It's Whit

On my day off from work, I went with another volunteer (from the Chicago suburbs, coincidentally, was scheduled to fly in on the same day as me, but was delayed) to visit the Leogane Cemetery. I’m not sure where it is in relation to the base camp, cardinal directions-wise, but it’s near the bus stop and was just a short moto ride away, for the cost of 15 goudes each person (about 40 cents).

Just like in New Orleans, Haiti has a high water table and so above-ground memorials are common — at least common in the cemetery, where the relatively affluent can afford plots. Many families simply bury their dead in their yards. No need or opportunity for fancy monuments.

Maybe it’s a little morbid, but I find cemeteries interesting and oddly beautiful. (Call it gothic appeal?)

Many structures, if they weren’t damaged by the earthquake, appeared to have been broken into. There were a few coffins sitting outside, fully exposed to the elements, and showing signs of that. Goats rested on a ledge of one structure, chewing slowly while eyeing us as we walked through the hilly, unkept grass. At the back of the cemetery, there was a cow, tied to a stake, grazing.

Outside the main gate to the cemetery is a mass grave for some 3,000 souls who perished in the earthquake. But motos and trucks drove over the spot regularly, and trash quickly accumulated on the then-unmarked gravesite, as happens to so many places in Haiti. Last fall, at the request of the Leogane mayor, All Hands built a fence to and sign identifying the spot where so many were buried. It was erected in time for the 1 year anniversary of the January 12 quake.

These days, it doesn’t look so pretty. Trash has accumulated along the fence and is strew inside the plot as well.

Another quick update to let you know I made it back to Chicago. My luggage hopefully will be joining me soon.

Looking forward to catching up with y’all!

Apologies for being delinquent on the blogging. I’m heading back to Chicago tomorrow, Tuesday. I’ll post more then!

Street addresses in Haiti are not nearly as helpful as they can be in American cities. First, many places don’t have street addresses because there are a lot of tents and temporary shelters, and they’re often not in neat little rows. But more importantly, street addresses, when they do exist, can be picked by the owner. So 52 Grande Rue may be next to 31 Grand Rue, which may be next to 95 Grand Rue.

I have yet to see a woman driving a motorbike or a car here. And I’ve been looking. I asked one of our local volunteers, Jean Kendy, about this today and he said that it’s just because women tend to work inside the home. There’s nothing to prohibit them from driving – anyone is eligible to get their license when they’re 18 years old – but yet, few of them do. I understand his explanation, but I still have a hard time stomaching it. Women here work little vending stations along the roads, selling Cokes and making egg sandwiches and such, so I can’t understand why they also don’t drive.

The currency of Haiti is the goud. One U.S. dollar is equal to about 38 goud (abbreviated as HTG, or gourde in French). However, some merchants price items by the “Haitian dollar,” which is a currency of sorts that doesn’t physically exist – it just exists in words. (Very confusing.) One Haitian dollar is equal to five goud. So, if a juice is $6 Haitian dollars, that is equal to 30 goud, which is little under $1 American.

Cokes and Sprites here are made with sugar cane. That’s right, no high fructose corn syrup here, baby! (Also, there are no “diet” beverages here.) At some vendors, you can purchase a half a litre of Coke or Sprite, in a glass bottle, for 15 goud – so less than 50 cents – although you have to return the bottle or drink it on location. As I recall, a 20oz of Coke at most drugstores and gas stations in the States costs about $1.59 these days. And you get stuck with a plastic bottle and high fructose corn syrup if you’re drinking something with calories.

Speaking of beverages, when ordering a hot chocolate or cocoa, do not ask for a “coco.” That means vagina in Kreyol. Order a chocolat.

For the last few days, I’ve been working on a rubble team clearing the Nicole Kindergarten, an elevated two-story school in Leogane that collapsed during the earthquake.

Although it’s an incredibly challenging site – HODR volunteers have been working on it for more than a week now, and we think there’s another three full days of work to go – and more grueling manual labor than I ever would have hoped to do in humid 100-ish degree heat, it’s been a particularly rewarding experience.

The school’s headmaster, Jackson, visits the site daily (if not multiple times a day) to shower praise and support on us. Jackson started the school with his wife some years ago. He obviously was devastated when the building was destroyed in January.

Jackson paid $800 to have a small section of the site cleared so that the school could re-open. That sum – which is HUGE by Haitian standards (and, of course, an amount which the vast majority cannot afford) – covered the removal of four large dumptrucks of rubble. Those four truckfuls equated to clearing 20-foot by 8-foot section of the building’s slab – a mere fraction of the building’s footprint, but enough for the school to hold class again.

Now, about 30 Nicole Kindergarten students, wearing adorable bright yellow uniforms with their names threaded across their bellies, meet this cleared area during the week.

The makeshift classroom has a couple of old green chalkboards, part of a wall with a definitely not Disney-licensed painting of Goofy on the wall, a small playground slide, and pint-sized tables and chairs for the wee ones.

This area is separated from the ruins of the rest of what used to be the kindergarten by some gray tarps from USAID. The roof also is a tarp.

And for the last week, those tarps also have separated the classroom from the crew of 10-15 volunteers who have been loudly banging, shoveling and wheelbarrowing during four morning hours of the kiddies’ schoolday. As distracting as I’m sure it is to the children, they’ve been remarkably well-behaved – arguably more well-behaved than the volunteers (myself included), who like to smile and wave and take photos of them when they’re on break.

(My favorite part of the day is when the students wash their hands before lunch. With the assistance of a teacher or aide, the timoun dip their hands in a bucket, lather and rinse, all while singing a song in French about the importance of handwashing and how to do it properly. Once they’ve washed their paws, they get in a single-file line and place their hands on the shoulders of the child in front of them. It’s terribly cute.)

