November 3, 2014 - Port Au Prince

We're back in the States now but I wanted to report on our latest water purification system installation effort in Haiti. The installation is at Life is Wealth orphanage run by Pastor Yves in the Carrefour Feuille area of Port Au Prince. The orphanage has about 60 children, mostly girls, but Pastor Yves also has a church and a 600 student school as part of the complex. I tried to blog when we were there, but had the wrong login info for Blogger and got locked out trying to get in. So the blog entries were written in real time, just getting posted on a delayed basis! Here goes . . .

Life is Wealth school

Well, it's been a crazy day with multiple "Welcome to Haiti" moments!

Darenda and Betsy came to Haiti a few days early in order to enjoy some of the finer aspects of Haiti with Crystal Funk who lives here a good part of the year and with whom we’ve worked before. Thursday thru Friday were lovely, but they spent Sunday nursing and cleaning up after Crystal’s sick puppies. One of the pups ended up at the vet where Crystal is paying $100/day for a week or so for parvovirus treatment - which the pup may or may not recover from.

The guys, Steve, Alan and Karl, were to come in to PAP Sunday about 2:30 pm. For reasons too complicated to explain, I was on different flights arriving at 1 pm. The plan was for me to wait for the guys in the baggage claim area. So 2:30 came and no guys showed up. 3:00 came and still no guys. 3:30 the same. There was no flight info in the baggage claim area so I had no idea what had happened to them. I had cellular on my phone turned off to avoid big out-of-country charges so I couldn’t get email. Finally I texted Crystal (thank goodness texts worked!) and she immediately called me to tell me the guys flight out of Pittsburgh was cancelled so they were flying to Miami and spending the night there at the airline’s expense. They wouldn’t be coming in until Monday morning. So I left baggage claim and immediately met up with the Haitians who had been waiting patiently in the parking lot to drive me to where we’re staying. The sent someone in to look for me, but somehow I managed to escape notice at at a time when I was trying to look as obvious as possible! Welcome to Hait!

This morning Crystal and Redgie were to pick us up and take us to Life is Wealth Orphanage. First they had a flat tire. Then they got caught up in Port Au Prince gridlock traffic. While we were waiting for them, we figured out that our Haitian driver and coordinator, Ancy, had all the suitcases in the KIA including the one with the education materials that we had to have for teaching and he was on the way to the airport to pick the guys up. We were supposed to start teaching at Life is Wealth at 9 am and the guys flight wasn't even arriving until then! So when we did get to the orphanage, we wouldn't have any of our teaching materials! Welcome to Haiti!

Crystal and Darenda

We got to the orphanage and Darenda sat with the water board to sign the covenant that states our responsibilities as the initiating partner and the Haitian operating partners.

Water Board discussing the covenant

 Then we and our students waited patiently for the guys to arrive so we could get started. They finally got to the orphanage about 11 am along with our education materials (thank goodness!) and we plunged right in (just 2 hours late) - as did the guys. At that point, the training was going ok, but we kept getting reports that the guys couldn't find things they needed for the installation. Welcome to Haiti! The one I specifically heard about was the flow meter. Valdes suggested they could build the system without and he could come back later and put one in. Apparently they found all other missing items. Karl said he and Valdes (Haitian colleague) had the solar part almost done by the end of the day. Our guys are FAST!

View of water building

Teaching went well. We had a class of 7 adults from 11 am to 1 pm. Then 4 of them (including Pastor Yves, head and director of the church, school and orphanage) came back at 2 pm along with about 15 of the older girls, Crystal’s leadership group. So in the afternoon we repeated the morning's lesson for the girls with the Haitians teaching most of the activities. We were really pleased with what a great job they did with the teaching. The girls were pretty shy at first, but they relaxed as we got into it.

Life is Wealth kids

It rained hard last night and we just had another thunderstorm this evening but it sounds like it's stopped raining now. Good for cooling things off for the evening. Time to go up to the 3rd floor terrace with the rest of the group for a Prestige!

Jumping rope