St. Marc, Haiti 2008

Day 4 of our trip to Haiti is almost done. Kumar went out with Humedica today to administer medical relief in the rural village of ….. I stayed back at the hotel to compress video footage and put it on our FTP server so that team members in America can take a look at it and use it for their news and packaged stories. I also uploaded audio files of interviews and pictures that could accompany any possible print stories. It was very stressful. The Internet in Haiti is not very fast. I was averaging upload speeds of 25KB/s, which meant that I had to really compress our video footage in order to get it on the server…but it still needed to be HD. After two unsuccessful attempts at compresion settings, I had the footage to a manageable 130MB. This took about 1.5 hours to upload. The other interesting factor was that you could only access wifi down on the patio by the pool and there was only one location with an outlet. Anyway, I think both videos uploaded ok.

We drove back to Port Au Prince in the afternoon, but made a quick stop at Water Missions to help unload our water purification unit. Once it was unloaded, we finalized plans for the journey tomorrow and went to the hotel where I was reunited with my luggage. It wasn’t that easy, but it’s not worth explaining on this blog. After an hour and a little more hassle, my luggage was finally here! Kumar and I enjoyed a wonderful steak dinner (our first “real” meal in two days) and then I immediately grabbed my swimsuit and went in the gorgeous pool at the hotel. The hotel is very nice and has many ammenities that we Americans take for granted (A/C, hot water, properly sealed windows, comfortable mattress, etc). The Internet is the only thing that is lacking and that appears to be caused by the weather. This happened the first night we stayed in Port Au Prince as well.

After my swim I went to the restaurant to grab a coke and struck up a conversation with another gentleman, Dan, who was here watching the Georgia football game. He is an American who has done humanitarian work in Haiti for 8 years. He was a wealth of information about the culture and people of Haiti. I am fascinated by the Haitian people more and more every day that I am here.