Food

Last week we started distributing food at the school.

It took a few days to get organized and is still far from being my favorite part of the day despite loving the idea of giving food to kids that many times go hungry.

It took us some time to find cooks that the village committee approves of. Then there was a long meeting about what they are entitled / not entitled to as part of the job and what is expected of them (yes: eat the food, wash the pots. No: give food to relatives, wash all the plates of the kids). The cooks requested and we agreed to collect extra money from the kids of the school so that we can improve and diverse the menu a bit. We ask the kids to bring the equivalent of 10 cents a day. From the entire school we are able to collect about 20 US dollars each day (about half of the kids bring money each day). This money is used to make a sauce or some cooked vegetables. We get about 1 spoon per kid. The entire process of collecting money, fighting with the cooks, making sure everything is done and distributing the food (while making sure the majority of it ends up at the school and not for the cooks) is quite time and energy consuming. Still – we are getting better at this and I hope it will be a routine soon. For now: some pictures from the first day of food distribution at the school.

Petite Section of Kindergarten

On the first day we tried giving the food outside.
Afterwards we started distributing inside the classes.

Video shoot - through photos

Last Saturday we went to shoot a video for Sila our friend/companion/translator.

Had fun.

Check out some behind the scenes photos. Will update when the video is ready.

Production meeting in the office in the morning

Sila and his gang. He used to be a semi-famous rapper.

The second location was a broken church.

10 months after the earthquake

Spare Time

Since I’ve been here I’ve read half a book (same one I started on the plane), saw one movie (as a social event) and watched one episode of a TV series.

Some things simply take longer here. My morning get-out-of-the-house routine seems to take longer. It now includes cleaning up my room (a bit) from the dust/spiders/mosquito corps of the previous night and includes applying all kinds of sun-screen lotions.

Any kind of meeting takes a very long time. An example meeting will usually include:

-         saying something

-         translator translates

-         person doesn’t understand

-         saying again

-         translator translates again

-         noticing a mistake in the translation (creole improving painfully slow)

-         person unhappy

-         trying to understand why person is not happy

-         getting more unhappy

-         …. 30 minutes

-         finding out where the misunderstanding was

-         moving on to the next subject

I spend a lot of time sitting around, watching kids play and trying to talk to them, answering questions.

our friend Bantigula and his aquarium

I spend some time staring at the wall because it’s the end of the day and we finally managed to get the village kids to go home.

me, updating my new blackberry. Soon to become a close friend

I spend some time updating this blog.

I go to sleep quite early, and wake up earlier than I did in Israel.

Still – time moves differently here. The concept of efficiency seems to be foreign to many of the daily operations.

     This weekend, for the first time since we got here we took 2 days off and out of the village. We came to our city hide-out on Friday evening (and celebrating the fun the city has to offer went to sleep at 9 PM J). Not going back until Sunday afternoon.

Other stuff....

Our little house has become an attraction for some of the village kids. Especially since Inbal does sports and arts with them, but also because we have cool gadgets such as computers and are basically the only interesting thing in the village. I like it at times, and find myself hiding in my room at other times….

Next week we need to find a way to distribute food to 300+ kids. Some of which are hungry, without causing too much disturbance to the school.

Our porch. We just finished building the bench we're sitting on.
The fence is also new. Now we can plant stuff.

kids fooling around

stretching

We have a School!

Check this out. Apparently when you take a building, put chairs and tables, hire teachers and enroll kids the end result is a school!

Sunday evening, one week ago. We had 3 rooms without a roof, but construction was going on full speed to finish before the morning. After a busy day of preparing classes and making sure everything is ready, we decided to return at 6 AM to organize our roofless class.

Then it rained.

Night before opening

At 6 AM, I was the first onsite. No roof. Quick re-grouping. Moving one class into the teachers ‘lounge’ (which at this point is an empty room the same size of a class), and stretching plastic tarps on one of the roofless classes so that at least there is shade.

Monday Morning

Plenty of time to finish up, shower and come refreshed at 8 AM when kids are supposed to arrive.

Didn’t factor in that on the first day of a new school, children and parents are excited and come early, there are dozens of people on the waiting list hoping to get their kids in, and that some kids come from far away so they come at various times.

