Our mission group

This was our mission group. From left to right:

Dan, Lyn, Pam, Ed, Pastor Roy, Doug, Greg

Haiti - Overcoming Fear, and Arriving

Haiti was not somewhere I wanted to go, but it was there that God sent me.

Our trip to Haiti was motivated by Pastor Roy Howard's desire to establish a partnership between our Saint Mark church in Rockville, and the wish that myself and others had to put in water filtering systems in a poor community somewhere. Thus, over a period of months Pam, Doug and I had been trained by the Living Waters for the World and prepared (in partnership with the Haiti Outreach Ministry (HOM)) to bring solar panels, electrical pumps, hygiene training and others necessities to L'Eglise Chretien at Terre Noire (also called Blanchard), where HOM maintains a church, school and clinic for hundreds of people in the community.

What images does Haiti conjure up for you? Scary land of kidnappers? Dark land of voodoo? Riding through the city on a battered van on that first night there were crowds of people, flickering shapes on the sidewalks, red glow of braziers, no streetlights, no electricity, smell of fires for light or cooking. Our driver Ronnie drove like a body guard over those cracked and rocky roads, swerving around other traffic to stay close to Pastor Leon's pickup truck carrying our bags just ahead. About half of us white folks in the van were scared to death, as if conjuring scenes from Dawn of the Dead!

Yet when we arrived at Saint Joseph’s Home for Boys in the Petionville area of Port-au-Prince, Brother Michael greeted us in the lobby of his beautiful building and poured us each a glass of cold water. Later I stood on the roof 5 stories high and looked out over the city, heard the music of people partying at a condo building, saw the many houses and concrete huts and occasional lights in the mysterious skyline. I thought to myself: What a strange, marvelous, and troubled country!

In the day Port-au-Prince looked completely different, just people going about their lives, bustling sidewalk markets and so on. Be skeptical of what you read in the papers. They would make you think you’ll be kidnapped the minute you step off the plane. “Gangs control the capital” read one article on 2/21 in the Washington Post. Nonsense. We drove all over and saw no gangs; the only guns were in the hands of UN, police and private security guards to protect the rich.

Intellectually I knew the paper was sensationalizing the situation, but emotionally I was scared. Sure there’s risk, and no one can totally quantify it. As an informational security professional, I knew that until we have personal experience, we tend to over-estimate non-quantifiable risks even if they are very small.

I’m very glad now that I went. It was one of the best weeks of my life and I would recommend a church mission experience in Haiti or another poor country to almost anyone. Please post your comments, keep reading my successive entries, and check the links on this page for references to people, places and sites!

Sunday - The facility at Blanchard

The Blanchard compound (or L’Eglise Chretien Terre Noire) is surrounded by a high cinder block wall with a sliding metal gate painted red (there are a number of similar compounds for other schools or institutions in the area.) There are a few vendors with food stands and other people hanging around in front looking for work or passing the time. On Sunday you could get your shoes shined for 5 or 10 gourdes. Religious Haitians really make an effort to dress up and look nice on Church day.

Entering the compound there is a yard, the clinic with an arched entrance way on the left, and the long church A frame building on the right. All the buildings are neatly painted yellow and white. There is a storeroom behind the church with some crude unpainted concrete steps leading up to the red metal door. The driveway continues past the church and lets out into the school yard. A chain is drawn across the driveway to demarcate the school area from other areas. The school yard is flanked on either side by two more rectangular buildings stretching almost to the end of the compound. These buildings have the classrooms for about 400 students and offices for the staff. They are raised off the ground and there is a line of steps running the length of the building on the left. The well and hand pump are all the way to the back between the buildings. Latrines for the kids are on the right corner, kitchen on the left.

Sunday - Church at Blanchard

We attended the church service at Blanchard, arriving just as it was starting. There were two rows of long white benches. The front level was full with a few hundred people, the back level had some space. Pastor Luke was preaching. We were conducted to the front row, where Roy sat next to Leon and we sat in the row in front.


