Disaster Risk Reduction and Sandy Beaches

All work and no play makes international relief volunteers dull boys and girls, so Hands On gives their volunteers every Sunday off to recover from the week and enjoy some of what Haiti has to offer. For most people this means beaches! Of course there are the waterfalls and cute coastal towns as well, but I’ll have to get to those a little later.

But before I can talk about the play, let me talk a little more about some of the work I’ve been doing here.

The first Saturday I was in Haiti I volunteered to work for HODR’s Disaster Risk Reduction education campaign. In my opinion this is one of the best and most effective things HODR is involved with. The program is to get together a group of Haitian teachers and teach them about the facts of earthquakes and how to respond to one. Basically we’re trying to get across the idea that earthquakes are a natural and inevitable occurrence and that the best response to them is to not run around screaming.

Coming from the Northwest, an earthquake prone region of the US, I had been trained from early childhood to drop and hold, find a stable doorway, or stand in an open outdoor area during an earthquake. I was also taught what an earthquake is: the movement of tectonic plates, sitting upon the earth’s crust. In Haiti, both the theoretical and practical education about earthquakes was virtually non-existent. Of course, it doesn’t help that so many children go uneducated anyway.

So, because of this lack of education, I found myself headed out in a tap-tap the first Saturday of my volunteer time here for a DRR (Disaster Risk Reduction) event at the newly completed school HODR had built in a town called Jacksonville, thirty or forty minutes west of Leogane. Of course, we would show up at the same time that another NGO arrives in town to do a sanitation education. And, of course, their event would involve loud music and puppets to get the attention of the village and especially the children. Ours was a bit more dry and lengthy and aimed at the teachers – we were outgunned – thus we were bumped to a later slot and the hygiene and sanitation education went ahead first.

This was all fine by me as we got to be a part of the dancing and watch the puppet show. They even had a giant Marti Gras style puppet that one person gets inside to be the feet and someone else runs the arms with sticks.

The downside was that our own education event didn’t start at 9:30 as originally planned. It didn’t start at 10:30 or 11:00. It wasn’t until 11:30 that six volunteers, two translators and fifty Haitian educators were settled into the classroom and ready to start.

We introduced ourselves and HODR, though most of them new of us from the construction of the school, and then we dove into the material. It went well enough. It’s hard to start something like that just around lunch time and ask people to pay attention while hungry and after a lot of crazy music and dance. We needed more interaction and attention grabbing within the event, but the material is sound.

We first discussed the causes of earthquakes. We discussed why they cause damage (the ground moves!). We also talked about how you measure them and most importantly what you can do to protect yourself in the case of an earthquake occuring.

It was surprising how little these Haitians knew about earthquakes, even after having suffered through so many recently. It was important to let them know that earthquakes are natural, inevitable, and that we need to be on guard and prepared to deal with them.

To that end we introduced the assembled educators to the earthquake drill. Emphasis in the Haitian version is more on getting outside of the building instead of the drop and cover that US school children learn – most of the buildings here pancaked downward thanks to their overly strong cement roofs and weak brick walls, so no school desk would protect a child. Instead we taught that the teacher and children should calmly, but as quickly as possible, exit the building and head to a safe spot.

It only took about three tries for them to stop running and pushing and screaming.

These drills matter immensely and will save lives. It’s always a game of sorts to children in US schools, since we do it all the time, it’s become second nature and an excuse to get out of the building. We told the assembled Haitians of one case that illustrates just how important preparedness is: The difference between the Chilean and Haitian earthquakes of this last winter.

On January 12, 2010 a 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit the Leogane area of Haiti and over 200,000 people died. On February 27, 2010 an 8.7 magnitude quake hit the Maule region of Chile killing 487. Why did an earthquake 70 times stronger kill so many fewer people? The answer obviously can deal with building standards, which was the first thing the Haitians pointed out, but also has to do with preparedness. Chile is prone to earthquakes. They happen every year in Chile. The largest ever recorded was in Chile in 1960, a staggering 9.5. So Chileans know how to deal with earthquakes. Children do earthquake drills constantly at school and communities are organized to respond to the tremors. Haitians haven’t had an earthquake in 200 years, since the last time Port-au-Prince was levelled and so had let their guard down. We told the Haitians they need to be vigilant and ready to act.

And so we drilled them. We made sure they had the drill right and then we told them to teach it to their students and their neighbours and to spread the word about the proper response to an Earthquake. An important message to be sure.