After working at so many sites where children were able to come and “help” us because they weren’t in school, nor being supervised by their parents, it’s refreshing to see these little ones in class.

The headmaster, Jackson, also has been delightful. Almost every afternoon, he drops by the jobsite with treats for us volunteer workerbees – sugarcane one day, mangoes another, grilled corn on the cob (prepared while we worked), etc. One day, long after his usual visit to the site, he spotted us standing alongside the road while waiting for our (tardy) taptap back to the base. He pulled over to make sure we didn’t need a ride somewhere.

Jackson could not afford to clear the entire site, so he is incredibly appreciative that we are doing the work for him, for free. And, on top of that, he said that he appreciates how much we appreciate the little treats he delivers during the workday. (Us volunteers, of course, appreciate being appreciated for our work. There’s a lot of appreciation going on!)

Another volunteer here, Sara, who is fluent in French, told me that Jackson revealed to her that our work has helped to change his opinion of “white people.” He explained that the influx of aid he’s seen since the earthquake, including the help he’s personally received, has both surprised him and demonstrated to him that people outside of Haiti do genuinely care about his country and his countrymen.

This is the stuff that makes it all worth it.

Work Tuesday began with a meeting with my crew standing on the roof of a partially-collapsed home.

By 12:30 p.m., the roof had dropped to the ground and what remained of the walls was only a few feet high in most places. Done.

Working on the “demo” (demolishing) crew was an interesting experience, but also one of the most dangerous ones I’ve had in Haiti. The demo team’s job is to fully collapse buildings so that HODR shovelers, pickers and sledgehammerers (ha!) on rubble teams can easily access the debris and get it out of the way.

The demo team is armed with sledges, metal chains, rope, some pulleys, a 12-foot long piece of plywood dubbed the “demo stick,” rebar cutters, wenches and a small battery-powered handsaw to slice stubborn rebar. So demo basically brings down (admittedly unstable, poorly constructed) buildings using the guns on their arms (muscles!) and brainpower.

Because the buildings the demo crew are structurally unsound and in various degrees of stress, most of the time there are only two or three members of the crew using tools at any one time. The other members of the crew serve as spotters by maintaining watch on the walls, pillars and other structural elements of the building which can be affected by the work currently being performed. If a column starts to wobble, or a platform that a worker is on starts to drop, the spotters yell for workers to stop immediately and to clear the building.

Of course, that system is in no way foolproof. One well-placed hit with the sledge can bring down a column without warning, so it’s really important to develop a strategy to bring down a structure while minimizing the time spent inside, on top of, and next to the structure. And just like with rubbling, working at these sites are full of other hazards. On Monday, for example, one member of the demo crew sliced her forearm on a piece of sawed rebar, resulting in 16 stitches. (Like the trouper that she is, she was back out with the team on Tuesday, when I was on it.)

Luckily, the team of eight I was working with in the morning was led by several veteran demo crew members and a HODR staffer, all of whom did a good job of breaking us in to demo work. Before beginning a phase of the demolishing process, they would ask us, “Where are you going?” meaning: “If the building starts to go down, how are you going to get out safely and quickly?” Thus, each of us always had exit strategies at the front of our mind.

Although the building didn’t come down as smoothly as I (or the rest of the team had hoped), it did!

We began by attacking a roughly 10-foot by 14-foot section of the roof in the back right of the building that was already leaning about 30 degrees toward the ground. A few team members started sledging on the roof so as to expand a deep crack in the concrete. This allowed us to access and cut the stubborn rebar that connected this section of the roof to the rest of the structure. Members on the ground also faulted and then brought down two columns supporting this roof section, which increased our access to the weight-bearing columns in the middle of the house.

The crew then shifted our attention toward the front of the building, where we knocked down part of a section of wall and roof that was being supported by the building’s metal door. The door was wedged under a column and roof piece. We looped a thick rope around this column and four of us volunteers used that to yank it out of place, like in tug-of-war.

Bringing down the large still-standing roof section and columns in the middle of the building proved to be the most difficult. We began by looping metal chains and ropes around three weight-bearing columns that were holding the section up. Each of those chains and ropes were anchored to columns or pillars on other pieces of property some 15 to 30 feet away with wenches or pulleys. Those devices allowed us to steadily increase the pressure on the rope or chain.

With a volunteer manning each of those ropes, and spotters on all sides, we started to increase the pressure to try to pull the columns toward us and the ground. But it didn’t work. One of the columns wouldn’t budge at all, and the other two moved only slightly. A four-foot wall next to one of the columns we were trying to pull down – which we previously had thought would collapse easily because there was no rebar in it – also hindered our progress by holding steady.

So, we paused our work on the tensions and knocked a hole in a side wall of the building. Because there was so much stress already being placed on the columns and the building’s walls, we used the demo stick to reach through this hole and knock out a few bricks at the top of this stubborn four-foot mini-wall, by banging one end of the stick with the sledgehammer from outside the wall.

We were set to resume increasing the tension on the metal chains and ropes hooked on to the three columns, when a small crack in the roof near the top of the mini wall suddenly ripped through the ceiling. (This happened just as Ton, a lanky and consistently monochromatically-dressed volunteer from Amsterdam, was looking to enter the building to move up a cable loop on a pillar. Rather scary.)

With that, the columns toppled and the roof dropped to the ground. Dust and debris rolled toward us seemingly in slow motion. Everyone hopped back a couple of feet in surprise.

Just like in the movies, but without explosive devices.

(And, of course, nobody was hurt or injured.)

In the afternoon, we began attacking another site.