It rained on her bed.

The director of the hospital Cardinal Leger in Leogane  ( which was the epicenter of the 2010 earthquake) called Relief Team One to see if we could repair her roof. The rainy season has started and every night it rains in her bed!  This is in the new building that was constructed to get her staff and herself out of the tents where they have been living since January last year! 
A team of seven of our best students went down and in three days they reconstructed the whole roof structure over the little chapel and the sisters’ bedrooms.  No funding comes for staff housing; foundations are much more interested in financing schools or hospitals. Yet, without staff, there is no functioning hospital….so the logic escapes me…

Any way my room was in the condemned former hospital. I was given a key to lock myself in, and when the rat decided not to enter the front door ahead of me, I was very pleased.  I have never spent the night in a deserted condemned greatly destroyed hospital before;  a  little gecko joined me in the bathroom where a thoughtful person had filled a 5 gallon bucket for my shower.  Ceilings are broken, partly fallen, equipment and supplies are still there, but everything is covered with dust and abandoned… the operating room is spooky  with only a little bit of equipment yet, some supplies still there , seemingly ready but covered with gravel and dust…everything sealed at a moment in time and deserted… creates a strange feeling.. really eerie !

The good news is that under Ray’s creative energy and guidance, the men and he were able to make a brand new roof. They all slept in the same tents the nuns have recently abandoned and had a taste for what their accommodations have been like. Mosquitoes galore, even after the UN ( gun at the ready, not sure why?) came to spray the grounds…

Where do I come in? Well I speak English and French and therefore am the link between builder and hospital staff…kind of fun!

What a class!

Half the class stayed after the hour was done to practice the problem given to them.  Their determination is palpable. They are working on assessing the material needed to build a frame structure in Haiti: something all of them can relate to, a dream that might become their reality:  they can envision building their own house! Jackson, the tailor, rebuilt the house that he lives in with his wife and young baby last spring after the earthquake destroyed it, using the skills that he learned from the program.

 This is the 7 am English for Construction class that runs five days a week every week for 6 weeks and is part of the program to teach construction techniques and construction management with hands on practice in the field.  At the end of this course they get a certificate attesting their competency in the classroom and in the field.  This is drawing a lot of students: 48 attend the class. This comprehensive concept of construction technology is introduced by Ray, the Director/Founder of Relief Team One who is a US General Contractor with a long experience in carpentry and masonry work. This course is his brainchild: class work, with top students helping weaker ones, Haitians helping Haitians. Field work takes place at the new orphanage site, under his watchful eye enforcing a tempo and a quality of work (with anti-seismic and anti-hurricane international standards) that Haitians haven’t encountered before.   In class the concepts are reinforced in English, French and Creole by Ray, Big and Bellegarde( 2 men being trained to be leaders) and I.   I enjoy adapting my experience in the classroom to this local reality: it is super fun to teach a practical application. 

26 men are currently employed by Relief Team One on the site of the orphanage complex we are building.  Ray gives out crisp orders, paces from one group to the other, directing the men to maximize their output.  He speaks no creole and ten words of French: but all listen and all hear his directives.  He has me call the owner who calls the suppliers who deliver the material and all the pieces of the puzzle of the construction come together. No heavy equipment to ease the work.  Men work in small teams on various aspects of a structure, holes and trenches are dug with pick and shovels, and cement is mixed with shovels, and it works!  Progress is evident and at every visit I get to see it.

Those men work harder than I have ever seen anyone work before: the fact that an unpaid foreign volunteer (Ray) with strong leadership skills, expertise and vision, is the drive for providing housing to their fellow countrymen who are orphans AND training and jobs for them is a HUGE motivator.  Most of them don’t have a background in construction; they are tailors, students, managers, musicians, mechanics…. But they come every morning and then work all day under the scorching Haitian sun.

Sweet Mickey is New President in Haiti.

The singer Michel Martelly won by a large margin. He has the support of the young and the poor. He wants to unite Haitians to work for Haiti.  His opponent Mme Manigat, stated tonight on TV that the elections had been rigged…. Everything is calm ( very few gun shots were heard on the night after the elections) and the results have been well received…what is she trying to do?  She has the support of the intellectual class and of former president Aristide who has a big following. Is there going to be another page to the election story?  We are all hoping for peace so that the country can continue rebuilding itself.

