on site

Arrived in Port-au-Prince yesterday early in the morning. There were a bunch of DEA agents at the entrance of my flight boarding i Ft. Lauderadale, which was pretty comical.

Paurt-au-Prince is hard to describe. There are hundreds of thousands of displaced people living in tents or on the streets. Some of these tent camps have had aid while most have not. The "lucky" ones that have get to live in actual tents that have the donor country printed on them. The others are left to fare with hurrican season in home made cloth and wooden tents.

We drove around a little bit to try and change some money. In order to do this, you have to go to a known street where people come up to your car and ask you what currency and how much you would like changed. This is all very confusing as Haiti uses the Haitian Dollar as well as the Gourde.

Eventually we began the drive to Jacmel. It took us 3 hours to get outside of Port-au-Prince. There are no real roads, and most dirt paths are flooded. We drove past huge camps of thousands of people living in these tents. The drive took us over some mountains and eventually arrived to Jacmel in the early afternoon.

Jacmel is one of the largest cities in Haiti. It has been extremely hard hit by the earthquake, as the only main road leading to it was blocked off for weeks after. This is where our coumpound is. We are fenced in by some walls, and we have a tarp over us to try and keep the rain out.

To those of you familiar with the UBC steam room, that is what Haiti feels like at all times. We had a really awesome rainstorm last night. Im not sure what people in the tent camps do when it rains, but they seem to live through it. Some of the people living in tents do own homes, but are too scared to return to them and live there in fear of another quake.

I am at UNICEF right now. Tomorrow we plan on going into one of the bigger displacement camps in a UN convoy. There are constantly killings and rape at these camps, so we have to go in with the UN and Venezuelan army. As i speak french, ill be going from tent to tent doing a sort of a census on the people.

More soon.