The word "Haiti" literally means 'high mountain'. Once you get off the coast, everything around Port-au-Prince is on a steep hillside. Just imagine San Francisco on steroids. We'd drive up and down hilly streets. You couldn't see far because of buildings, but every once in awhile the you've have a clearing into a ravine, and you'd get a glimpse of another world.
Our little section of Haiti was the neighborhood of Rue Delmas 87. Rue Delmas is the main road through Delmas, one of the biggest suburbs of Port-au-Prince ('rue' means 'road'; 'Delmas is pronounced 'Dell-MAH'). Most of the side streets are just numbers off the road- so non-major cross streets are just Rue Delmas 1, Rue Delmas 2, Rue Delmas 3, etc. Since we were on Rue Delmas 87, you know we were at the end of a very long road! This turned into a neighborhood of patchwork streets, which led down into ravines where the people actually lived.
A few hundred 25 pound blocks were delivered and stacked up on the street, and it was our job to carry them down into the ravine. I shot a video, following on of our guys down, which was the most popular video we sent back, called "The Long Walk".
What's a little cement among friends?
Go ahead and make fun of me for huffing and puffing just following him down with a little iPhone camera. (this was shot on the first day, and my French hadn't caught up with me either.) In my defense, I'd been lugging hundreds of blocks up and down all day and was exhausted. It took us two days to carry all the blocks down. We showed at the building site on the third morning and found an entirely new group of blocks to haul down. We also had to carry down 94 pound bags of concrete. Because of the pathway down and how awkward the bags were to carry, you couldn't use two people to carry them or easily hand them off. I carried 2 or 3 down, but my brother Eddy did 7.
Rochelle (neighbor) and Vanessa's baby
Our project was to rebuild a concrete block house for a widow, whose home, except for one room, had been destroyed in the earthquake. She lived with her daughter, Vanessa (pronounced vah-NEE-suh), Vanessa's newborn baby, and her two grandsons- all in one room. The widow's other daughter had been killed in the earthquake, leaving her two grandsons behind. Vanessa's husband was there one day, but I assumed he worked elsewhere.
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