Dye mon, gen mon

"Dye mon, gen mon" - Behind mountains, are more mountains

I realize what some of you may be thinking: "Alexander has already faltered in his goal of weekly updates!" I suppose this is partly true, but I will defend my position almost tenuously behind a lack of internet during the weekend and overall busyness the last few days following planned itineraries as well as a few unplanned. All of the really exciting bits happened this weekend, so let's start with Friday.

In my last update I mentioned that part of our scope is to visit other villages that we are dedicated to helping in addition to our responsibilities in and around Cangé, this week, we traveled to Morne Michel. Some of you may be familiar with the book "Mountains Beyond Mountains" by Tracy Kidder which is a biographical piece on Paul Farmer who co-founded Partners In Health (Zanmi Lasante in Haiti) and has spent almost the last forty years providing what PIH/ZL refers to as "a preferential option for the poor." The title of the book is a loose translation of our proverb for the day and used specifically in the instance of the book to refer to when Farmer and Kidder hiked to Morne Michel in order to follow-up with one of Farmer's patients who had missed his appointment in Cangé (this turned out to be due to a misunderstanding when the patient left the hospital in Cangé and was in fact well.) As such, the journey to Morne Michel has been referred to as the "mountains beyond mountains hike" and as such, I thought the titular proverb apt for our update. Sparing excruciating detail, we departed Cangé shortly after sunrise and arrived in Morne Michel just after ten o'clock, with the reasoning behind our early departure the desire to be in Morne Michel before the heat of the day set in as well as the need to complete our agenda for the day in Morne Michel and descend once more to Cangé before dusk. At this point, I'm happy to say that we accomplished both of these goals handily and saw a great deal in Morne Michel, the specifics of which are to follow.

Our predecessors had journeyed to Morne Michel and assisted with work on the school there (which looked amazing and far more structurally sound than buildings in other areas I've visited during my time in country) with investigations into constructing a water system with proximity to the school dating to before our eighteen month hiatus of no interns. On the way to Morne Michel, we actually encountered a man who Kolón introduced to us as the director of the school on his way to the town of LasCahobas. Alternating between talking with myself and Kolón and translating for Ashley, he expressed his joy that we'd returned to Haiti and that we were on our way to Morne Michel as well as his apologies for not being able to receive us personally. He also was deliberate in saying that he hoped we would be staying in Haiti and that Morne Michel was in great need of a water system. We assured him it was for these very reasons we were en route to his village and we continued on our separate ways. Seeing the great state of the school, we were immediately shown the solar panels installed on the roof of the school with aid from the last interns in the fall of 2015. We were told that the panels haven't quite functioned properly since shortly after they (the previous interns) had left. The panels themselves looked well and undamaged and the wiring appeared of good quality as well and the problem is suspected to be a bad inverter which, without delving into an in-depth explanation of solar panels and photo-voltaics (a subject of great personal interest,) simply converts the energy gathered by the solar panels into usable electricity (abridged and simplified.) Documenting and noting what we saw with the solar panels, we moved on to our investigations of where the people of Morne Michel get their water. There had been three primary sources of water identified previously where the people drew water. Along with Kolón, Gaelle, and Sadrack (who also came with us,) Ashley and I set about surveying around the first source. The terrain proved very difficult to navigate as we meandered slowly down from the school (what we would approximate after surveying) to be just over a hundred feet to the first water source.  Working our way slowly up the opposite side of the hill proved to be very time consuming and while we did finish the survey of the first source, we found that we were drawing very close to our ideal departure time to ensure we wouldn't be descending in the dark. With haste, Sadrack and I along with one of the men who works at the school (the same who greeted us when we arrived in the village proper) descended for a brief look at the lower two sources and to retrieve samples of the water that we could test for fecal coli-forms once back in Cangé. Often what we would do is restricted by resources of various kinds. This fact in the back of his mind, Kolón asked me quietly when we were alone if I thought we'd return to work on projects in Morne Michel during the coming year echoing the words of the director of the school earlier that morning of the need for clean and reliable water in the village. I told him that I certainly hoped we would and that our very reason for the visit was the intention of returning to work in the village. Following this we began our descent and returned to Cangé as the sun was setting. Though we were done for the day, Ashley and I prepared for an equally busy Saturday. We'd arranged during the week to travel with Marcelin (who works as the foreman for the water team) to Port-au-Prince and shop for pressure relief valves that we would install before and after the chlorinator to protect against pressure spikes that could be a potential cause of the blown caps on the chlorinator.

