My Ride on the School Bus to a Most Excellent Dinner

        Today is Saturday and it is Jacob’s birthday. We all sang Happy Birthday over a breakfast of cinnamon rolls. Breakfasts here are quite good. Yesterday we had pancakes and home-made glazed doughnuts, with their holes on the side. They tasted better than Krispy Kremes.  Today is Saturday so the level of activity across Christianville is reduced compared to the rest of the week. But Kirk and Ken did come over to the lab to install the water pump in the table top autoclave. Now Meer can make media again. They also looked into the -80C freezer that has never worked. The freezer drew too much power so Meer basically uses it for storage, room temperature storage. I said this is crazy, isn’t there some way to fix it? So Ken and Kirk took off the access panels, we downloaded the electrical schematics from the internet, and they had at it. They got the compressor going finally (took a few starts since the oil had pooled in the pan because it had not been used in so long). Now the freezer works. We will try letting it run on the generator during those hours of the day when the generator is on. Then turn it off. It should hold temperature as long as we keep the freezer door closed. So 11 hours power on, 13 hours off. Should be OK. We’ll try it and see.

Meer, John and Edsel with our school bus

        Tonight we all piled into the short, yellow Christianville school bus (yes, exactly like the ones back home; it probably came from some town back home) and drove over to the Ocean Grille restaurant for dinner. By all I mean the Christianville family, the permanent/long term residents of Christianville: Marsha and Ken and their son Kirk, Ingram and Dale, Edsel and Jayne, Preacher Raymond, Herold, Solomon (and his wife and kid who are just visiting), Jacob and Amy, John, Peter, Meer, and me.  The Ocean Grille is about a 10 minute drive from Christianville. To say it is a modest eatery would be an understatement. It is a thatched roof suspended on sturdy roped poles inside covering a dining room on a sand floor with wooden slat walls and about 15-20 tables (see photos).

 

The Ocean Grille, Gressier, HAITI 

Jayne,  Raymond, Peter, Herold, Edsel and Dale enter the Ocean Grille

Inside the Ocean Grille

Meer and Edsel

The owner/chef greets us. The folks from Christianville are regular customers. Apparently the restaurant was also very popular among Americans working with non-governmental organizations (NGOs). But business is way down because many of the NGOs have been pulling out or reducing their operations in Haiti.  We order drinks: Coke, Sprite, freshly squeezed passion fruit juice, and my first Prestige (the local beer) of the trip. As night falls, camping lanterns are brought to the table so we can see our meal. We start with a small dish of potato salad followed by bowls of fish soup (a sort of bouillabaisse) as appetizers. Our choices for the main course ran from a seafood platter for two to grilled red snapper to conche. I tasted some delicious grilled lobster (it tasted a little sweeter than the ones I am used to eating back home) and conche. The conche comes right out of the shell and goes on the grille and is great. Tastes a little like calamari. I had the red snapper. Excellent.

My grilled red snapper

I look around the table. The Christianville family comes from all over. Peter is from Kenya. Meer is from Bangladesh, and Solomon is from India. The others are from West Virginia, Kentucky, Michigan, Florida, and Maryland (me). The stories start wrapping around the table and around the world, from tales of life in the coalmines of West Virginia to traveling to the Arctic Circle in Russia to adopt a baby.

Me with Peter and Meer. Three continents, one table

I announce to everyone that I am writing this blog and that I will not mention anyone by name if they prefer. I don’t want to invade anyone’s privacy by writing about them without their permission. Preacher Raymond cries out “It is fine with me because everybody loves Raymond!” I think it’s OK with everyone (the pictures from tonight’s dinner went up on Facebook even before I started writing my blog!). We sing Happy Birthday again and Jacob cuts the cake. A good time was had by all.