… Success!!!!!!!!!!!! We win the quiz night, we lead from the beginning, strict rules of 8 per team mean we have to have play it with 3 subs, we do exceedingly well on the music round and fall a bit flat on the Haven round, but a win is a win and needs to be celebrated, so we do...
Wednesday:
Far away hills are green…
Before I left Brussels an old friend of mine and I got chatting about how we always think that far away hills are greener, to which I agreed, that was until I arrived in Gonaives here in Haiti.
Gonaives is grey, with other various shades of grey that light the distant hills, there was a bush fire on one of the hills nearby last night, this morning it didn’t look any different. Years of exhausting the natural woods of Haiti have left the landscape barren. I now have an idea of what it must be like to walk on the moon and look around, the sorry difference here is that there are 300.000 people living here in the city, not far off the size of Cork, Gonaives. We head into the city on a tour to visit some of the beneficiaries, I nod off on the way due to tiredness from the heat of a morning’s work in the sun and the blandness of the landscape. Security, as always, is tight on our visit and everything as always on this April trip, it runs perfectly.
Farra, the local representative of Haven is on hand to answer questions and she explains that there are strict criteria on the families that get houses such as ability to pay the 2 dollars month (which is les than the families would normally pay if only renting) for 5 years that the new home owners are expected to pay, but she then explains that if the family can’t pay for whatever reason, the months are added to the end of the 5 years, so eviction is not a real threat for the new home owners. Maybe this is something that Leslie B can persuade the Irish banks to follow suit on in Ireland over the coming tough times ahead for families.
On the way in to town, we pass a few interesting places, a shack/bar showing the Barca v Inter champions league game at 2 this afternoon, a few US Aid centres, Canada Aid and other organizations with the aim of helping the Haitians in their hour of need.
The one question that is constantly present is what will happen to the the Haitians after the houses are built (and there are 1.3 million homeless or living in tents)? Without a real and viable economy these families can never survive, or survive but little more. I am intrigued, to say the least, by what can be done, is planned to be done and what will end up happening…. Haven is a small step in the right direction and deserve to be applauded for being the pebble that causes the ripple in the lake.
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