Days 263 – 266 (7/20 – 23)

Friday – Team activity this morning consisted of sending one team to the airport for their journey home and I team off to their work site in Arcahaie. After saying goodbye to the teams, I took a tour of the Guest House complex. Apparently my pep talk to the engineers yesterday about the work schedule had a positive effect. Today there are about 20 workmen banging away at various jobs lots of noise and dust. With all the dirt piled up from the canal, septic system and Annex footing excavations; debris from demolition at the Guest House and the piles of sand, gravel and rocks for the new construction, the complex is looking like a war zone. I spent the rest of the morning with my Construction Superintendent hat on and made sure everyone understood the scope of work on their particular project.

This afternoon I called the factory in the Dominican to check on the status of our order. They said all of our wall panels were done and the roof panels should be finished by the first of the week. This should work out perfectly since we are planning on pouring the 2^nd floor deck on the Annex tomorrow. Actually it’s a little scary – things don’t normally go this well in Haiti.

Just before dinner our team from Mellier arrived after a busy week. We’ll send them home tomorrow and won’t have any more teams until late Tuesday afternoon.

Saturday – After saying goodbye to the Mellier team I once again put on my Superintendent’s hat and toured the site. I counted 39 workers this morning. About 24 of them were on the crew that is pouring the 2^nd floor deck on the Annex. They obviously had been working together for some time. Everyone had a specific job and were well coordinated. They had guys bringing buckets of sand and rocks to the cement mixer; another guy putting the sacks of cement; a guy bringing buckets of water; a bucket brigade moving buckets of concrete up the ladder to the 2^nd floor; runners taking the buckets to where the concrete was being placed; 3 or 4 guys leveling and finishing the concrete and even 2 guys running a zip line returning the empty buckets to the cement mixer. It was like a well-rehearsed ballet.

At 10:30 Tom, Mario, Danette and I left for Les Cayes. Les Cayes is about 90 miles from Petionville on the Caribbean side of the island. The trip usually takes about 4 ½ hours. However, this morning we had gridlock traffic in Carrefour and the trip took just over 5 ½ hours. We were in Les Cayes because Pastor Paul had asked us to attend the dedication of the new church in Torbeck – just outside of Les Cayes. I have a connection to the Torbeck church in that when Tom and I looked at it last year, it was partially built but had been sitting dormant since the earthquake. It was a structural nightmare and I told Tom it was not safe to have teams around it. It reminded me of pictures of the bombed out shells of churches in Germany during WWII. I took pictures and sat down with Eng. Laplanche  and suggested that we buttress all the columns to give the walls strength. He agreed and the work was done. It’s now a beautiful new, safe church.

We went down to Gelli Beach for a couple of hours to enjoy the Caribbean breeze and some refreshments - then returned to the Les Cayes Guest House to have dinner with Pastor Ablamy, his wife Donette and Pastor Paul. We all went to bed early and fought the mosquitos all night long.

Sunday – We all got up in the morning nursing mosquito bites (even Tom and he never gets bit) and had breakfast. I like most Haitian food, but fish for breakfast is not my favorite. We got to the church about 8:30 and the place was packed. They had their circuit convention this weekend and people from every church in the circuit were present. I would guess there were 800 to 1000 people there. They marched us up to the front of the church and had us sit with Pastor Paul and the rest of the clergy. I was hoping for a quiet corner in the back. The good news was that there was lots of music – 2 full choirs, 2 smaller ensembles and a band. The bad news was it ran for over 3 ½ hours. We didn’t get out of there until after 12:00.

We got back to the guest house and changed into cooler clothes and had lunch. Then we all packed up and hit the road. Now this was a milestone day for me. I drove back from Les Cayes – my first Haiti driving experience. I actually enjoyed it. There was only one small incident. At one of the many places where the road was torn up, I slowed down to pick my way through it and a SUV came barreling up on my left to pass me and I didn’t see a fairly large rock on my right. I hit it with a glancing blow off of the bottom of the front grill guard. I was going pretty slow and it didn’t hurt anything but made a lot of noise and scared everybody to death. I drove for about 3 hours to Mellier where we stopped to look at the work site. Mario took over the driving from there because he knows how to navigate around Port au Prince better than I do. I’m glad he was driving because we got into another traffic jamb in Carrefour and got rear ended. Not much damage to the D-Max other than a scarred rear bumper. It was another 5 ½ hour journey. We knew we were going to be late so we had called the Guest House and told them not to fix dinner for us. We stopped off at Munchee’s in Petionville for, in our opinion, the best pizza in Haiti.

Monday – After conferring with one of the site engineers about the days work, Spana and I went shopping. I had a whole list of things that I needed to get for the projects. One of those things is 24 full-size, sturdy bunk beds. We went to every source we could think of and found 1 bunk bed that would work. I asked the clerk how many he had in stock. He went away to check and came back in about 15 minutes and said “One”. I asked him how long it would take to get 24. He went away again for about 20 minutes and came back and said “I don’t know”. I love shopping in Haiti. The rest of our list suffered much the same fate. We were unable to find most of the things I needed. It’s very frustrating knowing you could go to a dozen places at home and find everything. In Haiti you end up having to improvise, settle for 2^nd or 3^rd best or completely redesign what you were trying to do. Did I mention that I love shopping in Haiti?