Arising early on Saturday morning, we met with Marcelin who had in his possession the replacement caps for the chlorinator (which he himself had held since Thursday, but we belayed their delivery to Cangé as we knew that we didn't want to replace the covers before we installed the relief valves,) after briefly reiterating our objectives for the trip to Port-au-Prince, we began the roughly two hour drive to the city. Ashley and I had previously only been to Port-au-Prince in transit to and from Toussaint L'Ouverture airport and hadn't really traveled it extensively. The first couple of ideas Marcelin had of stores where we might find our parts didn't quite work out and we at last went to EKO Depot, a name I recognized from old documents kept by previous interns as a reliable supplier located in Port-au-Prince. After entering and being checked out by security (a process with which I've become familiar during my time in Haiti when entering places such as a bank or store, and have similarly become accustomed to immediately producing my pocket knife for the guard which is held in his custody until I leave the store when I may retake it) we went about shopping. As I mentioned above, this was my first time personally at the supplier in Port-au-Prince, and after we'd finished Ashley and I commented about our surprises with the experience. Shortly after entering the store we were greeted by an associate addressing Ashley and myself in a bit of English (until I revealed that I spoke Kreyòl) and were subsequently helped personally find everything on our list. As I mentioned earlier, we were without internet most of the weekend and when we were getting ready to go to Port-au-Prince that morning Ashley and I realized that we didn't have pictures of the pressure relief valves to show Marcelin or anybody at the stores in Port-au-Prince. Left with little choice, we decided we would do our best to describe the function of the valves and see how things would go. After explaining to the associate helping us that we had an email with pictures we could show him if we could simply access it, we were loaned the phone of another employee in order to access the email and show them the picture. The pictures at last loading, the associate exclaimed half in English and half in Kreyòl: "Oh! Pressure relief valve! We have those, follow me!" Shortly thereafter we held the last two in the store (Ashley later joked probably the last two in all of Port-au-Prince) in our possession. Enhancing our experience, each time the associate helping us found a part we specified and we verified it would serve our intended purposes he cheered in a manner wholly genuine seeming to suggest assisting us in finding each part as a personal triumph. Thanking the associate for his helpfulness as well as his candor, we paid for our parts and returned to Marcelin's car. Our business concluded, I learned that Marcelin is originally from Port-au-Prince though he's lived in the Central Plateau (both Cangé and Mirebalais) for a long time, he took us on a driving tour of Port-au-Prince where he showed us the different neighborhoods and talked about each; also during which he treated us to what I could really only describe as a fruit smoothie (primarily banana) that, like everything else I've tasted while in Haiti, was delicious. After this, we returned to Cangé and planned the additions and modifications we would make to the piping in the filter building the next day.

I'll post a separate update later this week talking about the installation of the pressure relief valves as well as a few other things that happened on Sunday and earlier this week. Also, I know this is the part where we usually do pictures, but encountering some difficulty with the GoPro we carried with us to Morne Michel, I'll add those to this post later this week along with the new update.

Update 5/12/2017:

As soon as we arrived in Morne Michel chairs were produced for us to rest for a few minutes before we started our agenda for the day, but Ashley and I took a moment to marvel at the school first. The school is in very good shape compared to many of the other buildings we've come across in Haiti. The biggest thing being structural integrity. 

Here you can see people gathered at the lower end of what we refer to as Source One in Morne Michel. It's currently the source with the most water, evidenced by all of the activity. Surveying this area took much longer than we thought, but we did complete it and forwarded the information to the group working on the concept for Morne Michel's water system back in Clemson. 

