Recap of Day 6 and Back to MIT Life

Right now I'm back in Cambridge in my dorm room and it feels weird. It's been such a packed trip that sitting at a desk with my laptop seems odd and I keep running through all my pictures and videos from this trip (over 200 videos from my flipcam and 300 stills from my camera).

Friday, our 6th and last day in Haiti started off with an 8:30 breakfast meeting with Dr. Charles MacArthur, a doctor who runs an HIV/AIDs clinic in Port-au-Prince and wanted to use the water quality testing kits. Thankfully, 90% of his patients are still returning to his clinic after the earthquake. But he did acknowledge some of the problems mentioned in a New York Times article that I had looked at before regarding members of the TB hospital being dispersed into the tent cities and spreading resistant TB because the hospital is completely destroyed. I asked him about how effective he thinks DINEPA's add campaign for hygiene is and he said not much. I brought up the issue of illiteracy and using words and he brought up the point that when he makes campaigns to promote taking drugs at the correct time he uses pictures of the moon and sun to highlight what time medications need to be taken. Jess and Anila demonstrated the water kit by the pool and Marvin, Daryl, Professors DeGraff, and Vercoe headed off to Carrefour to check on the pedal-power generator.

I then headed for some art shopping with Jess, Anila, Asha, Clinton, Professor Joachim and his cousin. The traffic was crazy because the next day (Saturday) was a national holiday for agriculture and the banks were closing at 2:30 and everyone was running errands. We saw one line for a bank wrap around the building. After picking up a few souvenirs Anila, Jess and Clinton returned back to the hotel and while the rest of us were waiting for the car we had a conversation about what we were seeing and some of the points that we were discussing the night before regarding the Haitian populations lack of input in the reconstruction process. One model that Professor Joachim came up with was a supply and demand model where the supply is contracts for reconstruction and the demand comes from all the competing NGOs. It is kind of weird to be thinking about NGOs as companies competing to work in certain areas on different projects but that's what we have been seeing over this past week. On the drive back to the hotel the traffic was still ridiculous but it may have been due in part to the huge UN tanks and armored vehicles and patrol cars clogging up a lot of the key streets and commanding everyone to drive slow. We also drove past the house in which Professor Joachim's aunt lived and was buried under during the earthquake.

I grabbed a bite of Anila's Akra for lunch and then Jess, Anila and I headed towards the airport to meet with the German Federal Agency for Technical Relief where we were met on the street outside a huge CAMEP facility by Heinz, the team manager. The setup was AMAZING. In one area they had a housing tent where all the group was staying which included a washing machine and dryer. It was an amazingly equipped setup that I think everyone could learn from. In the other end they had a lab with incubators and quantitative machines for running biological and chemical tests on water and a laptop with internet (with google translate pulled up for easy communication). The staff included both Haitians and Germans and I have to applaud the dynamics of the situation. We tried to demonstrate our low cost kit to one of the lead technicians by setting up an experiment where we looked at the ground water and the water the Germans are supplying to the camp across the street from the airport. I was extremely impressed by their entire setup and more so by the staff, most of whom have volunteered for this posting and spend 2 weeks to 4 months in Haiti and live and work in a very contained environment and still maintain a very positive outlook and attitude.

On the drive back to the hotel we passed by some very very crowded and vibrant tent cities/ camps. People were bartering left and right. Back at the hotel we left at 7:15 to meet with the President of the State University. By this time night had fallen, and this was our first look at the city at night. It was really a different sight. Jess and I have traveled to other countries but this was unlike anything I have ever seen before. It was pitch black, there was practically no electricity and any light we saw came from burning trash or candles. Once in a while there would be a small store with one light bulb on and a radio which would draw a small crowd of chatting people. As much as I had seen this week, I was still unprepared and shocked by the site of so many people living in tents with only a single candle for light. We were originally supposed to meet with the President of the University at a restaurant but he was attacked early Wednesday morning and was uncomfortable leaving his house.

At his house we discussed what type of partnership could develop between MIT and the state university and what the university needs to do to rebuild. The president of the state university also introduced us to his father who is 92 and was pulled out from under the rubble. His wife of 65 years was also in the house when it collapsed and she did not make it. The state university president also mentioned that the agencies providing funding at the moment do not seem very interested in rebuilding the higher education system, although that is what is necessary to move the country forward. He also brought up a very similar perspective on NGOs to what we had been discussing this morning in stating that the NGOs will be challenged when Haitians can take the future into their own hands.

