Day 121 (2/14)

Tuesday – Today we only have one team leaving for the airport after lunch, so Tom, Oge and I were able to get an early start for our site visits.  The purpose of our visits is to assess the current situation at each site – determine how much work remains to be done on each site; is it work that a team can assist in and how many teams and/or money will it take to complete. The most difficult part of the process is defining the word “Complete”. The church has a never ending list of things that they want done at each site – most of which, at this point, are not earthquake related. Since the Haiti Response Plan was set up to do earthquake recovery work, we have to say at some point – our work is done here and move on to the next one.

There was a gas shortage for the last 3 or 4 days that shot the price of gas to over $8.00 a gallon and kept most of the cars off of the road. But, unfortunately, they were all back on the road this morning and our 20 mile drive to our first site in Cabaret took almost 2 hours. Cabaret is one of those sites that is very near completion. There are one or two things that remain to be done on the original scope of work and one more team can probably finish it off. Of course they want a new building to be built for school staff housing, but that is not in our mandate and will have to go on a future wish list.

Our next stop was at Thomas, which is where I spent 2 mission trips and have many friends. I think that 2 or 3 teams will be able to complete the current project. Of interest to “my October team” is there is a new Site Boss and I instructed him to tear out the stairs and rebuild them correctly.

Our last stop on this trip was at Arcahie. Arcahie is also nearing completion of the original project. Imagine our surprise to see 3 partial walls of a new building appearing on the back of the compound. We asked the Project Engineer what was being built and who authorized it. He replied that it was going to be a Guest House for visiting Pastors and was authorized by the District Superintendent. The District Superintendent drove up at that time and we asked him what was going on. He said, “Oh, we’re going to build a Guest House for visiting Pastors.” We replied, “Well, I hope you have the money to pay for it in your budget, because we don’t.” The silence was deafening. This is an attitude problem that we are confronted with daily – that we are standing around with an open wallet and will pay for anything they want. Ain’t gonna’ happin’.

On the way back to Petionville, I asked Oge if he would stop at Ti Tanyen. Ti Tanyen is the mass burial site for earthquake victims and I had not been there yet. With over 300,000 people killed, there was absolutely no way they could all be given individual burials. They literally brought bodies in by the dump truck load and buried them at this site. No one knows how many are buried here but there are thousands and thousands. There is nothing special about this site. It looks like a landfill with some crosses on a nearby hill. There even is a roadway across one side of it. They did, however, erect a memorial in the middle of it for the 2^nd Anniversary. A pretty grim reminder of how terrible the loss of life really was.

When we got back to the Guest House, we found Una Jones had arrived (she was expected). Una is the head of Mission Volunteers for the General Board of Global Missions (GBGM). She is the person in charge of UMVIM and Individual Volunteers. In other words – she’s our boss. I sense more meetings in my future.

Our entire staff, Una, Tom, Sarah, Mario and I went to a “mixer” put on by an organization called Build Change. They are an engineering group that specializes in earthquake retrofit. They advocate retrofitting buildings rather than tearing down and starting over. I think that there is certainly a place for this approach, but not all buildings are worth saving. The mixer was held at the Plaza Hotel and was well attended – partly because it included a free dinner. By the time I got to bed, my body was telling me that it had been a long day.