Pastors Roy and Leon comprised a dynamic duo, with Leon elaborating considerably during his translation to Creole and frequently getting the crowd to laugh. Roy spoke about the partnership of U.S. and Haiti, the materialism of Americans, and his admiration for Haitians. He had a joke but it didn’t translate well. Roy and Leon came back and sat down. Communion was passed, some of the girls sitting next to me didn’t take it, perhaps they were not yet confirmed. At the end of the service, many people filed past us. Many shook our hands grinning, about half, others seemed more reserved. I felt overwhelmed, grinning with all the attention!

After the service we began inspecting the compound. Doug, Ed and Greg found some problems:

• Solar panels welded and cemented flat on the roof over the store room (not inclined right or facing south)

• Some of the black three hundred gallon tanks on the roof not situated on top of load bearing walls

• It looked like it would be difficult to remove the hand pump and its piping down the well.

Sunday - The Road to Blanchard

Drove up to Blanchard, through Petion Ville and Delmas, our driver Ronnie following Pastor Leon in his green pickup truck. When the paved road became crowded, they would leave it and drive through a maze of rocky dirt side roads, navigating somehow by heading generally downhill or by sight somehow. Honking at pedestrians or slower traffic, passing it. We saw one stoplight and one or two stop signs in all of Port-au-Prince. I’m not sure if anyone has street maps in Port-au-Prince; we never saw or used one and I can’t find anything on the web.

Back on the main road the traffic was heavy, grinding. Haitian taxis (taptaps) with American flags or reggae themes like “One Love” painted on the side, motorcycles, cars, SUVs, and trucks of all varieties in all stages of repair shared the road. Street side markets proliferated everywhere, women were walking with loads balanced on their heads – even stacked cartons of eggs! Lots of Lesly Centers where they have banks or lotteries, lots of signs for Digicel.

Generally on the way to Cite Soleil you pass two traffic circles – Liberte and Fraternite (I never found Egalite). At the Liberte traffic circle there are UN armored personnel carriers. There are controversial aspects of the UN presence in Haiti (to discuss later). One time some Brazilian soldiers in a APC directly in front of us pointed an automatic rifle at us.

Turned off the main road to Blanchard near the sign for a church painted on a white wall. Then it was all rocky dirt roads and alleys. Blanchard is a few miles north of Cite Soleil; it was once rural but now many of Cite Soleil's residents have moved their to escape the gangs and build a better life. Little concrete huts, shops, even a cyber-cafe and a video place line the roads in some places, in other places there are still open fields. Sometimes there are piles of garbage on the fields, with goats, pigs, cows rooting for forage. Goats and chickens are also often in the road. And people are walking everywhere, children in school uniforms (or not), women, men, bicycles.

Finally we reach the the Haiti Outreach Ministry's Blanchard compound (or L’Eglise Chretien Terre Noire). It is surrounded by a high cinderblock wall with a sliding metal gate painted dark red (there are a number of similar compounds for other schools or institutions in the area and they all seem to have the same kind of gate). There are a few vendors with food stands and other people hanging around in front of the compound. Some people are looking for work or just passing the time. On Sunday you could get your shoes shined for 5 or 10 gourdes. Religious Haitians really make an effort to dress up and look nice on Church day.

We drive inside...

Sunday - Moulin Sur Mer

After the service it was time for our day at the beach.

Ronnie drove us out of Blanchard without Leon. We had no interpreter. Got lost, driving around Cite Soleil. More semi-rural areas and slums, even drove through an area where Ed observed there were a lot of angry looking people. Finally came out onto a road that lead into a plain where there was a large landfill where a number of fires were burning. A truck with a number of men was parked in the landfill. Soon we came up to some concrete barriers behind which a UN APC was parked. We drove up to them and told the Jordanian captain that we wanted to drive north to the Mouline Sur Mer.

Long, long drive to Moulin Sur Mer, passed a few other resorts on the way, oceans, villages. My leg cramped and I had to ask Doug and Roy if we could stop and then communicate this is Creole to Ronnie. After that they let me ride in front a lot and we proceeded on. At last we reached the resort. It was about 2 o’ clock. We drove down a driveway through some palm trees and parked on the grass. It cost $9 per person to go in but $5 of that was for lunch. There were some vendors with paintings, carvings and other souvenirs but we didn’t stop then. Kept walking to the beach area where there are some bathrooms for changing, a few bars, a restaurant and also some outdoor tables. A number of people were around, but most looked like employees.