After our meeting we took a shot drive to a restaurant filled with live music and dancing where we had a very late dinner. We bumped into a group from USAID with workers who had been in Haiti since January 14th. We headed back to the hotel exhausted, and peering into the darkness seeing some of the shanty towns lit by only one candle each. Somehow packing and chatting about our trip led to it being 3am and we were up by 6 to make our 6:30 departure to the airport.

On the plane I sat next to a Haitian doctor whose children go to school in Rhode Island. He was curious about our trip and I about what he saw on a day to day basis and what he thought about some of the issues that we had been seeing on a day to day basis. He mentioned that the number one thing he thinks that people should be working on right now is a way to manage security.

When our flight landed in Ft. Lauderdale we were a bit short on time because the computers in customs were malfunctioning and then Anila was missing her checked luggage and we had to go through customs and immigration and recheck our bags. It was a mess and we did not think we were going to make it onto the flight-- it was 1:35 when we were at security and our flight was scheduled to leave at 1:40.

We got into Logan around 5 and in the cab back to MIT, Jess, Anila and I could not help but comment on how different it was here. Pointing to the Charles and the park next to it there were no tents. The roads were paved. It just feels weird being back here because the atmosphere there is so different.

Adventures from Day 5

It’s already day 5 of our trip and this week has gone by incredibly fast. We started out the day one man down—Jess Kim, my roommate wasn’t feeling too well. We headed out to a school close to DINEPA that was founded by the first lady of Haiti with buses donated by the first lady of the Dominican Republic.

After a quick intro to the school and presentation by the children, Anila and I left our team mates at the school to attend a meeting at DINEPA for the water quality cluster. At the meeting there were a lot of people from different organizations such as Pure Water, American Red Cross, German relief and so many others. One of the key issues the meeting was addressing was contamination after the water had been deemed clean by the NGOs and delivered to the site. The group believes that a lot of the salmonella and typhus cases they are seeing in City Solei (an area I wrote about yesterday) is due to people using contaminated buckets to take water during distribution. Also, since the camp doesn’t always get water from CAMEP they sometimes take water from a reservoir that may be dirty. We were able to present the water quality testing kit and a couple of the organizations were interested. We actually opened our samples of CAMEP and Dasani (control) at the meeting (for the first time) and saw very clearly that the CAMEP sample had a lot of E-Coli present. We are hopefully going to meet with the German THW group tomorrow to discus how to get the kits out and into the communities in the tent city.

We left DINEPA around 12:30 and headed back to the school where we met up with the rest of the group. We had a quick lunch of MREs (for the first time in my life) and my pasta thing wasn’t too bad. (I took pictures of that too). Afterwards I visited a few of the classrooms that were taking place in this school. The school is setup with 6 buses that serve as classrooms for the children who are from ages 6 to 10 yrs. They alternate between a morning and afternoon shift and the teachers are really great in promoting art, expression, dance, sports, and XO (one laptop per child computers) in addition to the traditional curriculum. It was interesting to note that the teachers will read to the children using French textbooks while summarizing the main idea in Kreyol. Professor Vercoe and Marvin introduced the kids to new programs on the XOs, Speak and Music Painter. Clinton taught the teachers and students his step moves and Asha worked on art projects with the kids and they had an amazingly fun time. I helped out a bit with glitter and cutting out shapes, etc. and soon everyone wanted glasses made of pipe-cleaners to match mine! I also made friends with the almost-three-yr-old son of one of the music teachers at the school. He had amazing drumming skills and coordination for a three yr old. At the end of our visit, when were all saying bye, we formed a circle and were dancing and singing when he slipped a rock into my pocket for me to take home. I have been trying to get the glue and glitter out of my hair since then.


We left the school around 4 and headed to a café to meet with Dr. Cecile Claire Pierre who works with Partners in Health and is a faculty at Harvard Medical School. She was amazingly nice and spoke to us about some of the challenges and issues that they are facing in the camps in terms of health, water, and organization. During our meeting a couple of the sound trucks I was interested in following passed by campaigning about AIDs.

Right now I’m about to head off to a dinner meeting with Elizabeth Augustin who is the communications coordinator at UNICEF to discuss how campaigns like this take place. I haven’t been able to get online so I’m not sure if my radio contact will be coming around 7 or 8.

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After dinner and an intense Marco-Polo swim session with our group I’m back upstairs writing about the rest of my night.

