Probably the Longest Day of My Life: Part 1

Ok, before you even say it, I know I did not blog every day or every other day last week. This is taking a little longer than I expected, so rather than hold onto this post until it's done, I'm posting what I have and will hopefully finish soon

Wednesday morning was pretty surreal, I think that's a good word for it. I woke up a little later than I had the previous days, but that seemed to be the norm for everyone. When I finally made my way out to the main room, the activity that normally accompanied the morning wasn't present. Some of the Carolina guys had left early that morning for a hike they had planned at the beginning of the week, so they weren't around, most of our team was sleeping a little late and none of the Haitians seemed to be around either. I went out to the front steps to sit and watch the kids come in to school like I had the two previous mornings, but by 7:45 no one had entered the school gate. I found out a little later that school was canceled for the day.

Eventually the morning started to move forward. Even though the kids didn't have school that day, they still began to roll in to hang around the guest house. Most of them still didn't really get what was going on. The adults walked around with sad faces that reminded me of the days following 9/11, while the kids sat at the dominoes table trying to be as intimidating to eachother as their dads did every night. They were just having fun.

Pretty soon the North Carolina guys came back from their hike and we all sat down for breakfast, without Actionnel though, Yoland told us that he had gone into Port-au-Prince with some other leaders to look for two students from Bayonnais studing there. After breakfast we headed out for what we planned would be a pretty short day or surveying, it seemed a little futile to go out an survey while the country was in an official day of emergency, but it's what we came to do, so that's what we did. We only had one survey station left, so we figured we would be back at the house early.

As we walked to the pipe crossing, Tyler tried one of the water spigots along the road, just to check that the pipe was maintaining its pressure since being fixed Monday. Instead of water shooting out of the high pressure nozzle, a few drops dripped to the ground, bad sign. We got a little closer to the crossing and ran into a couple of the "sub-contractors" who had been working on the pipe earlier in the week. We started to talk with them, communicating mostly through Eddy, one of the NC guys who was born in Haiti and spoke Creole fluently. The men said that the pipe had broken some time during the night. They still had a lot of steel pipe left over with threads didn't match up. They were going to try to fix the pipe with that, but they didn't know how they would do it. We told them that we had brought a coupling with us that might be able to help them get around the problem. Eddy had been thinking about staying Haiti for a couple more weeks, so he said that he would keep the coupling and help the guys fix it later.

We got to the pipe and saw the break. We were pretty disappointed to see the pipe broke, we knew this meant no fresh water for 10 miles of community, just another thing to go wrong. But, we still went on to finish our surveying. Alysen, Michael, Eyleen, and surveyed while Tyler finished his scouting around the river for other projects we are working on.

As always, we had plenty of helpers with us surveying.

We got done surveying a little about 1ish. When we walked past the pipe on our way home, the sub-contractrs were back. They had taken down the broken PVC and had hauled the steel pipe back to the crossing. We stopped to ask them what was up. They told us they had decided to try to fix the pipe that now rather than wait for a while, so, of course, we decided to stay at the crossing and help.

Work at the pipe looked like the 6 of us brainstorming, planning, and making plans, while the men implemented the plans. Having Eddy at the crossing was such a blessing, communicating without him would have been rough. Eyleen did a great job too, her Creole just keeps getting better. Finally, after a few hours, we had a plan with all the bugs worked out. We were going to be able to use the coupling we had brought and the fix would be the most permanent fix the pipe had seen yet.

You can see in this picture the local men who were working with us.

Check out the homemade "scaffolding" they're standing on!

Finished Product and the whole team:We walked home from the pipe SO excited! We had left the house that morning feeling almost useless, we went out to survey because there was nothing else to do, but felt like it was nothing. Now we felt like we had all been part of something so much bigger, like we had helped bring a solution to a real problem.