Day at the beach

Betty wasn't too sure about my hat...

Finally, a breadfruit!  I have wanted to see one for a long time (ever since reading "The Coral Island" by R.M. Ballantyne, in fact.

Breadfruit tree.

On New Year's Day, we went to the beach.  It was fun!  I took care of Betty for most of the time we were there.  Mr. Schmidt took Jason and Maurice in the water a little bit.  Jason loved it, but Maurice just tolerated it.  Jason though had a rather bothersome activity the whole time (and I mean the whole time) we were there.  To use Mr. Schmidt's words  "Jason has a one track mind, and right now that track is on rocks in the mouth!"  In other words, Jason, who can use his feet with almost the same facility as his hands, kept picking up rocks with them, and attempting to stick them in his mouth!  Little rascal.  He was hard to do anything with because he was so focused on getting rocks.  And since almost the whole beach was made up of them, there were plenty to pick up. 
     Betty had a blast too.  JoHannah took her out in water that was about four feet deep, and floated her around a little there.  The child floats like a cork, so all that one has to do is keep her head out of the water, and she just floats right on top.  I walked around with her a good bit and got some photos.

     At one o'clock, we had lunch at the hotel that owns that stretch of beach.  We had paid to get in, and this covered lunch as well.  It was a buffet, but wasn't really well filled.  What was there was really good though.  There were some delicious home-made french fries, canned beets, fried plantain (a cooking banana that tastes sort of like a potato) some type of yummy chicken dish, and last but by no means least, a goat dish with sauce.  My favorite was the meat dishes- I liked them pretty much the same. 

     Mr. Schmidt had stayed down at the beach to watch over the children, and so we served him a plate of food, and when the boys were done they went down to take care of the children, so that he could come up and eat.  When he came, he told us that a bunch of Haitians had gathered to watch him with the children.  Sure enough, when we went down, I discovered that we seemed to be viewed in the light of a traveling circus or something.  No less than twenty people had gathered round to watch the show as these strange Americans (three of whom looked like Haitians) took care of the handicapped children.  The most puzzling thing, was that the three Haitian looking ones only spoke English, while the two older white ones spoke Creole.  This was very odd.  And besides, no one that they knew of took care of children like this.  There was no way that they were going to miss this, so the upshot was that we were stared at the rest of the time we were down by the beach. 

     We went up to the pool that belonged to the hotel after about half an hour of steady staring by the people, and I took some photos of a breadfruit tree.  This tree is really neat, and I'd read about it before, but never seen one.  There were also a bunch of coconut palms all over the place.

     That beach was beautiful!  Hopefully we can go there again sometime soon.