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.