Community Committee Meeting•
A meeting with the leaders of the Gandou community was held with Fr. Voltaire, Marty Hammersmith and Paul Roell. The members of the community included Pierre Jacques Laguerre (Denoyers), Janette Laguerre (Menancon), Bazile Jean Leon (Meriac), Josue Ledoue (Dieudonne), Steve Francillon, and Gerald Joseph.
• This was the first time we had ever met with the community committee in Gandou. It was a complete joy to start to get their input and help in prioritizing our projects in Gandou.
• During the meeting we asked what the community leaders would like us to focus on or help with besides the medical clinic. They responded with 4 items:
o Road improvements -it is up to the community to take care of the roads because government workers do not cover the Gandou area.
o Education
Need for additional classrooms
Would like to send more students to university but they ask to wait until grade 13 is in place so students come directly from Gandou
Better preparation for university life and studying
• Farming
o Chickens
o Set up co-op with several farmers managing the chickens
o Community tractor
o Professional training on farming
• Water
o More sources of water
o Way to capture water from church roof (does not need to be filtered)
o One well or water source in each village
• Our plan for the future is to get the community committee more and more involved in the decision making and prioritization of projects that we do. We are very happy to have their voice and see their perspective.Water Filter Project
• After our testing and selection process was done one year ago, we picked the Gift of Water filtration system which uses a combination of chlorine, a string filter, and a charcoal filter that removes 99.99% of viruses and 100% of E. Coli bacteria.
• In the past year, based on the suggestion of Father Voltaire, we have picked and hired our first Gift of Water local technician, Desir Ambroise.
• During our trip Paul Roell met and worked with Desir and was impressed with him.
• Desir distributed the first 50 water filter systems on January 4, 2019. He provided a list of the names that received the systems.
• Paul discussed his payment structure and that he would receive his first monthly payment in February, $50. When Desir distributes the next 100 units, his monthly pay will be increased by $25 to $75 for 200 systems. If he distributes 300 systems, he will be paid $100 per month.
• Paul also told Desir that we will pay him $10 per month when we add new water technicians as he manages and mentors the new technicians.
• Desir and Paul visited a couple of homes with the water filter system. The first family immediately dispensed some water in a glass and gave it to Paul to drink.
• Paul will get a date from Fr. Voltaire to begin to distribute the systems to the next 50 families. He will also get a list for the next 100 families.
• Our goal is to distribute 1500 systems over the next several years. The initial cost per filter system is $50 USD plus the ongoing monitoring and supplies will equal an additional $60.
• The introduction and continuation of this essential program will require a lot of financial support. The overall cost of this project is estimated at $160,000, and it will take about 8 years to introduce to all families. We are in need of 90% of this funding yet.
• The introduction of the filtered water systems will introduce clean water to the families. This will help with the problems associated with consuming unclean water such as diarrhea, worms, and sometimes death.
• Clean water is the most basic necessity of life, and it is difficult to image that in the year 2019 there are still people so close to the USA that don’t even have clean water.
Poor Families/Microloans
• In cases where an extremely poor family is identified by our doctors - a family that has almost nothing to eat, the children have signs of malnourishment, typically they have a very poor house or no house at all, and little to no support from anyone else – we enroll them in a program we call the poor families program.
• We have found the only way to help these people is to better understand the details of their problems and help them to break out of their own personal bad situation.
• Two team members met with families in the Poor Families Program individually to learn more about them personally and how we can better assist them. They spent time with about 40 of the 110 families in the program.
• We would like to gradually assist these families to become self-sufficient by enrolling them in the general micro loan program and/or goat program, shoe program, or sewing machine program.
• This trip we met with families that we gave a micro loan to during the last trip as well as our teacher who is the microloan leader. Each family that we gave a loan to had made their repayments as they were scheduled to do. The microloan leader showed his note book showing the families payment records. The families themselves also had a notebook we had given then showing their payments made and had the signature of the microloan project leader confirming their payment.
• We had gotten information from other mission groups in Haiti doing microloans which suggested they were having success with the families paying back their loans faster than we had originally asked the people to pay their loans back. We asked these families if they would like to pay their loans back quicker and they all said yes. Based on this, we accelerated their repayment schedule and we will see how it goes. Once the family is done with the first loan and if everything went well, they will likely have the chance to take on another microloan to continue to help them.
• This trip we also enrolled three additional families into the micro loan program. Each family received $300 as a microloan to help them start a small business activity like purchasing items such as rice, beans, and oil at wholesale to then sell at retail. Some choose to buy animals such as pigs, goats, or chickens to raise and sell. Still others buy and sell shoes or clothing.
