Haiti, Thursday March 27

[written from Haiti]

Today we got up around 5:30 to be at a 6am prayer service. The staff starts each day this way. After this it was back to the house for breakfast. I had brought some organic oatmeal, some high-protein granola bars, and a small can of V-8 juice -- so, a nice breakfast. By 7:00 or so we started our job for the day. We are working on improving the rooftop garden. Right now there are some vegetable plants up there that are growing inside old tires with very shallow dirt in them. We are building planter beds with cement blocks. The first job was to move the cement blocks from their pile to the rooftop. This meant hand-carrying them about 100 yards and then up 4 flights of stairs to the rooftop. Then back down to do it again. Once this was done, we had to move all the dirt from the very large pile it was in to another pile at the bottom of the 4 flights of stairs. I did alot of pushing the wheelbarrow back and forth to accomplish this. The dirt-moving project took up all morning and much of the afternoon. Now all the dirt sits at the base of the 4 flights of stairs -- we will see how we are to move it to the rooftop tomorrow. It sounds like we may carry it up, a bucketful at a time.

After the dirt-moving, 2 masons started constructing the wall. While they were building the wall in one section, some of us worked on chipping out the top surface of the existing concrete floor with a sledge hammer. I tried to alternate swinging the sledge with my right and left arms. I think I will be sore tomorrow.

In the late morning I was summoned to go visit with the head of the computer lab. He had heard that I was here and I worked for IBM and was very excited to meet me. I think he thought that I could actually *fix* their computers for them. Ha. I can't fix computers; that's why we have deskside support at work :)

Anyway, I got a good look at the lab and had a great conversation with Erick (who runs the lab). The lab theoretically has 15 computers, but a teacher was telling me that only 5 actually worked when she was trying to teach typing this week. The lab's server is an IBM Thinkpad that is visibly broken but still works. The other computers were a mix of IBM, Dell, Gateway 2000, and HP. Some appear to be quite old, and there is a mix of operating systems. It seems that they mostly teach typing, MS Word, and Excel. There is no internet access, and the computers are not robust enough to run anything like Encarta. Each student gets a 1/2 hour computer lab lesson each week.

Later this afternoon we were planning to take a walk in the neighborhood, but the security guard was not available to escort us, so that will have to wait for tomorrow. We fixed dinner, and I spent some time "blogging" (via pen and paper). Off to bed now (9:40pm). Tomorrow morning we are going to visit the Missionaries of Charity orphanage. I have been anticipating this for months. I don't really know what to expect, except that it may be a very difficult experience.