We made it. It was a long tough day, but we made it. The boys slept all the way home, too bad I couldn't have planned that nap during the Agape shift. We did eat mediocre cheeseburgers and chicken nuggets at "MacEpi" - Haiti's attempt at fast food. The boys loved it. We also shopped at Megamart - the new Haitian attempt at Sam's club. I have to admit something - I resorted to a terrible parenting mistake while there...
I bribed the boys to behave by promising to purchase toys for them. I am weak, I know it.
It worked, though. And we got sweet squirt guns and a flying helicopter.
The store was swarming with a group of UN soldiers from Sri Lanka, who - as usual - have a strange obsession with taking pictures of my youngest son. They all want to pose with the small white person and squeeze his cheeks. I tried to smile and be accommodating (some of them had machine guns, after all), but that gets really annoying. Noah agrees. During the third or fourth pose, he melted down and told them loudly "NO MERCI". He apparently thinks all foreigners speak Creole. I had to laugh.
When we drive up and down Delmas, the main commercial "strip" of road in Port-Au-Prince, there are always multitudes of street vendors approaching the truck windows pushing their wares (phone cards, water and pop bottles, fried foods) and many young children begging for handouts. Isaac and Noah both sit with arms crossed and say through the closed windows "no merci" over and over again.
Gotta go, it's time for a squirt gun fight.
-T
