Last minute packing is my specialty. I successfully packed everything I needed for Haiti in less than two hours. Those were also the last two hours I had before I had to leave for Haiti. My team consisted of twelve total members: Our two professors, Dr. Steinkamp and Dr. Tomandl; nine other biology majors, Andee Callaghan, Angela Naa-Dei Martey, Bethany Zilger, Carly Moeller, Cristina De Anda, Devan Pascarella, Hannah Jacob, Joy Mukiri, and Paul Lee D; and me. We left later on the seventeenth from Seattle with next to no idea what we would be doing for the next eighteen days and arrived in Port-au-Prince on Saturday Morning.
Haiti has made some vast improvements on it's airport, or so I have been told. This year we only suffered minor hustling by the fake airport staff. According to the great Steinkamp, last year was a lot worse. They pseudo Haitian airport staff dress in red polo shirts and wear almost legit name tags. Almost meaning almost complete, or not so real-looking, or yeah-I'm-a-guy-trying-to-hustle-you-into-paying-me-to-do-something shades of phony. They proceeded to accost Steinkamp and tell him we were not allowed to claim our own luggage and needed to give them our baggage claim tickets and they would get our stuff for us. It's a very smart business idea, but definitely something I'm glad doesn't happen in the States.
Once we got to the Mission of Hope Compound, we played some basketball with a few of the Haitian children who live on the compound.
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