7 AM, we’re still in the middle of ‘building the last class’, school is already full of excited orange kids.

We have full classes since the first day which in Haiti is some kind of a miracle, because rumors are that other schools start the first week with 20-25% of the pupils…

So there are still some glitches. We (the office) are not really sure which kid is going to what class as opposed to the class that they enrolled to. Need to get our lists straight. It took us the first day to find out what’s the best way to distribute water to 350 thirsty kids that are used to fight over water and food.

We are still trying to get the list of missing books from the teachers so that everyone can have all the books. But all-in-all, at 7:50 AM every morning, there’s a bell. Orange kids line up in lines in front of the flag, sing the national anthem and say a little prayer. Then go into classes in an orderly manner. Walking in the corridors – it sounds like a school.

We have a school!

A week later…2 days before school opening

It’s been a week since I wrote the previous two posts. I just didn’t have any opportunity in which time and internet collided. So – it’s Saturday, October 09, 2010. 8 PM. I’m sitting outside our house, listening to awful music from some party near by that will probably keep me awake at night and….. using wireless internet! I’m proud to announce the arrival of the 20^th century to Renaissance Village in Haiti! (21^st century coming soon to a theatre near you). 

School opens Monday so naturally it’s been a very very busy week. Tasks for this week included distributing over 3000 books, 300 T-shirts and backpacks to the kids who are planned to start school (done), arranging the classes (partial. We’ll try to finish tomorrow. Missing some chairs), finishing construction (roof on the second building was put today, but there’s still a lot of work to do. We may start inside a construction site), preparing the teachers (we did a best effort. Most teachers spent a lot of time today preparing and decorating their classes), decorating the school (a real painter. Not us. beautiful outcome. Almost done. Will attach pics once done), and some other logistics.

Parents in 'back to school' meeting

School almost ready....

In between we used our Israeli connections to ask the Magen David Adom representative in the general hospital in PaP to come check some of the village handicapped kids. They have a very nice rehabilitation center there, but the opportunity to spend a day outside the city plus a little begging did the trick.

We have a lot of follow-up for that. They all need more attention, physical therapy and new chair. We got an epileptic boy money for an EEG(using connections in a health related organization). Now trying to get finance for medication.

We packed 20000 water bags into a room since we don’t have water at the school yet

a lot of heavy lifting...

And… making our home a little more pleasant. Inbal made shelves and…. I helped J

First time for everything

Outcome

Today in the morning, we moved a big tent to be inside the school compound. We asked some other Israelis to come for a sleepover and help out. Moving the tent turned out to be much easier than anticipated, but we enjoyed the company.

The tent we moved..

Besides that we moved some stuff for the school, went to a near by village to copy some documents (I drove. Very scary), had a meeting with the security folks in the village about security for the school compound and had a visit from French embassy representatives that want to send 4 French volunteers to live here and help out. Plus the usual communication with the people in the village.All in all an easy 12 hour work-day that allows me to sit comfortably in the evening and blog.

Viva la internet.

What IKEA can teach the UN

On Friday we set out early in the morning to build a tent. We had a brand new Unicef tent lying around and needed to raise it at the school yard for extra space. You may be thinking of the tent you put up in scouts or camping with the family. That’s not it. It’s packed into 4 huge boxes and when built can house dozens of people.

The instructions were rather short, leaving enough room for error even to careful readers such as myself. Each error caused additional 30 minute work for a group of people.

Still - 7-9 people, 7 hours later we have a beautiful tent.

I’m writing this blog 2 days later and I can still feel my muscles (or should I say – lack of…). And I was not even thinking of doing the physically challenging parts of the construction.

Animals of Haiti

Cows and goats are frequent visitors of our little house in the village. In the beginning when I heard footsteps outside my window at 5 AM I got worried, but that’s usually just the friendly neighborhood cow.

I know it's not a cow. Couldn't find any cow pics.

Lizards of all kinds are common and quite impressive with different colors and patterns.. They are not edible so naturally they thrive.

However, without a doubt, the most widely spread animal in Haiti is the mosquito. It’s a wet season here (rains nearly daily, and we’re now in the middle of our second real storm), which means its high-season for mosquitoes as well. Even the locals that seem to adjust / accept nearly anything think that the mosquito attacks of the last few days are too much. We practically bathe in OFF (anti-mosquito spray) and I find myself abandoning my basic affection to living creatures and furiously chasing them around.