Bayonnais

A small community in the mountains near Gonnaives center around a church, a school, a vocational school, feeding program, clinic, and agronomic project. It is an amazing place. The school has close to 2000 students from the area—some kids walk an hour and a half both ways. The morning is for over 1000 elementary students and the afternoon is for high schoolers. There is a rice depot where people who work on various projects such as road repairs can collect rice as payment for their work. The clinic has a dentist as well as doctors to see the community. They are planting expo fields to show new ways to grow a variety of foods.

I was ushered into the Guesthouse and shown to the dining room…don’t know where Mom was but lunch was a very good pumpkin soup (though on a hot day). Then mom came back from wherever they had been walking. YEAH!! So good to see her. We set to talking and catching up in between getting introduced to the rest of the group. The air feels cleaner there (out of the city) and it is definitely cooler (in the mountains).

While we are there we took a hike up into the mountains to a village called Nichola. NIchola is even poorer, so much so that the people in Bayonnais felt called to send teachers to start a school there for the children. We left early in the morning so that we were there to see school start (with some songs and prayer) and then the kids went to classrooms…one stone building with 1 window and 1 door served as 2 classes faced in opposite directions and a reed structure that served as 2 more classrooms. The teachers walk from Bayonnais each day (about a 1.5 hour hike up)

While at the guesthouse there are always people around. And they want to practice their English. Or just gawk at the white people (that is what it felt like at times though I’m sure it was all well-meaning). If you sat on the porch you were pretty much fair game…and it was shaded so it was a great place to sit. I found that when I sat out there I would get an audience of 18-20 year olds pretty quickly. And when they found out that I spoke French it was even bigger. They seemed to want to test that…no more English. So the first guy would sit next to with the rest standing and watching. We would start. ‘Hi, my name is _____. What’s yours? You speak French. How long are you staying in Haiti? Etc.’ it would go on for a while and then his turn would be over. He would go to the watching area, the next guy would sit down and we would have the exact conversation that I had just held and he had just watched. Seriously. And this went on for ages…and every time I would sit outside it would start again. As friendly as I am…I wasn’t too impressed but then what else could we talk about. I run out of questions pretty quickly.
I loved visiting and seeing another ministry that is doing such good work and having the freedom to wander around the village (though I noticed that already I didn’t go far on my own).