Thursday and Friday we were back in Grand Goave, ready to take on some more projects. But first, we took a hike up the mountain to see the new “Be Like Brit” orphanage scheduled to open on the 2nd anniversary of the earthquake on January 12, 2013. I’m not sure I can do her story justice, so please,please check out www.belikebrit.org and watch the videos posted on the right hand side. It is a pretty amazing story…and looks like it will be one pretty amazing orphanage as well. It’s absolutely beautiful.
They were getting ready to pour the concrete ceiling in these pictures. We were told that once poured, they would leave the ceiling jacks in place for 21 days to let the concrete cure. In the United States, it takes 28 days, but because of the heat of the Haitian sun, it would take a few less in Haiti.
This is also the day we went to the new mountaintop property to help lay out the foundation for a new building. Hands and Feet has hopes that this will be a facility for the older kids to gain a skill or trade before they are turned out into Haitian society. They are really doing some fantastic things with these kids – not only taking care of their current needs…but also helping them plan for a future with the savings accounts they set up for them, and now planning to help them learn a trade to support themselves once they leave. Again – the vision is amazing.
(laying out the foundation with string)
(clearing the path for the string)
(and Beth…pretty proud of herself after she moved this massive rock)
When we came down from the mountain, we did spend some quality time with the kids. Lauren (the art intern) had been wanting to do this string art with the kids…a map of Haiti that the kids would paint, then use nails to outline the map, and finally wrap string around those nails.
I was really impressed at how much they all got into it. It was a good afternoon…spent helping them finish their crafts. She is doing some amazing things with them this summer. I was just reading her Facebook posts the other day…she’s got them making jewelry, making journals, painting on old t-shirt canvases, and making face molds. (yet to be determined what those are being used for). The intention…not only to give them a creative outlet and fun summer activities, but also to be able to sell something to the mission groups that come that these kids have made.
Hands and Feet is doing some wonderful things for these kids. I mentioned the mountaintop site before, and how they’re hoping to use it as a skill building facility for their older kids, but they’re also doing things at all of the sites to help promote responsibility and also teach them budgeting and help them keep learning, even in the summer.
One example at Grand Goave was the store. For each time the kids help with something (dishes, cleaning their rooms, etc) they are rewarded with points. Once every couple of weeks, Angie will take things from the donations the mission groups bring with them (flashlights, water shoes, sunglasses, costume jewelry, candy, toys, etc) and assign them point values. The kids then have the opportunity to “buy” things with their points, or they can save them for a bigger, more “expensive” item. What I thought was great was that she would tell them how many points they had available, and they would then need to figure out what they wanted and then determine how many points they had left, and if they could purchase more or if they needed to wait until they had earned more points first. So, it had not only a reward aspect, but a teaching one as well.
It was with sad hearts that we had to pack up and leave on Saturday morning. Sad hearts only because the time spent there went so quickly, and I knew it would most certainly be an adjustment coming home again to the normalcy of daily life here.
We couldn’t leave without a few final photos though.
(me Emmanuel and Egenn)
(me and Chadieu)
(and Odlin and myself…this little guy and I had quite the time playing “Red Hands” one night…those kids are all impressively good at it, and they slap hard too! There are a few I wouldn’t play with after the first time i got caught by one of their hits…like Chadieu in the picture above this one! I’m pretty sure Odlin took it easy on me…which I appreciated, and so did my hands!)
(one final photo of our group before leaving the site in Grand Goave and heading on another open air ride to Port Au Prince. I did get smart on the ride back…I wore a bandana to cover my head and ended up with hair that felt much less like straw than the trip in, and probably saved myself from a head-sunburn as well.)
Some of my favorite things about Haiti…and those things that I miss terribly, even after being home for a month.
The laid back atmosphere. Everything is done on Haitian time…meaning they may tell you you’re going to do something at noon…but it could be 1 or 1:30 before you get around to it. I only wish my schedule could be like that here sometimes…if I was being overly productive at home…i could push back going to work until I got around to it. Somehow, I don’t think that would go over too well…maybe if I explained to Beth that I was on Haitian time, she’d let it go??
Haitian pancakes (which were actually a mix from Walmart. I only wish I knew what they did to them to make them so amazing…I actually still have dreams about those pancakes),
Open air truck riding (while it made us gritty and our hair resemble straw, there is really nothing like experiencing a country through sight AND smell),
The openness and acceptance of the kids we met. They meet new groups of people every week and open themselves up to them and invite them into their world. It’s a beautiful thing.
I even came to appreciate the hot. You wake up and get out of bed and would be sweating already. I threw the “diet” plan out for the week, and ate whatever I wanted, and by sweating everything off, I managed to only gain a fraction of a pound, which came right back off plus some by the next weigh in.
The title of this post — the end…or is it just the beginning — I think it’s the latter. I can say with certainty that this trip will not be my last to Haiti. I loved every minute of being there. Every minute – whether donning my swimsuit to play in the ocean, or sweating my behind off painting the rack on the deuce…every minute was a blessing to me. I just hope that somewhere along the line, when I was being blessed in so many ways, I made someone’s day a little brighter by being there.