We had dinner tonight with Elizabeth Augustin, who provided us with a unique perspective of life during this reconstruction period and her work with communicating health initiatives before and after the earthquake. She mentioned a lot of the work that UNICEF has been doing in terms of immunization campaigns and the large need to study behavior change communication so the campaigns employed by groups like UNICEF can make an effective change in the habits of the larger population.

Since tomorrow will be our last day in Haiti I just wanted to take a few seconds to reflect on what we’ve been hearing.

Throughout our conversations today and this past week a few things have become evident that our group doesn’t know how to react to and is the topic of so many of our conversations during the day. The first is that the Hatian government does not really play a substantial role in this reconstruction process. In a lot of the meetings we have been attending they don’t have a presence and it is the NGOs who are planning the reconstruction. The second is that the Haitian population does not feel as though they have been called to act and reconstruct their own country by their government. There seems to be a lot of negative opinions on the government and more than one of the people we talked to this week declared that “the government has failed to prove themselves”. The government appears to be extremely short staffed and lost a lot of key members and has given a substantial amount of power over the country to NGOs and foreigners and this is a source of anger and disbelief for the Haitian population. Not one person we have spoken to considers the law passed that declared a commission of ½ Haitian and ½ NGOs/foreigners to be in the interest of Haiti and refers to it as “the shameful law”. Many of the Haitians we have spoken to consider it an infringement on their independence and the slogan “Clinton is now the President of Haiti” is not so uncommon.

Throughout our time here we have been asking professionals as well as the students what students in Haiti would want out of a relationship with MIT or other students at MIT and what the possibilities of a longer collaboration than just one semester would be and the answer has been “I don’t know”. I think the concept of such a partnership is foreign to many of the students, as is the idea of coming to a foreign country to work on projects as part of a class. As we talk to these groups I can’t help but realize how lucky we all are to be at MIT, where it is possible to receive funding for student projects that are meant to solve real-world problems and issues.

Our group of students have been discussing the idea of “Development Work” and what it takes for it to be sustainable and make real differences, in terms of the society, the political structure, the NGO and whether Haiti is in a place right now where the projects that we’ve brought here will succeed and whether the work that the NGOs are doing here will lead to a substantial betterment in the quality of life for the majority of the population.


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Lastly, if you are reading this blog would you please post a small comment. I would love to hear everyone’s perspectives on this trip and so far it’s been just me trying to jot down everything I do during the day. :) It’s really hard to believe that tomorrow is going to be our last day here.

swa katriyèm nou an Ayiti

It's our fourth night in Haiti and we had another packed day today. We started out this morning around 8:30 to head to DINEPA (the water treatment, hygiene and distribution group), which we had visited earlier on Monday. At DINEPA we first attended a meeting between all the NGOs where they discussed the situation in many of the camps with their community partners. We then sat in on the WASH (water and sanitation hygiene) cluster meeting led by UNICEF and DINEPA. The two meetings had completely different atmospheres.

The first meeting was held outside under a shaded porch where everyone sat down and discussed what the situation was in each of their camps. Representatives from a lot of the NGOs were present including UNICEF, Save the Children, World Vision, etc. We heard so much about the situation in the camps that I easily filled up three pages of my notebook. They spoke a lot about the hygiene promotion campaigns and how they were going to integrate it with the flag day program. They talked about programming in schools to help students and families learn about the proper use of latrines. They talked about places in Port-Au-Prince which were not being serviced by any NGOs because they had a reputation for being unsafe. One such place has a suspected outbreak of diarrhea, but the representative from the ministry and some of the other NGOs were quick not to label it as a epidemic yet because it may be a natural spike in numbers before the rainy season. All the representatives from the NGOs were asked to speak about their activities and the challenges and difficulties they were facing. While some organizations did not clearly state their challenges others mentioned issues such as typhoid. For example the same camp that may have a diarrhea outbreak has a situation where 8/9 tests for typhoid came back positive. There was one clear case of miscommunication where a community member mentioned that they had no resources and were looking for a NGO to partner with and an NGO representative spoke up about the fact that they were indeed partnered wiht the community as of last week. Other problems faced by organizations like OXFAM include that they have no idea of discriminating between i) people who are in the camps because they need help and have no where else to go and ii) people who are in the camps because they are poor and this is the best way to get resources. It seemed that many of the NGOs have no idea how many people are in the camps.

