Arrival in Port au Prince

It has been a long day, as is the case each time I travel to Haiti. Always such an early morning :) My alarm went off at 2am this morning and we were up and at 'er! I managed to forget to bring my water bottle which is laying in the drying rack next to the sink at home. Thankfully I realized this on the drive to the airport and was able to message my friend who had a later flight out of Ottawa and she packed me an extra bottle! Great team-work! I spent the rest of the drive remembering all of the other things I forgot :)
I met up with the rest of my team (physio, speech, ortho and RN) in Montreal. I didnt have too much of a wait between arriving in Montreal and boarding the plane to leave for Haiti. As we were about to board we noticed that boarding along side us was the honourable Michaelle Jean. When I got to my seat I found that it was occupied by another woman, and Caryn said that they had just had to do a big shuffle themselves because most people were in the wrong seats. Through broken Kreyol I discover that it is a woman and her mother who did not have seats together, but because the mother was elderly and not well she wanted to be close to her. WHo is going to be the bully in that situation? Not I. I was trying to figure out where her seat was, but she wasnt following my questioning because she just continued to repeat the info about her mother not being well. Luckily a flightattendent was able to get her to finally prodce her ticket so I could find where her empty seat on the plane was. It was way in the back in the middle of the middle. Convenient. I made my way back to her seat and tried to explain the switch but, again, communication difficulties and they werent letting me get into the seat which was pretty confusing. In the end someone else switched to that seat so I got an aisle seat which was preferable to the middle of the middle. I napped on the plane and played peek a boo with a little boy in my row and then we were here! Once through customs we all actually located our luggage pretty quickly, both of my hockey bags of supplies arrived. Big hugs for Gail. We then played a fun game of "find Allen" which is much akin to where's waldo, only you have no idea what Allen looks like. We didnt find him easily so we decided to head out and load up the van and Gail would go back for the mystery person when more people had cleared out. Big hugs for Noel. I bought a couple of waters in the parking lot, oh yeah, Haiti heat! And then we were off to the guest house! Big hugs for Andy. We unloaded the van and I picked a bed and then we headed out to the grocery store. It took us a very long time to get there because of traffic. We all bought most of the things we would want to bring home, in case we didnt get a chance to come back to the store before we left. I got the usuals and a few new things that caught my eye. I switched over some money into gourds as well. We had plans to go to Montana after supper, but everyone is exhausted and cant find the energy to leave. For supper we had a spicy pasta with pikliz, salad and frites and cherry juice. As we were sitting at the supper table we started to plan for tomorrow morning and came to the conclusion that if we were going to hit the road early in the morning to beat traffic to get out of town, we needed to get the wheelchairs out of the cage and organized. Mention wheelchairs and it means I get to work :) The light in the cage isnt working, just for an added challenge. All the equipment is piled into a small room, this is the same pile of equipment that we organized 6 mos ago. It is no longer in any shape or form organized. I climbed in and decided to get down and dirty to get the job done before I crashed. Luckily it didnt take us too long once we decided to be ruthless and just tear things out. I have a chair set aside for the teenager in Bellevue and I picked one out for Enrico by eyeing it and not having any measurements. I'm hoping these work out. We picked out a bunch of random parts and supplies in case we need to make repairs at the orpahange.
I apologize for this lack luster update, but the best I can manage is the bare facts of the day- no delightful insights or witty commentary from this worn out chick. I think I will actually make my way down to my bunk and crawl under my bug net.