At a local school

Bonswa…

We had a looooong day today. We visited a school in Bolos, which is a suburb (if you could call it that) of Port au Prince. The school has 850 students that are in classes from preschool to high school. Dony St. Germain, the head of El Shaddai Ministries International and his brother Louis went to this school. The basic campus is comprised of five main buildings, two of which have sustained some damage. The director of the school has an engineering background and he has already started buttressing some of the two-story buildings and reinforcing the ceilings of some of the lower floors. We were able to give some suggestions on how to do more quality concrete work.

A great thing that happened yesterday was that I received a call from a structural engineering ministry that happens to be in the area this week and next. They were wondering if we had any buildings for them to assess. Yesterday we didn’t…today we do. Hopefully we will be able to get them to the school next week. What a great example of God setting things up for us.

The director also asked if we could help by building 3 to 4 semi-permanent classrooms. After looking at the existing tent structures that they are using we determined that the house design that we are working on could be modified slightly and turned into a classroom. We will be discussing this with our leadership and see if this would be an appropriate project for future teams to work on.

From here we went out to a new community being built by Samaritan’s Purse…Leveque. We wanted to take a look at the transitional shelters that they are building and assess their technigues. The buildings .look pretty sound, but they are design to last for two to three years. This particular community is slated to have 250 homes built at a rate of 40 per day.

To top the day off our van broke down on the way back to the Oasis compound. And guess what, it broke down right in front of a mechanics shop. The alternator burned out. It took 4 hours to get it fixed, but at least we weren’t out at the Leveque site, which was about 20 miles from the compound.

Thanks,

David Short