We're making ourselves at home here.

So far Haiti has been good to us. It's a beautiful country. Here are a few pictures so far.

We've gone to the beach every Saturday. This is part of the group. Me, AJ, and Laura are on the left and we're the three country directors. Ashley and Matt are next - they are on the U.S. Management team and were just here for the first two weeks to help us get things going. Styven and Junior are two of the Haitian employees working for us and Rachel and Caleb, on the right, are two of the volunteers in this first wave. We get new volunteers every six weeks or so. In the second picture, those guys in the boat were catching lobsters right by us. It grossed me out to think there were lobsters that close to the beach. I like to think creepy water animals live much farther out. One of the Haitians caught a shrimp-like creature and ate it alive.

AJ and the other boys sometimes play soccer with the little kids on our street. I'm standing on the balcony of our house looking out over the gate. We have a little courtyard between the gate and our house. We have two loud dogs and a security guard down there at all times.

Alot of our time so far has been sent traveling to different communities within Leogane to see who we can help and how to help them. We hiked to this mountain community the other day to see if we could start an agroforestry project there to help with the obvious deforestation. You can see the mountain sides have been terraced and we found out that this community mostly plants peanuts there! There were peanut shells all over the trail.

I just spent today in the hospital. They let us scrub-in and observe a surgery. I don't know if we'll be able to assist like we thought but observing is good enough for me. I'll post those pictures soon. We're loving it here but we miss air-conditioning, water pressure, and all of you.