Sept, Quatorze, Vingt-et-Un

Today's blog was going to be in a handbook I was planning on working on for anyone who tried to follow and stay in Arcahaie for an extended period of time.  The handbook will include many useful tidbits of information, hopefully.  I'll have names with faces, phone numbers, important locations, etc.  It'll have a recommended packing list.  You can see what I'm getting at.  It'll have all the information that I didn't have before I committed to my 10 week trip.  In fact, most of which I didn't have even after touching down in PAP.  But I digress.

Those of you who know me know that I like to work out.  *Insert LMFAO song quote here*.  It's a stress reliever and provides a sense of accomplishment even while other projects or endeavors seem to be faltering.  I can hardly say that I'm a religious exerciser, but I certainly make an effort to try.  A telling anthropomorphic measure is that I weighed 205 lbs after my final summer pre-Iowa.  I worked out a ton that summer.  Then i hit med school.  I steadily dropped weight and got softer.  It happens.  Kudos to those who were better able to balance life and med school than I, because I struggled.  And sometimes, on some rotations, I continue to struggle to find the energy to do anything but sleep away from the hospital.

So ten weeks in Haiti must be a killer, right?  It gets dark at 6.  There's no Bally Total Fitness.  There would be no car to drive to a gym, even if there were one.  And when you've only got 50 pounds per piece of luggage, dumbbells aren't a high priority.  You tend to focus on things like: clothes, soap, toothpaste, and tons of snacks.  But I fancy myself relatively creative.  My time as a trainer at the very least allowed me to become resourceful and see exercise equipment in everything around.  Thus, I've created the "Haiti Workout".  This won't sculpt the next cast of 300, but I hope it'll keep my muscles awake until I get back to the climate controlled, 1000 sq ft gyms I'm accustomed to...

The pictures that follow, since I don't know how to put captions with them, are just some snaps of the various lifts I've been able to recreate since being here.  If anyone else has some tips, other than running because i hate running, I'd love to hear them.

"Box" Jumps

Dips

 Inverted Row

 Pull ups on the stairwell

 Pull ups on the front gate

 

Push ups with a heckuva view

Stick + 2 Concrete Blocks = Curl Bar

 I've only shed a couple pounds thus far.  It's kinda hard to gain weight since most of the diet is starch, so the goal is to remain weight neutral.  You'd think with all of the fruits and veggies, and the four growing seasons, there would be more options for dining.  But rice is the go-to.  It's funny because all of the bags have the Statue of Liberty plastered all over them.  We've created a system where they basically have to sell their healthy fruits to us while we sell them plain rice in return.  They get malnourished and suffer from food insecurity - see my post entitled abdominal pain -  so our Wal-Marts can have fully stocked fruit aisles.  Pretty messed up.