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pictures and donations update…

thehaitiexpedition — Sun, 30 May 2010 16:08:23 +0000

Hello!

So I’ve made a newer, easier way to donate, which is simply to click this link here and click on the box that you see:

http://benjaminhowe.chipin.com/haiti-disaster-relief

Give it a look and see for yourself! Thanks to all those who have already donated, your help has been totally invaluable, every single one. I’m going to put up some pictures of my week when the internet is working properly; it awesome. Finished the school build, rubbled and drove heavy machinery. woop!

What It’s Really Like: Part 1

thehaitiexpedition — Sat, 29 May 2010 15:45:15 +0000

No more Mr Nice Post.

So far I’ve focussed a lot on the good side of life here. To be fair, there is a lot of good to write about, so that’s why. However, I thought for this post I would try to accurately describe what life here is really like, what I’ve seen of local life and the situation here, so that you know and know what your money has gone towards.

Life at Base

Wake up at 6 in order to get ready. Transport leaves at 7.30, so we have to be fully kitted up and ready by then. Breakfast is a choice of oatmeal, corn flakes or bread and jam; with coffee, or if you’re up for powdered milk, tea. Always have to have oatmeal, nothing else sustains me past 8.30. Oatmeal isn’t much better but there you go. Dress and get tools ready for whatever job you’re on. We generally sign up the night before for a job, so you know where to go outside, and help get the necessary equipment. So far my week has consisted of leaving at 7 to do daily checks on the Bobcats; oil level, refuel, air-filters, diesel filter, hydraulic levels, that stuff. Work goes on until 11.30 when (theoretically) the transport comes to get you. The transport we use here, basically a rickety pick-up, are called ‘tap taps’, owing to the fact that communication between the 15-18 people crammed on the back and the driver is conveyed by tapping on the roof. Go, stop, someone’s fallen off; all of that stuff.

Work is hard. Full stop. Rubbling is non stop activity, sledge-hammering, cutting metal bars, carting away wheelbarrows full of rubble. Building work is similarly full-on. You can take a day of mental torment inputting data in the office if your body’s had it, but its only worth it if you really can’t face movement. School build has been gentler as of late, owing to the fact that the school has a roof now and so you’re in the shade when you’re plastering the walls, but it’s nearly done now. Working for the mayor’s office is more mental purgatory than physical, but it all adds up. So many people get taken out by heat exhaustion/fatigue/dehydration because the work is so hard and the climate so oppressive, but every day people get back on it.

We come back to base for lunch, generally rice and beans with one of: hotdogs; fish (fried or soup); vegetable stew; fried chicken; conch (Haitian sea-snail); or goat, with fried plantains, salad, hot onion stuff, sweet potato, soupy bean stuff, or a kind of onion gravy. Not bad at all, though it does get repetitive. Lunch is 2 hours to provide a pretense that we’re avoiding the day’s heat and to give volunteers enough time to recuperate from the first part of the day. 2 hours sounds long. It’s not.

Back to work is more of the same, or occasionally you do a different job in the p.m., and work stops at 4.30 to get people back here by 5 for dinner, which are the same foods as lunch. The problem right now is eating enough to fuel your body. The base is well over capacity for people, so food seems to be short. Almost every day I feel like I’m burning more than I can take in, which isn’t hard. Rice is usually abundant(ish) but the meat is one (often very small) piece each. Frequently the hungry do not stick to this, so there often isn’t enough to go round. It’s not seriously problematic or anything, just that everyone’s always hungry, and a full day of the hardest work you’ve ever done vs. two bowls of rice and beans = all round tiredness.

After dinner is the nightly meeting that lasts from 6-7 where the day’s work gets covered, newcomers introduced, work for tomorrow explained and meeting notes (general irritations, lost and founds, questions and announcements) addressed. By now you’ve had enough of paying attention, and meeting notes, unless truly important, which they only sometimes are, are the biggest annoyance, especially for long-termers who’ve sat through “please wash the dishes after yourself”, or “don’t take too much food” a million times.

