Days 105 – 107 (1/29 – 31)

Sunday – We got 1 team off to their church service and afternoon sightseeing trip and 1 team of to their site in Thor. Then Jim and Tom and I had a long discussion with Melissa Crutchfield about the current state of the Haiti Response Plan. As the Assistant General Secretary of International Disaster Response for UMCOR, she is very influential in deciding the future direction of our program. We are starting into the 3^rd year of the original 3 year mandate and really need to evaluate what the future program should look like, if the Plan is renewed. I think we all are in agreement that there will be a continuing need, but some changes in focus are needed. Getting the EMH to buy in on some of those changes will probably be a challenge. Haiti has been my first and only experience in disaster recovery work and I have been somewhat surprised to discover that the human dynamic challenges far exceed the physical and logistical challenges of rebuilding.

After lunch I worked in the office for a couple of hours and then found a soft chair and got back to my book. I’m finally getting around to reading Paul Farmer’s “Haiti - After the Earthquake”. I’m just about finished and it has been a good read.  I finished Phillipe Girrhard’s “Haiti – From the Pearl of the Caribbean to a Broken Nation” on the plane down here. I would recommend it to anyone interested in learning about the history of Haiti.

Monday – Today we have 2 teams returning from the field and one team coming in from the states. The Guest House is starting to fill up again. It seems more normal. Our work schedules are pretty well regulated by the arrival and departures of the teams. Everything we do has to fit into those spaces when we’re not dealing with the needs of the teams. Since I don’t have an “official” team support function I have a little more flexibility for site visits etc. But, there never seems to be a lack of things to do.

Melissa Crutchfield, Lauren James and Jim Gulley asked me to go with them to the St. Martin Church and School construction site. This is an UMCOR/EMH site and not a VIM supported site. There has been no volunteer team contribution and therefore not on my project list. However, they wanted my opinion on the current status of the project. I had visited there last fall and was very impressed with the overall quality and workmanship. I was again impressed with the progress made since that last visit and the continued quality of the work. I did find a few areas that do not conform to the new structural standards that we are initiating and took some pictures to show to Roger LaPlanche, the EMH Head Engineer, at our meeting tomorrow.

We then went to the College Bird campus which is the largest Methodist church and school in Haiti. The school and administration buildings were severely damaged in the earthquake and had to be demolished. The construction of the new buildings is scheduled to start soon and it will become the largest Methodist project in Haiti – about 4 million dollars.

Jim wanted to go up to the Hotel Montana for lunch. This was the building that he was trapped in for 55 hours after the earthquake. The hotel is owned by 2 sisters and 1 of the sisters was buried in the rubble for over 100 hours before being rescued. She was rescued by a Spanish recovery team and was in Spain for a reunion with that team on the 2^nd anniversary of the quake when Jim spoke at the memorial service. So – he wanted to say hello to her. She was very happy to see Jim and she told us all about their plans to rebuild the Montana. She then showed us the area that used to be the hotel lobby where Jim was buried. It was in a slightly different location then he had thought. We then had a great lunch on the patio overlooking Port-au-Prince.

I got back to the Guest House in time to welcome 2 new teams from the states and one returning from the field. We had over 50 people staying tonight.

Tuesday –After getting the 50+ people on their way, I had a meeting with Roger LaPlanche to discuss the process of establishing a standardized system of documentation for all of our projects. I have discovered that very few of our projects have any documentation – plans, estimates, inspection records, etc. Roger agrees that this needs to done and is in fact happy to get some support. He was hired very late in the reconstruction process and most of our sites were already under construction. He tells me that he was never told by EMH to provide oversight on all of these sites. Needless to say, I was very surprised and will try to get this clarified at the Joint Leadership Team meeting tomorrow. If he is not the man in charge – who is? UMCOR from the very beginning of the Recovery Plan has tried to turn the administration of the reconstruction process over to the EMH – which is, from a humanitarian aspect, a very noble thing to do - have the Haitians manage their own recovery. However, from a practical standpoint, ministers are not necessarily the best qualified people to be managing construction projects. I’m trying to find that middle ground of offering advice and support without seemingly diminishing EMH’s role in the process. It’s a daily lesson in diplomacy. Roger and I agreed that we would gather all the documentation we could find and then try to recreate files that are missing or never existed. We will also initiate my system for all new projects.