The Rural Haiti Project Summer 2007 Workshop Day 2

The Rural Haiti Project Summer 2007 Workshop Day 2 July 25th 2007

It’s me again,

It’s raining almost every evening since I got here and the main street of the town is not paved and is full of holes. Sometimes one is driving through lakes. The infrastructure is in an extremely bad condition.
We are always running a generator for most of our power supply, (we need to get these green energy companies to supply us with renewable energy equipment).
The workshop opened this morning at 7:00 am with the theme song for the environment
“Let’s put our hands to protect our environment, it’s yours, it’s mine, it’s yours, it’s his/hers, it’s our, let’s put our hands together to protect our environment.”
We did a series animations with the new kids; some of them recited poetry, some told stories, others told some jokes, and danced.
We had a guest lecturer today who lectured on environmental protection, specifically reforestation and the problematic of deforestation (soil erosion, drought, and depleted ground water supply). The kids were very involved. They asked many questions and gave their opinion on how any reforestation efforts should be tackled. We are very confident that the message is getting through, but there is still a lot of work to do in that department, as we need to get them to influence their parents on curbing certain practices. we have burning garbage everywhere. it's a desaster. The smell of burning plastic like spraying perfume in the early evening hours and somtimes they burn through the night and you see them still burning in the early morning.
The kids from last year were at it again with their drawings sessions where 90% of the drawings are houses. One of them drew a clinic and a bunch of people going to it with a little cartoon bubble note saying this town needs more clinics. Last night a couple of them dropped off some drawings they did during the course of the year at my place. Pretty cool drawings of mostly flowers and couple of cartoon figures.
I tried to go online last night to send post some images to no avail the infrastructure he is not up to par. Worst is today when my cousin went to get us internet service which we had inquired about, they want us to pay $250.00 for the equipment then charge $60.00 a month for the service but the catch is that you don’t really own the equipment because they want you to pay three months upfront so to get access for something that most of us pay very little for we need to spend nearly $500.00 dollars. We need your help in setting up a center with a few computers in other to warrant such exorbitant and undemocratic practice. Well with more computers we can have more kids visiting the center to get help with their schoolwork and, learn computer technology and communicate with world. Back to the kids, the new kids are so cute, they had their first drawing session this afternoon. We have a couple of 4 year olds in the workshop they were excellent.
Some of them show great capacity to learn, but others still do not know how to write their names. We are working closely with these kids to give them the basics of reading and writing. We will sponsor a percentage of their school year.
We are making arrangements for some of the kids to go online and blog and check out the website site. They are always very excited to see slide shows of the photos that we took of them.
We have tree planting scheduled for Friday and a light training session with a local artisan that I know since I could remember, his name is Estone and he makes chairs with dried banana leaves.

Save the date for July 12th we will have a private reception to view the work of the kids, videos and photos of the whole workshop.

Summer 2007 Workshop Day 1

Hey Everyone, fir

Thank you for all your support. I made it in one piece.

Today was the first day of the workshop, it will end on saturday with a big exhibition.
This morning we had the original 20 kids that we did the workshop with last year nd we added another 35 to the program. The group in Haiti organized a great show this morning. We started t 7 am everyone wakes up early in this country at 6 am everyone is up and already having their overly sweetened and overly strong coffee. Te program started with a lottery to choose the 35 additional children, the parents were very involved as well. The kids were engaged in creating a song entitled "let's put our hands together to protect our environment." The song is recorded and I will share the video with you. The kids from last year's workshop will be involved in recycling plastic bottles and bags to create a series of objects that can be used by local vendors with stalls along the streets. They also will be working in planning a "lakou." a Lakou is a property that is like a small village where members of the same members of a family lives gneration after generation. Now Many of these lakous have become mini slums. The goal will be for them to carefully analyze one of these lakous and come up with a development plan for it.
The new kids will take the same path of the kids last year with drawing programs and intense activities on how to portect their environment and care for it. we hope to plant trees and clean the streets of the town. They will go on a campaign to tell their parents and other kids about garbage disposal and recycling.
We are very proud to say that we are consuming all our food from producers in the country right down to the cows that leaves not far from my family's property for milk (now that is green). Did I say that the cows are not given any hormones or other chemicals 100% organic milk. Only if the ladies preparing the food could put a little less sugar in the milk and the other beverages they prepare.. Lol..
Talking of being green we bought all aluminum plates,untensils and cups that we can use again and again. We did not use one single disposble plate and untensil.
We have a lot programmed for tomorrow morning and the afternoon. There are two sessions, one that runs from 7:00 AM to 1:00 PM and another that runs from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM which will be a like an art/architecture school studio.
Until tomorrow. Right now I am using a cyber cafe to write this. Tonmorrow we should have our own service.I am unable to upload any media on this blog it is way too slow.
Take care and come back and check the blogg out adn thank you for all your suport.

Sincerely,

James-Herve Sabin

The Rural Haiti Blog

Hi,
We will be posting live updates to this site while the project is in action.. Stay tuned for more information.