After the outside meeting with the NGOs and their community partners on hygiene promotion we shifted inside to a tightly packed air conditioned room with sitting room on the floor packed with representatives from every single NGO imaginable. Doctors without Borders, OXFAM, USAID, UNICEF, WorldVision, Save the Children, Norwegian Aid Church, and too many others to name. In the meeting there were no representatives from the Haitian government (surprisingly), media or private sector. They spoke through updates on the municipalities, sanitation technical reports, waste treatment sites, desludging all the things about sanitation that we take for granted in the United States. They spoke about installing latrines in schools (side note: the school we visited yesterday had no latrines) and handed out GPS coordinates of a site where they are doing educational programming tomorrow. Their strategic advisory group mentioned that while there were 300-400 tent cities in February the number has escalated to about 1300 sites where people live and they have NO IDEA how many people are actually in the camps. In the middle of the meeting the conflict between CAMEP and DINEPA became really evident. In the words of the DINEPA representative “I would be lying to you if I told you that CAMEP and DINEPA don’t have an institutional problem”. One group also mentioned how their campaign to move 25,000 people to more permanent shelters was being viewed as being forced relocation.

After waiting for nearly 2 ½ hours we finally were allowed to speak for 2-3 minutes. Jess quickly presented our work and Marvin and I cleared up a few questions. Oxfam mentioned that they have their own kit for $700 dollars (versus our $100) and they weren’t really interested in ours. Fortunately, a group from Germany was more interested in hearing about our project and we plan on visiting the cluster meeting tomorrow at 11am.

By the time we were done with the meeting we had run into our 1pm appointment with the radio/tv station across the street. We quickly ate lunch in their conference room and then were interviewed about our projects. The recording is supposed to be broadcast sometime next week and hopefully we’ll be able to see the DVD.

After the interview we came back to the hotel to meet with a few of the college students. We had a few pretty nice conversations about how different the teaching styles are between MIT and their university. I spoke with a lot of Chemistry students and they talked about for masters and PhD degrees you have to leave Haiti. And there was just a difference in approaches to learning.

I think the most rewarding and hardest part of the day today was visiting the linguistic department at the university in Port-au-Prince. The department lost all but 7 of their faculty members (of 30 + dean) and 200 of their students. The four stories collapsed in the thirty seconds and all we saw today was cleared rubble. One of the professors described that he was on the first floor of the school, in the dean’s office when the earthquake happened. He was crouched over and there was a small tunnel but it was too narrow for his shoulders. He waited 30 minutes for the Haitian firefighters to dig him out with an ice pick. He described that the hardest part of this was that one of his students, was asking for help, but his foot was in the other room after the earthquake. The student permanently lost his foot and the professor hasn’t seen him since.

The most rewarding part of our trip to the linguistic department was the 4 boxes of books we brought instead of suitcases. The department has only a ragged red bookshelf covered in dust and rubble and covered with a tin roof filled maybe 50 books. The highlight of my day was the expressions on the professors faces when they opened the boxes and read through the titles of the books.


On the way back to the hotel we stopped at a supermarket to pick up candy for the kids we’ll be visiting tomorrow. We’re having a team bonding session right now and tomorrow morning we’ll be visiting the cluster and a school where another group will present their project.

And I’ve decided that the generator hates me… the power went out again when I tried to shower.

Third Night in Haiti :)

Our third night in Haiti has definitely been really really long. We started at around 8:30 to head towards a school near Carrefour. Along the way we planned to stop by a mechanic's shop so Marvin and Daryl could get feedback and finish building their project on pedal power generation that could be useful for charging batteries. Unlike yesterday when we had cloud cover today was really really hot.

On the way to the mechanic we saw a man on the side of the street using pedal power to sharpen his knives. As we got out to take a couple of pictures and ask a few questions we were swamped by angry people who weren't too happy about us taking pictures.

At the mechanics, Marvin and Daryl explained their project using a mix of French, Creole, and sketches. The mechanic kept repeating the words that "this is easy" "this is easy" over and over again when we asked if they could build our idea. When Marvin asked "if this is so easy why didn't you already come up with it" his response was that he didn't have the idea.

From the mechanics we headed out to the school. Along the path through Carrefour (the most hard hit region by the earthquake) the view resembled something from a action movie set in the Middle East, Bosnia or Africa, with white tank-like trucks with black UN letters posted on them driving through sand and dirt filled roads. Along the way we saw many many completely flattened buildings. One was a three story university that is now what people are referring to as a “pancake” three stacks of concrete. The devastation is unbelievable, and the roads are extremely dusty. Along the sides of these destroyed buildings there are many tent cities that have been set up. We stopped briefly to meet up with a few representatives of the school we were about to visit and a fourteen-yr-old came up to us and asked to listen to music. He really really liked AKON and proceeded to serenade us.

