Meetings, more Meetings, and some Exciting Car Rides
The last few weeks have been filled with some pretty exciting events, which I will summarize to give a taste of how busy we have been. Our first meeting was only two days after we arrived, when we went to meet the mayor of Boucan Carre, the equivalent of the county seat for Cange. Because Cange is under the jurisdiction of Boucan Carre, we were meeting to discuss a project to install speed bumps in the Cange marketplace. Unfortunately, because the marketplace sits on National Route 3, accidents happen quite frequently as cars speed by and hit the people selling their wares.
We were picked up from Cange by the mayor himself, and I enjoyed riding in the back of the pickup truck. I figured out that it was better to do as the Haitians do and stand and hold on to the back of the truck than sit down and get jostled about. Standing in the back of the truck, wind in our faces, my friend Lad pointed out that we were having our Haiti Titanic moment… Mwen se wa nan mond la!
When we arrived at Boucan Carre, we were introduced to the mayor’s second and third in command. As the meeting began, everyone had the opportunity to say a few words. Everyone said a few general words of welcome, but mostly everything was addressed to my advisor David, who was with us in Haiti for the first few days. However, the third in command was a woman, the only other woman in the room apart from Ashley and me, and she only spoke to us. She talked about how excited she was to see other women, and that she knew that we would understand the position of women and could empathize with our hearts as well as our heads. As she spoke of our shared solidarity and expressed her obvious excitement at encountering other females, I felt the connection she was speaking of. I will admit that I had been a little bit wary of how Ashley and I would be perceived as two females in a country where women hold such few positions of authority. However, the meeting was a very affirming experience, simply because of the connection we were able to make with a woman who has accomplished so much to be able to get to the position she was in. As we walked through the town with her, I could see how much she was admired by all the women and girls she greeted.
Unfortunately, the speed bumps which necessitated the meeting were not able to be installed due to a lack of money. However, the meeting was productive because we will be working with Boucan Carre on other community development projects we have moving forward.
Ashley and I also had the opportunity to travel to the city of Hinche, the largest city in the Central Plateau. We met a couple working on sanitation efforts in schools. They wanted to see the efforts of another NGO, which was providing schools with latrines and hand washing stations. We toured a few of these schools which had new latrines, but no water for the new hand washing stations. We were unclear as to whether the water was supposed to be supplied by the NGO who built the hand washing stations or the municipal water supplier. Situations like that, where you have pristine hand washing stations which are unable to be used due to lack of water, are unfortunately too common and are a combination of incomplete project planning and poor coordination with local authorities.
The next day we traveled with the same couple to the village of Palmary, a very isolated rural settlement fairly close to Cange. We were warned that we would be travelling over the worst road we would ever see in our lives, and that turned out not to be an exaggeration. Imagine trying to drive a car almost straight up, then straight down something akin to a cliff face with some jagged boulders sticking out of it. We made it, though Ashley and I both agreed we would have rather hiked. It seemed to me that the road might not have been meant for anything larger than a mule.
The community at Palmary was facing water insecurity. They had no way to access water, because a fountain was built which was not working. The fountain was higher than the water source, and unfortunately water doesn’t flow uphill! We had an engineer with us from DINEPA, the national water authority. The engineer assessed the situation then held a community meeting about forming a local committee dedicated to improving the water source. The meeting was very lively, with many community members sharing their opinions. Finally, a vote was taken to set the date to vote on who would comprise the committee. Success! The meeting concluded with the school children performing a rendition of “Dlo se lavi, dlo se lasante,” replete with some offbeat drumming on the table by the engineer and an old lady from the village who started banging two sticks together and dancing. “Water is life, water is health” indeed! Ashley and I think that should be CEDC’s new theme song.
Our list of interesting excursions also included a meeting in Port-au-Prince with our partners at Zanmi Lasante, the sister organization of the international NGO Partners in Health. It was good seeing Loune and Liz, two of my favorite people in Haiti. Loune, Director of Strategic Planning at Zanmi Lasante, is from Haiti and a woman of few words. Liz, Loune’s Chief of Staff, is from Chicago and definitely not a woman of few words. There is nothing like sitting in on a meeting led by Liz. We also met with USAID, but more on that in a later post. There are lots of exciting things happening around here, and my Wi-Fi connection can’t keep up!
