Saying Farewell (Nawe pita)

I regret to inform you that Jillian and I will be leaving Haiti tomorrow, and moving back to the States.  This isn’t an abrupt decision, it’s actually one that we have put an enormous amount of thought into, and made before the New Year.  Back then the choice seemed like an easy one to make: [...]

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Wyclef Jean Shot in the Hand in Haiti (Apparently)

According to Wyclef Jean, and the people around him, ‘Clef (as the kids here call him) was driving down Delmas 65 in downtown Port-au-Prince Saturday night around midnight when he got a phone call.  Because Wyclef does not like talking on the phone in front of his driver (weird, I know…), he told the driver [...]

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Aristide Expected to Return This Week, Just Days Before Sunday’s Run-off Election

Exiled former-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide is scheduled to returned to Haiti by the end of the week, leaving a country gearing up for it’s second round run-off elections on pins and needles to see how his return will be received.  While Aristide has repeatedly claimed that he is not returning for political reasons, his timing could [...]

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Haitian Heaven

I went to the island of Ile a Vache with some friends of ours last weekend, and it was pretty amazing.  Ile a Vache, which is a 30 minutes boat ride from the southern coastal city of Les Cayes, has no roads, no shops, and just beach.  It was pretty amazing all together, but this [...]

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Beatrice Has Kittens, Tripling the Number of Cats Residing in Our House

If you would have told me a year ago that moving to Haiti would result in us become one of those “Cat People” who has a ton of cats running around their house, I would have never believed you.  But Beatrice made that dream come true yesterday by giving birth to a healthy litter of [...]

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Taking a Bit of Carnival Home

You didn’t think we were going to leave Carnival without picking up some of those awesome masks, did you?! On our way out of the city, Jillian and I picked up some masks to commemorate our Carnival experience, and judging by the two, we clearly had different experiences: We got Jillian’s in a little shop [...]

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Caught in the Act

As I mentioned before, while taking pictures of Carnival in Jacmel, one of the Lanse Kod, or “The Rope Throwers”, who take sugar cane syrup mixed with charcoal and cover their bodies in it, got me in the face while I was traversing the rows of paper mache masks during the parade.  Well, a photographer [...]

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In Other News…

…there was a small earthquake last night around 4:15am that had Jillian out of bed and by the door before I could even open my eyes.  The scary thing about this one is that, while relatively minor, it lasted for almost 10 seconds, which is MUCH longer than most of the tiny earthquakes that made [...]

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Haiti Carnival 2011!!! (Jacmel)

This weekend Jillian, Ben, Alexis and I traveled down to the southern coastal town of Jacmel to see what this whole Carnival thing was all about, and it was pretty amazing.  Hundreds of thousands of people were there to see what had to be thousands of hand made paper mache masks in one of the [...]

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