Countdown?

I haven’t written in quite a while. I’ve been busy, and didn’t have anything special to report. Or so I thought….. Since I have a ticket home in a little over than two months, I’m already in ‘summary mode’. Thinking of the things I will miss and the things that I will not. Yesterday evening during dinner, we were chatting about another ordinary day and suddenly realized that our ordinary may be a little… extraordinary.

So – here’s a short description of one day in Haiti.

We drove to the village. Traffic was reasonable (summer vacation).

First, we went to talk to a man living in the village who is also a TV cameraman. We wanted him to volunteer to come in and talk to the kids in the summer club that we’re planning. We want one of the weeks for the older kids to be about Journalism. We will give each 4 kids a task to find and write a news story. He really wanted to help, but wanted to find us a real reporter as opposed to “just a cameraman”. We tried to keep it reasonable, but may end up hosting one of the famous reporters in Haiti in our little unofficial camp. When we got out of his house (with the details of his two daughters to enroll to the camp), there was a cellular phone engineer waiting for us in order to arrange connection of the community center to electricity (the phone company is a partner and they are donating the power). We are in the last construction phases of a community center that will hold a cyber area, health clinic, library and various meeting / class rooms for the community to use. We put him in touch with the construction engineer – and spent a few minutes discussing how we can use the community center (which is still under construction) as a VIP area for a presidential visit next week (President Clinton of the US and Haiti’s Martelly will be coming). By the time that was arranged we were just in time for our next meeting: starting to plan the community center content. We asked one of the ladies of the village committee and a young man that we like and have worked with before to drop by so that we can talk about how we can run the center, what kind of activities it will hold, how to keep it financially viable etc. We’ll be meeting again next week to continue the process.

 

The school year is over, but there are still activities that take place. Yesterday:

-         Kindergarten parents came to get report cards.

-         First day of registration for the kids summer club (and we’re nearly fully booked).

-         Second lesson of our new computer program (yeepee).

-         Connecting the school vegetable garden to a drip irrigation system (the vegetable garden and the irrigation system is something we’ve been trying to get to work for a couple of months now. Still working on it).

-         Summer cleaning of the classes.

-         Installing of a new gate for the school (2 weeks of back and forth and buying more cement just for the installation!. We ended up with a huge bumper at the entrance to the school which we didn’t plan).

 

Kaleta came to register for camp with her little brother



Preparing curriculum and trainers for the summer club and computer program has been very time consuming and we’ve been working hard on finding and training the local youth to make our special activities work well. Being basically pessimistic, I had a great time seeing the first couple of computer classes being delivered and accepted with joy J

Summer computer class



On our way out we quickly stopped in the house of one of the school cooks to arrange with her selling of extra flour from the school feeding program so that it doesn’t rot during the vacation. We’ll keep the money to use in the kitchen next year.

Got home before 8 PM and made a nice dinner. We were using google to find a good way to cook a malanga root and came to the conclusion that there is no….

Not really related to this post. Sue me.