Be Flexible. Really.

This is the second of two posts that have been stolen from Spring 2011 EMI intern Samantha Rowell (I believe a recent VT grad). I found the post in December 2015 while surfing. Sam had not touched her blog since the trip, but I wanted to hold onto the memories. I’m a cad, a thief, a man with no soul.
Sam’s blogspot site: http://samrowell.blogspot.com/

The EMI staff really meant it when they said expect things to go awry and that we must be flexible. Our trip required a lot more flexibility than most.
First, it was a surprise that we would be riding back from the airport with another group (Fuller Center) that was there to help the same ministry we were, Grace International. The result was this –

35 people plus their luggage in a extended-cab truck

Upon arriving at Grace Village we found out that their other vehicle was broken down. So that meant our team and the Fuller group had to coordinate transportation the whole week between our respective schedules. The bus became known to the EMI team as “the cage.”

All those people came out of the cage

That first night we found out that the Mardi Gras celebrations would mean roads through Port au Prince would be blocked off. Sunday and Monday we could not drive through past 3-4 pm and on Tuesday we could not drive through at all. This meant we had to push our visit to our work site back to later in the week.EMI was involved with Grace Intl on a previous project in Fall 2010 and that site (Lambi) is fairly close to our new site (Lafiteau). Our team had planned to go to Lambi and do some survey stakes at that property. Because we could not get to Lafiteau, we went to Lambi at the beginning of the week (we did not have to travel through Port au Prince to get there.)

Yes, that is a large pig next to the surveyors

In a way I think this was a blessing in disguise for a few reasons:

There was a big rain event the night before our visit to the Lambi site and this helped the engineers and our client, Grace Intl, to see that drainage at this site was a bigger problem than first realized. Basically it’s a flood plain and not an easy good [edited by sokkaleo] site to build on.

Construction on the first house at Lambi started a few weeks before our arrival and when we got out there, we saw that it was not located according to the plans we gave them. It was misplaced enough to knock out space for several homes.

Because of these two things, some of our team spent half the week re-designing the Lambi site…not what we had intended to do during the week.

Another little surprise at Lambi. We spent a whole day putting stakes with flags in the ground to mark out the road and some drainage ditches. That night we found out that some kids had gone around and pulled them out of the ground…we think mostly because they wanted to play with flags.

Later in the week, on Lafiteau, some of the guys that went out to walk the perimeter of the site were met with men with guns and they were not happy that we were there. That night the team found out that the site was 13 acres. We were told it was going to be 105. The next day it turned out that we actually did have the whole 105 acres. But this information on how much property we had was not a promise. Grace is currently working on securing the property.

Beginning stages of planning

Walking the Perimeter of Lafiteau

Meeting with Grace to talk about the site