For the next few weeks, Refractions will be posting stories and pictures from the Journey Haiti team. Here is the rest of Dave's descriptions of days 3-5. For more from Dave, including videos, check out his blog, The Agnostic Pentecostal.

One of the days we walked around the market, which only happens two days a week. Market day is when people from all the surrounding tiny villages pour into Marfranc to buy and sell whatever they may have been able to harvest, kill, or otherwise acquire. When you look around at the mountains and jungle, you would never know there were thousands of people living all over the place, under the canopy of banana and cacao trees and behind veils of sugarcane. But on market day they all come out of hiding, wade across the Grand Anse river (there are no bridges), and buzz around the central village.

The sounds: Machetes hacking through cow legs. A hand plane shaving an ice block, making (literally) shaved ice to douse with black syrup from an old antifreeze jug. Machete blades dragging across hand-turned sharpening stones – one man, squatting on the ground, hand-turns a crank that spins an old motorcycle rim, which turns a leather belt, which turns the grinding wheel for the man standing up, holding the blade to the grinder. People shouting. Vendors announcing their wares. Goats bleating. Pigs grunting. Young men slamming dominoes on a piece of plywood. Plantains sizzling in oil in a cast-iron cauldron over an open fire in the street.

Which brings me to the smells – Cow skin and fat festering in the very hot sun. Food simmering next to it. The fragrance of ripe tropical fruit blends into the air, but the sweetness is tempered with the earthy must of the pigs’ wallow nearby. Around the corner is the smell of fresh tobacco laid out on paper, and an old lady smoking her thick, self-made roll of it. And there’s lots of sweat. And that is the market. After people get what they need, they carry it on their heads or drag it behind them (especially if it’s a live animal), strip down, and wade back across the chest-deep river, back to their homes under the trees.

After spending our days painting walls and painting nails and roaming the market, we hiked back home, through a centuries-old cemetery, through a narrow pass in the jungle foliage, past an old sugar pressing plant, down a hillside path overlooking banana plantations and people singing together while they hand-plow fields. Those were most of our days.

Except the day we went to the beach, which, all I can say here, was by far one of the most beautiful beaches I have ever visited. Absolutely breathtaking, and refreshing after our hard work days. A big, private cove flanked by green-covered limestone cliffs. Crystal clear, aquamarine water. And an old sunken WWI German U-boat laying right in the middle of the cove, hinting at the undercurrent of constant political turmoil in Haiti. We played on its rusted skeleton. And there was a swim-in cave. And powder sands. And I can’t say enough.