Safe and Sound in Haiti

I arrived safely to Haiti yesterday and I'm staying at an amazing place, it's called the New Life Children's Home. It's only a few minutes from the airport, and it has security walls all the way around with guards. The minute you come in the gates, you feel safe and at home, an oasis from the craziness that surrounds it. It's only $35 a night and it includes breakfast and dinner. This is about a third of the price of a hotel room in Port au Prince if you're lucky enough to find one available, and the food is great. They have an orphanage with about 120 kids, many of them handicapped or missing limbs, and they run a primary school for the younger ones. They have a nice garden and some small livestock. They have American youth volunteers that help take care of the kids and it is so wonderful to watch how they love the children and how the children love them. In the evenings some of the volunteers play basketball and soccer with the older kids and some play on the playground with the younger kids and some just take a beautiful baby from the nursery and hold them or smile at and talk to the handicap ones. They have a program in the evenings in which they sing, do skits, share testimonies, etc. They are starting an English immersion and computer school in the near future. Like all of the orphanages in Haiti, they are already way past capacity as far as # of kids, but how can you turn these beautiful children down that have nowhere to go?

My dream is that someday we can do something like this. I'm envisioning a volunteer program similar to that of OSSO in which American college aged students, retired couples, and even families could come down and serve as mentors and help teach the kids English in an immersion school and offer them the love that every child deserves. The volunteers would serve as the temporary "parents" over the group of kids that they will share a bunk house with, giving them the opportunity to read to the children, pray with them, have "family time" etc, helping fill in the void that so many orphans have in their lives. We'd provide the volunteers with a safe environment and the opportunity for them to share their love with some of the children that need it most.

If we built the school sustainably, we could save so much money. We could also involve the students in the care of these sustainable systems and use them as hands on learning tools to teach students how to be better stewards of the land, providing them with valuable knowledge and skills that they can then share with their families. We want to produce families that are self reliant, something that is in great shortage here in Haiti. In the climate zone that we are in, it is possible for a family to be almost entirely self reliant with very little land if they know how. Of course teaching our students English and computer skills will greatly improve their chances at being employable someday, but with Haiti's rocky political history, people should be prepared and able to provide for themselves if necessary.

Building with earthbags would be the biggest money saver in the construction of the school, and if done right, it can produce very beautiful structures that are very earthquake and hurricane safe. The main limitation to building with them is that your buildings can only be one story. After you've read about earthbag building, make sure to look at "The Sun House" that was built in Haiti and suffered no damage during the earthquake, you can link to it by going to the "Projects and Pictures" link and then "Vertical Wall Homes".

This link has a video of a beautiful school that was built in Africa for $24,000. I have talked to Tiffany, the founder of Shine On Sierra Leone and believe that we could duplicate the process at the same cost.

Here's a site explaining greywater- what it is and how it can be reused. If the school were to use composting toilets and greywater, there would be no need to connect to the city plumbing system, saving lots of money, not to mention all of the raw sewage that goes untreated into the rivers and ocean in Haiti.

This TED conference talk w/Amy Smith is on creating charcoal from waste products. This could be a valuable tool that could help us become more self sufficient at our school and could offer some students a small business opportunity.

Here is Amy showing a group of students how to make charcoal- the video's a little long, but the process is definitely something we could duplicate at our school.

Here are some Haitians with their charcoal making business using Amy's method.

This is a desciption of rocket stoves- what they are and how they can save the amount of fuel that families use. These will save families a lot of money in what they spend on charcoal as well as reduce deforestation, especially when combined with the alternative charcoal sources described above.

Aquaponics could be used to create a talapia pond/garden system that could we could reproduce in Haiti. While I was here the first time, we caught some Talapia out of a pond in the yard of the guy's house I was staying at and ate them for our Good Friday supper. This is a resourceful do it yourself aquaponics site.

Here's a video about the founders of SOIL and their work with composting toilets here in Haiti. Here are a couple of videosshowing composting toilets in use in Haiti. This is a blog post i liked that shows an indoor composting toilet- something that I don't think that I'd be brave enough to try...

Here's something really cool that I learned about in Mexico. One of the students in the class there had an oyster mushroom growing business and he approached me saying that it might be a good idea in Haiti. It turns out that they are super easy and cheap to produce in a warm climate and they have a very high protein content, similar to meat. Instead of straw we could maybe use the coffee pulp waste product (and then use what's left after growing mushrooms to feed goats, pigs, etc.). Levi (the Mexican business owner) grows a kilo of mushrooms for a production price of 25 cents. He turns around and sells them for about ten times his production cost, so it could be a good microfranchise idea, and Levi also said that they could be grown in small amounts under tables, etc. inside people's homes to supplement their diets. It's even a profitable business in the states. These guys in California started their oyster mushroom business a year ago and now have 15 employees working for them.

This orphanage in Les Cayes has implemented many of these ideas and could be a good resource. They are the ones that built the "Sun House" earthbag home.

Here's an article about a group of BYU volunteers that is on the ground this summer in Haiti. I'll be going over to Leogane in a few days to spend some time with them and see if we can collaborate in the future.

This is an article that describes using livestock to cycle nutrients into the soil. If we fenced off our growing area with walls into fourths, we could rotate our goats, pigs, and meat chickens through one section at a time, thus fertilizing that area and clearing it of crop residues at the same time. By staggering when each section is planted, one section will be in the harvest phase at any given time. We could use portable chicken "tractors" like they have here at the New Life Children's Home for some of the laying hens to help control weeds and fertilize different areas outside the garden area that may need it.

If we save our own seeds we can save money and teach students a valuable skill.

Some earthbag cistern options that would save a lot of money and store rainwater runoff from our buildings for emergency use as well as meeting some of our agricultural needs

It would be a good idea to keep bees to produce honey, pollinate our plants, and teach the students another useful skill. The "top bar hives" described in this link seem to make a lot of sense for our purposes- we can make them ourselves.

A solar well like this one that Foyer de Sion recently got on their new property would be a good choice.

With an average of 8 hours of sunshine a day, it probably goes without saying that we'd want to use solar power (and generators for backup) to save money on electrical bills.

Once the buildings are done and we are able to provide a secure environment (ten foot earthbag walls with razorwire around them and security guards), we could start a volunteer program.

Tomorrow we've got to go to the border to get the truck registered for July. I tried opening a bank account today but the lines were so long I wouldn't have made it to the front in time, even though I was there two hours before they closed. I'm going to pay someone to stand in line for me on Thursday or do it on Friday when Brazil is playing in the world cup and everybody is home watching the game. (Everyone has Brazilian flags on their cars and houses for some reason.)

Jeremy gave me ten new laptops to bring down and give to a school. I made it through customs without any problems, luckily they didn't check my bags, I don't know if they'd have given me a hard time or not. I'm excited to deliver some of them to a school tomorrow.