Going Inside – Tuesday January 19

It’s been a week since the earthquake and during that time we’ve managed to take care of basic needs, and even provide some entertainment and intellectual stimulus for kids. Peter brought a pair of binoculars back after Christmas and has been taking them out onto the soccer field (where the kids are still sleeping at night) and teaching little astronomy classes. We had soccer and basketball tournaments yesterday. Last night Jon and I carried out something we had started planning last Monday – before plans changed. In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday, we played the audio of the last 5 minutes of the “I have a Dream” speech for all of the kids last night, then announced a speech competition – “what is your dream for Haiti?” We even had a group of about 10 kids who stayed around and listened to and read along with the entire speech while we talked about Civil Rights in the United States. I think the speeches – which they’ll write in English – will be pretty wonderful.

But it still wasn’t school, and a bunch of kids in a school not going to class for a week is just sort of unnatural. So today, we had school. We’re running a shortened schedule, since we don’t have all of our teachers and can’t use all of the classrooms, and only have about half of our students right now. We’re using all of the outdoor classrooms, and a few in the less damaged classroom building. We know that the building is structurally sound, but it has some cracks that look really scary even though they’re not on load bearing supports. (Oh, did I mention that my next career will be forensic engineer? This stuff is fascinating ….) So, it took some convincing, some hand holding, and lots of patient explanations of what the heck load bearing supports are, but we did get almost everyone inside. Many stood or sat right next to the door and a few only made it 20 minutes or so, but that’s a good first day. I told them I didn’t care if they learned anything or even listened to a single thing any teacher said all day. All that mattered today was getting back to a routine, and going back inside.

This afternoon an engineer finally arrived on campus to inspect the buildings. After six days of Tricia and Molly Bowman trying to work their contacts from the states, we finally got a guy from one of the Haitian firms that consulted on the construction of the most recent buildings. This guy was amazing. He had attended a funeral in the morning for a family friend, then fought the crazy city traffic (full of NGO people driving themselves around alone in their cars ….) to get here. He walked around with us for about 2 hours, inspecting cracks, tapping on beams with a hammer, and patiently explaining some construction basics. Earlier in the week I had walked around with a few people to take pictures of all of the relevant cracks to send to the states, so I walked around with him to point out some of the most … interesting … ones. The long and the short of it is that none of our buildings is going to fall down. If there’s another serious earthquake, one of them would probably be damaged, so we should do some work to support the columns in that building. The thing that blew my mind was when he was inspecting one superficially cracked column, he said, “wow, you guys did not have a 7,0 earthquake here. I’ve seen buildings just like this one downtown that are significantly more damaged.” Wow. I don’t even want to imagine what that felt like to those people downtown.

Now that we’ve reoccupied some buildings during the day, it will soon be time to reoccupy them for sleeping. The rule of thumb is that you wait for three days after the last aftershock to reoccupy a building that sustained any damage. That will be tomorrow afternoon. Let’s hope we can convince the kids that their beds really are more comfortable than the grass outside … even if there is a crack on the wall.