Jonny and I walked back home and started discussing what we could do instead. An hour later the sun was out and the weather looked great. We had no idea where we could go hiking without going somewhere we had already been. The only thing I could think of was to call one of my students. I called Jean who told me that he could go but he would want to bring his friend Amos. These are both sophomores from my Algebra class. When they showed up they had brought one of their friends, Shilton, from the 7th grade. We told them we wanted to go on an adventure, not just an easy hike. We didn't care how long it would take or how far way it was. Since we couldn't go on our trip to the island, we had the adventure bug in us and had to do something.
Amos told us that we could go to his dad's church. At first this didn't really sound like an adventure so I asked where it was. He explained that we would have to hike into the hills to get to it. We didn't know of anything else to do so we all headed off to start the journey. About five minutes later we had all gotten on taxis and were heading out of town. After about 10 minutes, we had passed The Breeze hotel and stopped at an intersection where we were let off. We paid for the taxis and started walking down the road. I had brought water and had eaten, but our students stopped at a stand to get some crackers and water for themselves. While we were standing there waiting we had asked about a few things that the vendor was selling. A minute later and Amos handed me some of the pastries that I had asked about. He also handed me a package of orange flavored crackers. I thought it was a very generous gesture considering that we were the ones that were supposed to be treating our students with the expenses since they were being our tour guides.
Once we had our food, we headed off on the hike. I didn't expect it to be too far and we were all just carrying along at a casual pace until Amos said that we needed to speed it up. I asked him why and he told me that it was about a two hour hike. It always amazes me at how long a trip can be from the road considering how we have roads to nearly every destination in the U.S. It was fun to take a two hour hike into the hills to get to a church that was so far away. The interesting part was that it was a hike that constantly inclined. Each step was higher than the last. There was only one point at which we walked back down and then started going back up. It was the highest I had ever been in Haiti. By the time we made it to the top, we could see out in every direction.
After getting to the top, Amos and Shilton took off to look for some coconuts. We had talked about getting some coconuts earlier and I mentioned it was something I had been wanting to get. I had only had one coconut here since I had moved to Haiti. About five minutes later they came back and said they found a tree but needed someone to climb it. They found someone who took us to one of the other pastor's homes who had a coconut tree. We weren't there but two minutes and they started bringing out chairs to us to sit on and their boy had climbed up into the tree. He hollered for us to step back and he began tossing coconut after coconut down from the tree. The pastor grabbed a machete and began to de-hull the coconuts and we cut holes into them to drink the milk. Once we finished, we broke them open and ate the coconut inside. It was delicious and refreshing.
After hanging out on top for about an hour, we headed back down the hill which went by much quicker. Jonny and I were too busy taking pictures and fell behind a little. It made for a fun day and gave our students something to do that they don't normally do. Even though it was fun handing out with them, they seemed to always stay ahead of us and enjoyed hanging out and kidding around with each other as all students do. I didn't know if they were having as much fun as we were, but they did seem to enjoy stopping and explaining to us what the different trees were and the different crops that some farmers had growing in their fields. We had seen ugly fruit, bananas, red bananas (which may have been a variety of plantains), cocoa trees, coconut trees, sugar cane, as well as common vegetables like onion, carrots and potatoes.
Once we got back to where we were dropped off, we flagged down some taxis and made our way back to the school where we all met before going back home. Jonny and I had been talking about how much fun it was and that we should go again some time. Amos and John also seemed to have fun because Amos kept telling us that he has all sorts of new places to go to. He also asked us if we were going again next Saturday. We said, "Sure!". Then, as Jean was walking away, he looked back and said, "Whenever you guys want to go again, just give me a call!" It was good to know that they had as much fun as we did. Below are a few pictures from the trip.
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