Haiti Days

I've been spending considerable time scanning slides from Haiti and other places. These pictures date from 1969-1972. Those are the years that I spend teaching missionary children in Les Cayes, Haiti. I was considered a missionary. I went to Haiti with a mission that was known at the time as West Indies Mission. The name has since change to WorldTeam since the work to spread to many other places.

My assignment was the junior high kids. I had been teaching primary grades in the States and so this new responsibility was quite different. I enjoyed it immensely, but there were times, especially in algebra, that I stayed a step ahead of them. By the time I reached there, "modern" math was the vogue, and that was not how I learned algebra. We survived.

The school was primarily for children of missionaries, but as time went on, we welcomed other children into the school. The only requirement was that they speak English. One family entered our school from Belize. The father was a worker with the UN, working on mosquito control. Some other children who joined our school were Cuban children whose parents had lived in the States in the Miami area and then came to Haiti and worked in a large sugar mill that was not far from our center.

I've been posting these photos in albums on FaceBook, and they've been quite popular among these kids. They're not kids any more, but adults with their own children. I'm not sure if any of them are grandparents yet. One of the Cuban girls, who, when she saw these photos, wrote to me and said that she couldn't thank me enough for posting them because she had so few photos of her childhood when her family worked in Haiti.

We had no TV's, no VCR's, no video games, and so books were very popular. Everyone was a reader. Even the children who struggled a bit in reading skills were seen with books in hand. Playing outdoors was a given, as well. There all sorts of places to explore and all kinds of bugs to find. The boy in the photo above was famous for catching lizards and keeping one or two in his shirt. He could be seen pulling one out of his shirt, giving it a kiss, and then putting it back. He was also our tarantula hunter. I brought one home with me one year to have on display. It certainly did garner all kinds of comments.

In the newspaper today there was an article about how iguanas are taking over in Florida, eating turtle eggs, burrowing owl eggs, and many plants. D. lives in Florida now. I wonder if he ever goes hunting. I think he could have quite a business.

Motorbikes were a favorite means of transportation. With the roads as they were, a motorbike was the best means of getting around. I sometimes accompanied the kids into town to have diner at the local hotel, and I generally was left in the dust. This was not the best thing since I wore contacts, and my eyes were often red from the dust.

The three and a half years I spent in Haiti were rich years. Many of these kids that I taught are missionaries themselves today. I have always considered it such a privilege that I had a part in their lives. Now that we are as old as we are, we are almost contemporaries. Now, when they see me, the say, "Hi, Bev." No more "Miss Wright."