Grace’s Mission and Our Mission

This is the first 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/

It was hard to resist the feelings of hopelessness that crept in as we drove around Haiti, but the people and mission of Hatian owned and operated Grace International was inspiring. Their vision is to bring opportunity to the Haitian’s and in doing that empower the people. One of the ways they are trying to do this is by building communities, not just homes. In the 2010 earthquake displacement camp tent village that Grace runs, we saw that they were applying expectations to the people who lived there and enforcing strict consequences. It seems simple, but I think this is a huge value to the Haitian people.

View of a portion of the displacement camp on Grace International’s property

Soccer game in Grace village

Our mission was to provide Grace with a master plan for a new community. We achieved that, but could not give as much detail as will be needed in the future for this site. EMI has worked with Grace for several years. It is very likely that this partnership will continue and we will be involved in helping them realize this long-term vision for the community at Lafiteau.

Our EMI team (Ash Wednesday)

The beautiful planning work of Dan Ford.

Our presentation at the end of the week to Grace Int’l

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

Voting & Taxes

Cobb County just participated in a local SPLOST election, where "based on complete but unofficial results, 42,971 people voted in the election: 21,525 for the SPLOST and 21,446 against, a difference of 79 votes." In a county census-certified at 688,078 residents, 6.2% of the people voted in an election to decide whether to incur a $492,000,000 sales tax over the next five years; the resulting decision (79 votes) represents 0.01% of the population. Regardless of the merits of the decision, it is both daunting and embarrassing that such a far-reaching decision is made by such a minority of the citizens.

It might be worth combining single-ballot elections into a greater election cycle - bringing minor elections like these into typical Primary or General Elections held in May and November of the year. You would certainly get a greater cross-section of the population through larger voter turn-out. However, you might end up with people voting without knowledge of the issue, similar to how we randomly pick judges on a ballot without any idea who they are (this certainly favors names at the beginning of the alphabet and ones that have a nice sound to them). Those who voted yesterday were certainly more informed and interested in the ballot measure based upon the fact that they came to the polls at all.

Regarding the merit of the vote itself, I would caution against the knee-jerk no-taxes concept that citizens throughout the U.S. are naturally drawn to. Some portion of the projects slated to be built would be shelved without the SPLOST money. However, a vast majority of them are geared towards Transportation improvements designed to improve our quality of (driving) life and enhance the livability and economics of being a resident, employee and employer within our County. If this SPLOST would have failed to pass, these projects would be funded through the County General Fund, being paid by our property taxes, which in themselves would need to be increased to cover these expenses. If one has the option, it is better to spread the tax burden out to continual transactions of the millions of people passing through the County on a day to day basis rather than on the yearly property tax bill of the much smaller pool of property owners within the County. This was a good decision, and the County has proven themselves generally responsible for their coffers (not including the County Board of Education, a continual source of local embarrassment).