School, gardens and Creole classes

Dry river bed.

First Monday back home:

Anna and I started our day working on cleaning and organizing both desks and the school room. Then we shared breakfast with Wes, Susie, and Sarah before starting our school day.

Cory ate earlier but after breakfast attempted to teach us adults how to do laundry in our broken washing machine (needing manual off/on switching of the drain pump). Very complicated but I did take notes and he managed to get three loads of wash done before heading out to see the rental gardens.

From 9-12 Creole lessons occurred while Anna and I continued to work on school. Met. Alert will be teaching Creole 3 hours a day for the next four weeks or so to the Munsell family.

We intend to learn as well as there are many words in Creole we don't know yet.

After chicken-rice casserole for lunch, the office and school work continued.

One mystery did get cleared up when Jean Pierre returned from a trip to Cap Haitian. This morning we could not find our bag of clothespins. And having cleaned the vast majority of the house we could not imagine where it could be ??

One of the 70 peach palms in a rental garden (left side).

Well we have an inside-clothesline that runs across Anna's and the schoolroom/office. One windy day he'd moved it to a hook behind Anna's bedroom door. Guess she didn't hear us talking about where in the world the bag could be?!

Cory worked on trimming some of the pathways that over-grew while we were gone and fixed a problem with the water pump electric cord.

The pump had heavy use with the drought this summer and the guys kept the nursery and young campus trees well watered.

The peach palm rental garden took 16 buckets of water each week, sometimes more. Gene and Yvon had to wheel barrow two trips each from a large pit dug in the river bed at least a 15 minute walk away. The pit was dug by local people to get water for washing clothes, etc.

Many people told them it was useless to try but after a while saw the good results and changed their minds.

 The peach palms and other fruit trees in the garden did well, most of them making good growth despite almost no rain for 3 months. It looks like only one fruit tree and one peach palm were lost, due to the weeders hired by the garden's owner.

It should be peanut harvest time now but only some of the gardens have recently been planted and young peanuts, corn and beans are growing or germinating.

The cocoa, breadfruit, and many of the other summer crops were lost, but will resume in a few months if recent rains continue.

Anna and Sarah spent some time after school getting exercise while playing volleyball. Mid-90's and muggy today.