Speaking of construction:  work at the new orphanage site is progressing.  20 workers are busy lining the septic tank, digging the foundation for the bathroom. It is a lot of fun and very impressive  to see all these men working hard in the brutal sun and making visible changes.  The plumber came and we went over the bathroom plans… it is going to look like a cross between a convent bathroom and the bathroom of  College Brébeuf in Montreal where we take our students every fall!  J

AND,   11 chicks were born ( 2 have already died) and are busy following their Mom /hen as she shows them how to scratch the dirt and fallen bananas trees leaves to find little bugs… Great fun to watch!

By the way , bananas right off the tree taste totally different than Giant Dole bananas: it's like another fruit!

Random tidbits

6 young men (18 to 32 years old students in the English /construction class) dug a 12x 12 pit for the septic tank for the future orphanage , 7 am to 4 pm, with pick and shovel hauling dirt and rocks out in 5 gallon buckets, one at a time all day for a week under the 90 F blasting sun!  Anyone want to try? They are covered with dust but work with heart because they are grateful for the $ 10 /day pay check and the lunch. ( we are trying to give them something to pay for the tap-tap rides to the job $ 1.75 /day)

We are looking into two water purification systems: one bio-sand, the other solar powered.  Interesting stuff!

One of the dogs ate the rooster!!! The chicken is traumatized, no more eggs!  J  Now the dog is gone!!  Choices are made:  dogs are not food.  Everyone sleeps better:  the dog used to bark half the night and the rooster would start to crow at 2 am!

Yesterday lunch was “ragout” !! I had wondered what the goat head,  fore legs, and tail that were soaking in the kitchen sink were going to be used for… now I know!

Enjoy your peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches J

Election day in Haiti

Yesterday was the second round of the elections. Martelly vs Manigat. Most people voted for Martelly according to my students. Port au Prince was like a ghost town. Everyone expected trouble; there had been no sales of alcohol, gasoline , motorbikes and trucks were banned from driving, bars and dancing have also been closed for the past two days.  Extra police force ( 20 000 men) so the process was calm.
We are now anxiously for the official results. Aristide is back and he supports Manigat.....

Teaching in PaP

I have to kick students out of class…..not because they are disruptive or disrespectful but because too many of them show up!  The young men and women are so eager to learn English they try to sneak in class and crowd me after class to ask for more.  Their interest is touching, all levels are in one class and somehow it works, the more advanced students helping the weaker ones, involvement is general.  No electricity means no technology, the books I brought are inadequate so I make up my own texts and they really like the personalization and pertinence to their lives. There is a lot of laughter and I leave the class charged.

My other delight is my afternoon group of young women novices who take advanced French with me. Today we worked on a book in French for children entitled:  “ Small  hurts, big disasters” , it deals with issues children have with the psychological trauma incurred after natural disasters.  Only one of the novices was raised by her own parents, the others were all placed in other families, sometimes a relative sometimes not.  It seems everyone has a story to share of a lost one.  We talked about how one could help a child deal with those issues. It strikes me that adults can be helped in very much the same way. Finding the strength inside, how what they have already done to get to this point is because of that inner strength.

8 eggs

How can it be so much fun to go check every morning if the hen has laid another egg?  Well it is.  8 now! I GET A HUGE KICK OUT OF IT!  It made me wonder why, and why I am so happy the skinny cat had three kittens two nights ago and why I enjoy hanging my laundry in the sun to dry (it takes about 1 hour in this heat and sun). Then there are the mango trees, papaya, banana and my favorite a goyave tree. I go watch all these fruits grow and ripen each day during my walk around and around the yard within the confine and safety of the convent walls.  It dawned on me that they and the eggs symbolize life and renewal and that in the face of the abysmal misery , and filth they are symbols of hope J

My eager students were back this am, a little early for their 7 am class, again they had to be stopped after one hour ,then asked if any of them wanted to work in small groups, they stayed another hour gathered in a shack, (our classroom was no longer available) AND they WORKED: reviewing what we had done, some explaining to others, practicing and coming to ask questions!  It was so much fun. THEY ASKED TO HAVE A GRAMMAR CLASS ON SUNDAY  !!!!!!!!!!