Two, Two Days in One (Blog)

Monday had a great start. I had a nice walk around the neighborhood with Ada. Followed by a tour of the new water purification facility at the orphanage. This water purification not only provides clean water for the kids at the orphanage (and us), but they are selling water to the neighborhood as a source of income (including flavored water drinks).

We left of a couple of our group at the orphanage, one to lead some teacher training the other to help with physical therapy, and headed for the Concorde Baptist Church, which also houses a school, where we were going to building an out lying building to house a water purification facility. The church seems to supply the surrounding community with water today and so clean water will help improve the health of community.

We spent the bulk of our day moving cinderblocks, 94lbs bags of concrete, mixing concrete on the ground (which is harder than it sounds) and moving it all again as the day progressed. It was a hot, dirty, and hard working day. But there is something about doing this type of work that is just amazing.

There were some setbacks, such as the Haitian masons forgetting to leave a space for the door and forgetting to remove the several large rocks before laying down the foundation; but it is Haiti and that is simply expected. (By the way, we removed that big rock in the picture after the foundation was poured. It took about 3 or 4 of us, but it was removed.)

In between spurts of manual labor we were able to interact with the kids and even spent some time on the street out in front of the church just talking with people. All the Haitians I have met while walking around have been extremely friendly and most are just looking to say hello or practice their english.

Speaking of english, the last thing we did before leaving for the guest house was to attend about an hour of the "Easy English Club" meeting. This club meets two times a week with each meeting lasting about 3 hours. This was a club started by some of the translators that we have worked with; the aim being to, well, teach conversational english. Tonight's meeting including a song, I Can Only Imagine, as well as a solo by a member who sang Italian opera ... you don't get that in many English clubs in Haiti.

Tuesday started off with a walk as well. This time Maureen, who came with us to Haiti to help provide some teacher training joined us. Then it was off to the construction site to continue work on the water purification building. We had some down time as the local builders put some scaffolding together to support the concrete roof that is required to support the water tank. We used this time to do some general trash clean up at the school. There is still a lot of trash in Haiti and the culture is such that most people toss food wrappers, etc. on the ground. Lots of children saw us cleaning up today so we are hoping that at least one of them catches on.

After the work day we spent some more time with the children at the orphanage. There were some parachute games, board games, and reading. The children really do enjoy being read to, but it rarely happens. I delivered the donated laptops to the school while we visited the children. My plan is to visit the classroom tomorrow while they are teaching typing to the children.