Language Overload

We arrived safe into Cap Haitien early this evening, to a warm welcome and tight hugs. I have missed these people and this place more than I realized.

For those who want to learn more about the place, click here. Checking that link out made me realize how frightfully little I knew about the history of the town. A good lesson indeed.

So my travel companion and I did quite well for ourselves in communicating our needs in Spanish while in the DR. We rarely were able to determine what was being said back to us, but our complicated requests yielded the proper results (breakfast a half hour earlier than scheduled, a taxi waiting for us afterward, two copies of our receipts, and a deal to have the hotel hold our luggage during the time we have to kill when we go back). It made me sad when I realized how far I am from fluent, or even conversational, but hey, it was a pretty successful learning experience.

On our bus ride, it was a trainwreck of trying to find common tongues to communicate with our stewardess (bus attendant?) and fellow passengers. French, Creole, Spanish, English, and probably a few other languages were used in turn. During our wait on the DR/Haitian border, there was a near-riot of small children desperate to get in the bus to get food/money/anything from me, the "blan" they had spied through the bus windows. The bus driver noticed the frenzied activity, and dispersed the crowd by taking off his belt and swinging it wildly around his head. This did the trick. The kids held their distance. Later, I noticed that two of the children were speaking to each other in sign language, and I strained to see if I could recognize any signs/gestures.

Then, at the hotel, my few words of Creole came back. My mind consists of pure language mush now.

There is a nine-month-old sweet girl on this trip. Big bonus!

My after-dinner conversation/meeting was very productive! I am hopeful that this trip will move my project along nicely. Fingers crossed; the project is so necessary, but very very hard to make progress on due to obstacles aplenty.