A glimpse into Haiti - Part 3

It's morning and I have discovered there are banana palms in the eating area! Love it!

We all slept well, but our mattresses were so thin, I took another one to pad it. Actually, I moved two thin mattresses to my bunk, and then slipped the pillow under the hip part to cushion me even further. Jackie and Sharon called me a princess and I said I would put a pea under my mattress. Tessa had not heard that story. We were cool last night because the air-conditioning. After breakfast we walked down to the job site. 

The area looks very similar to Cochabamba, but much more rubble and dust. It took us about 30 min. to reach a man's hut that was beside the small garden of Swiss chard, okra, corn, melons, and other vegetables. The man's home was tarpaulins and woven leaves under tin roof. 

He had a few chickens in the pen, plus a few chicks loose and a rooster whose leg was tied to a small rope. Immediately we began to break up a square of about 12 X 12 with pickaxes and created a trench around the outside. 

Like in Bolivia, cement and small stones were poured into the trench. I marveled at how well our two groups worked together, especially with the bucket brigade moving small boulders. Cliff Temple's minister of missions, Wes, is a natural leader.

As we were digging out the center area, we unearthed two small tarantulas. I even touched one. With gloves on, of course. But even  a fear of  spiders won't stop me from the desire to build a home. I'm so proud of the way we're working.

We mixed cement and stuffed small rocks and such into our footings. Naturally, the locals were curious and stopped and watched us, with various children slipping into the area. 

One cute little boy with just a shirt on, (and nothing else!) stuck around. His red shirt was ripped and had been resewn. He kept grabbing things, especially Tessa's earrings and her dreadlocks. When we had nearly completed the footings, we left for home for lunch, walking back a different route. Surprisingly, the weather is cooler than I expected and cloudy this morning, but after lunch it really got hot.

Lunch was chicken, rice and beans and vegetables. I've discovered that Tessa is a vegetarian, but we had brought flatbread and peanut butter, and we found some jam and washed it all down with Coke or 7-Up.

After lunch, it was naptime, but before that, we gave away T-shirts with our group logo to the compound staff and sewing kits to the ladies in the kitchen. The man who runs the compound, Jean-Faucher, took the little girl dresses that some of the ladies of the church made, and brought in to our dormitory about half a dozen little girls. So we got to present them to them. And of course pictures were taken.

We walked back to our worksite past some vendors, and I asked Junior, a young man who was in charge of us, to ask how much a dress I saw cost.

We finished the footings early. On the way back, Junior asked the store lady how much the dress cost . She said $20 US. I said no, but Junior said bartering wasn't appropriate. She lowered the price to $15 US and since Rhonda had a 20 US dollar bill, I borrowed it and she got some Haitian gourdes back. The dress was a pretty blue-and-white one with smocking at the top. 

We walked down to the river where the town was installing a mesh embankment. 

We got back to the compound, I took a shower and wash my socks as they were filthy. The other group invited us to the rooftop for devotional, and we have agreed to do two of the nights. Wes says he's interested to learn 'Canadian doctrine'.

We have a mango tree here in the compound and Allan says he'll get some to eat. Our supper was a macaroni casserole with big glasses of water. Which was good thing, since the food is very spicy. We ate crackers and flatbread. After we went upstairs onto the rooftop for a nice devotional. 

When that was done, we all went around the corner to a smoothie shop, where the lady takes evaporated milk, fruit, sugar, and ice and blends it altogether. However, she only has three flavors, papaya, potato and breadfruit. Yes, you read right, a potato smoothie. Tessa had that one. They were all rich and sweet. We had a good long day, a productive one, and I'm bushed and off to bed.

Haiti - glimpse into the real country - Part 2

Today is day one. Tonight we'll be in Grand Goave in Haiti, ready to build a rubble home for an earthquake-displaced family.

Image from news.bbc.co.uk

 

Me, (Barbara), with my husband, Allan, with Bob, Joan, Rhonda, Tessa, Jackie and Sharon are in-flight. We managed to clear customs, although I wonder what they thought of us traveling with steel pipe, saw blades, screws and other building tools. I've discovered that Miami airport is a gazillion miles long. And naturally, our flight landed at one end and we had to journey to the other end. We took a Skytrain to reach our gate, only to backtrack looking for a restaurant. But TGIFriday's was worth the trek.

The Port-au-Prince airport is a non-delightful version of some 1970s airport in the middle of someplace hot and dusty. And every single person on the flight tried to squeeze out the single door, all at the same time. Beyond were vendors, drivers, families and friends all pressing in on us. We are going to be working with Conscience International, and had been told our trip to Grand Goave will be in the back of a pickup truck. 

But fortunately, a bus, not unlike our old church bus (which we retired due to its poor condition), awaited us. Unfortunately, the bus smelled like burning brake pads. Or a burning transmission. I'm not sure. Thankfully, the driver kept a gallon of water on hand to pour on the brakes should they heat up.

We've met the other group with whom we will be working this week. Seven men, one woman, all from Cliff Temple Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas. 

