Bab pi lon men sousi pi vye

The beard is longer but the eyebrows are older.

I'm back! First day, I went to the village of Bwa Joli to check out their water system.

After a wonderful, albeit somewhat hectic, week at home for my brother’s wedding, I am back in Haiti for this last full month of my summer in order to finish up a few projects and initiatives while training the next set of Clemson interns for life here.

There are three things that I hope to accomplish before I depart:

1)   The water system in the community of Ba Cange

2)   The establishment of a local water committee that can one day take over the operations and

     maintenance of the water system in Cange

3)   The installation of a solar panel at the village of Morne Michel

We have been completely out of power for the past 10 days now. The only reason I have been able to get this post is that the generator in the compound where I stay provides power for about 2-3 hours every day. As soon as power is restored, we should be ready to finally begin work on the water system (1) as well as the solar panel (3).

There is a huge meeting with the whole Cange community on Sunday where we will introduce the idea of a water committee in order to take over the water system. We don’t know exactly how this will go over; people will not be happy that they have to start paying for water. My goal is to hold elections the Sunday after and then bring in DINEPA (the Haitian Water and Sanitation Department) to legitimize the committee as a legal entity.

In terms of the Marketplace situation, we have money coming down later this month to mitigate the terrible erosion that I mentioned in my last post. Since I am leaving in a month, most of this work will be conducted with the next wave of interns that came a few weeks ago. See the pictures below:

This is James standing next to a pit latrine that has started slipping down onto the new Marketplace road due to erosion. 

The concrete structure you see on the right is the roof of someone's house adjacent to the new Marketplace land. As you can see, it has been almost completely buried by dirt due to the erosion.

As you can imagine, it is going to be a busy couple of weeks here in Haiti but, if all goes well, I should be able to depart without feeling like I am abandoning the people and the new interns.