Questions about Haiti--

I'll be going to Haiti with Global Volunteer Network in May. I will be gone for three weeks, but now that I have received my preparation guide, I see that I will actually be in Jamaica for almost a week total. For my first few days, I will be attending orientation in Montego, and on Day 5, I will fly to Port Au Prince and then travel "overland" to our base camp at Jacmel. It looks like I will have weekends off, and then on the nineteenth day, I will fly back to Montego, debrief and be home on the twenty-first day.

Conditions will be very basic- I'm told that I will be bathing out of a bucket for my two weeks and that I will have to purify my drinking water. I am also going to be buying a mosquito net soon, which is sort of... startling. It's not something I ever thought I would need! Global Health Action posted some photos of the recovery process on their facebook page. This was one of the most interesting to me:


It's a tent, made out of whatever the Haitians could find. Most of the tents are like this, from what I am reading, and the Red Cross says that "more than half of Haiti's 1.3 million earthquake survivors have now been provided with shelter. The Red Cross says it expects most of the victims will have some form of shelter by May 1 to protect them during the upcoming rainy season."

More news as I hear it and more progress is made.

In North Myrtle Beach--

I was just at my family's place in North Myrtle Beach a year ago, but I cannot tell you how happy I am to be here right now. My mother and sister are already here (little sis is on spring break) and one of my aunts lives here these days, so I knew I was going to get some lovely family time.

I pulled up around 5 (the drive took me six hours and some change, which unnerved my mother) and my sister and I immediately decided to drive over to Waites Island after we tossed my suitcase and stuff into the house. We got 100 feet away from the house and ran into some horses who we assumed had escaped. We ended up taking them back to the barn- but I'm pretty sure they were actually let out on purpose. Whoops! Anyway, we went to the island after that. There are more shots after the jump.