Painting and playing doctor.

So today was our first real day of work in Haiti! The trip here was loooong! 2 days of traveling, to Miami, onto the Dominican Republic, and then a pretty comfortable bus ride over to Haiti. All and all everything went smoothly. After 2 taxi rides in the morning in Dominican Republic (the first one dropped us at the wrong location), my dad befriended a man with a shot-gun at the bus station and he directed us to the correct bus. And guarded our luggage with his life...or his shot-gun.
Crossing the border was a crazy experience. We were shocked by the drastic increase in poverty the second you cross the boarder. Literally on one side of the river there was infrastructure, buildings, businesses, and a relatively clean enviornment (Dominican Republic), and on the other side there were seas of trash with naked, hungry looking kids wading through them and skinny cows munching on tin cans. There were no buildings but metal roofed huts and thousands of people sitting around (Haiti). While in the DR we had noticed that they were significantly more developed than Haiti, but we were not expecting such a sudden, drastic difference.
So we made it to Cap Haitien relatively unscathed and Ebed picked us up at the bus station (only 1 hour late!). We then settled into Ebed's, had a nice meal, and had long discussions of the politics of Haiti, the current state of the country, the cholera outbreak, riots, and much more. We then had a very cut-throat game of racing demon (the best card game ever!) before heading to bed.
Today we awoke to the sounds of roosters and prepared for our first day of work! We headed straight to the clinic, donated our Cytomax, Pedialyte, and alcohol swabs, and got to work!
Jenna and I each saw our own patients while my Dad and Anna took pictures and listened in. There was also a Haitian doctor who was conducting seperate consultations and also helping with ours when we couldn't understand something or wanted to know more about the kind of bites people get here etc. It was quite a successful morning in the clinic and we enjoyed seeing the patients and we were able to see them all by lunch time.
After a quick lunch we headed to the trade-school and started to paint the classrooms!! Jenna, Dad and I painted one room together. We made a mess of our selves and every once in a while managed to get some paint where it wasn't supposed to be....but all in all I think the room turned out pretty well and we were all happy with our accomplishment! My hands are permanently yellow now though...this oil-based paint is impossible to remove! We worked until it was dark and we were out of paint (we did about 1/3 of a wall in the 2nd classroom) and packed it in and headed back for dinner. It was a pretty exhausting day today (who would've thought painting would be such a work out?!) and I know we will sleep well tonight!
Tomorrow we are headed to the orphanage to interview the teens we will be sending to trade-school and donate all our toys and muscle-milk!! We are all really looking forward to it! Must go now and continue my reign of terror in racing demon!! :)