Days 197 – 200 (05/14 – 17)

Monday – No teams at the Guest House this morning. However, it was a full day for me. Tom and I had a meeting with Engineers Derly Charles and Roger Laplanche and Constantine from World Hand Alliance, one of the housing contractors in Mellier and Carrefour. We have to do some contract modification with WHA due to time delays caused by increased start-up time in their block manufacturing process.

This afternoon I worked on the MOUs (Memorandum of Understanding) NGO speak for contracts, for the Haiti Home Assistance Program. These are the contracts that the beneficiaries will sign outlining how the funds will be disbursed and their responsibilities in the construction and renovations of their homes. I wrote them in English and Sarah translated them into Creole.

We had a team return from Mellier and just before dinner a new team arrived from the states.

Tuesday – This morning we got our Mellier team off early to the airport and then our new team off to work in Petit Goave. Then the fun part of my day began. I was able to hand out the first draw checks to the first 6 staff members so they can start building their new houses. The first 6 recipients were: Nicolas Bruno and Antoinette Gabriel (a couple); Danielle Pierre-Saint; Lysmeus Pierre-Claude; Gerda Torcheno; Oge Celin; and Jean Baptiste Israel “Maxo”. It has taken 7 months of blood, sweat and tears to finally reach this point. The smiles, tears handshakes and hugs I received made it all worthwhile. I have 8 more to go in the next few days.

Wednesday – Engineer Roger Laplanche picked me up at 7:00 AM to do a site visit to Mellier. We picked up Engineer Arbicher in Carrefour and were supposed to pick up Engineer Derly but he had car trouble and couldn’t meet us. We stopped first at the new church. This is our largest project to date and with the mezzanine will have over 6,000 square feet. It has been under construction for 20 months and the 2^nd story is finally going up. We wanted to make sure that the changes we had made at our meeting last week were being followed. They were.

Our next stop was to look at a couple of World Hand Alliance sites to check on Constantine’s progress. It was gratifying to finally see walls going up. The new light weight block design seems to be working very well and the crew built about 80 feet of wall 4 feet high in the 30 or 40 minutes we were at one of the sites. On the way back to the highway we stopped at one of Homes for Haitians sites and watched them pour concrete into the Styrofoam wall forms. They should have 10 homes completed by the end of June. Good progress all the way around.

I got back to the Guest House about 2:00 PM – in time to say goodbye to our “Petit Goave” team and to Sarah who was going to Miami for a long weekend.

Thursday – This morning Tom, Lauren James and Elizabeth Petheo from UMCOR, and I, along with Pastor Paul and all of the EMH District Superintendents and clergy departed for Orlando, Florida to participate in the Haiti Mission Partners Conference. The other participants, from UMCOR headquarters in New York and major partners from all over the US, are gathering for 3 days of meetings about the Haiti response. This is the first time ever that all of the EMH clergy have met together outside of Haiti and the first time in the US for many of them. We flew to Miami, went through Emigration and Customs (much easier for US citizens than for our Haitian friends); caught our flight to Orlando; took the shuttle bus to our hotel; and finally got to our rooms about 4:30 PM.

 My room overlooked the pool and it looked very inviting with just a few people lounging around. I thought I would throw on my trunks and go for a swim. I unpacked, put on my trunks and looked out the window and counted 56 kids in the pool. Welcome to the town of Disney World, Epcot Center and Universal Studios. I decided to go for a walk instead. After my walk, I came back to the hotel for dinner and met up with my friends Phil Bandy and Warren McGuffin from the California/Nevada Conference and several people that had been in Haiti on teams during my tenure. There are over 100 people scheduled to attend.