The beach is small with little sand but there is a wharf going out to sea and the water has that blue and translucent emerald color of the Caribbean. There are pebbles and coral underfoot as you wade in. The temperature of the water is ideal, and all we lacked were snorkeling masks to see the coral beneath as a few of us laughed and splashed and swam, getting a welcome relief from the heat and tedium of the ride.

We had lunch at one of the tables. Unfortunately there was no spicy Haitian fried goat and the portion of spicy pork was rather meager and fatty, not like a pork chop you would get in the U.S. But the meal was satisfying all the same.

After lunch, Doug and I wandered off to explore. There are several wings with rooms; its looks like a typical garden motel, pretty well maintained despite the low level of traffic while were there. We paused to admire a monkey in a large cage on the way there. Ther is pool, which is very clean with a huge sculpture of a conch shading under a root with white columns in the Italian style but tiles in the Thai style. Fusion architecture! The pool was very clean; we took a swim there.

When it was time to leave we took some photos by a king palm, bought a few souvenirs and got back in the van heading south. One notable incident – the van stalled in the middle of a long funeral cortege of well-dressed people mostly on foot. But we rolled it to the side of the road. Ronnie lifted up the front passenger seat, reached through a hole in the dusty metal floor and manipulated something that hot wired the engine back to life. We continued on our way without further incident.

Sunday - St Joseph's Home for Boys

That night, and each night, after returning from our daily activities, we came to back to St. Joseph's Home for Boys.


Here is what their web site has to say: "A five story building with tiled floors, brightly colored walls covered with Haitian art work, tastefully furnished and a beautiful root top terrace with rattan furniture, potted plants and a view of mountains in the distance, St. Joseph's Home for Boys is a gem of a place. Situated 25 minutes from the airport, off Delmas 91 near Petionville.

The facility is run by Michael Geilenfeld, who formerly worked with Mother Teresa in Calcutta. In 1985 Mike, who had worked in Haiti previously, returned with $1,000, rented a four room house and invited six boys to be part of a family. The rest is history. Today 20 former homeless street children staff the hostel doing the cooking, cleaning and marketing. While living in community they attend classes, learn job skills and usually by age 18 are independent. Since the program stated 117 children have graduated."

Pastor Roy has also written about St Josephs. See his post on Haitian Angels at http://web.mac.com/royhoward/iWeb/SayingGrace/Blog/Blog.html.

To me, the place was a bit of B&B, art museum, monastery, college dorm and family all wrapped up in one. On Sunday night Michael told us his story, which was very moving. He deals with the guests and acts as a big brother (or father figure if that role is demanded) to the boys. But two older boys, Bill and Walness, actually run the facility. We met Walness Sunday night and he lent us his laptop so we could message our families. The next day we will see another side of Walness...so read on!

Monday - Mission work begins

Breakfast at Joseph’s Home for Boys is downstairs in a spacious kitchen and dining rooms with many excellent Haitian paintings on the walls. Michael takes orders for omellettes or eggs, and when we were there, there were always tangerines, bananas, mangoes, sweet pineapples or other fruits. I miss those mangoes!

We drove to Blanchard again. Roy and Lyn off for leadership meetings with Pastor Luke and Church elders in the community; Greg and Ed to the store room to build shelves; and Doug and Leon off to assemble work men to re-orient the solar panels. Pam and I went to the office, where Pastor Leon’s wife – Jackie – was registering students and talking to parents. It is a large administrative task to run a school of 400.

Eventually Jackie installed Pam and I in an office on the second floor of the school building. There is a bathroom with a toilet up there - same rules as at Saint Josephs: go, deposit any papers in the trash not the toilet, and flush by pouring half a bucket in the toilet bowl. The sink sometimes work, it is fed by gravity from the 300 gallon water tanks on the roof.

I took water from the well and started working on the water test using the water test kit from the LWW. All the paranoia about getting bacteria on my hands or drinking the water and getting sick was multiplied by the worry about messing up the test. But eventually I got the test done right and left the bacteriological sample cooking in a plastic bag in a cup.

