Hey folks! It’s Alex. Long time no see. Let catch you all up with how Haiti was for us!
If you weren’t aware, the host we were staying with in Haiti was Mission of Hope. They have a large plot of land in Titanyen, which is their main campus. There’s an orphanage, a school, a clinic and even a prosthetics lab (one of three in the country and the only one that’s completely free) there! Much of our time was spent on long-term projects MoH wanted complete that the large volume of 1-week teams constantly coming in & out wouldn’t be tasked with. Primarily, we repainted the orphanage (I believe the entirety of it, by the end!). That may not sound like a lot for a whole month, but it’s five building with four dorms each (and each dorm was 3 rooms), and we painted inside and out. The kids and the orphanage mommies were all quite excited; they hadn’t had any new paint in five or six years (which really shows on cinder-block and plaster).
But that wasn’t all we did! We also spent time in local villages meeting people and doing what MoH calls ‘Strategic Village Time’/SVT. Unlike in the states, people here are pretty open and will have a conversation with you about just about anything. So during our time visiting people the ‘strategic’ parts comes in. MoH using a GPS device to record the location of the household we’re visiting (since there are no addresses to speak of), and we’ll ask them a bunch of basic living-conditions/quality-of-life questions. How many people live here, do the kids go to school, most recent doctor visit, have you ever seen a dentist (If memory serves, a single local we asked this said yes to this one), where do you get your water, how do you purify your water, is everyone healthy, etc.
This is us with our interpreter visiting a lady at her house. She’s not in this picture, but she’s teaching us a hymn in Creole and George is writing it down for us so we can practice it. She was a lot of fun and loved to sing! Hopefully I will get the picture we took with her too.
We got as much of this as possible during our visit and recorded it for MoH. MoH then uses the information to coordinate with locals they call ‘village champions’. Village champions are Haitians who have shown themselves to upstanding members of their communities and have a desire to help said communities (Fun fact: MoH in Haiti has ~400 haitians employed full-time compared to ~15 Americans/Non-natives. They’re big believers in equipping Haitians to love and improve their communities themselves, and it’s awesome to see).
Sorry that this is coming so late but the internet access here in Costa Rica is as good as we’d hoped, so hopefully this post is the first of many this month!
