February 5th Email from Steve

Everyday here makes a lasting impression that will stay the rest of my life, the sights, the sounds, the people, the smells.  Today it was two men bathing in the gutter.  We had a short work day as we reached our main work objectives  for the week so we were able to visit the kids at the Children's Home again.

As we stepped outside the gate in the high wall that surrounds the home, we saw two men bathing in the gutter.  They had a plastic water glass and a bar of soap in a soap dish.  They would dip some water with the glass, pour it on their heads and lather up.  The roads and ditches here are full of garbage and trash and open sewer lines run into the them.  The water was about the color of skim milk.  Just as you start to think that the people here may no longer have homes and may not have many material possessions, but they don't look like they are starving and aren't wearing rags you see something like this and realize just how desperate things are here.  At home we might see someone down on their luck who really needs a bath and a change of clothes, but we don't witness people trying so desperately to maintain some kind of normality under such difficult conditions.  On a sad note, we found out today they may have to close the Children's Home due to funding.  There are 38 kids there from toddlers to teenagers who have no parents or whose parents can't take care of them.  The home is about half little , all of whom were taken in after the quake.

Today was a great reminder of how true it is when they tell disaster response volunteers how important it is to be flexible.  This morning I thought the team I am coming back with later in February was going to work here in this compound again.  Before dinner, I was told we would be staying here, but working on housing a little way from here.  Tonight I found out we are going to Petit-Goave and will be staying in a guest house there and working on some project in that small community.  Right now we are a little ways south of Port au Prince.  Petit-Goave is about another hour west of here on the south shore of the large bay that makes up the west end of the island.  It is supposed to be a prettier area and in a place where it is safer.  The guest house like here is inside a walled area.  It seems just about everything here is.  There are so many variables, so many teams staging though, so many things that need to be done and so many different skill sets, it really keeps the staff here jumping to stay on top of everything and to keep everyone safe and productive, you just can not know for certain what job you will do until you actually do it.

Today we had our first vehicles drive up our new road into the back of the Guest House compound.  It is at about the stage that we would call a sub-grade if we were building a forest road.  Not much gravel on it yet, it still is not smooth and there are still some cobbles and roots sticking up.  However, after driving to the Children's Home today, we realized it is smoother and wider than about 2/3rds of the roads in this area. 

The staff here are happy to have the additional access and it will provide safer access in the event of future problems.  The existing access would best be called an alley at home.  It's just wide enough for a car to drive down. There are car bodies, rubble, scrap piles of steel, welding shops and all kinds of things, not to mention its rough, bumpy and dead ends at the Guest House.  The new access opens onto a main wide road.  When Tom, the manager here told some of the team members we were going to turn the area into a road and they just couldn't see how.  Now after less than we week, it looks more like a road than anything else.  Think of building a logging road at home through a grove of trees with no bull dozers, no excavators, not even horses, just 25 men and two women with 3 picks, 5 shovels, 6 machetes, one ax, one hundred feet cheap rope and one pulley.
The plaster removal on the residence is done enough that the engineer came to check it out today.  He will develop the plan for making structural corrections, so there was no more for us to do until that is done.  They have already started delivering materials so it shows that we are contributing to more than just making more rubble, but we really did make a big pile.

Some of you have asked for the blog address again so here it is  http://www.heartsforh8i.blogspot.com/

That's it for now,
Steve