The rain has been falling for just short of two days straight as of the time that I write this. And most of the time it is a pretty heavy rain - lots of water. There has got to be a lot of flooding that I just haven't heard about yet.
Around 3 PM I got a call from Kyrk saying that I should meet him up at the entrance to the mission. As I was going up, I got a call from Rob asking if I was going up. I was wondering what was going on. When we got there, there was no way out of the Mission. A very large tree had fell from the other side of the road right at the entrance and blocked both the road and the entrance. It took a bunch of power and misc. lines down with it - including the electrical pole right at the entrance to the Mission. We went back to get equipment and change clothes.
This picture is from the road looking down the road where if you follow the wall on the left, it "Ys" into the Mission parking lot. Notice the amount of water going down the road - it's been like that for two days. I need waterproof boots - mine are soaked!
We worked in the rain until about 6 PM and finally got traffic to go through. There were about 3-4 of us using two chainsaws and a few others using machete as axes (which they do a lot here in Haiti - they're fairly effective too which surprised me). Some Haitians we walking around, some sitting and waiting in their vehicles, some others were watching as if we were entertaining them (and we were entertaining at times - we were having fun) and still others were actually helping out. It was good to speak a little with and work with the Haitians in the neighborhood. Nothing like a storm to bring neighbors together. Mostly Mission workers were helping to clear the debris. The main trunk of the tree was more than two feet in diameter near the base.
One of the street vendors had his wood-frame store (about 4 foot by 4 foot) smashed by the tree. He had paintings, carvings and other items in there that he was trying to save. We tried our best to work around his stuff, but I would say about half of it was lost (including most of the structure). I would like to do something for this guy, but I am not sure what is going to happen. I'll mention it at our dinner tonight and see if we are going to do anything.
Chicken
We ordered a box of frozen chicken legs since it is cheaper by the box and you can't get breasts (the US doesn't send them here much apparently). Tina and I spent some time before the tree incident repacking the chicken since the box the chicken was in got destroyed by the rain and there was chicken blood all over the floor by the door where we brought the chicken in. This is the kind stuff that takes a lot of our time up randomly throughout the day - things that we didn't have to deal with in the US. There is talk about more food riots here so we are happy to have a supply.
I don't know why these pictures are not rotated correctly, they look fine on the file itself, but it's no big deal...
Boring car stuff...
Since it was raining so much, I decided to stay in and work on the Mechanic database in Access that I had started. Just as I was getting settled in, someone knocked on the door and said the battery in the white pathfinder was missing. It was last used Saturday and now the battery is gone from under the hood. I still haven't found out what happened to it.
Shortly after that, I got a call from Kyrk at the office here by the mechanic shop and he told me about the Canter which had a small electrical fire in the middle of the dash Monday. So I went to go take a look and they were push starting it because the batteries (2) were not hooked up well. I had seen that the terminals were messed up, but never had access to the vehicle when I was able to work on it. A common practice here (at least at the Mission) is to jam nails, screws, or pieces of solder in between the battery post and the terminals to get it tight. This is usually done because they don't have the right battery for the terminal connection. This causes the battery post to become disfigured and further exacerbating the problem. So I replaced three of the four terminals (I didn't have enough to do all four and we'll have to do something about the battery posts, but it is good for now.
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