Leogane Continues

As the project is coming together, I am realizing that I am just going to be busy down here. It has been a hectic and exciting week. We started our first house in Leogane and the crew of masons are hardworking and eager to learn from each other and teach me their ways too.W orked stopped the other day for a short English / Creole lesson of tool vocabulary. They loved it, “flat shovel, hammer, pointy shovel, etc…” I have started learning the words for materials, but don’t have any verbs so at least my arm motions can get the point across when I call out for cement or wash to mix it up.

I showed up today after an afternoon off. The masons had almost 30 percent of the walls up and were moving along. I was a bit disappointed with some missing bars, but in the end there is so much redundancy built into this house that I realized it didn’t matter and we are all learning from it. Similar to the process we explored in Saint Ard. It’s a combination of two building systems working toward an efficient and cost effective design superior to their standard practices. It will just take 2-3 house to get to that point.

Learn more about or donate to the rebuilding in Haiti here.