Timkatek

Today, our visit to the Timkatek school(s) for street children broke up the landscape of stunning and frustrating poverty which we've seen and discussed in PAP. We toured the original school first, where boys considered most vulnerable progress from grades 1-4 and given free meals, uniforms, classes, and spots in the dormitory. Once they graduate from there, they can learn plumbing, masonry, agronomy, or other trades to enable them to support themselves at Timkatek 3 professional school for boys. They can also choose to work instead of taking classes and continue to live in a part of the girls' school- as long as they're in by 6 pm.

This is where our tour moves next, giggling filling the air as we enter the . Rachel, the school director, leads us through full classrooms of uniformed young girls in the same first to fourth grade classrooms as their male counterparts. A posted class schedule includes communication, drawing, and "savoir vivre." Upstairs, girls who have graduated into the professional school learn sewing. The cooking classroom has several stoves and girls of 18-20 take notes on recipes. Everyone is friendly and the girls exude happiness - to see the director of the school, to see us, to sing a welcome song for us. To me, these factors speak of the real hope in their lives. We learned that one of our cooks at MCC was a graduate of this school. The girls who learn to sew sell their products on the street. On the highest level a roof has been recently constructed

I would say Port-au-Prince is a nice city for me, if we did not have the chance to have a city tour this morning; now, thanks to the city tour, I have to say, the personal feelings the city gives me make me feel connected. The city tour reminded me of a Chinese city, Qingdao. The houses we stopped by in Port-au-Prince were built by French colonizers hundreds of years ago, and they function as the visiting sites in the city now; there are some good spots for sightseeing in Qingdao which attract the majority tourists in Qingdao, a Chinese city famous for its tourism, were built by German invaders around the year of 1900. It is ironic if you think about that the main sites in the city do not belong to the city itself. In the same way, some artifacts which used to be possessed by China were plundered by those foreign invaders and are currently on display in foreign museums - as some of their top objects in their archives.