Progress

Today has been an interesting day. I woke up at 5 this morning and decided not to try to go back to sleep. I set up breakfast and threw on my giant green headphones (as I do every morning). I was set to lead a crew at that rubble site, Wesley Vernet, but a bit after 7 we were called outside for a meeting. For the next several hours, all the local and international volunteers discussed the situation. Basically there are two problems – the threatening note one of our Haitian staff members got and the structure of the local volunteer program. At this point the two problems have become interconnected which is a real problem in and of itself. The management decision is to scale back the local program for the time being and reassess at a later date. Most of us feel that’s not the way to go. So a couple hours into the meeting this morning, one of the local guys, Big Junior, stood up and said that he wanted to tell us the names of those who wrote the note. He shared, in front of the whole meeting, two names of those responsible. We all really appreciated him being courageous and loyal to HODR. The meeting ended with things still in the air – there is a CLEAR consensus about how the volunteers feel so it’s just a matter of waiting for the decision to be reversed from the top. We expressed our solidarity with the local volunteers, letting them know we consider them family. The feeling is clearly mutual.

We ended the meeting with just an hour or so left in the work morning so it was decided that my crew wasn’t going to go out in the morning. In the afternoon I worked more with the teacher-training program. Tomorrow we have a training in the morning at a school in Leogane. After we finished running over things, I spent the rest of the afternoon playing Haitian games with a couple other volunteers and this one little Haitian girl. We had dinner and followed that with a rousing game of soccer. We played out back behind our base so the local guys could play as well. Upon their insistence, we played international volunteers vs. local volunteers. Surprisingly we didn’t get killed (it was 2-2, in fact)! But it was a lot of fun. I played goalie for a while which probably wasn’t such a good idea. I was clearly the worst player out there but it’s all good. Today was, again, tense for a while. But at the end of the day people (both local and international) seem really happy. Things are getting better for sure but Monday will be a pivotal day as that’s (supposedly) the day the restructuring of the local program is going to happen.

Tomorrow is going to be super sweet. Like I said, I’ve got the teacher-training in the morning but all the volunteers get the afternoon off to watch the USA vs. England soccer match. The plan is to get a projector set up in our giant outdoor tent and we’ll close all the sides so it’ll be dark and certainly ridiculously hot. We’re going to eat delicious food (likely homemade pizza) and watch sports, which sounds like a plan to me.

Looking forward to the weekend!

Love,

Daniel