Day 1 in Haiti - Port-au-Prince

Monday 02/20/2012 – Port-au-Prince
Haiti! Finally. After months of waiting, planning, discussing, dreaming and reading up on Haiti, I finally got to see the country with my own eyes. “Ayiti” as the Haitians write it in their now officially recognized Haitian creole, means the land of mountains. And it was plain to see why as we flew above it in the airplane. Mountains of brown dirt were specked with dots of green foliage, far and few between, the glaring proof of severe deforestation. Thousands of feet above the ground, the rolling mountains looked like a piece of wrinkled cloth, reminding me of the powerful tectonic forces that had pushed the Earth’s plates over hundreds of millions of years, in much the same way a fabric creases under pressure.

Our team, Jack Reid, Lee Bristol, Martha Mason, Diana and Ben Snouffer, and me, landed in Toussaint Louverture International Airport around noon and were welcomed by Father Verdieu’s brother, Canas. On the way out of the airport, a dozen people immediately crowded us, each one hoping to get a small tip for helping us to carry the suitcases – one of many reminders of the country’s poverty. I got my first glimpse of Port-au-Prince on the way to his house. It was not my first time in a developing country, and so I was not surprised by the typical scenes of a poor overcrowded city: unpaved roads, people in rags carrying heavy loads on their heads, pushing carts full of merchandise as they could not afford to transport it by car.

After dropping off our bags at Canas’ house (and a few beers), we went to check out the base of an NGO called “Haiti Communitere” (recently changed from Grassroots United), which mainly acts as a coordinating body between different NGOs – an important role, seeing as Haiti has the most NGOs per capita of any country in the world. The base is a hub and a kind of experimental ground for different organizations to try out their sustainable buildings and small-scale projects. Or to quote one of our team members (he knows who he is ;-) ), a dream place for “hippies gone wild.” If “hippiness” is all about green, cheap, do-it-yourself sustainable technologies that the average Haitian can use to better their lives without the need for massive outside funding, then count me in.
The best place to find out about their projects is on their website, but I’ll go over a few things we saw.

The first thing we saw was the aquaponics center. This was the first time I had ever seen one, and I was impressed by the simplicity of this self-contained ecosystem. I don’t remember the details, but the idea was that Tilapia fish in a black plastic tank were fed a type of plant contained in a nearby box, and their composted waste material fertilized the plants, with a small pump circulating the water around. There was no need to add fish feed or clean the water, which is I imagine part of what makes regular fish farming so environmentally unfriendly and expensive.

Next we took a look at the different types of composting toilets – I was especially eager to see the thermophilic composting system set up by an NGO called “GiveLove,” who has set up composting systems in several spots in Haiti including Cite Soleil, a refugee camp outside Port-au-Prince, and I one of the largest slums in the northern hemisphere. I could talk for hours and hours about how fascinating composting toilets are (especially thermophilic ones) and why they’re a crucial part of the solution to fixing our planet (ecologically and in many other ways), but I’ll save that for another post. Strangely enough, many people don’t seem to enjoy hearing about the wonders of composting “humanure” - especially not over dinner, I’ve found. But I highly recommend “The Humanure Handbook” by Joseph Jenkins, for those who are interested in the topic. This book isn’t just an instruction manual on how to start your own composting toilet - it gives the bigger picture, putting many related environmental problems into perspective, in a witty, humorous way.
Next we saw the different types of green buildings. Since virtually all of Haiti’s steel and cement is imported, construction of American-style homes is expensive. Workers don’t have the right tools to mix the cement properly, and tend to water it down too much in order to reduce costs. The result is shoddy buildings, ready to collapse at the first earthquake, as we saw in the Port-au-Prince earthquake last year. This article “Death by a thousand shovels” (http://cementtrust.wordpress.com/2010/08/04/concrete-crisis-in-haiti/) lays most of the blame for the 230,000 deaths on poor construction practices. All of the green homes we visited in Haiti Communitere, on the other hand, are made from locally-sourced materials (mostly) and have been tested for resistance to earthquakes and other natural disasters. We visited beautiful houses made out of trash (walls made from plastic bottles, or Styrofoam/trash bricks), cob (a mixture of straw, clay and sand), strawbales, earthbags, and many other designs. I could also go on about green homes for hours, but there’s plenty of information on the web about it (such as here: http://www.greenhomebuilding.com).
There are also plenty of people, including average americans, who have built their own homes out of cob for a few thousand dollars, literally from the ground beneath their feet. Their stories are easy to find on the web and quite interesting. Cob houses are quite durable, as evidenced by the fact that there are still several-hundred-year old English cob houses being used.
I also quickly looked at one of the NGO’s albums of solar cookers made and used in different parts of Haiti.

We returned to Canas’ house to find a sumptuous feast waiting for us. Canas imparted that this meal was a small thank you gift for all that St. Mary’s has done for the Parish of Carcasse. Unfortunately I’m writing this a week later after the actual meal, so I don’t remember everything we had, but I know it was delicious. We spent the rest of the evening chatting under his cherry tree, accompanied by clucking hens and proud fighting cocks. We went to bed early, exhausted from our early start at 3 am and long trip.