Then is free time, except on Thursday when I do the radio show, which usually takes from 7-8ish. Some read, some scavenge for food, some go to the bar across the street. General free time activities. Lights go out at 10, which is when ‘quiet time’, a vaguely inforced rule begins. Bed is pretty much the only option now seeing as you can’t see and aren’t meant to be making noise, but it’s not like you’re not grateful for it anyway. Many people use the first 10 minutes of lunch for food and the next hour and 50 mins for sleep and are in bed well before lights out. Bed is either a bunk downstairs or a tent on the roof or in one of the few prized spots inside the base. Generally bed is a mixed blessing of gratefulness for rest and a recalcitrant attitude for more bug spray, more humid mosquito nets, more sweat and the inevitable train-wreck/drowning hippopotamus gurgle snoring you will encounter in (for some reason always) the bunk next to yours. Anyone who has fallen out with feeling at all human or useful in the morning can go and continue their night on the roof for general chatting, and there are always people there. There is a strict no alcohol policy on base, so there’s no revelry, which is basically a good idea if you want half the workforce to turn up the next day. Personally I expected there to be no alcohol whatsoever for the entire time I was here, and was surprised by the proximity of the bar to the base. Honestly I rarely feel like it, but I can’t say I’m not thankful for the opportunity for one or two cold beers on Saturday night after the week’s work. It’s thoroughly medicinal and thoroughly deserved.

Sunday is the one day off. Most sane people sleep lots, although you do find yourself inadvertently waking up at 6.30, unable to get back to sleep. Some people go to a nearby beach and all the usual stuff like laundry (hand buckets and soap) go on here. It usually heats up fast in the day, and 120 people all wake up around the same time, so sleeping past 8 usually doesn’t happen anyway. I made it to 8.30 last sunday, a personal record.

Repeat.

It sounds hard, and it is, but it’s also hugely rewarding, and the harder it is, the more it bonds you with the people you’re working with.

Just a couple of quick updates before I sign off. Radio show last night went well, but ended prematurely due to ‘technical problems’. That means the radio owner wanted us out to do something else, but hey. We had no translator and no local volunteer to speak as we were meant to, but we had a Haitian American called Frantz step in, who did a solid job. No recording of this one, because of aforementioned made-up problems, but next week. it’s going well now, Gage and I basically do it on our own, being left by the higher-up’s here who have lost interest, as long as we’re doing it right. We got some weird questions on the show, like: “some people are complaining that you haven’t fixed their house yet, and want to know when you will”. Pretty much every house here is broken, and people are living on the streets as a norm. Shanties made of sticks and tarpaulin is the modus operandi of everyone, so what do you say to something like that? We have been helping some locals, and when someone asks, “why not me?” it’s difficult to know what to say other than; sorry, we do what we can. It sounds a bit thin.

Finally, I led a rubble team for the first time a couple of days ago. This means coordinating the operation for that day, telling people what to do, how to do it, getting everyone there and back and keeping everyone in one piece. It also involves sorting logistical problems such as ‘the rubble pile is too big for anyone to climb and we don’t have any space to put stuff’. Locals are unsurprisingly quick to come up with solutions that generally involve dumping it on their neighbours land, but finding a workable solution is trickier than that. It was a good day and I was happy to be leading, felt like the hard work i had done was recognised in that. Also, we turned a nightmare site into the most efficient, smooth running operation ever. It had an in-door and out-door for wheelbarrows; easy-load rubble slab (a chute where gravity did the hard work for us), 3 tiers of volunteers plying each other with rubble…well, maybe you had to see it, but it was glorious I tell you, glorious.

That’s it for now. expect part two later for the politics and ins-and outs of what’s going on here. Any questions or comments, please send them through.

fin.

What It’s Really Like: Part 2

thehaitiexpedition — Sat, 29 May 2010 15:40:15 +0000

Haitian Life

So even part 1 was still quite tame because writing about life on base took longer than i expected. What I’d like to write about now is what life is like outside of here, in the real disaster area, as far as my limited experience has taken me.

While it is a (necessary) bubble inside the base, life outside is chaotic at best. Truly I am in awe of how people merely get along here, because I’m trying and I haven’t managed to work out how they do it.