We also talked to the teachers about the way a catastrophic event like an earthquake can cause trauma in children and how they can use song, dance, art, and other creative means to help children express that trauma and overcome it.

So even if we started late and the meeting lasted a little too long (the format of the program needs to be tweeked a little bit), the message communicated was important and I think most of the Haitians realised that and took it to heart.

So at this point in time I had done rubble work and I had worked on disaster risk reduction education. As I write I’m working on a couple of other projects that I will write about soon – a YouTube “Life in a Day” video contest and building shelters for those who have lost their homes to the earthquake.

Before I sign off though, I’d like to say – Haiti has some great beaches and I’ve been lucky that the last two Sundays I have been off to visit one in particular where the water is warm and clear, the lobster is fresh and gigantic (not exactly cheap, but cheap enough), and the beer is cold. A good way to relax with other volunteers and to scoff at the NGOs that show up in their 80k dollar land rovers while we come on tap-taps (the local pickup truck transports) so that our organisation can devote more of its resources to projects and less to our living standard. I mean really, do you need that extra land rover? Maybe you do, but maybe you don’t. I think too many organisations spend too much money on the wrong things. But more of that rant later.

For now, I hope you enjoy the pictures I finally got a chance to load up (too many for one blog post) and I’ll write more soon about the shelters, YouTube video and my upcoming trip to Jacmel this weekend.

Rubble in the Morning

The morning routine is important to all organizations. With Hands On Disaster Response (HODR), it is breakfast served from six to seven and everyone out to the door to their work transport by 7:30. Our transport is usually a pick-up truck with welded on benches, called a ‘tap-tap’ because that’s how you communicate with the driver – pound twice on the side panel, “I want to stop here.” Pound twice more, “Ok, we’re ready to go again.”


The place awakens pretty gradually – there’s no reveille. It’s not easy to sleep after the sun starts peaking over the base’s walls, so most people are up by six or six-thirty. Nothing beats a natural wake up to the sun.

Breakfast consists of some oatmeal, bread, peanut butter and jelly. Pretty much the same as I ate for everyday for two years in the Peace Corps. Carbs for the big work day ahead. And, of course, there’s some good rail-road style coffee: always a “brew of the day,” which happened to be Towo – Haitian Revenge Coffee, this morning. It really is the same black sludge brew every day, but for sanity’s sake it’s nice to pretend it’s not. But it doesn’t really matter in the end when coffee is coffee and food is just food.

Come 7:15 or so, people start to get ready for their work day. The dirty shirts and shorts for removing rubble come back on (if they ever came off in the first place), the tools – sledgehammers, picks, shovels, wire snips, bolt cutters, wheelbarrows ,etc.— come out of the tool-shed to be loaded on the tap-taps. The Bobcats come alive with a slight growl and like some sci-fi cyborgs crawl out the back door with their drivers nestled in the caged-in seat. Not everyone leaves, some stay at base, but it gets quiet when 100 of 120 volunteers are gone.

Base:

HODR has moved into a partially finished nightclub/community center/radio station/internet café/bakery of a local guy named Joe. It’s a real sturdy building which is nice to have in an Earthquake zone. Our area is a large rectangular courtyard in the partially completed community center. At the end of each head is a small stage and large, 15 foot tall over-hangs, held up with big sturdy-looking pillars lines each long side. Under one side bunks are set up for volunteers. Under the other are work areas for fabrication, storage of cement and some work equipment (like the Bobcats) and a seating area with a couch made out of undistributed emergency tents in their sacks – lumpy cushions but nice to have none-the-less.

Since there are so many volunteers and staff, the bunks are augmented by tents set up all over the place, mostly on the stages and roof. An office occupies a room behind one stage and the bathrooms occupy the area behind the other stage. Showers are set to the side of the office, tarps set up over a framework of wood for division and privacy. Bucket baths and flush toilets are the way – water is drawn from a well via a diesel feed pump. No A.C. Nothing much in the way of fans. Simple and basic living. Nice to be back to that.

In our ‘backyard’ is a large supply base. Dubbed the Joint Logistics Base, it is shared by other NGOs: USAID, CHF, Canadian Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity, and others. Rows of containers take-up one area while construction of steel frames, long term habitation tents takes place in a large tent in another area. Many more large tents an supply dumps area arranged in the area. A large walled in compound, HODR shares security and logistics responsibilities with the other groups, providing them with an area to work and plan, and HODR with access to partners with financing and projects to implement. The steel frame tents are a USAID financed, CHF administered project producing sturdy, weather (and Hurricane) proof housing for Haitians.

