What the Haitians Saw....

I mentioned that our tap-tap broke down a few times on the way to the Orphanage on our first day there. We were stuck on the Haitian equivalent of the 'freeway', which means we were in the middle of a 2-lane road being used as an 4+ -lane road and traffic was swerving around us. It's very possible that one could get carbon monoxide poisoning from just sitting by Haitian traffic. I don't think there are regulations about vehicle emissions in Haiti. It was quite a thing!


Brent and I are both professional people-watchers. We love to observe people. Airports are a particular favorite. We like to go to the mall on Christmas Eve and grab and Orange Julius and then sit on the benches in the hallways and watch all the craziness around us. It's fun to watch people in their "natural" habitat being... people.


So, from that aspect, I imagined to myself that we were, at that moment in Haiti, a bit like a special exhibit at a "people zoo".

LIMITED TIME ONLY!!

WATCH THE AMERICANS DEAL WITH CAR PROBLEMS IN A FOREIGN COUNTRY

This is what we looked like in the back of the tap-tap.

Along similar lines, there are a lot of UN soldiers in Haiti. You see UN vehicles all over the place. This vehicle drove behind us for miles.

The soldiers in this vehicle were from Brazil. They saw that I was trying to take a picture of their vehicle from the back of our taptap, so at the next stop, they posed for me:

A big thumbs up from the Brazilian soldiers!

So at the end of the week, when we were loaded up and heading back to the airport, this UN vehicle of Filipino soldiers was behind us.

As a testiment to what a strange site the "Americans in Tap-tap" exhibit was in Haiti, I saw that the soldiers were taking a picture of US!

So I flashed them a peace sign.

Their faces lit up and they tried to line up again to take a picture again:

I guess I'm not the only one that likes watching people....