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.”
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