There’s been a lot of cooperation in Haiti, even if there hasn’t been a lot of organization from the top. Maybe it’s just HODR being open to cooperation, but in the couple days I’ve been here there have been meetings with NGOs, UN Missions, and Haitian locals to coordinate planning and project implementation.

Rubble removal is the mainstay of HODR’s activities, but they also work in many other areas. There are people working in house demolition, as hospital runners and orderlies for the field hospital next door, developing sand-based water filters that can be produced locally, composting toilets and sanitation education, redevelopment of public spaces, building schools, interacting with orphans, and training teachers on disaster response education and how to help kids recover emotionally from the tragedy. The projects are many and people are encouraged to try out different ones. Each evening there is an ‘All Hands’ (get the pun?) meeting where the day’s work is discussed and the next day’s is presented. Afterward people sign up for the jobs that they are interested in for the following day.

So far, I’ve done Rubble Removal which is the mainstay of HODR’s work in Haiti.

Rubble Removal:

Someone in the news said recently that at the current rate of clearing rubble, Haiti will be free of it in twenty years. Twenty years! One of the projects HODR works on is removing rubble for Haitians so they can have a clear place to start anew. Whether the new start is a tent or a new house is up to them, but we can at least help them move on to that point.

This is some of the hardest work I’ve ever done in my life. I’m used to being physical active, even in the heat (Drum Corps, anything in Niger), but I’ve never before put in a four hour shift of swing a sledge, dragging out rebar and concrete and carting rubble off in a wheelbarrow. For me, the heat here isn’t too bad, but working in it… that’s a whole other story. You sweat and sweat and sweat, till your shirt drips and your shorts and work gloves are soaked.

When I arrived at my first rubble sight, where two houses had collapsed against each other, a twisted pile of concrete, exposed steel rebar and buried belongings, I thought, as everyone does “Where do I even start?!”

It’s a process of sledging up the large chunks, to free the rebar which, if in good shape, will be used again, and to make the debris small enough to cart away in the wheelbarrows. Nothing is ever straight forward in clearing a rubble pile. Multistory houses create level upon level of solid roofs or walls that have to be completely smashed to move downward. Rebar becomes so twisted that it needs to be cut with heavy and awkward bolt cutters. For some reason Haitian roofs were much stronger than the walls so that a wall can be demolished in a couple minutes, but a roof will take thirty or more – maybe one of the reasons so many houses collapsed.

It’s offer the small victories over a stubborn piece of rebar or a particularly stout ceiling that keep you going through the heat and exhaustion and aches and pains. It almost seems to take longer to tear down a house than to build one in the first place. It’s amazing how many volunteers have been here with HODR for three, four, or five months, clearing away the rubble and helping Haitians find a place to start over.


Notes:
-  On my first day there was a cute little girl named Jessica who was trying to help me out. After trying on my gloves herself, she put them on my hands for me, she brought me my water and tried to carry some rubble, though she tired of that quickly.
 
- Her brother(?), on the other hand, spent the afternoon clearing out one little piece of rebar by hand on the back side of our sight. Worked away at it for a good long while.
 
- Just like in Niger, kids run rampant. Not as bad as there, but they’re still all over the place. Sometimes they’re annoying, sometimes helpful, but most always cute little buggers.
 
- I am on picture taking crew on monday so will try to get some pictures up then.

The Air Over Haiti

I know I said I would finish blogging about my trip, but real life moves on. One day I'll get back and finish those two posts (they're basically already written in my journal), but for now I have more important and current events to write about:

I’ve never flown over the Caribbean before. It isn’t an hour into the flight that we were passing over large bare, muddy, soggy flat land, much the way I imagine Haiti to look in the rainy season. Storm clouds, anvils a thousand feet high, dot the landscape (airscape?) around our Air France flight. I can’t stop thinking what am I in for? Why am I going?

Eight months ago I was just returning from Peace Corps and a couple months of traveling. I needed a new adventure to take me away from the boring, day-to-day of law school applications and sitting around my parents’ house. After the earthquake I wanted to help. I didn’t want to give money, I wanted to give time and energy, so I applied everywhere I could think of or find online. Now here I am on a plane to Port-au-Prince (PaP in the international slang down here). First thing: My French is a bit rusty, but I think it will come back quickly enough. Second: I’m a bit nervous. No need to be really. I’m going to be picked up at the airport, my hand will be held a bit. I think I’m nervous about what I’m going to see – and what I can do. Oh, and of course, it’s going to be hot and humid. All these thunderheads are dropping a good amount of rain judging from the smear of gray that follows under them.

