- Water well drilling
- Start of school semester, coming up soon
- Pastor Pascal recovery from minor surgery
- The Pomona team and their work here
- School construction
Brenda’s bit
As we write up our latest entry we are half way through an 11 day visit with a team of volunteers. They are from California and Louisiana, and are a very loving and hard working group. They are building a rubble house, which is literally a house made from the rubble of an old home (actually the rubble from 4 homes is necessary for the one new one). Each rubble house is currently unique. After one is finished there are adjustments made for improvements; this latest one for example is the first to have indoor plumbing. We are working in partnership with Conscience International in the constructing of rubble homes and it is an exciting venture with immediate benefits to those needing to move out of the now rotting temporary tent homes.
On the home front we said goodbye to Tori, who has been working here, in Grand Goâve, as a nurse for about 6 months and we welcomed Jenny; who comes to continue and expand Tori initial medical response to a long term self sustaining venture.
We are still settling into our house and making small improvements almost daily. Jenny has moved into her permanent bedroom and we hope her ‘armoire’ will arrive this week so she can hang up and put away her clothes. We still haven’t got doors inside the house and Jenny and I have impressed on Mike the need to get the windows covered to try and keep out the unwanted bugs and tarantulas. Yes, tarantulas!! Mike has killed a number of them since I have been here. They are black, hairy and about 4 inches across. We are not looking to have one bite us but we have been told they will not kill us as the wives tale says they will!
Mike’s bit
Communication is so key to any relationship. As one of the coordinators living amongst Haitians that speak a different language it is even more critical to listen and affirm what you think you heard is in fact what was said. Add to this the need to understand the connotations of any phrase or sentence and the phrase “Communication is so key to any relationship” really hits home as to its importance.
I had a tough communication week! I have learnt, again that God gave me two ears and one mouth. I should listen twice as much as a speak. For the people who know me; for me to stop talking it must be a God thing! He has blessed me this week with a peace in the knowledge I have gained and while it was not fun at the time I hope it will help me moving forward.
This week has also been a power week – electric power….
Nearly two weeks ago the Church received a very large power bill; they only have one or two lights bulbs and the amplifier for their main Sunday service, so it was obvious that others had spliced into their power lines. The church immediately removed the cable from the meter, cutting off all power supply to the whole site. This was not brought to my attention until the Friday evening. We had been running very low on the batteries and we had had to run the generator a lot more than usual and I was getting concerned there were issues with the inverter itself. The plan was to rewire the cable to go directly to the Siloë kitchen as a single continuous wire and then negotiate with EDH on the outstanding bill.
So this last week Moise and I purchased the necessary wire and we ran it from the street back to the kitchen. We were able to reconnect the power and it was a real delight to see how much current we had available to charge the batteries, now that we were able to use all our power and it was not been sliced to the local neighborhood.
Our joy was short lived.
On Friday night a tree fell on our power line and resulted in the cables shorting and melting 10 to 15 feet of cable either side of our meter. We are now back to using the generator to keep the batteries powered and hope that EDH will fix their side of the cable this week and we will fix our side at the same time. We still have to negotiate the payment of the huge bill but we should be able to get the batteries back to full power every 24 hours without having to run the generator for so long, each day.
Today we had to locate the right cable to be used to replace our side of the meter! Grand Goâve has two hardware stores; we were looking for 12 or 10 gauge wire and were quickly disappointed. However, Moise did some asking and some choice second hand cable was brought out. A suitably thick wire, twice the length than we needed was traded for some cash and now we wait for EDH.
Hopefully next week I’ll be able to report that all is well on the power front!
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