That's the night that the lights went out in Jacmel

Let me tell you a little bit about our house and its ammenities. First off, we are in one of the nicest areas of Jacmel, so when you see the pictures, realize that this is not the norm for Haiti.

HCO (Haitian Christian Outreach) is currently renting the house, which they call L'Abri (I think it means rain). The house has a name because there are no street names or street signs. In facts, during my whole stay in Haiti, I saw one stoplight, and that was in Port-au-Prince.



The house has five bedrooms, three bathrooms, a balcony, two meeting area, and a flat rooftop with an amazing view. It would be a great vacation condo. However, there are some factors in this house that make it very different from the usual house in the states. First of all, due to the poor plumbing situation, you can't flush any paper down the toilets. So everything goes in the trash. And while we're on the subject, every drop of water costs money. So you should only flush when absolutely necessary :) and showers had to be military-style: get wet, turn shower off, scrub down, turn shower back on, rinse.



Also, the water out of the faucet is not safe to drink, and there is no water heater. So you have to heat water to do dishes and you have to buy bottled water to drink. In fact, many Haitians drink water from plastic pouches instead of bottles to cut down on trash (by the way, there is no trash collection in Haiti. The trash just piles up until someone burns a pile of it.)

Electricity is not on all of the time. Some man has control over when the power comes on and goes off. Luckily, we were there during the World Cup, so he kept the power on pretty late into the night. Once the power goes off, you have to rely soley on a generator, which can be tricky sometimes. For example, one night at around 2 am, I start hearing this beeping. It came every few seconds for about a minute. Then, all of a sudden, all of the fans stopped and the beeping became one, long, constant beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep. After a couple of minutes, Tessa finally spoke up, "Am I the only one who can hear this??" Apparently the batteries on the generator were not completely charged, so we were out of power until city power came back on (around 9 am).

Another thing I was not prepared for was the little creatures we came to know during our stay at L'Abri. There were at least 3 lizards who stayed with us, along with some spiders and lots of ants. I definitely had to get over my fear of these things, since I was sleeping on an air mattress on the floor.



All of this said, the house was great. We had a wonderful stay there, and were so thankful that we had such a nice place to stay. Not to mention that the beach was about a 10-minute walk away and there were lots of beautiful neighborhood kids to play with whenever we went outside. I think everyone's favorite part of the house was the roof, where we hung out to meet in the evenings and take in the amazing views.