not only did I sleep for like 12 hours every night, but I also slept most of the day on the beach - I hadn’t realize how exhausted I was. With everything that had been going on combined with working for two organizations (where I clearly tried to work full time for both), I had done a horrible job at forcing myself to stop working. It was also so nice to be in a more laid back environment and to get away from what has become of Leogane. I don’t think I heard a single “hey you” or “blan” during my entire time there. It was a reminder of how beautiful Haiti is and what great potential it has. I feel very lucky to have had the opportunity to travel and see other parts of the beautiful country that Haiti is.