Yesteday a crew of about 8 of us finished clearing a massive house of an insane amount of mud. The house was expected to take two weeks but ended up taking five and a half days, mainly because we all worked like crazy people. I spent an hour and a half of the first morning on wheelbarrowing and nearly killed myself. There was a bottleneck in a narrow alley so we had a system in place where two people would get their wheelbarrows loaded with mud, two people would run out the alley, and two more would wait at the dumping site. It all ran like clockwork but was super fast so I had to save myself and defect over to the less intense, but still hot and sweaty, shoveling team.
I had so much fun at this job, partly because the mud was almost perfect, partly because the family whose house we were working on was so appreciative (and made us lunch twice) and mostly because our team was made up of fantastic people and hard workers which made the day really intense but also pretty inspiring. I have never seen people work that hard.
The best part, I think, was on the last day when we sorted out a pretty good system for getting the wheelbarrows out to the dumping site and back in. When we arrived that morning, a group of Haitians were in the process of clearing a mountain of mud from the street. There were about 15 of them walking wheelbarrows from the front of the house, down a narrow path beside the house to a field in the back (that they had told us not to dump on a few days before). We all thought there would be too many people on the path because it was too narrow to let wheelbarrows pass but we decided to get out there with them and try it anyways.
We had a Haitian volunteer, Richardson, directing traffic with a whistle we’d found in the first aid kit. He was like a traffic cop, all serious and waving his arms about and the only thing missing was the white gloves. The funniest thing for me was watching our volunteers making the Haitian guys out front run like hell. Our guys had been working like animals running around with wheelbarrows all day long for days and, in order to not get run over, the Haitian workers had no choice but to run as well. It was so funny to look out the window towards the alley and see Haitian guy, white guy, white guy, Haitian guy, white guy… bang bang bang running like maniacs up and down the path.
It was the last day in Gonaives for a couple of people who worked on this house from the start and we were all kind of sad that the job was over, but happy that those two got to see the end of it. It was my favourite day so far in Haiti and a reminder how amazing this experience is.
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