Vegetable garden started!

What a sight!  All these children working together to create a beautiful vegetable garden.  About 30 children from the Foyer Notre Dame de Lourdes under the guidance of two agents from Hunger Relief International planted rows of cabbages, beans, beets, mustard, spinach and gombo on the site of the Village under construction.  What was just talk a little while ago is becoming reality.  Maud Laurent facilitated the project:  the young under her care are learning to grow  what will provide them with food later this year. 

Spring break volunteering in Haiti

What a great group of students and workers Gannon University blessed us with during their Spring break!  Thanks to International Samaritan, and Andrew,  seven students,  their  campus Director for Social Justice, Arlene M. and the President of Gannon University Dr. K. Taylor did an amazing amount of work. Keeping up with the Haitian crew in the heat, they painted the long professional building, the bathroom block and  reinforced the concrete roof in the back of the main building. Great job!  

Ray and the crew were also able to hook up the water cistern to the plumbing so that we now have showers ! A big treat .    

Special thanks also for the efforts to fundraise and bring medical supplies, four sewing machines and four computers for the mini-lab at the Foyer.  You are a wonderful group of caring individuals and Relief Team One warmly thanks you for your support of our project.  The children are one step closer to living in a better environment thanks to your help. 

Pastry & Laptops + finished roof.

How great to witness the success of the children of the Foyer NDL selling all their cookies !  Thanks to Michelle’s teaching and providing the set up and follow up by Amy, Vic and Odile and most specially France, the coop of the Patisserie NDL: une cooperative des Jeunes du Foyer Notre Dame de Lourdes is in existence! What was just a dream when Michelle and I talked about it in August has become a reality. GREAT JOB Michelle, the thoughts, organization, success at fundraising, and your passing on your skills are paying off. RT1 is very very proud of your accomplishment and thanks you for trusting us to facilitate your involvement.

Michelle teaching cake decoratingE

Elphania, Mirlaine and Rosena practice

Mano learns how to make frosting

Rosena and Dieudonne practice

Et voila!

First sale: sold out in 10 minutes

Equally exciting was to see all the children mesmerized by the computer screens of the three laptops and printer given by Louise F., John H., Jason M and David O. of Loyola University Maryland. A big thank you to the IT team and to David O, RT1 wants to express heartfelt gratitude for the generous spirit, effort to put all the equipment together, bringing it down and setting up what is now a functioning micro-lab at the Foyer NDL. Congratulations.  David became a favorite of the boys, also for his domino playing skills J

Learning how to type

David teaching basics

Practicing on new laptops

Another accomplishment of the past two weeks is the tin roof over the multipurpose room in the main building and the plumbing progress at the construction site. The young men who started learning construction less than a year ago show how much they know!

Jean-Baptiste and Fenel installing roof over multipurpose room

The roof is done, tin in the front and cement in the back over bakery, kitchen and laundry room. Now we need  doors and windows!!!

And then there are the 5 new “cabris” at the convent of the Sister in Tabarre. Their farm is prospering and the guest house sees a lot of visitors.

“Free the slaves” contribution of craft items are on their way to Jérémie. The children of the Centre Saint Jean Bosco ( that is getting an addition to accommodate the craft center) will discover their new tools when they come back from vacation this week.

To all those who have contributed to this continuing venture, many many thanks.

It is heartwarming and wonderful to witness all these steps towards positive change. 

Two micro-enterprises for the future.

Blog Dec. 27, 2011

Two micro-enterprises for the future.

We are very excited to welcome on our team three dynamic volunteers who will further Relief Team One’s mission in Haiti of Education for Employment to foster durable Empowerment towards positive change.

Michelle from Pennsylvania is a professional pastry chef who works at Talkeetna Lodge in Alaska during the summer.

Michelle has volunteered to come set up and teach cake making and decorating to 6 of the young adults currently living at the orphanage.  She will develop with them pastries that use ingredients found locally and that appeal to the local market. They will have an inexpensive line of daily offerings and more exclusive cake offerings for special occasions. She has been very busy selling her own confections to raise money for this venture.

Amy is  a professional cook and entrepreneur who will assist the current staff with cooking for the volunteers coming for the first two weeks of January but will also train a young man or woman to be the pastry business manager and help develop a marketing strategy.

In addition, we are delighted to have on board, David, IT expert from Loyola University Maryland who will set up a micro-lab (with lap-tops donated by the university) and will teach our crew and some of the older youngsters’ computer skills at various levels. He will also help the local marketing expert hired by RT1 to develop promotional material for the pastry shop.  This micro-lab will be used as a source of revenue for the orphanage as it provides document making and printing for the neighborhood.

These infrastructures for those two co-ops with adult mentorship will not only develop badly needed regular resources for the Foyer but also teach a trade and therefore give a future to some of the orphans.

The ridge beam is up!

The ridge beam is up on the main building and the men hang around at the end of this long day of work and look up.  They are reluctant to leave, they high five and hug each other; their excitement is palpable says Ray. This is an accomplishment for this crew still learning construction skills. Seeing what they can do, what they have learned and the concrete evidence of their efforts is a high point. They are proud and rightly so. It is a victory against the odds, against the elements, against all the challenges that have led them to work on the construction of the Village Notre Dame de Lourdes. It is a symbol of their power to change things for themselves and for their country.  A seemingly fairly minor undertaking for a western crew becomes a symbol of hope in Haiti.

We finally have drinking water on the site!



YES!  That water will be clear and pure!





Carrie Emard, Maud Laurent, Stephanie Peterson

 En Francais: la liste des microbes elimines!




A big THANK YOU to Carrie Emard and Stephanie Peterson of the Foundation “For One Another” who brought to us a central water purification system and contributed a water cistern. They also distributed water filters to our crew and taught us how to train people in using the system properly. Their support and contribution means that there is now drinking water on the site of the construction of the Village and that more than 35 families can purify their own water!  What a great gift!

The children of the “Foyer Notre Dame de Lourdes”

I am back in the US but their faces and stories haunt me.

Is Emma going to stop crying her heart out, the way she does now because she is not getting the attention she craves? Will Strung ever get filled up: when a child is abandoned by his mother on a trash heap and no one comes for him for two days, does he ever get over it? Will Joseph and his earnest seeking face find the godmother for his communion that would make him feel he is special to someone? And Stevenson: what are the chances he will get the operation to stop his incontinence? At 21 it must be excruciatingly difficult to accept to wear a diaper and it is so unfair what the earthquake did to him: crushed his lower body so he can’t walk anymore and killed his parents.

These are only a few of the stories of the children of the Foyer, Emma was born in the street from a teenage mother who ran away from her life of enslavement and prefers to be free and live of expedients on the streets of Port au Prince.  She delivered her baby on the pavement surrounded by other women in her same situation.  A few months later she brought her to Maud and said she never wanted to see her baby again!  Emma is somewhere between 2 and 3 and she has the brightest most cheerful smile, she runs to foreigners and grabs their heart… yet, often, she cries… not just the normal tears when something doesn’t go your way and you are about 2 years old, but deep sobs coming from way deep inside …what is this sorrow about?

Maud has said her house is full, and we are pushing to get the funds and pursue the construction  of the complex ( dorms, kitchen, elementary school and vocational center) but she is scarred: the last time she refused to accept a small baby , the mother of the child put a plastic bag over her baby’s head….so how can she turn down the baby of the 15 year old who approached her recently because she got raped by her own uncle?

Joseph

Strung