We fly over strange turquoise streaks in the water. Reefs? It’s always great to see a part of the world for the first time. So many new things.

I didn’t write much when I was in Seattle. Only a couple of pages in a journal, one blog post. It was a comfortable eight months. I worked, I played with friends. I didn’t meet a bunch of new people; I was trying mostly to reconnect with friends of old. I had some good dates (and some bad). It was comfortable and I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the life there. I could have, yet again, satisfied and content, but instead I pushed myself out to do something different in a different place. I pushed myself to be uncomfortable. I wonder why I do that. It seems to be a family trait with Kate perpetually on the move. What happened in our childhoods to motivate this? I can’t think of our parents ever pushing internationalism. So where did it come from, this wanderlust?

The muddy land we flew over wasn’t Hispaniola. We’ve moved back over open water again, though it’s dotted with many islands, big and small.

I guess, for me, comfortable just doesn’t inspire me. I want to be inspired. I want a muse. Travel and new faces can be muses of sorts. I wrote everyday I was on the road. I wrote much when I first arrived in Niger. I plan to write in Haiti.

I think Haiti will be a lot like Niger.

A short nap and I awaken to “Nous nous commençons notre descente vers Port-au-Prince,” we’re beginning our descent into PaP. Similar thoughts go through my head coming in over PaP as did coming in over Niamey. Poverty is obvious from the air – shacks and trash heaps. The Earthquake is evident too, though less obvious. Some collapsed walls and rubble. Though what we flew over was a short stretch from ocean to airport, not many concrete buildings to begin with. One thing quite noticeable from the air are the blue tents. They stand out against the metal roofs of shacks and houses. There are so many of them, clustered in groups, sometimes standing alone in a concession or alleyway.

As we taxi to the terminal we base a full on military air operation based in the middle of the PaP airport. Helicopters, field tents and support vehicles arranged orderly in the middle of grass fields between runways. A Peruvian transport loading up a contingent of Peruvian UN troops to head out is parked next to us on the tarmac.

The airport itself shows signs of the Quake: cracks and exposed brick work. The main building is still unused it seems and customs and baggage have moved into a secondary building.

Not quite as chaotic a scene as when I arrived at the Niamey airport in Niger – the porters are all held outside the gate, down a walkway from the exit from customs. That, however, didn’t stop someone from pulling my bag off the baggage conveyor and stealing the hard drive I had in my side pocket. Frustrating to lose so many photos and all of my music. A short attempt to talk to the airport and Air France officials was useless. They just shrugged and said I should go talk to someone else. The run around.

After the hard drive fiasco and meeting up with another volunteer, it’s off on a crazy drive to Leogane, a city to the West of PaP where Hands On Disaster Response (HODR) is based and the epicenter of the January earthquake. Something like 80-90% of the buildings in Leogane were destroyed.

Traffic is always crazy in the third world. Rubble piles in the middle of streets don’t help the free-for-all style of driving much. It was just a mess in PaP with busses, pick-up trucks, and motorcycles all competing for their route and lives.

We took a route that passed by many damaged and destroyed buildings. The main cathedral was just a shell, the entire roof had collapsed leaving arching walls sixty feet tall and stain glass windows intact. The parliament’s entire front façade had fallen away and many ministry buildings in the area were heavily damaged. I saw buildings that had fallen sideways, some collapsed, and some entirely all to rickety-looking to have been lucky enough to have survived.

Weather isn’t so bad. It is hot and it is humid, but it’s nothing worse than I ever experienced in Niger. Very much like Niger during the rainy season.The terrain is not all mud and bare ground as I had feared. A lot of green, palm trees and hills. No forests which I guess is what people are referring to when they say this half of the island was logged off.

People remind me of Niger also – friendly, energetic, loud, a bit pushy when it comes to waiting in lines. Here, though, I feel that being white will have a slightly differeny connotation. In Niger I was an anomaly, something out of the ordinary, but I get the idea that Haitians are more accustomed to the aid workers, especially after the Earthquake. It will be interesting to see how that affects relationships with locals.

It’s surprisingly nice to be back to this type of place and people, even if I’m not so comfortable with it yet. But, hey, wasn’t comfortable what I was escaping?