Two of the men had been on this type of mission trip to Haiti before and marveled at the improvement they saw in Port-au-Prince, while I was struck by the level of despair. There were still small cities of tents, uninhabitable buildings, piles of rubble, and so many cars and people. It reminded me of Bolivia, but without the stop signs and traffic lights. Traffic pressed all around us, especially the small pickups with tin walls and roofs colorfully painted, called Tap-taps, because you tap on the roofs when you want the driver to stop. They were brilliantly painted, often with religious symbols and icons. Jackie later noted that these icons seem to be more as talismans than any religious fervor.

It was a long, bumpy ride and the bus filled with dust and the smell of burning brakes. Some of the other team put on dust masks. I'd forgotten how quickly it gets dark in countries close to the equator. We finally arrived, but it was too dark to see much. Our compound seems to be a mishmash of buildings covered areas and tropical trees. The ladies were shown to the house at the front of the property whose main room was turned into a dormitory.

The doors are intricately carved and there are two bathrooms.

We were warned that there was no hot water and only cold showers, but I've discovered that the word cold is relative. In Canada our cold water comes from the ground and at this time of year, it hovers just above freezing. There, the water is stored in a cistern on the roof and exposed to the sun all day, and is more lukewarm than cold.

We were given a meal of rice, spicy brown sauce with veggies, and another sauce made from beans, and small grilled drumsticks. Each of us were given a large glass bottle of Coke, though there were few 7-Up mixed in. 

We had a quick orientation by a tall Haitian named Alex, who claims he loves to laugh. We put our passports and money in the safe and Tessa and I sent quick e-mails, me to my daughter and Tessa to her mother, saying we arrived safely. Just as we hit 'send', the circuit breaker clicked off, and we had to navigate from the office in the dark, through a forest of trees and picnic tables, one filled with people from Cliff Temple who had brought iPads and iPhones and were checking in with their loved ones through the now-unavailable wi-fi. I now have several bruises from hitting the picnic table.

The streets are filled with potholes and rocks and they're incredibly dusty. Many people still live in tin shacks or anything that can provide cover. 

 

We'd crossed over a river on our way here, and it was filled with garbage and various livestock that foraged there. When the rains come later this year this junk will be washed out to sea. 

We are all exhausted, so several of us are already in bed. Such is day one. Tomorrow starts with breakfast at 630 and work at eight.

Haiti - glimpse into the real country - Part 1

This coming Monday, I will be blogging daily about my trip to Haiti. I want you all to tune in and read each daily entry. It's fascinating and since we lived like Haitians for a week, it's a wonderful chance to glimpse into the lives of the western world's most desperate poor. 

So, mark you calendars and come back Monday!

Early in 2012, those of us from our church interested in taking a mission trip decided that we would go to the island nation of Haiti to build rubble homes. This past week, it finally happened. We were in Haiti. Over the next week, you can read the events of what happened to us transcribed from my journal.

To bring you up to speed, I'd like to tell you a little bit about rubble homes. In Haiti, when they make cement blocks, they don't always use the correct ratio of sand, water and cement. I don't know the exact ratio to make a decent cinder block here in Canada, but I can tell you that they probably use twice as much sand in the mix in Haiti. As a result, a cinder block may look marvelous, will literally crumble if squeezed by your hand. Since the majority of the homes in Haiti were made from cinder blocks with cement ceilings, and corners of cement and re-bar, (and often another storey was built exactly the same way on top,) these homes would never stand up to an earthquake.

When the earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, the majority of these homes crumbled like sand castles being hit by a wave at the beach. And rubble lay all about. A university in the United States devised a system of building a home that though it is not earthquake-proof, is much more durable and will allow its occupants to escape relatively unhurt. After the system was tested, they began to build these single-room rubble homes in an earthquake stricken Haiti. 

A wire mesh cage, the size of the thick wall, with re-bar running from bottom to top, is set on footings, filled with rubble, which is simply the broken cinder blocks from the previous earthquake. The insides and outsides of the wall are cemented to a smooth stucco finish. An A-frame, and corrugated steel roof are added, extended at one end to create a simple porch. Two doors and windows made of specially designed diamond-holed cinder blocks, are built in to finish the home off.

So, our team traveled to Haiti to meet up with another team from the United States to hopefully build our own rubble home. For the next eight days, I will journal about our trip. For that time, we lived like Haitians in the town of Grand Goave. We weren't the first group of people to build rubble homes, and we won't be the last. But follow us along as we learn how to serve, how to work together with strangers and true humility.

Promote Winter Out!

Okay, when the military wants to get rid of someone, they often promote them and post them far away. So that's what I'm doing here. I'm going to promote winter off the calendar! (in a very unique way!)

Hard Target

See this book? It's part of my evil scheme to rid this hemisphere of winter. Because this book is set where winter is warm and palms trees rule!

Let's get rid of winter

Soooo, Hard Target has been reduced to just $1.99 for a couple of weeks. It's a kind of 'Let's hurry spring along' promotion. 

Because, frankly, I'm getting sick of winter. Let's promote it and post it far away!!