The day we departed teh Dominican we all woke up around 4:15am to pack the rest of our belongings
and began our first official travel day as a squad. We carried our stuff outside and then when the two
buses arrived we packed the buses with all of our stuff. The buses were designed to carry about 25 people without stuff, but once we loaded the back three rows with our packs and bags to the ceiling there were about 15 seats left on each bus…so that means there were about 30seats left for 46 people this is where it became interesting. We placed these make shift seats across the real seats so there were a few extra seats for the rest of the squad members. We were told that our total travel time would be approximately 11 hours…this 11 hours first started with a back trackto Santo Domingo, which
was about 3 hours. We were dropped off at a bus station in Santo Domingo around 9am and we were not leaving until 11am, we we had time to just sit aroundand get stared at by all the Dominicans passing thru because for some reason a large group of 46 white people attract a little bit
of attention.
From Santo Domingo to Haiti we got to ride in style on a charter bus with comfortable chairsand plenty of seats for everyone. This trip mainly consisted of a lot of sleeping and just getting to know more squad mates because when you live with 46 people for a month you dont get to know them well enough…
The border from D.R. to Haiti reminded me of traveling in Central America meaning that the buildings were very small and just basically had a cubicle style desk with a window for us to check our passports and all that good stuff.
We drove alng the Hatian country-side seeing very similar houses to that of the Dominican Republic country-side. As we continued on we caught our first glimpse of small tent communities…just a bunch of these government style small tents clustered together in what I guess you would call a community
We saw a few small tent communities as we traveled and this was the part of the country where the earthquake did not much affect the people, but the people just reloacted there and I assumed they were from Port Au Prince area. Majority of our travel in Haiti was in the darkness of night so we only caught a glimpseof Port Au Prince as we traveled to our ministry Site.
All we knew about our ministry site is that we would be working at an orphanage.
