Summer 2007

Today I awoke to the sound of cock-a-doodle-doos coming from chickens on just about all sides of the house.  Whoever named the sound a chicken makes was pretty much right on.  After a breakfast of eggs, avocado, and mango, Madame Evelyn came up to the guest house to talk with Daniele, Bill, and I about the project.  Madame Evelyn has served as a technician for the water program for years, and she helped us understand the records she keeps.  They’re amazing.  She speaks Spanish and Creole, so most of the hour-ish meeting was conducted in Spanish.  I felt bad that Sony, whose job for the next 6 weeks is to follow me wherever I go and translate for me, probably felt rather useless this morning.  However, I confess that I didn’t even think about that for awhile because I was so thoroughly enjoying speaking Spanish.  One of the few but big disappointments of choosing this summer project was that I thought I probably wouldn’t get to practice my Spanish.  Although Madame Evelyn’s role will be limited and I don’t know how much more Spanish we’ll speak, I enjoyed it while it lasted and hope to do more.

After a long philosophical lunch during which Daniele and Bill put forth their ideas about what makes certain countries collapse, I trained Sony on qualitative interviewing techniques (since I’m a master at this after taking a 2-credit class this spring).  As we were talking, Sony found an English Bible and took the opportunity to show off his reading skills.  He seemed very interested in teaching me about what he was reading, so pray that we have more opportunities to discuss the Bible and maybe even teach each other some language skills in the process.

After that Daniele and I had the pure exhilaration of entering data.  It’s the glamorous part of the job.  Last summer, I never did resolve the issue of why God had me working a job purely for the money in which I was told the first day, “if you take this job, we’re pretty much going to throw you in a closet with a bunch of data and have you enter it all day long.”  Not that it compensates for all of the hours I spent in that closet, but perhaps I can at least see that last summer’s experience prepared me well for the next week or so of entering 1-2 pages of sales data with notes written in Creole for each of the 2,000+ families in the program.  I reverted to the data entry groove of putting part of my mind on auto-pilot and philosophizing with the other part of my mind.  We’ll see how long the fun with data entry lasts.

If today is anything like the coming days, the hours between 6 and 8 will be a flurry of activity.  That’s when the generator comes back on (and so does the internet) after being shut off around lunch.  It’s amazing how cooperative three internet-deprived people learn to be and how efficient each one of us becomes at checking email and what not when we are forced to do so.

However, the 2 year old Haitian boy who lives in the house beside us stole the show and overshadowed the attraction of the internet during his visit.  We have yet to get him to talk, but he warmed up to us blans today when he took a seat at the kitchen table between Daniele and me.  After I made some quacking noises at him, he found it amusing to try to repeat them.  His attempts resulted in something between a sniffle and a sneeze.  He also learned that making faces and rolling his eyes gets him lots of attention, especially from the ladies.

We planned for tomorrow’s all-day training session with the four interviewers and entered more data lit with the light of laptops and head-lamps.  Tomorrow should be a full day, so pray that we develop good relationships with the rest of the team which we will meet for the first time.

Our day of travel went surprisingly smoothly.  There were plenty of logistics that could have gone wrong that didn’t.  I suppose knowing people helps.  Daniele, my mentor from CDC, breezed us through the Ft. Lauderdale airport with her frequent flyer “Gold” status.  Bill’s friend in the Port-au-Prince airport breezed us through customs.  Bill’s other Haitian friend breezed us to the in-country airport where the two Brazilian pilots got us through a brief rainstorm to an airport in the north.  Daniele giving lots of US government money to a guy who trailed our car on the way to the clinic breezed us through the last leg of the journey.  Apparently they have redone some of the roads so that the previously 2-hour drive winding up and down hills is now a 1-hour drive with an occasional strip of concrete.

It’s quite peaceful here at the clinic.  The compound sits on a hill with a view of mountains on the other side of a river.  The view is beautiful despite the fact that there should be lots more trees on the mountains given the climate of the island as a whole.  Good old deforestation.  Inside the compound there is a medical clinic, the factory at which they produce the chlorine, a couple houses for the Haitians who work full-time at the clinic, and the guest house for missionaries, which is where Bill (the program manager), Daniele, and I are staying.  Our setup at the clinic is pretty sweet.  All day long we get water for showers, flush toilets, and water for drinking that is chlorinated with Gadyen Dlo, the product we’re studying.  During the morning and early evening we even get electricity.

Today we met a couple people who work for the water program and charted out a schedule for the rest of the week.  Should be fun.