Street Scenes in Port-au-Prince

Once we left the airport, we meet our guide for the week, Jeannot, on the bus.  Jeannot traveled with us the whole time we were in Haiti.  He works for Compassion and he was a wonderful guide, translator, educator, and he had plenty of 'pasyans'.  (Have you learned that Creyole word now?)  No matter what question we asked him or what situation we were in, he always seemed calm and unruffled!  It took perhaps an hour to get from the airport to the restaurant where we were to have lunch.  The traffic made it slow going.  But there was always something interesting to see out the bus window.  Jeannot talked to us about Haiti and Compassion as we went along.  Here are some photos from that part of our journey.

People are still living in tents in the city.

Some places the sidewalks were quite dirty, but here they are doing their best to clean them up.

Most places there were crowds of people.  We saw lots of what we would consider unsafe riders, too, such as the men in the blue hats on the back of this truck.  At least they had hard hats on!  The flags in the distance are around the sculpture in the next photo.

 

This is called the Globe Unity Sculpture.

Here's a closer view.  Can you find Haiti on the globe?

Ladies carrying things on their heads is a fairly common sight.

I wondered if this tree might have been damaged in the earthquake, or maybe it was run into by a truck.

Here are some new houses, probably built to replace ruined ones after the earthquake.