Personal Narrative: A Day At Haiti

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Haiti
There were three weeks left until Christmas, I was fourteen at the time and trying to get my Christmas list made with as many items as I could think of. Between me and my friends, it was a contest to see who could get the most presents. Once I was sure that my list would win, I took it to the kitchen and hung it on the refrigerator to make sure my parents saw it. Once my parents read my list, they decided to call a family meeting about Christmas this year. When we all gathered in the living room, my dad began by saying “boys I’m happy to announce that we will be doing Christmas differently this year.” When he said those words I immediately knew I was not going to be happy. He continued by saying “instead of getting gifts this year, we …show more content…

They reassured me and my family that we would be okay and asked once again if everyone still wanted to go. Everyone said yes, so we headed for the plane to go to Port Au Prince, Haiti. When we arrived we instantly knew we were a long way from home. The airport was a dirty, rundown building with no air conditioning and half of the lights in the building were not working. There were no restaurants or stores, it was a night and day difference from the Atlanta airport. The security consisted of dogs sniffing your bags, unlike Atlanta’s airport where our bags were checked using high tech scanning equipment. When we got our bags off of a barely moving conveyer belt, we were immediately greeted by Haitian men who wanted to carry our bags for money. This made me realize how lucky I was to have air conditioning, security and all the other luxuries I was so used to seeing. Even though before the trip, we were warned people would be constantly asking you for food and money, I was overwhelmed with sympathy for these people. These men were only trying to make money so they could eat, our translators told us the average pay for a day’s work in Haiti was $1.00. With our luggage in toe we headed for a bus that would take us on a two hour drive to La Gonave Haiti to meet

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