Retour

I'm sitting now in my cheap airport hotel in Miami, getting ready to pack up and fly to Virginia. It's very, very strange to be back in this country.

Yesterday, I flew from Fort-de-France to Guadeloupe, then from Guadeloupe to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and then from Haiti to Miami.

On the plane from Guadeloupe, I sat behind a little boy named Louhan, from French Guyana. He was showing me his Sudoku puzzles and his Nintendo DS game the whole time. He told me he would be spending a week in Miami for the Toussaints vacation, and that he was excited to see what Halloween was like. He probably couldn't have been older than my CE2 students, and he was just so cute.

The view of Haiti from the airplane showed many of the buildings in run-down condition, and I could see a lot of people gathered by the side of the road on one of the freeways. I'm not sure why. In the Haiti airport, there were no LCD screens; the flight information was just written up on a whiteboard in the waiting area. There was also no PA system -- I'm not sure how people knew it was time to board, but at some point everyone just started getting up and standing in line. And there were no security machines -- airport workers opened up all bags by hand and looked through them, and everyone was patted down by hand, too.

Anyway. I'm not sure yet what this small sojourn back into the US of A will bring. I'll update again soon...