There is no banking system here locally. People have to think about how to accumulate money for the next day or two, and there is startlingly little local progress in terms of daily living. The tarpaulin and stick 5 foot by 5 foot shacks that people erected after the earthquake on the 12th January are largely all still there. A friend of mine here questioned it and thought, however harsh it sounded, that it was hard to understand why they hadn’t done more. It was pretty interesting because the answer isn’t as immediately obvious as you think. Probably, I still don’t fully understand the complexities of it. Something to consider though, is that if people have no real way of accumulating money, or anywhere to keep it where it won’t get stolen, what do they do? The same applies for raw materials. If you live in a community where everyone lives in the same tented area as you, as soon as you work on building something better, will it not just get stolen? So whats the point? Its pretty difficult to consider.

AID. aid aid aid. Now this is tricky. Haiti has basically been living off of aid for the last 10 years, and being here makes you think that they have developed a pretty aid dependant way of life, even on a local level. I want to talk about this more in a different post, but there is a very split culture here of wanting aid and NGO help; a distrust of NGOs; a serious need to do something about their own situation, meaning the cessation of aid; and a desperate need for help and aid. You do the math; it’s not easy. I’ll elaborate more when there’s more time.

I’ll have to go for now, there isn’t enough time to write more before I go to work, so hopefully there’ll be part 3 tonight. But the last thing I’ll say is that Haiti is devastated. It may have faded from the news, but the earthquake still looks like it happened not long ago. The situation for Haiti is pretty desperate, and the real work that needs to go on is getting the government working properly; a subject I would like to know more about, so if anyone knows, please message me.

Quickly, my news is I rented a motorcycle for the last few days to get around and had to quickly get used to driving in pandemonium. Helmets and padding are not options here. Also they drive on the right. 50% of the time. So basically, there isn’t a rule for where you drive, it’s usually the biggest car wins.

Driving Bobcat all day today, plus working on a demolition site. There’s more news to come but i’ll have to post it tonight. See you then.

What it’s really like, part 3: 27/05/2010

thehaitiexpedition — Sat, 29 May 2010 15:26:53 +0000

An Appraisal

Because it’s all I can manage, to say what it’s really like would be impossible. I’m sort of at a loss for what to say. Perhaps should not have started trying to say what it’s ‘really like’ at all. The problem is that it’s difficult to transpose your cultural values onto another culture and make a direct comparison, it doesn’t really work.Even though I’m right here, it can feel like I’m a million miles away from being able to understand what it’s really like here.

I constantly have to argue with locals about the fact that they think we get paid. One such encounter occurred while I was working on a drainage system for the base yesterday. It’s serious because they think that we have come and are taking jobs away from them, and making money off of the disaster, which is not good for our relationship. we have the word ‘volunte’ on our backs, meaning ‘volunteer’, but i speculated the other night that while ‘volunteer’ is socially coded in our country to mean someone who offers services, generally for free, it really might not mean that here. It’s often a very hand-to-mouth way of life here, and I suspect ‘volunteering’ doesn’t go on much, for obvious reasons, so I have a feeling it just doesn’t translate.

The buildings are smashed, tents line the streets. But what do the words mean to you? Their meaning is difficult even to me; it’s such a common sight by now that it’s easy to catch yourself thinking about rubble sites as rubble sites, rather than people’s homes.

Life appears to be generally accepted to be far more fleeting here than at home. I see very few old people here, and at a guess I would put the average age at 30 or less. It’s incredibly dangerous as an everyday way of life, or at least what you and I would consider dangerous: my motorcycling expedition the other day was proof of that. No-one wears protective clothing on motorbikes, and the roads are terrible, and excessively seldom paved. There seems no traffic laws, or if there are, they’re not enforced, and if they were, there would be no-one to enforce them. Today I saw a family of 6 on one motorbike, as they meandered past the back of an operating digger carrying a ton of rubble. It was my job for part of the day to stop traffic and people from being too dangerous round the diggers and I have a feeling I failed spectacularly.