Eventually got a chance to check on the engineering work. The solar panels had been welded and cemented flat on the roof over the store room, and they need to be raised to a 20% incline (which represents our longitudinal distance from the equator and oriented due south to maximize the power of the sun. I started to climb the ladder but was intimated by the fact that I’d have to walk off the top rung and up the inclined tin roof of the church to get to the roof of the store room.

Monday - Class begins!

Normally, hygiene classes for the Living Water program are taught to teachers, community leaders or parents that will then "teach the teachers" or teach the kids. However, Blanchard has a full functioning school with as strict a curriculum as an other school, and they couldn't change things around and take the teachers out of the classes for a special class. Thus, we were relegated to teaching the kids with Jackie translating (when she was available to leave her registration activities) and the regular class teacher watching.


The class with the kids was an experience! The children are very well behaved, reciting in unison – “Bonjour Madame Jackie!” and the same to “Dan” and “Pam” when we are introduced. I taped a map of the world on the wall. Pam showed that Haiti and Washington are not so far apart. She also showed pictures of the kids at Saint Mark.

We led the class in a number of activities using handouts created by Jodie from the Living Water Foundation. One is a laminated card the children hang around their necks that tells them to use clean water for drinking, brushing and caring for the baby but not for bathing or cooking (hope I got that right). There is a song about this to the tune of Frere Jacques – “Use this water, use this water, it is good!” and so on. We handed out the makings of simple musical instruments: comb kazoos, drums of plastic cup and beans, balloons.

Pam also read the scripture of Moses leading the Israelites through the desert. She tied a towel around my head. Now I’m Moses! She declaimed “God sent manna from Heaven!” and we threw candy in the air. That was a mistake! For then we had little kids (and teachers) diving everywhere among the desks. After that they surrounded with little hands out imploring “Manwe! Manwe!” and no matter how much candy I handed out they always wanted more..

So, in future classes we didn’t do the manna from heaven anymore. We did hand out “water wands” made of blue and grey yarn, and had the children wave them around when Moses split the rock and the water flowed…

Monday - Resurrection Dance Theater

On the way back from Blanchard we found that Ronnie had had to tie the side door in the van open with a piece of wire. We stopped at the Carribean market and bought some Prestige beer and other supplies. This store was like a regular supermarket with fluorescent lights and refrigeration inside, SUVs and other cars in the parking lot outside - except that there was a guard with a shotgun and poverty all around. Doug told me during his July mission trip there was none of the Prestige available because the UN had cornered the market. Sounds like the economy is improving, at least. We saw a few Americans and also some UN people in the store.

That evening, we had a special treat. After Michael’s dinner of chicken and rice, there was a performance of the Resurrection Dance Theater by the boys of Saint Josephs. During this performance we saw a whole different Walnes (photo left) as the lead dancer and singer. They had a number of skits re-creating their life on the street, including one of a poor shoeshine boy almost getting arrested for taking the purple hat of a well-off but non-paying customer. Fairly early in the show, 3 drummers took position to the side of the stage, led by Bill (photo right), who drummed ardently for over an hour.

Michael served as the narrator, involving the audience in the shoeshine skit and getting us to dance in a circle with the boys after the performance was over. At one point he told us about the Resurrection Dance Theater, how it had performed at the Dance Africa festival in the U.S. and how Bill had studied in the U.S., made contacts and even traveled to Ghana to learn more about drumming.

Tuesday - Testing the Waters

Tuesday we had a new driver named Mario, who like Ronnie did not speak English.

With the driver, on my insistence as the self-appointed Chief Security Officer (CSO) for the trip, we hired an interpreter. His name is Mark, and he spent 19 of his 30 odd years in Miami where some of his family still live. He was an interesting person to talk to, and didn't sugarcoat things.

