We made a trip into town with our Haitian guys to run errands. We left it up to one of them to get us transportation. I will put it to you this way - the 'vehicle' we rode in one of our Haitian men refused to use again. Said even the Haitians don't consider this a vehicle but being the adventurous women that we are we navigated our way into the van that was completely stripped down to the metal. The windshield had a huge hole in it that was stuffed with something so the air couldn't get through and the seats were like sitting on ply wood but they rocked b.c they had rusted out and no longer stayed in place. The highlight of all of this was when Nicolas stepped out of the 'van' and the floorboard fell out of the car onto the side of the road. Oh yes, we were riding in style.
We managed to open a bank account in only 3 hours, get unlimited internet for our guys and get our own Haitian cell phone that we can use while we are down here and add minutes to when we return.
So after running around all day in that sad excuse for a vehicle we were ready for dinner. As we stood in the buffet line in front of the rice and beans I had to step back b.c the man serving the food smelled awful. I quickly filled my plate and went to sit down where Alisha says to me, "I think our food stinks" and I lean down trying to be non obvious and sniff and reel my head back trying not to gag. Any of you familiar with the movie Bugs Life when they say "Who ordered the poo poo platter?" I think that about sums it up. If you are up for a laugh you can watch the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tv5DlbpOt30
Needless to say we didnt eat the rice and beans and spent the evening in our room hysterically laughing that we thought it was the man who smelled, repeating that line from the movie and replaying the heap of junk or more commonly referred to as POS that we have bravely used that day.
We have 640 applications and will be adding 60 more that will be men and off those 700 applications we need to chose 300. We have women who ranging from 19 to 80 years old applying for loans. Every time we come down here we learn something new or that plans have changed. We brought all the paperwork needed for Franck to begin teaching October 15th but some meetings we were not aware of need to take place before that and so we are having to push back our training till January. More than likely the marketplace won't open until June 2014 which gives us more time to raise money. So just for fun - we added up all the money that the applicants were asking for and all they want is 1.2 million. Seriously. I don't know what they are thinking asking for such huge loan amounts. They are obviously not just for the inventory needed to start their business. So how do you tell someone that instead of getting the $12,000 they asked for they are going to get $300. And how do you tell half of your people that they are not going to get a loan? How do you decide which family to 'save' and which will have to wait until the loans are repaid and they can be in the next round. Do you tell the woman who has 12 people living in a 10 x 12 room that she is/or isn't going to get a loan? Or the woman who is feeding her children mud b.c that's all she has?
When we leave our guys are going to call all the applicants to get more information from them. Since Franck was the only one taking applications he wasn't able to get all their information and we really need it in order to make the decisions on who gets a loan. So they will be doing that while we are gone. We have entered all the information into an excel spreadsheet should something happen to the actual papers - we stayed up till 2am doing that and each man will get half of the applicants to follow up with. We are also going to have them go out into the various marketplaces and see how much it will actually cost to start the businesses that the people said they wanted to start. I'm sorry, but selling bananas is not going to cost $2500 dollars. We must be made out of money.
Speaking of which, one more funny story from the bank. We had to answer all kinds of questions and they wanted to know how much money we make. Alisha said zero. Franck stared at her, the bank lady stared at her and Alisha said zero again and held up her hand in a big 0. To which Franck grabs a piece of paper and hands it to her and says, "if you don't want to say just write it down." Man, we had a good laugh about that one that night too. We make 0. 00.
We are excited to say we got permission to put stuff on a LAC container and it will be stored here until we come back and can distribute to the village we went to back in June. We will also put everything for the office that will be Open Hand's in the marketplace on that container as well. Can you see Alisha and I in a UHaul driving down to Florida? Oh man. I can't believe our husbands let us do all this. ha! And another small pleasure - after the first two nights of being so hot in our room we couldn't sleep Sherry said we could have the AC on all night. Now that is a big deal. We are so grateful for that!
And another HUGE accomplishment - when we went to the bank on Tuesday we were told checks take 15 days to arrive which obviously was not going to work for us b.c we are leaving on Saturday and need to pay our guys with advanced post dated checks and low and behold, our anxious pleading and many phone calls caused these awesome bank ladies to get it done. Oh yeah! Who Rocks? Open Hand does that's who!
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