A little boy of 2 got hit by a motorcycle outside of my school build the other day. I gave him first aid with 2 others and got told that I wasn’t meant to. There are obviously accidents of that nature all the time here. I’ve seen 3 car crashes since I’ve been here, one building site accident involving a man being crushed (but thankfully not killed) by part of a falling building, and then this the other day.

I don’t know. the last part of this post (because it could go on forever) will just be that it is impossible to think you know whats going on here, even with this kind of direct experience. We get some hostility from people when we work, not often, but sometimes, and it’s difficult to fathom. Similarly, sometimes when we work the owners of the house help out loads (this is, incidentally, the most common situation, and I have found the people here to be mostly honest and hardworking), sometimes they do nothing or I’ve seen one occasion of them berating us. Sometimes on the radio show I’ve fielded; not explicitly aggressive, but certainly loaded, tense questions about why we’re here. It’s difficult to work out, because you think you’re trying to help, and don’t understand the reaction. However, I spoke about this with some friends yesterday, and here’s what we came up with:

it’s a mistake to think you can transfer your values and thoughts to the people here. None of us (at least I hope not) will ever know what has gone on here really. A friend of mine, Brian, illustrated it well: the earthquake struck at 4.30ish. Imagine you’re in one of the houses that doesn’t collapse. You walk outside and you see your car is crushed by a tree or rubble or something. Immediately you might think of how terrible it is; oh my god, my life’s going to be hard, why’d this happen etc, etc. Then as you walk out, you would realise that not only is everyone else’s stuff destroyed, but that every single other house is broken, smashed, demolished on your street. Then you realise that it’s not your street, but your whole block, then the whole area, then the whole city that’s been totally levelled. After that; who knows, for all you know, it’s country-wide, and it is. Not only that, but imagine walking down that street where so many people have just died. People that were here right after the earthquake said that the bodies lined the streets. Often we work on houses where several people died. Many of our local volunteers lost mothers, fathers sisters and brothers, usually more than one. I’m entirely not surprised that some people feel tense towards the people who have come in the help demolish buildings, perhaps the building where you’ve lived all your life, or for generations, where you were born, and where your mother and sister died just a few months ago. There are plenty of other tensions going on here, it’s not like you can hope to grasp it, and I don’t want to go on and on, but I do want to give you an idea.

That’s it. That’s not a pleasant update, but I think having started to try to say ‘what it’s really like’, if I left it out, I would be doing it a sever injustice. I also want to say that for the most part, the people are friendly, helpful and grateful. I have people calling the radio show all the time saying how much they appreciate us and the work we do. Strangers will sometimes come to help you with your work. After 5 minutes of meeting someone, they will often teach you the creole word for ‘friend’: sounds like ‘zanmi’, that’s how I say it anyway. Life in Haiti is beautiful in its own way, but I wanted to show how tough it is for people living here, to try to give an idea for those of you reading.

Pictures to follow.

- Zanmi ou, your friend

Orphanage Update….

thehaitiexpedition — Tue, 25 May 2010 22:33:11 +0000

OK Becks here, so I’ve just arrived back from my twice weekly afternoon project at the local orphanage, which today was quite stressful. The building that all of the kids were in in structurally unsafe (where I’d been teaching them for the past 3 weeks..) so today I was told that they had moved into a large tent in a nearby field.

Upon arrival it became clear that the tent was too small for the amount of children that we had coming in to play- it is incredibly difficult to organise because i’ll have say 20 children to start with, so i’ll begin an activity and some will leave, some will arrive, some will fall asleep because the site is shady and they are exhausted, and some are too weak/sick to join in. The ones that do want to play are a joy to teach, but the organisation of the orphanage is more than slightly dodgy…

A volunteer today met with the ‘owner’ of the orphanage to find out how Hands On could be of better assistance to them- we have since found out that some of the orphanage owners were asking for a large quantity of tents for their kids, from charities such as Hands On or UniCef, which they then went on to sell at the local market just minutes after being given them…. the owner also refused to comment on how he gets paid and when I asked him where the orphans sleep at night, he just shook his head, smiled at me and said he didn’t know….makes me very frustrated.