This picture is actually on the way to Morne Michel. While pausing to catch our breath, I noticed that just on the edge of what you can see here (to the right,) you could see the Grand Savane, an area of interest to us for agricultural and water projects. However, at roughly six hundred feet above Cangé up rough terrain, we realized we would need to develop a road to facilitate greater ease of access (the team working on this was actually my first assignment in CEDC in the spring of 2016.) We noticed that the tower you can see here mounted much of the steeper areas to the top with more gentle sloping the rest of the way to Grand Savane. We think this could serve as the starting point for this crucial roadway in the future.

These are the solar panels atop the school meant to provide reliable electricity to the school. The panels themselves are intact and functional, but the school has had issue for a while with the intermittent availability of electricity. We suspect the problem to be bad inverters. The solution is simple enough and consists of securing new inverters as well as isolating the cause of the burnout in the original inverters to prevent the same course from taking place again. 

Coming soon to a Glenn Holcombe Department of Engineering pamphlet near you! This picture was actually taken by me (and featuring Ashley who's taken most of the pictures the last month and she loaned me her camera to take it,)  at Ashley's behest saying this was perfect shot for the department to advertise. Unable to agree more, here is the finished product*

*Made possible by skills learned as part of the curriculum of the Glenn Department of Civil Engineering, Clemson University. Trademark 2017 All Rights Reserved

Piti piti zwazo fè nich

"Piti piti zwazo fè nich" - "Step by step, a bird builds its nest."

In a reversed fashion of sorts, I'm writing this beginning last as I found myself ready to publish this update, I realized I hadn't explained my choice of proverb for this update. Today's saying is one heard often in Haiti (particularly this week.) It's employed often in cases including introduction to a new environment, when things don't go to plan, and slow but steady integration into new norms. The wisdom to be understood being that everything is a process, like a bird building its nest. Good and worthwhile things take time and yield fruit in their time (the case in the proverb of a new home for the titular bird.) With that finished, let's dive into our update...'s introduction!

It is with elation I find myself again writing from the Project Managment office in Cangé. Just over two months ago you might recall Hurricane Irma making its way through the Carribean. Hispaniola in the projected path of the storm, the decision was made that I was to be evacuated from the Haiti if at all possible. It was, and I found myself aboard one of the final flights out of Toussaint L'Ouverture airport bound for New York. What I was sure would be a brief stay to simply ensure I would not be in danger while abroad, indeed became a nearly two-month-long wait before I was able to return to Haiti and work in the Central Plateau. It's been nearly two weeks and the welcome I've received has been one of the warmest in my life. "Mwen kontan pou mache avek enjenyè yo Clemson anko" commented Djapanou, one of the guys we work with on the water team, meaning that he was happy that we'd finally returned and to be feeling similarly about working together once more. Further, I've had the opportunity along with the rest of the community to welcome Ashley as my new partner and our newest intern. Ashley is actually Clemson alumna having earned her B.S. earlier this year in Civil Engineering with a minor in Environmental Engineering; her time in Haiti as part of her graduate studies in which she is currently pursuing a Master's degree in Environmental Engineering. With my tenure in Haiti still set to terminate next month, I have just a few weeks to show Ashley many of the things she will need to know as an intern, in addition to tutoring her in Kreyòl so as to be effective and ready for the remainder of her internship extending into next year and to teach her own new partner in January. That said, we have had a very busy two weeks and expect to have an equally busy three more to follow, let us begin with the retelling:

