It is amazing how time is passing by since I started this new job in Port-au-Prince. Meetings after meetings, reports after reports, the day is just flying. Working 7 days a week, makes me loose the sense of time; is it Friday, Monday or even Wednesday...a single day off per week would at least break this hypnotic routine. On March 19th it will be 7 months already since we arrived in Haiti, just incredible.
Anyway, I like what I'm doing and I believe that is the most important.
But I have a certain work ethic and it is not always easy to have expectations on the way the work should be done, especially here; Haitian people, like many other people who live on an sunny island don't have the same approach on a workload. There is in the air, in their attitude a kind of "nonchalance" on which stress slips on. Whatever is not achieved today will be done (maybe) tomorrow. But for us, programmed the way we are to deliver on time, it is frustrating to have to wait on something that could be done in hours instead of days or sometimes even weeks. On the other hand, when I think about it, I think we should copy them a little. After all, we work so hard to meet the deadlines and then what...other deadlines? We are running all our life after deadlines until we reach retirement but so tired physically and mentally at the end that we barely can enjoy any of it. Definitely something to keep in mind to alleviate the level of stress we are creating ourselves in our daily "developed countries" life.
Since I'm in Port-Au-Prince, I don't have much interaction with the local population but with the recent change of time, we can enjoy an extra hour of sunlight which allows me to get back to running. A 30 minutes run every night allows me to meet people in the neighborhood and salute them in which they usually reply with a huge smile and a waving hand; and to date, not a single incident to report ;-)
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