Sunday 11 July

With a final push we finished the kindergarten rubble clearance yesterday morning. As we ran out of tipping space, we were wheelbarrowing the last rubble across the main road. Sounds dangerous, but there was always one of us watching the traffic. Drivers always hit the horn hard whenever they see any activity in front of them and most traffic is slowish. The fastest cars are the 4wds, many of them owned by the UN and other agencies.

As we finished, Jackson and his wife and 3 sons (just his eldest here)arrived with 2 cakes and a long speech - it was emotional for everyone and we all felt quite sad as we set of back for lunch. We tried to explain to him that we take much more away from Haiti and the Haitian people than we give, but for him the thought that people are prepared to travel across the world to clear his rubble is just too huge. I'd like to see whether it would be possible to set up some sort of link between the kindergarten and one of our local junior schools.


Just for the afternoon I signed on for yet more rubble, this time at a residential site more in the countryside. For some reason, I'd expected there to be less damage in the country but actually it's just the same. I don't know whether it would have been more or less terrifying to have been out of the town when the earthquake hit. I would guess that any rescue work would have been much slower.

A treat last night. There were several people leaving and they clubbed together to buy all of us (125) an ice cream at the bar next door which has a rare American ice cream machine. Vanilla or pineapple heaven, especially with a little cane sugar rum over the top.

There is a constant turnover here as people sign up for anything from a week to several months. "Long termers" are virtually staff as they preserve the institutional memory for the project and usually take the lead on projects. Found out about another interesting one yesterday: two volunteers returned from 5 days on the coast north of Port au Prince being taught by a Canadian couple to build domestic water filters. These are simple and made with concrete moulds and then filled with gravel and sand layers, and can effectively filter the worst contaminated water at about 5 gallons an hour with help from microbes which (apparently) join in the fun a day or two after the process is started. The 2 volunteers brought back some sets of moulds and the plan is to start building the filters here. The cost is almost all labour so, with volunteers doing the work, these will be very cheap to produce. The objective is eventually to hand over the whole operation to a local organisation to carry on.

I talked to David Campbell yesterday about HODR's history and about the theoretical difference between disaster response and development. The growing demand from volunteers means that he (and the HODR board) see HODR doing elements of both in its unique style, and Haiti is beginning to provide the test bed for this. He is a very easy person to talk to and personifies the characteristics of most of the staff and volunteers here too. He looks younger than his 68 yrs - quite an achievement to set this up at 63.

Well our day off is disappearing fast. The remaining 3 wrinklies (we lost 1 leaver this morning) repaired some bikes and spent an hour riding slowly and carefully around town. There was a hope that the bar would have a TV set up for Spain v Holland but unfortunately (or fortunately by the sound of it) that didn't happened so I'm writing this instead. Next up, a read and a nap I think.....
Part of the work supporting the operation of the mayor's office - fairly basic stuff as you can see, but valuable and (now) highly valued.