• Two more treadle sewing machines were also given to families who had expressed interest in this as a way to help them. Hopefully they will be able to make clothes in order to sell and raise some funds for their families.
Home repair project
• Last year, we launched a $100,000 home project to repair or rebuild homes for 33 families in our sister parish. Father Voltaire and the community committee identified the families as those most in need of help in the community.
• Hurricane Matthew damaged some and others still had damage from the earthquake in 2010. Many of these homes had leaking roofs. Often part of a wall had collapsed and was just covered with a tarp or old plastic.
• There are way more than 33 hurricane/earthquake damaged homes in our community, but these 33 were a place to start.
• The project was broken into three phases. Each phase included about 1/3 of the homes.
• In July of 2018 we finished phase 1 and began phase 2.
• Late in 2018 we raised the final funding for the complete project. When phase 2 is complete in the next couple months, we will begin phase 3.
• For phases 1 and 2, fourteen of the 33 homes in our home repair project have been completed. Seven more are in currently in process.
• The construction on the remaining twelve homes should begin soon. Due to the recent political unrest, demonstrations, road blocks, and business closings, things have been slowed down due to difficulty getting and transporting supplies. We are praying this is about done.
• Members of our team this trip visited two families in the program. Both families were very happy, grateful, and proud to show off their homes.
Nursing student
• Frantczette, one of the nursing students in our university program, graduated from nursing school this past summer. She took the boards in the fall. She reported that she would have the board results within one month.
• While in Gandou we worked with and talked with Frantczette and Father Voltaire about beginning her 2 years of service in Gandou as repayment for funding her education (see the pictures below).
• We have much work for Frantczette to help with in our clinic in Gandou. This includes the malnourished program, blood pressure program, referral program, community health training, and health training in our school. Frantczette will begin helping in the clinic right away.
• We will also work on a more formal contract with her for her two years of service.
• We are excited about getting to finally work with Frantczette more and to get a nurse from our community working in our clinic.
• We thank God for providing her help right at the time we most need her.
Sponsored Students in Our University Program
• Dave and Fran from our team spent time with several of the students sponsored at the university. Currently we have two students in nursing school, four in education, one mechanics vocational training, and one in a sewing training school.
• Wilson is studying secondary education, English and Spanish. He will finish in June. He is currently working on a thesis. Wilson’s English language skill are super. We use him as a translator for the team when we come. We are super impressed with everything about him.
• Missiana will finish in June. She is interested in introducing some Montessori into the school in Gandou. Missiana also helps the team when we come by helping to enroll the families for the clinic. She is a real take- charge kind of lady. We could not keep order without her. We are excited to have her graduate and come back to our school. She will be a great addition to our team.
• Snack is currently on a probation period due to grades and will likely be changing majors. His sponsor understands the situation and continues to want to help him.
• Mackenson is studying secondary math and physics. He will finish in June 2020. Mackenson works at our ID card station during our trips. He enrolls all our patients into our patient tracking database and prints them an ID card with our computer and printer setup. His skills are super impressive. On his own, in his spare time, he programmed his own computer script which searches our patient database for existing patients so that we don’t give them a second ID number and re-enroll the patients in our database. This work has been a huge help to us and it was all taken on by him without us asking for it. He just saw it as an efficiency improvement and did it. Having him back in the Gandou community to teach and to spread his knowledge and skills will bring many great things to this community. We praise God for such a wonderful young man.
• Frantz Joseph is the mechanical trade school student. He will finish in July 2021. He is learning generators, farm equipment, and diesel trucks. He was able to work a little with our maintenance crew during the trip and it was clear to them that he is gaining knowledge and skills as a mechanic.
• Christofe is studying administration and counseling. He is scheduled to finish in June 2020. We are hopeful that his administration skills and guidance counseling knowledge will add much to our school when he returns.
• Nannecie and Sibile are nursing students who are graduating this summer. They have worked with the team on several trips. We have been impressed with their nursing skills. We are in great need of them in our clinic. We are expecting them to take their boards in the Fall of 2019.
School
• Dave and Fran from our team also spent time with both Father Voltaire and the three top leaders of our school. Estive, Gerald, and Daniel were once our University Sponsor students but have now graduated and returned to Gandou, completed their two years of service, and now are full time paid teachers in our school.
• Estive, Gerald, and Daniel explained that they are running mini camps during the summer. These camps include remediation in math and reading, art, PE activities, knitting, and dance. They had a Flag Day Program on May 18th.
• Grade 13, the last year in the Haitian school system, will be implemented in the school in the 2020-2021 school year. It is with great excitement that we look forward to the addition of this final grade to our school. When we first arrived in Gandou there was no one in the whole community qualified to teach beyond the 6th grade. Slowly year by year we have added one new grade per year. In the 2020-2021 school year we will add this final grade completing out high school in Gandou. This is a great victory for the community and has the potential to do great things for the people of Gandou. We never stop thanking God for all His help getting to this point.