The focus of Ashley's graduate research is one of the steps taken in treating Cangé's water supply, chlorination. In preparation for this, the design for a replacement of the then current chlorinator began early this summer. We carried the constituent pieces of the new chlorinator with us and arriving in Cangé late at night on Saturday (04/11/2017,) we set about work the following day after church. Assembly and installation of the chlorinator could not have gone better, and in the week to follow we set about testing the chlorine levels of treated water at the filter building and each fountain every day. There are, however, always hiccups in life. In this case, manifesting in unfortunate occurrences. Passing a whole week back in Cangé and five days with the new chlorinator, we arrived at the filter building Saturday morning to learn that in the night a loud sound had been heard by security emanating from the filter building; the sound heard turned out to be the cap of the chamber where water passed through chlorine tablets for treatment blowing from its seating and striking the opposite wall. Ubiquitously, unfortunate things happen, and in preparation for unforeseen circumstances, the chlorinator was designed with a redundant treatment chamber which we employed handily while arranging for a replacement cap. There are also times, for reasons we often don't understand, where a seemingly preternatural contrivance takes place only to stymy one's efforts. You may now be thinking to yourself "what a rather cryptic thing to say," and you would be correct, it is not however without significance. You see, I gave voice to this latter thought due to my ignorance of another way to describe what happened next. Just two days later, early on Monday (13/11/2017) morning, another loud sound which was (as you may have guessed by my borderline labored preamble) the cap of the chlorinator's redundant treatment chamber also blowing from its seating and striking the wall. Saturday morning, we had a problem. Now, we have a big problem. There may have been just a bit of internal freaking out at this juncture, without caps for the chambers, how will we treat the water? Fortuitously, we'd earlier that weekend received the balance of an order which afforded us fresh filters for installation at the filter building. This information in the back of our minds was a positive point of our current situation of course, but we still needed to devise a mode by which we could continue to chlorinate the water passed through the filters without a chlorinator. After conferring with David and planning the better part of the afternoon, we had our solution and as the sun set over Cangé (occurring around 17:00 or 5:00 PM now) we set about its implementation. With our chlorinator out of commission at the moment, we needed to route the water around it. The design to reintroduce chlorine to the system was simple; we had available lines in the system from when we used to use UV Rays to treat water which we had ceased due to its unsustainability. With the assistance of the team, we added a new connection in the pipe with a ball valve in the middle to serve as our "door" into the pipe, the means by which we would add the chlorine tablets into the pipe. The flow on either side of our emergency design (dubbed tongue-in-cheek as the "nouvo nouvo machin klowoks" or "new new chlorinator") manageable by the presence of ball valves, the outflow now serving the dual purpose of preventing the passing of whole pieces of chlorine tablets through the subsequent piping. We now had purchased for ourselves time, and I'm happy to say that just today we worked out the details of receiving replacement caps for this time next week.

Ashley and I have joked the last few days when asked that discounting the volatile nature adopted by the subject of her research, transition into life in Haiti has been very smooth! We've begun familiarization with the regular operations of the water system such as cleaning filters and testing water at the filter building, maintenance of the dam and pumps at Bas Cangé, beginning to understand and speak in a new language, and of course, (delicious) Haitian Cuisine. Before I return home, there are still some objectives to complete and ventures to other villages to be had; the details of which I plan to share with all of you. Bearing that in mind, check back often as I'll be undertaking the (arguably ambitious, given my record) of weekly updates for the remainder of my time as project management intern. Just before we sign off here, it's time for the best part: pictures.

Our arrival on the fourth was timely in the interest of being present for the monthly maintenance at Bas Cangé (normally scheduled for the 12th of each month.) Maintenance typically consists of checking each of the pumps, changing their oil, and noting any abnormalities in function in addition to the cleaning of the dam. In this picture, Djapanou was showing Greg and I an issue with the butterfly valve for pump two where we weren't able to close the valve completely and totally shut off flow to the pump. We were able to shut off flow to the pump at the dam, but became aware that will need to replace the valve in the near future. 

Cleaning at the dam is a necessary operation which the team currently undertakes monthly. As you might remember from earlier explanations, we partly drain water held by the dam via an overflow pipe built into the dam. Once the water is wade-able we set about cleaning mud and other flotsam we don't want to flow into the pumps or is otherwise stuck on some part of the dam. 

This picture is actually mid-installation of the nouvo nouvo machin klowoks. Once Ashley and I settled on a design and a plan, we called the team to help with its addition into the system. Having picked up those Stillson wrenches myself, I would have appreciated smaller ones! They were however what we needed and got the job done, and after that, I could not in good conscience ask for more. 

Completed installation! The design, as I mentioned earlier, is very simple with ball valves on either side managing flow and the upright valve allowing a point of access for the addition of chlorine tablets. 

Here lies what remains of the caps for the chlorinator. As you can see, the breaks were relatively clean. It was also very fortunate that when the caps blew, neither their threading nor the chambers themselves suffered any damage. This turn of events was just enough, however, to put a (slight) damper on our day.