When we reached the school area, we first visited the original site of the school, wehre the building is completely damaged. At the back of the school there is a small clinic where I saw many amputee victims. We held a discussion outside under a tree with a group trying to develop software for One Laptop per Child. We then drove a few meters down the road to the site where the children have relocated to—a tent outside because they are still terrified of stepping into buildings. We had a brief lunch of crackers and Sprite and then started to interact with the children and OLPC’s XO laptops. The children seemed to have a great time showing us what they could do – despite the language barrier. It was really uplifting to see the children from ages 8 to 15 work together on the laptops despite the really poor situation around them. They were asked to write short stories using graphics on their machines. One child wrote about how his mother punished him for being mean to his brother. Another child wrote about picking mangoes with her grandmother and another fruit falling on their heads.


From the school we headed back through the rubble to Carrefore to meet up with the mechanic and see how far he had gotten. Once we got there the main problem was that the mechanic still did not have electricity and couldn’t get any of the welding done because of that. At this point we decided to split the group up. Marvin and Daryl stayed behind with their project for a few more hours and the rest of us went to a university that was turned into a tent city.

At the tent city we had a lot of fun interacting with the children. We also got a chance to meet with the president of the university who is also Haiti’s foremost expert on earthquakes. He mentioned that there are 4,000 families which is approximately 20,000 people at his one camp (and we have seen so many). The numbers are staggering, and to see all these tents, cramped together under the 100 degree weather seems unreal. The only good thing I saw in this cloud of dust is that the children are still able to play around with smiles on their faces.

We then drove back to the mechanic’s place and picked up our team mates before heading back to the hotel. During dinner we met a group of nurses and doctors working in the city’s only trauma hospital. They described gun shots, machete wounds, typhoid, malaria and so many other diseases and health issues. In their words it is the hardest environment that they’ve ever worked in.

After dinner we spoke with Dr. DeGraff and her husband (Prof Michel DeGraff’s brother) about everything from our projects, to healthcare in Haiti, to Haitian politics and how people feel about the help they’ve received after the earthquake. It was a really interesting discussion.

We have an early morning tomorrow because we’re meeting with the WASH cluster and being interviewed by a radio/TV station so I’m going to hit the bed. The power just went out again (although by power I mean generator—since the hotel is constantly run on generator). The last time the power went out I was in the shower.

Second Night in Haiti

Bonswa!

Today was packed and productive! We started out around 9 am and were planning on visiting DINEPA, (Direction Nationale de l’Eau Potable et de l’Assainissement – National Direction for Drinking Water and Sanitation), the organization under the ministry of health that is in charge of water treatment and public health messages. On the way to their office which is located in a very wealthy part of town, Petion Ville, we stopped on the roads to take a look at some of the public health posters put up by DINEPA and admire the artwork. We saw a lot of paintings on the streets, some abstract, some very traditional, all very colorful and creative. Among the all of the paintings there were two that were particularly interesting. One was of the presidential palace, post-earthquake, with jagged black cracks and slumped white walls. The other was a picture of a bunch of people gathered around a store, with fear visible on their faces, and in the bottom the date January 12th 2010 was inscribed. After stopping in this street filled with artwork we continued to take our minibus towards DINEPA. Along the way we stopped at CAMEP, an agency that focuses on water distribution within Port-au-Prince. Since it was an impromptu visit, the engineers at agency refused to talk to us without permission from their higher ups—although I tried to convince him engineer to engineer.



From there we continued to venture up the hill towards the mountains. On the road up to the mountains we could see the shanty-towns which were severely destroyed by the earthquake. Once we got up into Petion Ville, less and less of the houses here were seemed to have been effected by the earthquake. Unlike the center of the city where we are staying there wasn’t much visible damage. We saw the German embassy and other very nice looking houses. We stopped to collect a sample of water from a pipe on the side of the road. The people collecting water from there said it was a CAMEP distribution site. In the midst of this residential area there was a pristine looking building which turned out to be DINEPA. At DINEPA we met with 3 people, who graciously made time for us even though we had showed up at 10 am (despite the fact we had a 1pm appointment). They gave us a couple of maps and talked us through DINEPA’s role in Haiti. One interesting thing they brought up is how there is not enough focus on transitioning to a permanent shelter situation. Jess and Anila presented the water testing kit and the head of water treatment was very keen on working with the technology. We are planning on meeting up with this group again for a WASH (water and sanitation hygiene) meeting lead by UNICEF on Wednesday morning.

