We are at that weird time between projects right
now. We are finished with the first round of projects for now, the fountain
upgrades and the sand filters, and I am working out budgets/timelines for
our next set of projects: renovating a school at Morne Michel, a remote village about a
10 mile hike away.
After speaking with some of the leaders in that village, we
have identified several potential projects. They want to improve the drainage and
their roof so that they don’t have leaks in the classroom. They also said that
the area around the school is rocky and the students fall and hurt themselves
all the time. Consequently, they want to pour concrete around the school to
create a safe(r) schoolyard for students to play. Finally, Morne Michel is way
off the grid and has no electricity so the students struggle to find light to
study and read at night. Ideally, we would be able to install a solar panel
with a few LED lights to illuminate this new schoolyard.
The hardest part of this will be carrying everything up to
the school. It literally sits on top of a mountain but the Haitians aren't intimidated. We just need “an army of beasts” to carry all the materials up (a
beast is anything from a goat to a horse). When they first built the school a
few years ago, “many beasts died on the way up the mountain” as a result of the
immense weight of the materials.
This project has many unique challenges but I think we are
up to the task. In a perfect world, no animals would be harmed in the execution
of this project.
Beyond projects, my Creole language skills are still a work
in progress. I am doing flash cards now to help memorize some of the trickier
vocabulary but I am getting more confident everyday. By this summer, I hope to
be able to, as the Haitians say, speak Creole like a rat.
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