It’s been busy at the Guest House.  I have been enjoying the repeat groups we currently have staying at the house.  It’s a chance to get to know them on a deeper level.

We had a mess of car things happen this past week.  I was going to write about it but then noticed that Nick already had a great summary:

Filling stations in Port-au Prince have been out of gasoline for five days. That’s 3 million people with no gasoline.

They say the reason is because an oil tanker from Venezuela is two weeks late. Probably Venezuela forgot to send out the boats after Hugo Chavez died.

The prediction is we’ll have more by Sunday. [FYI – We have gasoline again!]

In the meantime, traffic is thinning out on the roads. Diesel is still available, so most vehicles out running now are diesel.

Our cars were out by like Wednesday. For some reason we always run them on quarter tank anyways so it didn’t take long. So much for preparedness. Except then, in a back corner somewhere, a few extra gallons were found yesterday, so we dumped them in our Montero. Now we’re back in business!

Except today Ryan and I got stuck at the hardware store because the Montero wouldn’t start. The starter is bad. We just took the starter out last week and brought it to a starter repairman. He repaired it, but now it’s broke again. I’m not thinking he did a very good job.

John and Pierre came and towed us home. That was exciting, getting towed halfway across Port-au Prince. I was driving the Montero getting towed (with no power steering or power brakes) and Pierre (red hat and shirt below) drove the pickup truck pulling us. Sometimes Pierre drove faster than comfortable, all while dodging traffic and potholes. At one point he drove off the road to avoid some obstacle… without slowing down!

Ryan was with me and couldn’t watch. He kept trying to occupy himself looking down on his phone. He did take the following pictures though:

Of course during all of this car excitement, we had been having issues with the water at the guest house.  The pressure tank went bad.  For a while, we attempted to use the broken tank but it just kept getting worse.  Eventually, we purchased a new tank for the Guest House.  Below you can see our detailed diagram of the new tank 😉  Also, we couldn’t empty the old one through the valve, so ended up drilling some holes in it – looks kind of funny.

Of course, the normal side-projects of installing fans!  Fans must be one of the biggest marked up items in Haiti.  These guys are $120/piece.  I suppose they can get away with it.