On our way out of DINEPA I noticed a sign on the opposite house which read International Radio, I asked if we could go in and see if someone would talk to us because I’m interested in looking at how effective the public health messages were. I walked in and to our surprise the owner of the radio was close friends with one of our professor’s brothers. They were extremely happy to show us around their brand new studio. They originally had a studio in the center of the city which had collapsed entirely during the earthquake. We could see the recovered CDs and furniture spread throughout the entire first floor and parts of the basement. They very graciously invited us into their studio, gave us a tour and asked us to return Wednesday to record a few informative broadcasts for their TV broadcast.

We then headed out for lunch, stopping briefly at an embroidery shop. By the time we got to lunch it was already 2pm and we had spent much of the morning as investigative journalists.

After lunch we made a quick stop at a crafts store and on the way back to the hotel stopped by Professor Dale Joachim’s cousin’s house. She welcomed our group of 12 into the house and showed us her power setup—complete with 12 car batteries and an inverter. Towards the end of our meeting I got a chance to ask her husband, a Dean at the state university about where he was during the earthquake. He shakily described that he was meeting with a group of engineers on the second floor of a building. The second floor collapsed onto the first and he described trying to take the stairs down to the street. He then walked home for a half hour and he described emotionally how once at home he had to wait for 2 hours for his wife to come home and he had no idea where she was, if she was okay, etc. After the earthquake they did not have government supplied power for 5 weeks.

We then returned to the hotel to meet with a group from Waveplace which is working on using a program called E-Toys on the One Laptop per Child machines. They are working on a pilot program with 40 students and 10 mentors and wanted to introduce themselves tonight. We will be visiting their school tomorrow.

We then had dinner and then tested part of the water testing protocol poolside.

As you can see it’s been a long and productive day, we definitely met a lot of people and I hope tomorrow is just as exciting!

First Night in Haiti

So we're in Haiti! We landed about 7 hours after we were scheduled because of the medical emergency and then we got placed on a later flight. We had a nice group lunch at Miami airport and emailed more of our contacts in Haiti.

I was so tired by the time we were on our flight from Miami that I don't remember much of the plane ride. (We had left at 3 am from MIT and hadn't slept at all Sat night)

I woke up a few minutes before we were about to land. From the plane we had a spectacular view of the region, surrounded by really really green mountains we landed in what was most likely the shortest runway ever. The weather is a bright, sunny, sweltering and humid 94 degrees. The airport was filled mostly with aid workers and a few Haitians returning.

At the airport we were met by a bus driver who took us to our hotel Le Plaza. On the trip to the hotel we saw a lot of rubble left over from the earthquake and lots and lots of tent cities. The people seem to be moving on with their lives, there is a lot of music playing from the tent cities. Some of the buildings look untouched, others are just piles of cement blocks. The contrast is startling. Otherwise the streets look much like what I've seen in India, people bustling around, political campaigns with graffiti on any visible cement wall, and instead of wooden/cement structures with tin roofs on them in the shanty towns-- there are tons and tons of tents. We saw women carrying jugs of water back from what looked like a tube-well setup. We drove by the presidential palace- where we saw one end of it slumped in obvious damage from the earthquake. Our hotel is at most 10 minutes from the presidential palace.

The hotel has a strong security presence, with armed guards moving around the area. Apparently, until about last week, Anderson Cooper, Sanjay Gupta and the CNN team had a strong presence at the hotel. This was where they stayed and set up their satellites. The hotel is still running on generators. We recuperated in our rooms for a little bit, drank a bit of gatorade and then headed to dinner. The highlight of dinner was definitely the mango. And it was amazing, by far the best mangoes I have ever had in my life.

After dinner we discussed our plans by the pool. We met a group of nurses. One of the group members had been here for 5 weeks. She talked about how she saw tetanus and rabies on a daily basis and how she had never seen it before. She used the term "slice and dice" to describe the treatment options for the tetanus patients. She had been involved in the WASH program as well, which is one part of the projects that we are going to learn about tomorrow.

We went up to the roof and from there we had a view of the presidential palace and could enjoy the music that drifted up from the neighboring tent-city. Afterwards we came back to our rooms to rest up for tomorrow and jot down this quick note.

More updates tomorrow!

In the air...

After a slight diversion to Washington-Dulles for a health emergency we are now in Miami and booked on the 2:35 flight into Port-au-Prince.