I've posted some photos and a new video. Unfortunately, the video I really wanted to post from Paradise Beach on Monday did not come out (actually I somehow managed to hit the stop button while filming). Sad...was a good bit of film I thought. grr
The day at Paradise was very nice ( 18°25'52.77"N by 72°47'38.47"W): since it was Monday there were no crowds. A group from
HODR went via tap-tap but Brendan and I got out ahead of them on the motorbike so we made the beach nearly an hour before them. We had the beach nearly to ourselves for some swimming and reading. The tap-tap arrived and then a few locals came out including 4 kids and we all got to horsing around in the surf tossing frisbees and dunking and other general mayhem. I got to launching a couple of the boys into the air the way Dad used to do with me as a tyke and, as all do, they got a great kick out of it. One of the boys could hold his breathe a remarkably long time and would lay in the water playing possum or take advantage of the launch to perform and underwater attack on one of the HODR gals nearby (which, while I knew he was doing that I did NOT catch just WHAT he was doing during the attack run...and had I known I would have left off with the playing...or joined in and blamed it on him...muhahaha)
I was also able to borrow a facemask and found some abandoned flippers and thus was able to do some reef diving and fishy watching. The mushroom blooms of reefs are quite wonderful with brilliant purple, mauve, red, orange, and yellow colors all in attendance. The fun area, though, is the 3 or 4 blooms all growing close together as they form a sort of underwater highway if you go down and skim along the sandy bottom below their initial outward growth. The reefs are about 15' tall and this troupe seem to be the last ones before the water turns a darker blue and runs off into the murky - and just a tad scary - distance. I try to keep thoughts of sharks and such out of my head but all it takes is one little peep and I'm glancing out toward 'the deep' and scanning for big shapes moving 'in for the kill'. Sometimes having an imagination really gets in the way of just being in the moment, ya know? And as we are well aware, Michael's imagination is a rather binary unit: all or nuttin'...sigh. I ran the highways but I did pay a toll as the lanes are tighter than they at first appear. It was fine as long as I kept up my momentum but if I slowed or hesitated and allowed buoyancy to get ahold of me then all was lost and I'd skin myself on the reef. I was surprised (happily so) at how calm I was about being effectively 'trapped' underwater while on the highways. We aren't talking complete tunnels but the gap and overlap was enough that there was no aborting and going straight up for the surface either. There is a tunnel/cave but there appears to be no outlet and so I won't be tackling that one as it seems to dangerous: quite dark, and very much too narrow for a turnaround - or at least that's what my imagination (aka, fear) tells me. In this instance I'm going to listen. I wish I HAD brought my darned underwater video camera. It would be so wonderful to be able to share this with y'all, dagnabbit! Even if it records at a mere 480x640/30fps...still woulda' been worth it.
The
HODR compound has taken on a new face as we recently reached the end of what was originally the end of the HODR presence in Leogane. The result is we had a very large number of folk leaving and another large influx of new volunteers. Overall our numbers have lowered which makes compound life more palatable since the 'white noise' of 130 volunteers is now down to 75 or so. Staff are trying to find that delicate balance of effective number vs too hard to manage since there's a sense that the Emergency Stage of the recovery effort is perhaps waning and the Transitional Stage is not far off.
I'm thinking hard about my extension and have heard from some of you about the idea. Right now I'm leaning toward extending and I do want to flesh it out here in the blog, but at the moment it's near 1/4 past 11 and I should lay my head down and get some zzz's as tomorrow shall be a big day at school 4 I hope. I've estimated that we will be ready to pour concrete by Monday and I desperately want to meet that goal!