• One problem we have however is our school building. We need more school classrooms. We are currently using the temporary classrooms in the courtyard.
• We need to add a whole new school building with 6 more classrooms much like the one that was recently built.
• We talked to Father Voltaire about where we would place this new building. He said there is still enough land in the school area just north of our oldest 3 classrooms.
• The cost for building these 6-additional classroom is expected to be similar to the school building project which was completed last year which was about $83,000. It would likely be a bit more because of the rise in prices in Haiti and because the land which we would build these class rooms on is not as level which will require the moving of more dirt and likely a larger cement base. We have a donor willing to make a significant contribution towards this school building project but we need more donors. Please pray for these donors to step forward.
• Food for the Poor has donated some computers with solar power stations. Food for the Poor will be returning later to install them soon. We will be using one of our current class rooms for the computers, but this makes us still further short on classrooms.
• We recently received a donations of school desks from a school in Cincinnati, Ohio. We coordinated the transport of these to Food for the Poor and Food for the Poor shipped them on their sea container to Haiti for us. Father Voltaire then worked out the transportation of these desks up to Gandou and put them to use in our school. It was so wonderful to walk into our school building in Gandou and see these beautiful strong high- quality steel desks in our school in Gandou. It is without a doubt that our students will be able to learn better now that they have a place to lay their book and paper and have a smooth surface to write on. See the wonderful picture below.
Goat Microloan Project
• Two members of our team met with Daniel Noel who runs the goat microloan project (Daniel is also a teacher in our school).
• The ten original families are doing well. Five families have paid back 2-4 goats each.
• Twelve additional families received goats, partly from the paid-back goats and partly from the additional funds we sent last September.
• Twenty-two total families are now being helped with the program. There are approximately 100 goats in the program.
• Daniel Noel, the administrator, spends about 20 hours a month on the program visiting the families.
• There is another person from the community who is also named Daniel who helps with the goat microloan project and spends about 3 hours every 60 days administering vaccines and educating the goat owners.
• The families continue to give thanks for the program and the help it is providing to them. They keep telling us this is a very good program and they always seem excited about it. Daniel said this is a good program to help people stand on their own.
• After they pay back their goats, most families state that they will use the goats to pay for their children’s school.
• Daniel continues to want to increase the program. We would need to come up with $500 for every additional family we want to give a goat microloan.
Maintenance
• The first big problem that our maintenance group ran into happened when they pulled our medical/dental clinic generator from storage and tried to power up our clinics. The generator, which was a $400 generator from Lowes in the USA, was first put into use on the previous trip and had not been touched since our last trip. It still looks like new and it started the first pull but it would not produce any electricity.
• The maintenance guys worked with it and found there was a problem with the voltage regulator and through a careful process of dragging the engine speed down to a lower speed and tricking the voltage regulator they were able to get it to work again.
• Later in the week they found a voltage regulator from one of the old non-working generators at the rectory that was very similar and only had different terminals. They were able to re-wire it and put it on the generator we were using and get us a completely functional generator again. Once again we find that God sent us the perfect people that we needed for this trip. God does not make everything go smoothly without issues, but He makes it so that whatever issues do pop up, that with trust in Him, the issues can be dealt with. Let us praise His Holy Name.
• Since every trip there is so much for the maintenance group to work on, last year the decision was made to take someone from the community and help them go get training on mechanics and maintenance. Between the summer trip and this winter trip we started sponsoring a young man from Gandou to go to mechanics school.
• This young man, Frantz Joseph, started in school and returned during our trip to work with our maintenance group. See the picture below. The team found that he already had good understanding of working with wrenches and doing repair work. We were excited to make this connection and to begin a relationship with someone who can be such a big help to the community in the future.
• Once Frantz is done with school, he will be available for the community to do any repairs or maintenance work that is needed. Because we don’t think we can keep him busy full-time and his training is less expensive than the full 4 year University programs in which we are sponsoring other students through, we are only requiring 1 year of service in the community after he graduates.
• During our trips, the men stay in wooden rooms on top of the rectory roof. These rooms also serve as storage rooms. For a couple of years, we have been considering repairing or replacing these rooms. Constant exposure to rain has rotted the lower portion of the walls and they are no longer structurally sound. They require attention very soon.
• Repairing the rooms would be the least expensive option, but would likely result in the same problem again in a few years. Long term, Fr. Voltaire and the team feel it would be best to replace these wooden rooms with cement rooms. This would be significantly more expensive. Because it would be mostly used by our teams during our trips and not for the general community, we cannot use general Haiti donations for this. The money would need to be donated specifically for this project.