On the ride to Blanchard that morning we saw a Haitian Car Wash. A Haitian car wash is performed by street children with a towel as the car drives slowly through the congested traffic. The boy wipes the car when it stops and runs after it, or if it has a good bumper or anything he could stand on, he’ll jump on board and wait until it stops again before resuming the washing. The street scenes are always wild, wild with lots of people crammed into taps taps, backs of trucks, sometimes even jumping on trucks with or without the driver’s consent! Vendors everywhere, women walking with loads on their heads.

We got lost on the way to Blanchard because neither Mark or Mario had been there before. Ended up driving through all sorts of back alleys of Blanchard where are very few cars, even through a market street with fruit stands in the road so that there was barely room to pass through. Mario began asking people where “Pastor Leon’s” place. Finally an old man got in the car with us and directed us. The CSO was not happy about this!

At last we arrived at Blanchard. Progressing to the office I found the test culture from the deep well was still negative – it was still yellow - negative, by the way, is good when it comes to test results for germs. But the second culture was positive. I must now explain that the previous afternoon, one of the workers who helps out around the Blanchard site had led me to what I thought was the shallow well. This was a pit with cement lining partially covered by boards around the side of the school building next to the compound wall behind the kitchen. Later I was to learn that it was just a pit dug to get water for construction, but at the time I thought it was the shallow well that was hooked up to the portable pump, so I had to take a sample.


This morning – Tuesday – the water sample from the shallow well had already turned black and smelled foul. I had just created my very own weapon of mass destruction! At the Clean Water University they had cautioned us to make sure we disposed of such samples carefully. If it gets on your hands you may get very sick, even die. And nothing must be left of the little plastic bag where the culture is inculcated, lest a Third World child pick it thinking it may be useful for something.

I needed to get some Clorox and some gloves to dispose of the sample properly, so Pam and I walked over to the clinic. There were some Haitian men and women in the front room waiting to be seen, but we were taken back into the clinic hallway lined with store rooms, offices, and examination rooms where we met a nurse that speaks English. We also met a Doctor. But they had no gloves in the clinic, and of course no running water - not yet.

Meanwhile, Doug, Ed, and Greg had been working. The solar panels were re-oriented to face southwards at a 20 degree incline, and they were also working on repositioning one of the huge black 300 gallon tanks over the school room roof so that it would sit on top of a load bearing wall. I learned that there is still one big problem: no arrangements have been made yet to remove the hand pump from the well, obtain the proper hose and drop the submersible pump down the deep hole.

There was nothing we could do about removing the hand pump without Pastor Leon hiring some contractors, but he was busy on errands to different places. When he came back in the afternoon he said told that he had talked to some contractors but they said they were busy and hadn’t typed up an estimate yet.

We showed Pastor Leon the picture of the positive (black) bacteria culture from the shallow well, but he told us we had tested the wrong well. We couldn’t get to the well we were supposed to test, he said. Test the water in the tanks now which had been pumped from that well. I talked to Doug about this and he threw up his hands in confusion and asked “How much does it cost to test the water in the tank?” Nothing, obviously, so I started yet another test.

Back at Saint Joseph's after dinner, I talked to Darren Ell, a journalist from Canada. He has been interviewing political prisoners and people that have been brutalized. His campaign is against “impunity.” As I write this he is probably still in Haiti. He had posted some pictures when I looked at ww.darrenell.com, maybe when he returns there will be more info on the site about his trip.

Finally that evening we had another treat – a performance of Godspell by the boys of St Josephs. They were joined by KC, a young woman from Baltimore that had some significant roles in the play, as well as singing. It was a good performance but I enjoyed the previous evening’s resurrection dance theater more.

Saint Joseph’s is like a bed and breakfast where you have to share the bathrooms. One has to be strategic about getting to the shower when its not busy! And the shower itself…is a bit different. This may seem like a long blog to you, but believe it or not there’s plenty of detail I’m leaving out. For a detailed discussion of showers and Saint Joseph’s I refer to Roy’s blog post on “a cup of water” at http://web.mac.com/royhoward/iWeb/SayingGrace/Blog/840BF1A8-32B4-44E2-9755-A315FAB5F7E6.html.

Wednesday morning - Slow progress

”Be wise as the serpent, but innocent as the lamb” Pastor Roy quoted from the Bible at breakfast as we had another one of our discussions about security for the trip. We should take reasonable precautions and keep our eyes open, but not let the security concerns blind us to the goodness of so many people we meet, nor restrict us from the incredible experiences that God has to offer.

