Post office

So I’m ok at keeping up correspondence…not the best but I do try. And as I’ve always loved to get ‘real’ mail I’m used to writing letters too. So I’d written some letters and often I would get teams to take them back to the US to send for me because there is no postal service in Haiti. At least that is what I thought. Then Nadege told me that there is a post office. And while we can’t (or don’t—probably can’t) get mail through them, we might be able to send mail from there…I thought it was worth checking out. Well, a couple of weeks passed (and as you might know this is also all happening at least 6 weeks ago as Nadege is now in the US to finish her degree) before we got around to heading out to Delmas (the big street where everything is found) to look for the post office.

It is a large building but the actual post office part was small. And it looked quite closed. We crossed the street anyway and found out that it wasn’t closed. Back into an office where 2 women were sitting.  I showed them the letters I wanted to send. 4 to the US, 2 to Europe and 1 to Africa. They were muttering and calculating how much that would cost and finally gave me a number…3850 gourdes…I thought they must be joking or confused…(divided by 40 that gave me US$96.25), but they weren’t. It was roughly $9 to send a letter to the US and more for other destinations.  I laughed and tried to get my letters back. The woman kept talking to Nadege who wasn’t having it…telling her that I understand Creole and speak French and I am the customer…She didn’t want to give me my letters back but there was no way she was getting that kind of money from me.

 Needless to say the US letters went back with the next team…to be sent for a much more reasonable price. The foreign letters stayed with me because I didn’t have the right stamps yet. When I then decided to go to the Dominican I took them with me and found a post office there that sent them for about $4…I was ok with that expense…