Surprise Gift

Tomorrow is Haitian agriculture day.  I have been put in charge of organizing tree planting for our students.  Throughout the week, I have been teaming up with our friend, Vanel to prepare for the special day at school.  We made several trips to the countryside to buy small trees and fertilizer.  We borrowed the truck to go get "sweet dirt" to add to our garden (since the ground in Jubilee is full of salt).  The final thing that I needed to do before tomorrow was to get manure.

JB suggested that I ask the students to go find "kaka bef" (manure) and bring it to school with them.  Oddly enough, my students were very excited about this task.  As an extra incentive to make sure we would have enough manure, we told the kids that if they brought it with them tomorrow, we would give them each 10 goud as a prize for helping.  At the end of the day, they ran off happily, plastic bags in hand, in search of cow poop.

Later that afternoon, we were having an after school program.  I was busy in one of the classrooms, but my kids ran up to Lala, our director.  They were very excited and proudly handed her their very full plastic bags and exclaimed, "We got this for you!!"  Unknowingly, she opened up the bags only to find them filled with cow poo.  Needless to say, she was VERY confused.

We had a great laugh about it when she came up to me with a priceless expression on her face asking, "Why is your class bringing me bags of cow poop?!?!"