On the way Blanchard, we met Pastor Leon on the road.. We had a difficult discussion with him about all the problems that had been caused by not having a more engineering-minded person to communicate with prior to coming to Haiti. The mis-aligned panels, tanks on the wrong part of the roof, confusion about PVC pipes gauge leading us to buy things we didn’t need, no one there to remove the hand pump…the list goes on. Why couldn’t he put Ronald Janvier, an English speaking engineering type who’d been identified as the contact point on our water issues survey, in the loop?

Pastor Leon replies “I cannot work with Ronald on this unless you hire him. Are you willing to pay for him to have a job.” (Background: Originally HOM had planned to employ Ronald, but when the water tested clean in January and it was clean, there was no need for a filtering system, and thus less need for ongoing maintenance and a full time employee.) But a part time employee would have been nice! However, we could understand Leon's point of view. But later we found out that in Haitian culture the discussion/argument by the roadside is seen as a big confrontation - not a good thing.

Back at the compound I went to check to water tests. Both were still negative, and I wondered, what am I going to tell Pastor Leon if the tank water that had been pumped from the shallow well (and is presumably contaminated) ends up negative on this particular test? However, that test was not due to complete until Thursday afternoon; they take 24-48 hours. I disposed of the original (positive) test result using chlorox that Pam bought at the Carribean Market the day before.

More fun with the children as we taught the classes again. Again I played Moses, but this time Mark took a picture of me.

Later Mark and I went to the clinic to give them the gloves that Greg and Ed had found as they built shelves in the store room. The store room is full of stuff from well-intentioned mission trips. Pastor Leon doesn’t seem to be able to quite keep up with distributing it all.

The latex gloves are dusty, not sterile, but they will at least protect clinic workers from their patients. Mark wanted a tour of the clinic so we looked at their laboratory and their store room for drugs. An older woman is waiting in the laboratory patiently as we interrupt everything to ask our questions. She smiles when I say “Bonjour.” In the laboratory is a price sheet for the tests – 50 Haitian dollars (about $7 US) for HIV test, 20 for malaria test. A fortune to some of these poor people. Mark tells clinic employees about Dr Tracy, someone he met who provides free HIV tests and treatments to the people of Haiti, and who might be able to bring help to the clinic at Blanchard, which will do things for free whenever it can.

By 2 PM I revisit the office to check on the water tests. The first test – from the deep well with the water is officially negative! I felt extremely relieved!

Wednesday afternoon - Wings of Hope!

About two o’clock we set out on a ride to visit the Baptist Mission and the Wings of Hope – which is a home for disabled children. Wings of Hope grew out of the ministry of St. Joseph’s Home for Boys. It is located in Fermanthe, south of Petionville in the mountains above Port-au-Prince.

Michael and some of the older graduates of the St. Joseph’s Home for Boys decided to take over the home when they heard that after eight years the previous directors were leaving Haiti, but were unable to find placements for any of the disabled children. Michael told us a moving story of how the boys and he visited the facility and saw a paraplegic child named Soni, who was confined to a bed that represented his whole world. The nurse disparagingly referred to him as a “living piece of furniture” but in his mind, Soni always dreamed of flying.

Michaels’ boys were determined to keep all the children at the orphanage together. They extended themselves and took these children under their wing. Thus came into being the second home of St. Joseph’s, even though Michael had told them it was totally impractical. But then the boys reminded him that when he had started St Joseph’s they had nothing, but God provided. Michael recognized that this was the inspiration the boys needed to reach their potential, bowed to their faith and God did provide. Soni eventually learned to walk, and we actually saw him dance (fly!) with the Resurrection Dance Theater Group. In 2001 and 2002, Soni Derazin (shown in photo below, right) came to the U.S. on a book tour with Canadian children’s book author Peter Eyvindson (who we were fortunate to meet).

