Days 161 – 164 (03/25 – 28)

Sunday – Today was one of those rare days that I was totally on my own and had absolutely nothing to do. There were no teams; Sarah was still at Jenn’s wedding; Tom was hiking and Mario was visiting with his cousins in Thomasin. I went to church on the Frère campus and came back to the office and fired up my laptop. A few days ago I found a website where I could get satellite TV on my laptop. So – I got comfortable and spent the afternoon watching the Arnold Palmer Invitational. It was fun to watch Tiger Woods finally win a PGA tournament after 2 ½ years. Despite his personal problems, he is a phenomenal golfer to watch when he is playing well. After dinner I watched part of a very confusing movie with Leonardo DiCaprio. I finally gave up and read my book du jour.

Monday – This morning we sent our local team off to Delmas 33 for their work day. The rest of the morning was devoted to setting up the individual files for all of the Haiti Home Assistance Program beneficiaries. Some of them have already brought in some of their paperwork and it was starting to stack up. It is going to be an interesting experience helping them through a process that most of them have never been through before. One of the documents they have to provide is proof of land ownership and in some cases this is very difficult. Some records, if they ever existed in the first place, were destroyed in the earthquake. Some land purchase agreements are hand written on scraps of paper. Some parcels appear to be obtained under some form of adverse possession that everyone seems to accept. Coming up with proof of undisputed legal ownership is going to be a challenge.

This afternoon my friends from California returned from Thomas and since Sarah didn’t return from the wedding in Port Salud until late, I got to do the debrief after dinner. It was fun to be able to spend some time with them and hear about their 8 days working in Thomas. They will probably be the last reconstruction team sent to work in Thomas since the project is pretty well completed. Future teams may be sent to work on community development projects such as water and agriculture. Another team arrived from the states just in time to make it to the end of the dinner line.

Tuesday – The California team was up very early and left for the airport at 6:00 AM. Bon Voyage. We got the newly arrived team loaded with tools and supplies and on the road to Banique by 8:00 - then the local team to Delmas 33.

The excitement level from the Guest House staff is still pretty high and people have lots of questions about what they need to do to get started on their homes. I can see that there is going to be a lot of hand holding necessary with quite a few – but that’s OK. That’s part of my job.

Wednesday – We got our local team off to Delmas 33 by 8:00 AM and I got ready for my meeting with EMH Engineer Roger LaPlanche. This morning was our kick off meeting for the new 8 unit Staff Housing addition. Roger has selected Engineer Roos to be the Project Engineer and I wanted to be sure that all 3 of us were on the same page as to what we were going to build. As it turned out, we weren’t. The project had gone through so many permutations that Roger thought we were building 2 separate buildings. He was somewhat relieved to find out that we had actually ended up going back to the first plan we had designed. So, we walked the site and agreed upon the building location. Engineer Roos said that the crew would start site preparation tomorrow. I can’t believe that we are actually going to start.