Kreyol pale, kreyol comprann.

Creole spoken is Creole understood.

Twenty-three students from another southern university arrived here last Thursday and fifteen students from Clemson arrived here the next day. As you can imagine, college students have taken over the compound for Spring Break.

Talking to people here for the first time gives me the opportunity to see how far I’ve come since I first came to Haiti. Not only can I communicate with Haitians so much better but also I am visibly more comfortable and aware of what’s going on. It’s easy for me to take everything for granted here, to keep seeing my environment without considering the spectacle of it all. With visitors, I get to see everything anew through their eyes and experiences.

We got right to work as soon as the Clemson students arrived. Yesterday, we installed sand filters into a water system to reduce sediment loads and clean up the water. It was an extremely difficult project to manage for a number of reasons, the least of which was my poor plumbing skills. I was managing both Clemson students in English and Haitian workers in Creole and both parties had even less experience with piping than myself.

Despite these obstacles, we managed to come together and make some real progress. It’s far from perfect—we’re not professionals—but it will work. In Haiti, where budgets are tight and materials are always low, that’s all we need. Expect pictures of our finished product later this week.

The rest of the week will consist of meetings, tours, and more work on the filters. We are hoping to sit down with DINEPA and the Partners in Health Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WaSH) team at some point this week and talk about partnerships. As I’ve mentioned in previous blog posts (Sonje lapli sa ki leve mayi ou), public-private partnerships are the only way to really establish any sort of sustainability to our work. I hope it goes well.