When we arrived at Wings of Hope (WOH), Alcindor – St Josephs graduate and director of the WOH orphanage – took us on the tour. Like St Joseph’s WOH has grown from a modest edifice to an impressive edifice with marvelous architecture, tiling, skylights and gardens. They had state of the art equipment for therapy and helping disabled children. We met Renee, KC Berst of Baltimore (who as I wrote earlier performed for us in St Joseph's Godspell show), and another young woman on a 3 month graduate study program for sociology and genetics. They showed us a game room, kitchen, and school. Multiple levels, cycling ramps with rough brown tiled floors. Atrium with a tree, playset and a yellow slide...

And we met the children. One is named Junior; he was in the bed making grunting sounds. He is 29, Alcindor says "He is my brother." We walked through a bedroom where younger kids were resting or sleeping. My heart went out to one little 2 year old who was just laying there. I wish I'd been more spontaneous and picked him up at that moment... We went into the kitchen were a bunch of disabled kids were sitting in high chairs. Some of them seemed insane, but there was one little half paralyzed 5 year old girl named Josephine with the most beautiful smile. She is very smart - speaks French, English and Creole – I played with her a bit, let her take my hat. One boy/man who was rather smelly shook our hands, and then settled on Lyn, leading her all around the place for some minutes.

All of us had strange reactions to the kids. We were uncomfortable, or moved. I found myself most comfortable with the younger children, most creeped out by older ones that seemed insane, or better said, living in their own world. But all of us wanted to reach out, to make them feel that we cared.

On the way back we stopped at Kenscoff Road, at Boutilliers or the “Look Out”. Our Haitian handbook reads: “From this high point you can see all of the greater Port-au-Prince area except Petion-Ville. You can see the bay, and on a clear day you will even see the island, La Gonave. You can see the National Cemetery, that seems to glimmer in shades of turquoise, the National Stadium, the National Palace, the Catholic Cathedral, the PAP International Airport, and the lakes and mountains which form the border with the Dominican Republic. You can shop for crafts and paintings with some of Haiti’s prime sales persons.”

Haiti’s prime sales persons – that’s for sure! No one else was there and they were desperate to sell us their paintings, carvings and other souvenirs. “Please buy from me. I need money!” one begged. It may be an act, but one senses genuine desperation in their voices. There are few jobs. It is heartrending. I feel that as much as anything we need to bring jobs to Haiti. On the street I saw men in yellow shirts sweeping the streets; 5000 such are employed by hip pop musician Wyclef Jean. Back in the U.S. I bought Wyclef’s “Welcome to Haiti” album and listened to the songs.

“If I were president, elected on Friday, inaugurated on Saturday, assassinated on Sunday, back to work on Monday…” he sings – there is a link to his "Hope for Haiti" web site on this page…

I bought what I could from various vendors I met, but there are always more…

Thursday – Anticlimax / Paster Leon's Car Wash

It was still early in the morning, and there was still work to do and problems to fix. Up on the roof we found that one of the tanks was overflowing and water was dripping down in the yard. Doug looked at the way that all the pipes were connected between the three tanks on the roof and decided two additional check valves were need to prevent the water from flowing in the wrong directions. However, the plumber – Jilean – was not around, so nothing could be done.

Also, Pam had gone off the Jacmel and left it to me to show people how to use the two gallon sprayer to purify the water bottles before they are filled and given the children at the school. (It’s no good pumping clean water into dirty bottles.) This sprayer is a fairly complicated device with a pressure valve, a pressure pump, and it needs to be filled with a specific amount of chlorox and used to rinse out water bottles in a specific procedure. I was very determined to try to accomplish this training so that we could know we’d finished our work.

But there was no translator available, and it wasn’t clear who was going to be responsible for this task or whether anybody understood its importance. We had wanted to train Jackie but she wasn’t coming back to Blanchard until the next day, Friday. I thought I’d train the kitchen staff. I talked to Leon about this, but he was spread very thin and demoralized by the argument we’d had Wednesday morning. There were all kinds of things going, a group of men were rebuilding the latrines in the corner where the children line up to go to the bathroom during the day, and I saw that Dieux Just was working.

