April 2012
22 posts
Haiti Property Law
{written 4/25}
Yesterday night marked our second seminar, led by Frederique Siegel of the Villa Rosa team. At AfH she leads the community engagement side by day, but she is also a member of the Haiti Property Law Working Group, a coalition of interested parties that are working to improve Haitian property law. To be honest, I wasn’t particularly excited to hear about property law for an hour,...
learning on the job
At this point in our adventure here in Haiti, we should not be surprised when things don’t go as planned.
Yesterday was our first presentation to the sisters and administration of CIM (College Coeur Immacule de Marie) and we proposed a master plan and phasing process. It consisted of 20 classrooms, a kitchen, multi-purpose space, toilet block, labs and administrative offices to services...
Villa Rosa Community Center
As Villa Rosa continues to recover, grow and densify, space gets eaten up by houses and businesses. Room for playing, socializing even walking is limited. Paths disappear as a family claims a plot of land for their house and kids are left with the stairways to play on.
For the last week I have been beginning the design for a community center. But like all of Villa Rosa, this process began with...
Collège Couer Immaculé de Marie
This week, Angela and I have been working on a master plan for the CIM campus. It’s a school of 850 students ranging from 1st-13th grade (their school system is a bit different than ours) and most of the campus collapsed during the earthquake. Here’s a google map image of the site before. Three story buildings fill the site. On the south end, you can see the reddish-roof of a...
Progress!
Ecole Baptiste Bon Berger is a school located within the dense urban landscape of Cite Soleil. It is a private institution serving 1200 students with 36 teachers. The earthquake severely damaged several buildings and AfH’s first decision was to demolish nearly every structure on site. Previously, there were only 5 disgusting toilets and although the facilities had been built with the...
First inaugural Port-au-Prince chapter UMN alumni...
We met with the three U of M alumni working in Port-au-Prince for lunch today. If you count our group of six soon-to-be alumni, maybe we could apply for a Haiti chapter of the alumni association…? The three Haiti veterans you see here are Andrew Ripp (left) of MSAADA Architects, Anne Hake (second from right), a colleague at AfH, and John Wade (the only one not pretending this isn’t...
class in session
A few of us have been working with schools and after a client’s response to the question “What are you looking for in your new school?” was “We want this to be a school of the future,” I began to wonder what that meant.
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Architecture for Humanity places schools high on their list of priorities because of their potential as a catalyst for change. Educating...
Port Salut: A Weekend at the Beach
Most of our posts so far have focused on our work here with AfH and while it is our focus, we have had time to relax, learn and discover more of this beautiful island. This weekend was one of those moments.
[[MORE]]Saturday morning all 7 of us crammed into a car for the 4.5 hour journey to Port Salut. We all were happy for a weekend away (intentionally leaving all computers at the house) and...
Last weekend we had the opportunity to visit a pediatric clinic being built by No Time for Poverty in Port Salut. No Time for Poverty is an non-profit organization started by Jeff & Michele Boston from Saint Paul, MN. There is more information about their organization at their website www.notimeforpoverty.org. The clinic has been a long time in planning and is being built to address a need...
Schools and Bloc Sanitaires
Working here with Architecture for Humanity, half of us are focused on school projects. Of the list of projects that AfH is involved in, many are schools. Schools seem to be one of the best places for AfH and their donors to make an immediate difference in the lives of the people here in Haiti. Clearly, housing and clinics are also priorities, but building houses for 800 people requires a lot...
Building: It's complicated
Please be aware that building in Haiti is difficult. The seismic activity of the region is perhaps the most well known of the challenges, and then there’s tropical storms. Most of the building materials arrive on a ship, driving up the costs to often times exceed averages in the United States. That means making good buildings is expensive and much of what is required to build well has a...
Villa Rosa Phase 3
The Villa Rosa team (including Jessica, Kristen and I) has officially moved onto the third stage of our urban design project: the design phase. All of the hard work of mapping, mobilizing the community, and coordinating with the alphabet soup of NGOs will be the base for our planning effort, beginning with two weeks of “micro-planning.” Based on a blend of factors, including...
taken for granted
It is easy in America to forget how much has simply been given to us just because of where we were born. As an American you are likely to have a roof over your head, a bed, and access to medical services, power, toilets, and clean running water. That is simply not the case here; here you do not just turn a knob and have water, much less water you can drink.
This last week, I’ve been particularly...
A Sunday Hike and a Little History
Like many Americans I knew very little about Haiti before the earthquake. I was aware it was in the Caribbean and was one of the only successful slave revolts, but that was about all. After the earthquake the news was filled with images and stories of the earthquake, as well as statistics about the country’s poverty. However I still knew very little about the history until recently. The...
Traveling around Haiti it is readily apparent that there is no waste disposal system. The side of the road is littered with plastic bags, bottles, styrofoam containers, broken shoes and other discarded objects. Often times they are tossed out a car window, an open window of a house or carried to the nearest ravine and dumped. Everything sits and waits to break down, decay or more than likely,...
Distribution of Wealth
Yesterday, after two site visits in Saint-Marc north of Port-au-Prince, we drove back past what represents Haiti for most of the inhabitants here. People walked to market with burros loaded down with corn and mangoes to sell. We drove along bumpy roads that threatened to burst our tires because of insufficient maintenance, past areas where trash had dangerously accumulated and people were short...
Voodoo on our doorstep
It’s easter weekend! That means we have tomorrow off while the whole country shuts down for the weekend (and for most people Monday too!). People migrate to the countryside for the annual celebration recognizing the easter holiday. Haitian easter is a unique tradition that combines observance of the Catholic holiday with voodoo rituals. Voodoo is one of the three constitutionally...
the small things
We came in focused on the big things, but as we settle in we’ve been noticing some of the small things that make up the day-to-day life here. I think that, in a way, they are just as important.
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pictured above is the state of the national palace, still untouched since the earthquake. I’m going to categorize that with the big things. On the right is our power switch -...
one step forward, three steps back
You could say that things here run on Haitian time… but something tells me the hardship so apparent in Haitian history has a lot more to do with why things here run the way they do. Every Friday we end the week with an office meeting that recaps the progress and setbacks of each of the major projects at AFH. This last week was a two hour conversation that covered the constant “one step forward...
There have already been a few observations posted on the blog about the rain and flooding here. It has rained almost every night since we have been here and the other day on our way home it was light enough I was able to take some video of the streets during a storm. The combination of the steep terrain and lack of permeable surfaces quickly overwhelms the drainage system and floods the streets....
