Hi all,
This will be the last report from Haiti this trip. We fly home tomorrow and I will be coming back with the Vashon Island United Methodist Church team in two weeks.
Today we took a teeth rattling, bone shaking and bladder splitting ride up to the the village of Furcy. Furcy is just below the top of a mountain that lies two ridges south of us here. It is about 5,000 feet in elevation. The village consists of a clinic, a church a school and some small farm huts. We took a very bumpy road up the 12 miles from here, a few hundred feet above sea level, to the top of the first ridge, and through a saddle that connected to the next ridge.
The road up was steep, bumpy and crowded for the first half the distance or so. As we climbed in elevation the soil changed from the chalky white rock that is around Port au Prince to very red volcanic soil. When we got to the top of the second ridge, we parked the van and walked about 3/8 mile down a steep trail to Furcy. Furcy is an agricultural area and the mountains are terraced from the tops, over 5,000 feet to the bottom. The terrain looks a lot like the steep portions of Hawaii with the long, steep, narrow, parallel vertical draws that run top to bottom, except it is almost all cleared and terraced. At Furcy the mountain top has pine trees, banana trees and bamboo where it has not been cleared and terraced. There are also black raspberries that look just like ours at home. The farm plots are fairlyy small and they grow all kinds of produce. When we were there they were harvesting cabbage. We were told that because of the poor roads and infrastructure about 60% of the produce they grow goes bad by the time they can get it down to marked. The view from Furcy is beautiful, but you can see some serious erosion in various places. The crops looked good, but there were lots of areas you could tell had been farmed but were not any more. We were told that the last hurricane pretty much destroyed the entire local farm "industry" but that seed and fertilizer had been brought back in and production is picking up again.
Today was clinic day and there were a number of Haitians waiting for the doctor and nurse. They come to the clinic one day three weeks a month. Although Furcy itself is quite small the school and clinic serve a population of thousands. We were told people will walk 10 miles to the clinic from further out in the mountains. Unlike around Port au Prince, most of the homes were not concrete block, but were either hand split lapped wood siding over bamboo frames or mud and stick waddle. The homes were about 15 feet plus or minus on a side and most were one or two rooms. There are some concrete block homes, but they did not seem to be the majority like down in the city. Some of the buildings have electricity. They run it up from further down the mountain using barbed wire. It is strange looking up and seeing barbed wire run through the trees. Insulators are anything that won't conduct electricity. One was a plastic dish soap type bottle stuck on a cut off limb. The wire was run through the loop formed between the handle of the bottle.
We also visited the school. We packed in school supplies for the kids, along with a few toys. The kids and principal were very happy to have visitors. As I told you before all the schools operated in Haiti are fund by churches and other NGO's. The kids all wear school uniforms that identify which denomination's school they attend. As you go around in Haiti you see kids in all kinds of different colored school uniforms. At Furcy there was a real contrast between the bright clean school uniforms the kids wore and the clothes the older people were wearing around the farms. Even though the schools are sponsored by churches and non-profits families still have to pay some tuition for their kids to go to school. Only about 55% can attend, even with scholarship programs to help. Many poor families put a very large percentage of their income for the kids to attend. One of the outcomes of the quake is that the Haitians are even poorer than they were due to the loss of work and the local churches are not getting the revenue from their own members they were, so their having an even harder time supporting the schools and clinics.
When we got to Furcy, we only met older women, other than the people we met at the medical clinic and school. The children were at school and the men were at work. One very elderly woman was weaving large baskets out of strips of bamboo that were about 20 feet long. Some our members bought some baskets, and she showed us how to push the bottom of the basked up to form sort of a hat shape in the bottom to make it easier to carry on your head. We visited a number of the homes. As we started walking back to the van we met some of the men coming home and other kids who were wearing different school uniforms because their school is sponsored by a different denomination. If I remember correctly, the Methodist Church sponsors over 100 schools in Haiti.
One of our members will be bringing a team back to Furcy in April to start construction on a guest house, so outsiders will have a place to stay when they visit. This is important for not only medical and construction aid workers, but also for services such as agricultural education for the farmers. In addition to packing in the school supplies our visit gave our team member a chancee to see where she would be bringing her team before they actually get there. Furcy would be a pretty rustic place to just show up at if you didn't have a little advance knowledge. If you would like to see the Furcy area and some of the Methodist Church's work there you can check out this youtube link for Mountains of Hope for Haiti. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Br5LklsXueA
Today is the day the President is supposed to step down, but he did not because the legislature had extended his term until May after the earthquake. There was a little unrest and we saw lots of police and UN forces on our trip back from Furcy, but we did not witness any problems.
Well I guess that about finishes things up for now. I will forward some photos after I get home and have a chance to get them from the camera to the PC.
Steve
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