Things You can do in Haiti

These past few weeks I have learned a few "more interesting" things that you can do in Haiti...

-Dig a trench across a public road to pipe water to a house across the street.
-Burn large quantities of trash on opposing sides of a main road to the Dominican Republic.
-Dig multiple large holes (Think about the fact that I needed help climbing out of each one) alongside this roads to bury the metal, glass, and remaining ash.
-Paint a sign on the nearby wall that says in Kreyol: "Attention! Do not litter here."



As you might guess, the last few weeks have been pretty interesting. We started a pretty major project: trying to clean up the mountains of trash in our area. Like many developing countries, Haiti has a very weak sanitation system. Basically, there is no formal way to dispose your trash. Burning trash, with the exception of metal and glass, is the most "environmentally" safe method here in Haiti. Anyway, are currently sending over 100 students each day during clean up time to pick up trash, make piles, burn the piles (with gasoline or kerosene), rake trash out of the ditches, dig holes, and bury non-burnable trash (metal/glass). We have even begun trucking plastic bottles back to campus for our recycling program.

We had a major push the first week of the project as the U.S. volunteers and Haitian staff members took smaller student groups outside throughout the day to pick up trash. Similarly, the project hired someone to literally dig holes all day next to our burn piles. Speaking of burn piles, these can contain almost anything you can imagine. Rotting food, general trash, tires, clothes, shoes, dirt, leaves, cans, diapers, and dead animals are only some of the treasures you might find. One of the piles even included 2 dead dogs and a dead cat. As you might imagine, the "hot dog" and barbecue jokes that began that day have never stopped...

Life has continued since that first, hectic week. As I mentioned before, we have started a recycling program for plastic bottles and aluminum cans. We have a pretty impressive collection of plastic, which I am very excited to see leave our campus. Also, we've expanded our zone of "clean" to more than six blocks on the main road, our entire surrounding neighborhood, and we are pushing towards another main road. Pretty exciting stuff. And just so people don't get too practical (or cynical on us) we ARE trying to make these changes more systemic by talking to local government, businesses, and citizens. Still not sure how this will all work out, but the effort is being made.

In other news, the other week I had some pretty great discussions with my students about national identity and what it means to be a Haitian. I found two questions to be pretty provocative for my students: (1)Are Haitians who leave Haiti with the intention of never returning still Haitian? (2) Could Mr. Moynihan (the president of the Haitian Project) ever be considered Haitian?

Their responses were pretty interesting and the best thing was that they did not agree with each other. I love watching my students disagree.

The other day I had one of those moments when I am forced to remember that this is not a usual school. Certain moments on certain days scream this. One of my favorites was cleaning up dinner with the principal of the school and watching him mop the floor to finish the job. Similarly, this past week our students were not doing a good job cleaning the cafeteria. So instead of class one day, I took my class and we cleaned both cafeterias, sweeping, mopping, and wiping down all the tables. We even returned and had class for the final 5 minutes! Craziness...

Looking to the future: final exams are next week! Yes, that was an exclamation point. I never realized how much fun tests are to give to others... Plus exam week here does not include normal classes, as everything stops and the students take a 2 hour exam for each subject. So, a week off from class planning! And a four day weekend!

A sad day for the Irish...I'm not getting many break this year for college football. A sad day.

ps. I'm not in either picture. Sorry! I wasn't there the day the camera was present...