On a better note, I helped a child with learning difficulties through the use of some art therapy techniques today- we found that by drawing the infinity symbol helped to calm a lot of the more rowdy children down so we were able to teach them more effectively and help keep their attention (this is often very hard through such a language barrier!)

I am starting to develop a teaching programme for volunteers from Hands On to teach our local volunteers English, so that we can all communicate better on job sites, making for a happier and also safer environment (you want to be aware of who’s swinging what slegehammer etc etc). So yeh, that starts tomorrow….

Got to go now, more updates from me and the orphans soon. xx

Radio Show

thehaitiexpedition — Mon, 17 May 2010 01:17:46 +0000

OK, until I work out how to get the player up, the radio show is here.

http://hodr.podbean.com/

Half Way Through; Riots, Radio and Rubble 16/05/2010

thehaitiexpedition — Mon, 17 May 2010 01:09:41 +0000

Updates for my Sunday Night posting. Big, big week.

Alright, there’s been a lot of stuff going on this week, so the post will be quite long, but i can put up pictures and allsorts.

Politics first. There’s been some rioting in Port au Prince, and also a couple of NGO workers have been kidnapped. We’re not really near PaP here, so it hasn’t been going on here, but we do need to go there at some point to get money (there are no banks/cashpoints within a couple of hours drive), and we would need to pass through there on our way back to Santo Domingo. So that’s a little crazy, but it’s a long way off yet so hopefully it’ll calm down. The effects were felt here, we were without fuel for a day which meant no water except what was in our stocks and no light, electric etc. Back to running as normal now.

OK, that out the way, the work started with the school build, a project I’ve been privileged to be involved in, and I got on it on the first day the wooden frame was erected. Now it looks awesome and we are plastering the walls inside and out. Check it:

So that’s really cool. I did some tool repair here at the base, because all of our tools are completely B.r.o.k.e.n. Sledgehammering all day and piling rocks on things apparently makes them break. For those of you interested, I don’t think I’ve posted much about the base yet. The pictures are in there of the base.

But, after that, the fun began. I’ve spent some time rubbling different sites, mainly on one called ‘Yvone’, which is a really big site, and involves a few big floors of sledgehammering and carting rubble. It is a fun site though, and the people there are wonderful, lots of friends. Back at the base, I signed up for ‘Bobcat Ops’ for one of my days of work. A Bobcat is a heavy digger with tyres and a compact shape for maneuverability, but still, it’s a big boy. I assumed I would be assisting the Bobcat team by moving things, clearing the way for the diggers, making tea. Hardly exciting, but I did it on the request of a friend here. When I turned up, it turned out that they needed DRIVERS. I have no experience. Or should I say, I had no experience, because for the rest of the week, I have been driving that Bobcat around and basically doing the best job on base. This is essentially training for taking the Bobcats out on site, which will help a clearing process, or the safe destruction of an unsafe house no end.

Just quickly, as a break, we played the U.N. Sri Lankan cricket team for a friendly game the other day after work. With 3 people who knew how to play cricket, and the rest being American, it was tough. Well, we lost. But, I took a wicket with some killer leg spin, and we scored 50 runs between us. I was proud of our effort to be honest.

In other news, I have been running a radio show with another guy who volunteers here called Gage Love, an awesome guy. We’ve basically been running a sort of ‘HODR news’ for the locals, fielding questions and trying to promote our efforts. We play a western song and a Haitian song (ours is usually Micheal Jackson, they LOVE him here). We then give informational and then anecdotal updates on what we’re doing; we run a call in show, do a sort of informal english lesson, then do any other announcements. We’ve made it into a podcast, and I should be able to put it up on the blog, please feel free to check it out. Be aware that 1) The first intro bit is in Creole, you won’t understand it, 2) There has to be a Creole translator there translating everything we say 3) They call me Jim here, don’t be confused. It’s quite long, about an hour, but have it on background if you want. Also, for the phone in: Hatian phone-in’s consist of an old mobile phone and a microphone pressed up against it. It works infrequently, so forgive the technical problems about 40 mins in.

