Well it's been quite a week to say the least. Dinner with Ann Voskamp was great. She is a neat lady, it was a fantastic treat to get to meet her and the folks from Compassion Canada. The past few days have been crazy with animals.... Sunday I was supposed to go and pick up goats for the kids in Pernier (the second class) but Pastor Johnny needed the big truck so I ended up going this morning. And it turned out I was needed for another project yesterday. How some things happen I will never understand but they still are very cool. Me of all people was contacted to help rescue a black capped petrel. They are globally endangered. There are an estimated 5,000 worldwide and about 1,000 in Haiti. Somehow one got lost and was captured on the 4th floor balcony of a bank up in Petionville and I was the person to help it find it's home and make sure it was ok. It had no health issues so I took it up the coast to my favorite beach to see if it was able to fly or swim. I am calling it a "he" but I don't know for sure :). Anyway when he smelled the sea air he perked right up. I put him on a concrete wall and coaxed him into my hands and put him on a rock near the water. He looked around for a minute and then whoosh of into the wild blue yonder he went. It was breathtaking!

So today I took two of the boys from Merger and we headed to the valley to pick up goats. We picked up 20 and a bunch of forage for them (we have had no rain here and there isn't much grass). It is always so fun to ride with the kids from Merger, they are so excited to see everything and we have the most interesting conversations. They were teaching me French today and explaining which of the ladies on the road was really a mambo (voodou priestess). This weekend was a huge voodou festival at So Do and there were thousands of people going and coming along the road. After we dropped of the 20 we went to the place we keep our goats here in Port and picked up another 8 that have been donated back to the project to round out the 28 we need to give out on Wednesday. 25 for the kids in Pernier and 3 to replace ones that were killed a while back by the dogs in Merger.

Then this afternoon we got to deal with bees. It seems a swarm decided they wanted to take up residence at the entrance to the dining room at the training center. They just showed up yesterday and by this afternoon they looked like this.

I am afraid of bees, but last month Brian, Keith's son worked with some bees and it wasn't too bad. Keith isn't here so that left me. I asked for help from some people in Merger that have bees and we successfully captured them and put them in a hive.

Then we also harvested the honey from the original hive that we have had for almost a year and have never touched because we were all scared :). I don't know how much it will make. They were pressing it tonight and I'll see in the morning. I know we lost some because a couple of combs fell, so we will have to do it more regularly and the guy from Merger said he would teach us!

So that has been the excitement for the past few days.... Tomorrow we are going to start making seed grenades with the kids in Merger. The other day driving I remembered something from a permaculture class years ago and urban gardening. So we are going to take seeds from Moringa, Luceina and Jackbeans and put them in a clay and manure mixture. When the balls are hard we are going to go and toss them up in the mountains and see what happens. The best case we have 2 species of trees and a nitrogen fixing ground cover that will fill the mountain tops, next best they come up and the animals eat them all up the first year and worst case nothing grows but we have a great time with the kids in Merger and they learn something about saving the environment. The goal for tomorrow is 7,000 seed grenades. The kids in Merger and Pernier have been collecting the seeds and tomorrow is play in the mud day. Then next week sometime we will throw some of our grenades here around Mon Kabrit and along the mountains of Route 3 by Corail. The others we will take out to the valley. They have rain already in the valley and we will just wait until it decides to rain here and see if our plan works. The photos don't want to upload so you will just have to wait. Then on Thursday we are going to start a vaccine trial of Teschens. Finally the vaccine is here!!