Chain Saws and Wood Chippers

Nope, this is not a description of the latest construction project or earthquake recovery project in Haiti. This is what’s going on in my parents’ neighborhood in Arlington. As I flew home on Sunday, the flight was held up over Providence for about 45 minutes waiting for weather to clear in Boston. Then when I landed and called my dad, he explained that a tornado – what turned out to be a “macroburst” – had hit their neighborhood while I was in the air. There were more than ten huge trees down, some of which fell on cars and houses. Their house was OK, but there were two huge trees from neighbors’ yards now covering their backyard. Oh, and there was no electricity. So I woke up on June 6 and got ready to leave Haiti in the dark, and arrived home and ate dinner and started to unpack in the dark too. Who needs electricity anyway? I told some neighbors that I don’t know how to operate a chainsaw, but if anyone had a machete I’d be happy to help. I don’t think they really got it.

Since Sunday night I’ve been busy, but also just really enjoying some of the small things. I started an apartment search on Monday that seemed dismally depressing at first, but which turned around on Wednesday morning when the Craigslist gods smiled upon me and I beat a kagillion other people to the punch on the perfect Davis Square apartment. Lease signed, checks written Wednesday, and I can move in July 1. I’ve spent some time at PHA beginning to sort out exactly what my job will be next year, but mostly just hanging out with kids and adults, catching up, and wondering how it is that ninth grade boys can grow six inches in a year. Amazing. I’ve done a lot of walking around in this unseasonably chilly, but brilliantly sunny week. It’s such a pleasure to be able to just go where I want to go, and no one even notices me. Anonymity is not really possible for me in Haiti. I’m enjoying iced coffees and burritos from Ana’s Taqueria and stop lights and the T and the view of Copley Square through the giant glass windows as I came down the escalator at Copley Place.

I’m off to Chicago this afternoon to join some of my favorite people for the “Tour de Farms,” the annual fundraising ride for the National MS Association. We’ve done this ride a few times in honor of Michael John Myette’s father who has been battling MS for many years. Now we’re riding for Erika too, his wife and one of my very closest friends from Notre Dame, who was diagnosed with MS this fall. Yet another reminder that our own life plans amount to so little compared with God’s plan, and that there is no shortage people in anyone’s life in need love and support. Really, you don’t have to go to Haiti to find someone to help.

It will be a wonderful weekend, I’m sure, despite how terrifyingly out of shape I am. I rode 20 miles on Tuesday and it was a little rough. 150 over two days? Right … I’ll be fine. Which reminds me, if any of you want to make a contribution to our team, The Loose Sprockets, here’s my fundraising page: http://main.nationalmssociety.org/goto/BetsyBowman

After this weekend trip, I’ll enjoy a quiet summer, I hope … moving into a new apartment, getting settled in a new job, catching up with old friends, spending time with family and welcoming new nieces and nephews into the world. In August I hope to return to Haiti for a week to help the new group of volunteers get settled into their teaching roles. Then school starts in September and a whole new adventure begins. Maybe I’ll update this blog again with updates from Haiti in the future, but they certainly won’t be so frequent. Thanks to all the people I know and all the people I don’t know who have been reading this and even sharing it with more people. I hope you’ve enjoyed it – and that you continue to keep Haiti in your thoughts and prayers and ACTIONS in the years to come. It’s going to be a long road.

If you want to read another interesting blog – here’s the blog of the PHA students visiting Guatemala for the month of June. They arrived just before the volcano erupted and the torrential rains began. Now their trip has changed form a bunch of kids coming to see the world and learn Spanish to a bunch of kids helping to dig houses out of the mud. Sound familiar? www.juniorjourney.blogspot.com

All the best,
Betsy

Graduation

It was beautiful. There's not much to say really that these pictures don't already express. There were a lot of joyful kids and families and the whole thing went off without a hitch. It was a wonderful way to spend my last day at Louverture Cleary School.

Snapshots of the last weeks

Back in March I was a little bored … not anymore! May has been busy and hectic and at times stressful and irritating, but also fun and joyful. A few snapshots of LCS in May …

Construction: The maintenance guys have been busy. They’ve rebuilt the front wall surrounding the school that came down in the earthquake, and have almost completed three other damaged walls. It’s amazing to watch them work. They had to break the old foundation to pour a new one, and there are no jack hammers for that. They did it with sledgehammers and pick axes. Then they had to pour the concrete, and there are no cement mixers. They do it by hand – mixing the sand, gravel, cement and water, stirring it on the ground, then shoveling it into wheelbarrows to transport it to the site. And did I mention that in the middle of the day it’s been in the high nineties for the past few weeks? In all of these projects, students have been working too. This whole place was constructed by this community, so students have always been involved in construction projects here. They’re so proud when they see the wall that they helped to build.

Schedules … again: Apparently it is my calling in life to coordinate school schedules. This has often been part of my job at PHA, and post-earthquake it has been one of my major responsibilities at LCS. This past week required coordinating the final exam schedules for the oldest students whose school year is over, while maintaining the normal schedule for the rest of the kids. Now I’m working on the schedule for the extended school year through June – though I won’t be here to see it happen. The graduates will come back in June to work with their professors to prepare for the national exams that they must pass later in the summer. I was working on their schedule today and then one of the kids tonight just said, “wait … we have to be here at 8? They told us 9 …” I really am the last to know anything around here. Back to the drawing board.


