Day 7

This morning we woke up at 2 am to rain! We quickly jumped out and covered our tent and our stuff so we wouldn’t get soaked. We contemplated staying awake and packing up since we would be getting up in 3 short hours anyways. We decided against that and went back to sleep for a little while longer. At five we got up and much to our surprise the roosters, cows, dogs, and people of Leogane were already up. When do they sleep!?

By 6am we were out the door and on the way to the bus station. Our driver this morning was insane! He knew we needed to get to the bus station on time and he meant business. I think he used his horn the whole hour and a half we were in the car. He drove on the wrong side of the road, swerving in between cars, etc. We made it safely to the bus station though!

As we got on the bus we all let out a big sigh. We were sitting on a bus heading home and it had air conditioning! This was the first time in a week that I wasn’t sweating.

When we got to the boarder of Haiti and the Dominican, everyone was asked to get off the bus, grab our bags, and go have them checked by boarder control. As we got in line, dreading opening our bags for fear they would never close back and for the fact that our clothes smelled awful, an officer came over to us and waved the three of us, the only white Americans in sight, back onto the bus. We laughed at this but realized they knew we probably wouldn’t find anything in Haiti that we would need to sneak back to the US.

When we finally made it to Santo Domingo our first stop after checking into the hotel was to a pizza place right up the street. It was amazing! After that we headed back to the hotel and had many two more amazing experiences- a warm shower with water pressure that would get rid of the grime of this week and a soft bed with AC blowing over us. I knew I would sleep well…

-Kat