Grosse Roche Beach

Today I finally got to swim at Grosse Roche Beach. This is the beach at the north end of town.  I went with some teachers from the school, actually the third grade staff:  JeanRony and Blemur, two great guys who are also good teachers. I can always count on having a fun class on Wednesdays, when I go into the third grades.  I can tell when kids are thinking, and their kids are.  If you see that more than just a couple of the kids in a class are trying to puzzle out answers, it's always a sign that they have a good teacher.

Grosse Roche is beautiful!  Dinah, who says she is my mother here in Haiti, was worried about me going there, because of the high contamination in the bay.  They understandably do not want me to get sick. I promised her I would not put my head in the water, and wore my glasses and hat to remind myself.  The water in the Caribbean is so warm and so heavy with salt that a person my size floats like a cork.  JeanRony does not swim, unfortunately, so he swam by hugging onto a beach ball. I told him I have an old waterskiing life vest at home I wish I could give him.  I think he could swim around better if he had something like that.  Blemur is a good swimmer and told me about snorkeling at Labadie, where I hope to go after Easter.  He said he saw some nice coral and fish there.

The beach was covered with large round rocks.  Some of them were pebbles, but a lot of them were broken up coral that had washed ashore.  There were pieces of staghorn coral, and we saw a piece of brain coral that actually looked like one of the lobes of a brain.