Liz’s visit: When I decided to come to Haiti last year, Liz Murray, my long time PHA colleague and most recent roommate, proposed coming to visit. She and I both know that chances to visit Haiti are few and far between, and April vacation seemed like the perfect time. Then … plans had to change. It looked like she wouldn’t be able to come at all since flights were not easy to book, and were not cheap, but then she figured it out somehow and spent five days at LCS last week. Not surprisingly – to anyone who knows Liz – she was hanging out with the 11 year olds in about ten minutes and was doing crowd control for the kids waiting in line outside the “store” within her first four hours in Haiti. She came with all kinds of supplies and goodies for kids (and some for the grown-ups too … if you’re ever wondering, frozen Toll House chocolate chip cookie dough will survive a flight to Haiti!) Mostly it was just so wonderful to have someone who knows me so well in my normal life witness my Haiti life.

A fresh coat of paint: Classes ended Wednesday and the younger students went home, and then the graduates returned to campus to do all the prep to make the school look beautiful for their families to see it on Saturday. It’s amazing what motivated kids can accomplish in a few hours! With only a little supervision from adults, they painted every flat surface they could get a paintbrush on, and the school buildings, benches, and walls look beautiful. They’re also painting their class mural, on the new front wall whose plaster was barely dry this morning. Their mural includes the names of the 41 graduates and their class name “Odyssey” with an incredible image of a ship at sea. Again, talent combined with motivation and a deadline yields some incredible results. And what were the adults doing while he kids painted? We made 20 cakes and 24 lasagnas for the graduation lunch. The cooks are making the “real” food, but we decided to pitch in where we could!


Goodbyes: The kids here see volunteers come and go every year, and to be honest, I expected them to be a little guarded in their relationships with us as a result of these annual goodbyes. But they’re not guarded at all, and their farewells were so sweet and their thank you’s so sincere. I’m so happy that five of the ten volunteers will be returning next fall, and two will stay until the end of the extended school year in early July. I think it will be so good for these kids to have some consistency, and as the years go on, to still have people around who shared the earthquake experience with them. When they ask why I’m not staying, I tell them that I promised some other kids I’d come back after a year, and that answer seems to satisfy them. But I’m dropping some pretty strong hints that I intend to visit in the not so distant future … maybe with some of those other kids I know.


Tet anba – upside down: We love to do things a little backwards at LCS – turning conventional things on their head. On the last day of class, that meant the staff showing up at the morning meeting wearing kids’ uniforms. We each conspired with a student to borrow their uniforms, then marched out in a line to stand in front of the kids at their daily 8 am meeting. It was pretty hilarious. Some of the staff members literally WERE LCS students a year ago, so they looked pretty normal in their green plaid skirts, but some of us looked pretty fabulously ridiculous. This uniform just does not look good on most white people. It was a wonderful moment of levity in a busy week full of exams and grading.

So many generous gifts

After the earthquake, the students at Montrose School (where I went to school from sixth through twelfth grade) raised about 2000 dollars for LCS through “coin wars” and a benefit concert. Though they understood why it was critical to just send money, they also wanted to give some kind of gift to the students directly. So they worked with their art teacher to create eight beautiful posters that represent LCS and Haiti and HOPE. They used some of my photos to get ideas and others just used their imaginations, and the results were amazing. Liz checked the huge tube of posters as her luggage, and on Thursday afternoon we spread them out on the basketball court for the kids to see. They loved them. They loved the representations of themselves and their school and appreciated the thoughtfulness of the artists so much. They also loved reading the artists’ biographies so much, through which they learned things like what lacrosse is and what after school program means and which year in school are sophomores. Almost immediately they suggested making a gift in return for their new faraway friends, and in just two afternoons, a little crew of four 16 year old boys created four drawings for the girls at Montrose as a way to say thank you. I don’t know … I just can’t help thinking that these are the kind of experiences that change kids’ whole view of the world and their own place in it.

Earlier in the spring, Prospect Hill Academy, the school where I have worked for the past 8 years, announced that they would contribute about $3000 of their “PHA fund for Haiti” to the Haitian Project and Louverture Cleary School. This money will be used to underwrite the programs within the school that support the neighborhood children who are too young for LCS. Presently, there are eleven children in full time day care / preschool, about 50 who come for lunch and play time each afternoon, and about 25 school aged children who do not attend school consistently are attending classes here taught by LCS students. I think this program is such a perfect match for PHA. It’s about kids helping kids, and about reaching out to the community outside of one’s own little world. I hope that one of these years some PHA kids will get to come here and see it for themselves!

And at least once a week I receive an e-mail from a friend or family member reporting that some other friend, or a local elementary school, or somebody’s church had a fundraiser and raised a hundred or three thousand dollars of the Haitian Project. It’s amazing to see how many people have actually followed through on their well intentioned promises to do something to help. If this many people actually stay engaged in Haiti’s progress in the critical months and years ahead, then I am truly hopeful that Haiti can rebuild itself into a better country. It’s going to be a long road though, and the work has only just begun.