A Day of Projects

8:00 AM - The sounds of work all around us. After many inches of rain and a very cool night it is bright and sunny with blue skies this morning. Everyone has their laundry hung on the line already. Paul is making project lists. He and Robert will head to Nira (mini home depot) and the concrete block factory today. One project is building a block incinerator in the back yard. Our steel drum has rusted away to nothing. Eli is moving rocks around in the back yard to make room for the burn pit. Clorene is busy doing laundry. "Doing laundry" in Haiti means that a woman or girl sits on a short stool with a large shallow tub in front of her full of cold water -- there is no hot water because it requires fuel to make. Using strong powdered detergent the woman vigorously scrubs each piece of laundry. After she rinses each piece in another tub she hangs the laundry on a line (often wire) strung around the yard or lays the clothes out on the roof. More often, especially in the countryside, the clothes are spread out on hedges and bushes. 11:30. Went to CSL hospital and paid our bill for all of the referrals from the April trip which included 2 hernia surgeries, a breast mass and TB tests on a couple people. Next we went to John V's to pick up the plane tickets for Yanie and Amoce to fly to the DR on Sunday. Now we're at Nira buying PVC to make mosquito net frames for Amoce's family and tools for the burn pit project. 12:15 At concrete block factory. The Haitian men were working around a manually operated concrete press. Put down a square of wood, load the press with cement, two men pull down on the press handles to squeeze the cement deep into the block forms, then they lift up the handles. Two other men then lift the board up off the ground with 6 heavy wet concrete blocks on it and carry it across the yard to the drying area. These guys were sooo muscle-bound! 3:45. Our mission house now has a strong solid fire-pit. Paul and Eli worked side-by-side to build it. They're on the roof now, mixing concrete and repairing the crack over our storage area. 5:30 PM. A final project - mosquito nets and frames for Amoce's families beds. Eli jumped right in and cut the PVC to fit the frames together. It was a really productive day. One more item on our list -- legalising MSM in Haiti. Jan and Amoce are working on that now.