23 February 2012

hi friends! hopefully the pictures from the last post gave you a little bit of an idea of the scale of this school building project. often a picture or two is worth a thousand words, and a video can be worth a million. i've got a couple short video clips of the concrete pouring process, but couldn't upload them because we were close to the internet capacity limit for the day. hopefully sometime soon!

other than those few pictures, i know it's been a long time since i posted anything of substance. there has been a ton going on. daniel and john both left today, so now it's just myself, 45 of my closest new friends, boss pepe, and a crew of haitians. we're mainly going to be backfilling the foundation inside the building perimeter, which will probably need to be done mostly by buckets, since there's now six-course-high (4 feet) block walls everywhere. backfill will bring the floor level up about three feet from where it is now, so the walls will slowly become less of an obstacle, but for now, we'll do the best we can!

today (thursday) is officially day number 38, meaning i have 33 days left here. ten weeks in some ways is a long time, and yet somehow it's already half over. at the same time, it really does feel like i've been here way longer than that. for me, after about the two week mark, my "normal" recalibrates, and life here is just how life is. there hasn't really been anything this trip that i've really been craving. it's going to be nice to be able to eat a salad and take a hot shower when i get home, but at the same time, it's amazing what you can live without when you stop thinking about it. for me, it's very much 'out of sight, out of mind' about all the things i think i need but really don't. honestly, i think that in some ways i'm much more content in this third world context than i am in the united states. our american culture so easily breeds the materialism, immediate gratification, greed, entitlement, self-sufficiency, and ultimately pride that is the root of so much discontent and distance from God. not that life in Haiti is perfect and i'm exactly the kind of person i want to be when i'm here. i think the biggest difference here is that the problems i see or encounter here are actually things of significance, rather than the things we can think are important that are really insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

building a school so that the next generation of kids in grand goave can get an education and can learn about jesus. guys working so that they can earn food for their kids that they run up the hill on their lunch break. guys learning how to build a building the right way so that it's strong and safe and can withstand hurricanes and earthquakes. trying to get people to see beyond just today. Haiti is a culture of immediate need, whether it's shelter for tonight, or food for my family tomorrow. The natural result of growing up your entire life in a culture that is so driven by things that are temporary and needs that are urgent is that you will be so focused on the present that you never get to see the big picture; never look beyond tomorrow to six months from now, or to why this is the way it needs to be fixed now so that it doesn't break again next week. it's just the way people think here. it's not that they're not intelligent or are incapable of understanding something; it's that this is the reality of the environment they've been surrounded by their entire life, and because of a lack of education (for a myriad of reasons) they aren't even aware that there might be another way to view a problem, that the quick fix might not actually be the best solution. efficiency and long-term planning are words that i don't think exist in creole, and yet somehow, things still get done. ingenuity and creativity definitely exist here, and often haitians come up with temporary fixes that i never would have thought of. the key is learning how to work in this environment, encouraging positive change, but at the same time not trying to make haiti into america. and all the while speaking creole.

welcome to life in haiti.

to Him be the glory!