Days 208 & 209 (05/25 & 26)

Friday – Only one team to get out this morning. We got them on their way to Mellier by 8:00 AM. We won’t have any more teams at the Guest House until Monday. Tom and I then went to a meeting of the Inter-Disciplinary Team. This is the Hatian program coordinators put together by UMCOR to oversee the Water, Health, Agricultural, Community Garden and Micro-credit programs. Jim Gulley and Lauren James who chair the ID Team asked Tom and I to attend to discuss how VIM teams might aid in the implementation of some of these community development projects. This is a direct result of our Orlando conference.

After the IDT meeting, Jim, Lauren, Tom and I headed over to Epi Dor’s a popular cafeteria style restaurant in Petionville to meet with Doug Ahlfeld, the Homes For Haitians contractor, the president of LiteForm Technologies, the U.S. company that manufactures the Styrofoam concrete forms that Doug uses in the construction of his houses, and the President of EHI Industries who is now producing these forms and other Styrofoam building products in the Dominican Republic. It was very interesting. These products are being used to build 15 and 20 story projects. They make some prefabricated wall and roof panels that I think would work in some of our projects. I think that Eng. Laplanche and I will fly to Santo Domingo next week to see their factory and get some more technical information.

We decided that since we had no teams, it was a good night to go to Hang’s, our favorite sports bar and have hamburgers. They’re about the best we’ve found in Haiti. When our driver Johnny came back to pick us up, he came in and sat with us while we finished. He then related to us an incident that had happened today at a funeral home just down the street from the Guest House. It seems that a man had died earlier in the week and the funeral home employees took the body from the cold storage to prepare it for the funeral later in the afternoon. When they were cleaning the body, the man opened his eyes and sat up - totally freaking out the employees. They started beating the man until he was dead (speculation varied from – “they thought he was a zombie”, which is very possible with the widespread voodoo beliefs in Haiti – to “they didn’t want to lose their funeral fees”, which is also possible. The funeral proceeded but when the family saw how bruised and beaten up the guy was they freaked out – at which point the guy opened his eyes – AGAIN! An ambulance was called and the guy was rushed to a hospital where it was reported that he later died – for real this time. A riot ensued and family and friends stormed the funeral home and Johnny reported that two of the employees were killed, but later reports confirmed that the owner and 3 employees were arrested and are currently in jail. How’s that for a bed time story?

Saturday – Tom and I left at 7:00 AM with Spana and the D-Max for Hinche. As I’ve said before, it’s a beautiful 3 ½ hour drive into the central plateau region of Haiti. The team from California/Nevada Conference (Placerville, to be exact) was working in Hinche and was interested in investigating the feasibility of an agricultural water project. A previous Cal/Nev team had met with the church pastor and several community members who expressed the need for such a project. The EMH engineer for that area had prepared an estimate for the project and Pastor Paul, the EMH President, had given his preliminary approval. The current team was interested to find out what would be required to move the project along. So – Tom and I wanted to see the proposed project first hand and talk to the pastor and engineer. There is an existing cooperative of farmers that are growing primarily corn and peanuts on some privately owned land. They are entirely dependent on rain water for irrigation. There is a stream that runs along one side of the property and water would have to be pumped from the stream, about 200 yards and 60 to 80 up, to the high point of the property into a cistern or tank and be distributed from there. There are a whole lot of questions that have to be answered before we can proceed with this, such as: Does the benefit justify the initial expense? How much will this increase their current output? How are they going to maintain the equipment? How are they going to pay for the operation of the system? At this point these questions are met with blank stares. We left a list of questions with the pastor and the engineer and told them that when they had the answers to those questions we could move forward with a proposal. These are entirely new concepts to most of these people and it requires a lot of hand holding.