From April 3 to 10, 2011, I along with 12 others from The Gateway Church traveled to Port-au-Prince, Haiti to partner with Builders International to help rebuild what was destroyed in the earthquake. Here are some pictures of my time there.
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Here is a little gecko crawling on the ceiling of the deck where we stayed. One thing I love about traveling is seeing all the animals and plants that are native to that area that I never see in Iowa.
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| As you can see, there is a tent pitched on top of this house. Many Haitians are afraid to move back into their homes lest they collapse because of damage from the January 2010 earthquake or because of another earthquake. Many still live in tent cities. Some have put tents on their houses, thinking that if they do collapse, they can ride it down to the street on the roof. |
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| This is the yard across the street from our job site. In front of the blue barrel is a well. There was a pink bucket on a rope they would lower down to get water. Three different families live in the building in the background. Most Haitian houses are about 10' x 12'. |
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| We had to sift the gravel to get sand for the concrete. That was my job one day. When we were driving to and from our job site, I would see Haitians doing this also. |
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| On Monday, while we were waiting for the presidential election results to be announced, we did various projects around the compound where we were staying. Here we are working on the wall of a 10' x 10' storage shed. |
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I am in blue, snapping a chalk line across the board.
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This is the truck we road everywhere in!
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| We'd pack the generator, ladders, and other tools we'd need for the day in the center of the truck, and we'd sit on benches along the side. |
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| We laid the corrugated metal floor of this school. |
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| We put a roof on this building, which will one day be the school office. |
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| On Wednesday, while we were waiting for Stephen to come back with all the lumber we would need for the rafters of the roof, we filled a leather glove with gravel and set up two cinder blocks opposite each other. The goal of the game? To toss the glove into the holes of the cinder block! Let me tell you, it is much harder than it may seem! If we had had to wait 2 1/5 hours for lumber in the US, most of us would've been on our phones, texting, checking email, etc., but we were in Haiti, so we invested in our relationships with each other! |
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| A wall of paintings in a Haitian market. We saw these in a number of different places throughout Port-au-Prince. |
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| Because we efficiently completed all our work, on Friday, we drove up into the mountains. Here we are at 4,000 feet, looking down on Port-au-Prince. |
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Here we are relaxing at the beach. It was gorgeous! I am so glad we were able to see more of Haiti than just Port-au-Prince. On our way to the beach we drove through smaller communities and past some of the tent cities that were established outside the city.
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