Wednesday

In the morning everyone except for Olivia hopped on a bus with the guys on our team. We dropped them off at Bercy to continue their noble fence-building project with the tarantulas and inescapable direct sunlight, and then we doubled back to the village of Leveque. We drove through the housing we had seen on Sunday, but continued over the hill to a separate part of the village. This was the deaf village Mission of Hope had developed there. In Haiti the deaf are treated like lepers, social outcasts who don't add anything to society. Following the earthquake the majority of the deaf community were living in the roughest ghetto in Port au Prince. Thanks to Mission of Hope's connections within the Haitian community they learned of this situation and relocated about a hundred families to Leveque. Now these families are better off than they were even before the quake. The houses they are given consist of 3 rooms, 2 bedrooms and and main room that is often used as the kitchen. The insides of the houses are cream or white, and the families get to choose what colour to paint the outside. And just when we thought we had escaped olive green, we discovered that was the colour of the day in Leveque. So we whipped out our paint rollers and paint brushes and motored through those houses. And this time we had eager little hands to help us.



For lunch we boarded the bus and passed around peanut butter sandwiches and Pringles. In the afternoon, some of us lucked out and got to paint the insides of some homes, a welcome break from the sun and the green paint. It was so cool to watch conversations go from English to French to Creole to sign and back again. Sometimes people from the main village in Leveque would come over just to chat with us, practice their English, and laugh at my French.



As we left Leveque that day, my second pair of sunglasses found their way onto some boy's head. Happy to have done my part in protecting the eyes of Haitian youth, we departed the village with the hope of returning the next day.

On the topic of eyes......Olivia had found out about a Vision Clinic being hosted at the Mission of Hope base to provide glasses for the surrounding community. With her future career path leading to optometry she took this as a really cool God opporitunity.



That evening we had some down time on the basketball court, tossing around a football, having a massage train, and a few of us actually played basketball.....truly though, Julia and I decided that out game of dancing football was more of our calling, and we were inspired to purchase a football when we returned home. That night we slept well. There is nothing like feeling physically exhausted. We had been longing for that kind of exhaustion.....mental exhaustion, emotional exhaustion - sure! all the time, but we don't really get the chance for any kind of physical labour whilst in university.