It’s already day 5 of our trip and this week has gone by incredibly fast. We started out the day one man down—Jess Kim, my roommate wasn’t feeling too well. We headed out to a school close to DINEPA that was founded by the first lady of Haiti with buses donated by the first lady of the Dominican Republic.
After a quick intro to the school and presentation by the children, Anila and I left our team mates at the school to attend a meeting at DINEPA for the water quality cluster. At the meeting there were a lot of people from different organizations such as Pure Water, American Red Cross, German relief and so many others. One of the key issues the meeting was addressing was contamination after the water had been deemed clean by the NGOs and delivered to the site. The group believes that a lot of the salmonella and typhus cases they are seeing in City Solei (an area I wrote about yesterday) is due to people using contaminated buckets to take water during distribution. Also, since the camp doesn’t always get water from CAMEP they sometimes take water from a reservoir that may be dirty. We were able to present the water quality testing kit and a couple of the organizations were interested. We actually opened our samples of CAMEP and Dasani (control) at the meeting (for the first time) and saw very clearly that the CAMEP sample had a lot of E-Coli present. We are hopefully going to meet with the German THW group tomorrow to discus how to get the kits out and into the communities in the tent city.
We left DINEPA around 12:30 and headed back to the school where we met up with the rest of the group. We had a quick lunch of MREs (for the first time in my life) and my pasta thing wasn’t too bad. (I took pictures of that too). Afterwards I visited a few of the classrooms that were taking place in this school. The school is setup with 6 buses that serve as classrooms for the children who are from ages 6 to 10 yrs. They alternate between a morning and afternoon shift and the teachers are really great in promoting art, expression, dance, sports, and XO (one laptop per child computers) in addition to the traditional curriculum. It was interesting to note that the teachers will read to the children using French textbooks while summarizing the main idea in Kreyol. Professor Vercoe and Marvin introduced the kids to new programs on the XOs, Speak and Music Painter. Clinton taught the teachers and students his step moves and Asha worked on art projects with the kids and they had an amazingly fun time. I helped out a bit with glitter and cutting out shapes, etc. and soon everyone wanted glasses made of pipe-cleaners to match mine! I also made friends with the almost-three-yr-old son of one of the music teachers at the school. He had amazing drumming skills and coordination for a three yr old. At the end of our visit, when were all saying bye, we formed a circle and were dancing and singing when he slipped a rock into my pocket for me to take home. I have been trying to get the glue and glitter out of my hair since then.
We left the school around 4 and headed to a café to meet with Dr. Cecile Claire Pierre who works with Partners in Health and is a faculty at Harvard Medical School. She was amazingly nice and spoke to us about some of the challenges and issues that they are facing in the camps in terms of health, water, and organization. During our meeting a couple of the sound trucks I was interested in following passed by campaigning about AIDs.
Right now I’m about to head off to a dinner meeting with Elizabeth Augustin who is the communications coordinator at UNICEF to discuss how campaigns like this take place. I haven’t been able to get online so I’m not sure if my radio contact will be coming around 7 or 8.
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After dinner and an intense Marco-Polo swim session with our group I’m back upstairs writing about the rest of my night.
We had dinner tonight with Elizabeth Augustin, who provided us with a unique perspective of life during this reconstruction period and her work with communicating health initiatives before and after the earthquake. She mentioned a lot of the work that UNICEF has been doing in terms of immunization campaigns and the large need to study behavior change communication so the campaigns employed by groups like UNICEF can make an effective change in the habits of the larger population.
Since tomorrow will be our last day in Haiti I just wanted to take a few seconds to reflect on what we’ve been hearing.
Throughout our conversations today and this past week a few things have become evident that our group doesn’t know how to react to and is the topic of so many of our conversations during the day. The first is that the Hatian government does not really play a substantial role in this reconstruction process. In a lot of the meetings we have been attending they don’t have a presence and it is the NGOs who are planning the reconstruction. The second is that the Haitian population does not feel as though they have been called to act and reconstruct their own country by their government. There seems to be a lot of negative opinions on the government and more than one of the people we talked to this week declared that “the government has failed to prove themselves”. The government appears to be extremely short staffed and lost a lot of key members and has given a substantial amount of power over the country to NGOs and foreigners and this is a source of anger and disbelief for the Haitian population. Not one person we have spoken to considers the law passed that declared a commission of ½ Haitian and ½ NGOs/foreigners to be in the interest of Haiti and refers to it as “the shameful law”. Many of the Haitians we have spoken to consider it an infringement on their independence and the slogan “Clinton is now the President of Haiti” is not so uncommon.
Throughout our time here we have been asking professionals as well as the students what students in Haiti would want out of a relationship with MIT or other students at MIT and what the possibilities of a longer collaboration than just one semester would be and the answer has been “I don’t know”. I think the concept of such a partnership is foreign to many of the students, as is the idea of coming to a foreign country to work on projects as part of a class. As we talk to these groups I can’t help but realize how lucky we all are to be at MIT, where it is possible to receive funding for student projects that are meant to solve real-world problems and issues.
Our group of students have been discussing the idea of “Development Work” and what it takes for it to be sustainable and make real differences, in terms of the society, the political structure, the NGO and whether Haiti is in a place right now where the projects that we’ve brought here will succeed and whether the work that the NGOs are doing here will lead to a substantial betterment in the quality of life for the majority of the population.
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Lastly, if you are reading this blog would you please post a small comment. I would love to hear everyone’s perspectives on this trip and so far it’s been just me trying to jot down everything I do during the day. :) It’s really hard to believe that tomorrow is going to be our last day here.
