Days 94 – 96 (1/18 -20)

Wednesday – The Guest House is bustling with teams. We currently have 5 teams in country with 1 or more coming or going each day. I enjoy interfacing with them and already recognize some who were here last year.

Tom and I had an interesting meeting this morning with Gareth Lewis the new Shelter and Reconstruction Coordinator for UMCOR – Haiti. UMCOR has partnered with Miyamoto International Engineering (whose international headquarters are in Sacramento), with funding assistance from the UN, to start pilot training classes for skilled and unskilled workers, householders and community members.  The skilled worker training will be a 6 day class teaching better methods of building new homes and repairing existing homes. The unskilled worker training will be a 1 day training class focusing on safe demolition. The Householder class will be 2 days and will include basic construction processes for the do-it-yourselfers. The Customer Protection training for community members is designed to introduce them to construction and site management, procurement of labor, materials and costs – which will aid them in hiring contractors to do their work. It’s an exciting program. The good news is that it now exists. The bad news is that it has taken 2 years. I will have to admit to a certain sense of smugness. They are using the same training material that we used in our training class last year.

Thursday – Three teams returning from sites today. It never slows down this time of year. We are trying to get some of our 30 construction sites finished so we can start on more that have waiting in the wings. There are 2 or 3 that are very close to being finished.

Pastor Paul was in Canada visiting some of his family over the Holidays and returned yesterday. He stopped by the office this afternoon to welcome me back to Haiti and set up a meeting for tomorrow to talk about my projects. He needs to give his approval so we can move forward.

Friday – And the beat goes on - one team to the airport; one team in from the airport; one team returning from Mellier and one from La Trembley.

I’ve been working on getting Haitian Engineers assigned to all of our active sites. We need to have more oversight to assure that the site bosses are conforming to our new building standards. I’m also working with the Head EMH Engineer, Roger LaPlanche, in setting up a standardized inspection and reporting system. There is no governmental system in place yet, so we have to design our own.

My meeting with Tom and Pastor Paul this afternoon was interesting to say the least. I always enter these meetings with great expectations and am almost always disappointed. As I have reported many times in this blog, the inability or unwillingness to make decisions seems to be endemic in Haiti. The only decision reached in one hour was to set a time for another meeting next week. I am really hamstrung until Pastor Paul gives his approval to proceed. Yet, his parting comment to me was “I’m expecting you to get a lot done.” I’m beginning to fear that my contract will expire before we ever start. Don’t mean to whine, but my frustration is poking through.