• Fr. Voltaire’s truck is completely worn out. The rough mountain “roads” have been very hard on the truck and it has many problems. Since the June trip, Father has had big issues with the transmission and the front axle. These were both repaired and it has been a few months since he has had major problems.
• At the end of our trip, on the way down the mountain the brakes began making noise. We ended up leaving Fr. Voltaire in Jacmel with the truck to get it repaired. After the trip, we e-mailed Father and found out that it took several days for the truck to be repaired. This meant he was not able to return to Gandou for several days.
• We are working with a Germain organization, Adveniat, to try and get Father a new truck. This is the same organization that helped us purchase the current truck. They will pay up to 75% of the new truck cost. We talked with them during this trip and we are on the list as a priority parish to get a truck this year. They order their vehicles in bulk to get better pricing. They believe it will be this summer before they have their order ready to place, and it will likely be the end of the year before we get a new truck. To participate in their program, we will have to sell the current truck. After adjusting for this sale, they estimate our portion will be US$15,000.
• Previously Father’s rectory generator was stored in the chicken house. The chicken house roof was very leaky and the generator was getting wet. This was shortening the life of the generator. We sent funding for a new storage shelter. The new building is pictured below. It is beautiful, strong, and nice and dry for the generator. The old building was removed.
• We continue to thank God for His many helps.
Community Water Supply
• Our desire is to work on the root of the health problems in Gandou so we can work ourselves out of a job and someday move on to another place that needs us more. To do this each trip now we work on improvements in the community water supply and water filtration.
• One year ago we made repairs to one of the community water spigots areas where the people get their water. This is from the capped spring near the rectory. Six months later we found that the water spigot valves were so highly used that the valves were already nearly worn out. We began investigations into a valve design that can accommodate a higher use rate than the standard off-the-shelf ball valves.
• In this search the team connected with others who are highly involved in water projects in Haiti and found out there is a valve called a Talbot valve. These are poppet style valves rather than ball style valves which offer two advantages. First, they automatically shut off when the user lets go of them. This helps to conserve water. Second, the valves are rated for many more use cycles than the standard ball values. These appear to be exactly what we need.
• Our team members worked with the student who we are sending to mechanical school to change the ball valve at the water station to the new Talbot valve. It was good to see him using wrenches and learning about plumbing. Our goal is to have someone in the community in the future take over these types of repairs.
• We decided to move slowly on our transition to the Talbot valve as we need to gain some experience with it before we purchase many of them. We only changed one of the two values at this water station. In six months we will see how it has lasted and then considering changing both sides to this new style valve.
• One thing that was different this trip compared to the last trip was that we were in more of the dry season and obtaining water from the water spigots was much more difficult. The people recognized this and they were careful to conserve any water that was coming out of the water spigots.
• Early one morning the team members went to the water spigots thinking that over the night the water supply would have built up again and there would be water for the people. However, even though they went shortly after the sun came up, they found that many people had already come to the water station and already any supply of water that built up during the night was used up.
• Close to the cement water tank where the water for the water spigot is supposed to be stored, the PVC pipe that carries water to the water tank was dug up and could be easily seen. It appears the line was damaged and had to be dug up to be repaired but was not yet re-buried. The PVC pipe they have available in Haiti appears to be something like schedule 10. It is very thin and frail. It does not surprise us that it is often broken or damaged.
• Because water supply is now one of our biggest issues, the team members decided to start further investigating the water supply sources in the area. We asked for the help of one of our top teachers (Estive) who is from Gandou and who also speaks English and we walked with him to three of the local water supply locations.
• At each location we basically just found a small source of water running from the side of the mountain. One had a cement box with a rusty steel door that must be opened to reach inside to get water.
• The other was basically just a hole next to a tree root where water slowly came and you could very slowly fill your bucket and carry it home.
• Each appeared to be producing just a few gallons of water per hour.
• After walking to each water source location, and thinking about the location of each of the water sources, the team noticed that they all seemed to be in a line. We are worried that they might all be the same water source and if we were to better cap and store the water from any one of the sites, the others would run dry.
• In order to work on the root of many of the problems in the village of Gandou, we need to work on the water issues. Likely one of the most urgent of these water issues is the supply of water.
• We have been trying to work with the organization Food for the Poor to try to get someone to Gandou to try to drill a well. We are hopeful they will be able to drill us a well in the near future.
• We need to continue to ask God to provide some way we can help the people obtain enough water to sustain their lives. I can’t image what it must be like to not only not have enough food to eat, but also to try to live in the heat with a very limited supply of water. Still more evidence of the suffering laid on top of suffering which makes up the daily lives of these people.