I was sitting next to Leon there in schoolyard, and he said couldn’t do the water bottle cleaning training Friday because there was another group coming in – “I have four groups coming in next week I am not with you tomorrow,” he said. He did agree to translate for the kitchen staff with me at 11:30 but it turned out he’d double booked this with a trip he had to take Doug on. Deliberately? I felt demoralized at this point, and it was very hot. No one was getting trained on the bottle washing protocol, the water wasn’t flowing right to the tanks and it was leaking in the yard. The water test from the shallow well / tank was still negative, so it would take another day to be sure that water wasn’t contaminated. And I didn’t know when the plumber was coming or what the plans were for the next day.

It was definitely an anticlimax moment, a type of moment I realized I’d known before after suddenly breaking through to accomplish something big but then realizing there are still many loose ends to tie up, and I want them to be done because although I’ve made so much progress I see I’m still a limited mortal being, nothing has changed, and I feel cheated somehow. I resignedly told myself “There’s nothing more I can do now,” and went up to the school office room, laid down, and rested on the bench until the depressing feeling passed.

After awhile I got up and went to see Ed and Greg who were building shelves in the storage room in back of the church. I hammered some nails for them (badly), but then Greg showed me how to use the circular saw to cut some boards for the shelves. That was exciting, something dangerous I hadn’t ever known how to do before. It worked out pretty well and I enjoyed it despite getting a nasty splinter in one finger.

When Doug and Leon returned, Doug hooked up the extra flexible hose pipe (originally intended for the well) to a faucet and washed Leon’s car as it sat in the yard. Leon was amused and astonished, and the kids and the kitchen a bit amazed; they probably hadn’t seen a car wash before.

We drove back to Saint Joseph’s after that. Stopped at the Carribean Market again a few blocks from the guest house and bought some beer. About dinner time Roy, Pam and Lyn came back from Jacmel and told us about their flight in the small plane, about the orphanage there, and about Roy’s ride on a motorcycle taxi.

Later on, we had a long meeting talking about feeling of anti-climax we all had; the financial issues, the sense that Leon was really having trouble managing everything and that stuff was piling up in the storage area so that he didn’t even know what he had anymore. Roy was upset that no preparations had been made to have a service with the communion set the Saint Marks congregation had sent for the church in Ibo Beach. We had also wanted to have a dedication service Friday for the water system, but didn’t know if Leon would be around.

We were frustrated because of our very American wish to have everything on a plan and schedule. But we were not in America, we were in a parallel universe where alone among us, Pam could receive calls on her cell phone but not send, and we’d heard it was snowing again in Washington and our families were shoveling snow. But in Port Au Prince it was always warm, always dry while we were there. Planning is minimal in Haiti because so many things don’t work well. The people do work hard and creatively, but it’s improvisational; Leon would have said “You have to be flexible.”

Friday - Last Day

We went to Blanchard in the morning. Jilean the plumber and Doug got the pipes straightened out so that the tanks filled and stopped leaking. I managed to get Pastor Luke to translate for me as I explained to the kitchen staff how the sprayer worked to purify water bottles, and then went over it again with Jackie.

We were all there, and Roy and Jackie led us in a dedication service for the new electric pump and running water. It was good that she was there for that, because Jackie is very spiritual, and it was good that Dieux Just and his son were also there. The water test from the tanks was negative, so it seems both wells are fine. Pastors Roy and Leon drove off together to visit a fourth compound that HOM has just started; they had some healing moments.

It was our last day; That night we would have one more dinner and one more meeting, and would then take the long flight back through Miami Saturday. That is all a blur to me now and not really worth writing about yet. To all intents and purposes, the journey was over that Friday afternoon even while we were still there. We felt like people waking from a dream slowly returning to consciousness of our normal life and we looked at each other and talked merrily and hugged a number of times that final Friday night in Port Au Prince and then Saturday until we finally parted at DC National Airport.

But the next week in a wonderful moment Pam and I learned that the doctors who came through with one of Leon’s four mission groups the week after us said the clinic at Blanchard was the best small clinic they’d seen in Haiti – partly because it had power and water (!)

And - here is a picture of me drinking the water from the faucet, the water the team and I had tested and set to flowing.


Its all theirs now, thanks be to God.