That’s about it, well, not really, there’s still so much but this post will go on forever, so I will try to post later with more. It is still hot here. I mean hot. It might sounds great to be in the Carribean right now, but we are talking over 100 farenheit every day. It gets up to 40 celcius. That is meltingly hot. I’ve been taken out most of the day by some serious fatigue and heat exhaustion, but I’m alright

Thanks for looking, and any more comments or donations, please send them through.

Big Love

orphanage and hospital updates

thehaitiexpedition — Thu, 13 May 2010 22:23:17 +0000

okay hi everyone,

just a short post to keep you updated with the status of the projects that i (becks) have been working on recently.

I have taken over as temporary team leader of the orphanage team, we go out to the site and play, sing, dance and do arts and crafts with the little’uns (and some very big kids as well). I teach English to them, mostly by the medium of song and dance, and they seem to be picking up a lot. Was holding this little girl today and everyone kept coming up to me saying ‘take her home, take her home,’ these kids are so desperate to have a family its so difficult leaving them there at the end of the day.

I experienced my first shift at the hospital today as welll. apart from organising stock, transporting patients and working in the pharmacy, i also was lucky enough to be invited to watch my first amputation, something which was a truly remarkable experience. the grace and expertise of the doctors here who get flown in on a weekly basis from Miami is stunning, the surgery was quick, faultless and i was left feeling very lucky to have been allowed into surgery on my firstday at the field hospital.

more updates later. love to all you guys reading. xx

Good Morning 11/05/2010

thehaitiexpedition — Tue, 11 May 2010 12:07:27 +0000

Its 6am.

Just got up for work. Quick oatmeal and tea and off for a hard day’s ‘rendering’ (thats plastering for all you non-Americans). Body feels a little beaten up already and its only tuesday. Good day sledgehammering yesterday, but it makes your back feel like this.

There are riots in Port au Prince, or so I’ve heard, has it made it back on any news yet? Anyway, it’s stopping us getting fuel which means we can’t run the generator here, which is potentially problematic for the base’s water and food situation. There’s already limited water and no bread. But lots of Oatmeal. Everyday, more oatmeal.

But its going really well here, and i also need to do a donation shout out:

Amanda Costello: 30 Pounds

Phil Connor: 20 Pounds

Beatrice Howard: 50 Pounds

Which is brilliant, thank you so much. Someone asked in one donation email if donations are still needed, and the answer is a big YES. please keep donations coming in. I promise to post pictures asap, hopefully today.

Kyle

Updates and stuff

thehaitiexpedition — Sun, 09 May 2010 01:20:48 +0000

OK,

I’ve decided to update twice a week, once nowish, saturday night or sunday morning and one on wednesday. This is a bold move considering I have no idea if anyone is even reading this and trying to get on the internet here is understandably impossible.

Its been a great week, and im attaching pictures of what I’ve been up to. got involved with the project to build a school here in Leogane, which was great, we got to erect the shell, and the school is now well under way. Most of the time I rubble. Rubbling involves going to somewhere where there is a collapsed house and a)smashing it with sledgehammers, b)cutting out the metal framework, and c)carting the rubble somewhere useful. Each house usually takes about 5-6 days with a team of 10 or more.

This is crazy. Its hard to explain that practically EVERY SINGLE building here has some kind of damage. Most are levelled, or in a state where they need a demolition team (us, usually) to come and tear it down. But these are people’s old house’s you’re dealing with here. The family sometimes stands there while you smash away and pull out odd treasured posessions. I find that hard.

Also, lots of injuries here. I buggered my knee by running with a wheelbarrow full of rubble. Wheel hit rock. Barrow stopped. Knee did not. That took me out for the afternoon, but the most common injury is definitely heat exhaustion. Loads of people go out with that one. Swinging a sledge in temperatures that g towards 40 celsius is tiring, take my word for it.

Anyway, its less scary now, no more earthquakes as yet. Someone getting in touch and telling me how the election is going would be great, i have literally no idea out here. Pictures aren’t really uploading at the mo, so i’ll try to get them on later.