May Day

The children did not have school on May 1st. May Day is a national holiday in Haiti to celebrate agriculture. Last year, we went to the fair downtown on Champ de Mars, but this year, we decided it might be a little too risky to put ourselves in the middle of a huge crowd, so we stayed around the orphanage for the day. It was a nice break for some of the kids from all the studying that they had been doing. And for others, it was just an extra 24 hours to study like crazy.

At the boys' house, everyone watched the Chelsea-Liverpool game. Note the all blue section that was supporting Chelsea. The boys kept disappearing into their rooms and emerging with more blue t-shirts. By the way, I was also wearing blue though I couldn't care less which team won.
A day off from school means going to the soccer field twice! I took the boys in the morning and the afternoon. In the morning, there was already a game being played when we got there, so the boys just watched or played basketball. I made a basketball team with Job, Adler, Monsanto, and a little boy from the neighborhood. We faced a powerful team that kicked our butts. That team was composed of Bernadin and ... *cough*... Bernadin. Shameful but true. Now, to be perfectly honest, if you took all of my team's arms and put them together to make one gigantic arm, it would still be shorter than Bernadin's. So maybe it isn't quite so pathetic that he beat us all by his lonesome.


We also did a lot of just hanging around the house in between soccer games and soccer games. (You know, real ones versus televised ones.)

Big news at HFC: all of the kids got new pillows! Of course, the pillow cases haven't arrived yet so they are all sleeping on them with the plastic wrap around them still.


The other gifts of the day were watermelons! Both houses got a dozen watermelons. The girls have been eating theirs progressively over the last few days. The boys, on the other hand, ate every single one of theirs on Thursday evening. We had quite a few stomach ache-y boys that evening!