What a day! Today was our last day with the deaf community in Cayes and I can't speak for everyone, but I was barely able to leave.First let me start by telling you everything before the goodbye. We had our regular morning routine. We all knew it would be the last time we would wave at the children in our neighboring houses and the last time we would see the street vendors and buildings and billboard and farm animals and bull with one horn going to the job site. When we drove up to the site, we immediately noticed that there were less people working today than on Friday. We were told that the workers needed to switch off weeks so that all of them could get paid. That being said we realized that many of our friends such as Evans and Beer (yes we called him Beer) were at the site even though they were not scheduled to work. They stuck around all day just to get one more conversation in.
Our job for the day was to complete the concrete floor in the kitchen and the hallways. For some reason this process was a little slower going. We had so much down time that we ended up doing new jobs that we assumed were needed, but not necessarily asked. Tyler put himself on the duty of going to the water pump and getting water for the concrete. We found that Tyler was not just getting us buckets and buckets of water, but he would stay at the well and pump everyone else's water too for women and children. We also noticed that there was a lot of trash around their property so almost the whole team went around the surrounding area picking up trash. The Haitians looked at us like we were crazy, but in the end the space looked so much nicer. Jim also made it his mission to save a poor little goat from a choking rope around its neck. Miriam was so relived that she could cry! I got a lesson from about four of the guys on every word in the Haiti sign language dictionary. We also worked on our ability to say no as we had several speaking Haitians loitering around the site asking for us to buy their merchandise. We are looking forward to Madame CheepCheep's customer service. At the end of the day, we looked around at all of the concrete floors and the steps and we realized we had accomplished a lot. When it was time to leave we took a group picture in front of the sanctuary and I linked arms with the friends that I had so easily fell in friendship with. We all gave a huge hug to the people we had bonded with and Tom even picked up Edner and threw him over his shoulder which got the whole group rolling with laughter. When we piled in the truck we reached a record for us with 18 people sitting in the bed of the truck with many of our friends hoping to steal a few more minutes with us. The last person we let off was Kola, who was one of the most enjoyable people we met in Cayes. We waved goodbye and went back to SEED.
~Abigail