Update: June 2019 Trip to Haiti

On Friday June 15, 2019, at 4:00 am my wife was scheduled to drive me to the San Antonio airport for a trip to Haiti to join our team of instructors who are teaching the Disaster-Resistant Home Construction Course.
As with the February trip, there was rioting going on in Port-au-Prince and other places in Haiti. The US Embassy issued a Level 3 Alert.
On Friday afternoon, we delayed the trip. The student instructors started classes without me. I was able to fly to Haiti on Wednesday June 19. The classes were held in Delmas and Deluge. My trip report is broken into 2 parts one for each class. The links are below:

Delmas Class - June 2019

Deluge Class & Graduation - June 2019

Plan for June 2019 Classes

When flying to Haiti on June 15, I will be carrying about 40 pounds of books to give to the students.

UPS has been suggested as a way to ship books to Haiti, but the cost is over $10 per book when shipping a case of books. Customs fees also add to the cost.

We give away EPUB books in Haiti, but many prefer a print copy of the book. We always encourage our students to share the EPUB books with anyone who could use them.

The first class will be held Monday through Friday, June 17 through June 21, in Port-au-Prince.

The second class will be held Monday through noon on Thursday, June 24 through June 27, also in Port-au-Prince. We will extend the hours of the class slightly each day and cover the same materials as in the first class.

The third class will be held for people in Colminy and Balegue. It will be an abbreviated class and will concentrate on building with confined masonry and on producing better concrete when adequate material is not available. In Balegue they are looking at building a new church. We have helped them with selecting a location and with the design. We will head north on Thursday after we finish the second class. The Colminy/Balegue class will be on Friday and Saturday, June 28 and June 29. After it is over, we will return to Port-au-Prince.

Certificates will be given out after the Sunday service at Bon Berger Lutheran Church in Port-au-Prince.

Another item on our agenda for this trip is to pass more control of the Disaster-Resistant Home Construction School over to the instructors we certified in October 2018.

February 2019 Class


We scheduled two weeks of classes in February 2019. The concept was that I would be there, and the instructors we certified in October 2018 would do most of the instructing. We had 70 people registered to take the classes.

The plan worked well until the afternoon before I was to fly to Port-au-Prince. That was when I was notified that with the riots in Haiti, I should delay the trip. That delay resulted in the instructors we certified in October 2018 teaching the classes. It also resulted in only 25 of the 70 who were going to attend the classes being able to attend.

The instructors did as good as or a better job than I could have done, but I was not there to sign the certificates. For some reason, the students like to see my name on the certificates.

Expenses & Donations

Cost to train these 70 students will come to about $10,000, or less than $150 per student. The Construction Foreman for the Colminy School was one of my students and the quality of construction in that school was much better than most of the construction in Haiti, so the training is making a difference.

If you wish to donate, you can donate in several ways:

First

Donating through MissionHaiti99. Go to www.missionhaiti99.org
They have a new website and are still building it, so the construction and teaching construction aspects of our work are not yet included on the website. If you designate that your donation should be used for Homes for Haiti, the money will go to the right place, and we will put it to use.

Second

You can talk to your church and donate to them, and they can forward the donations to me as we spend money and send in requests for reimbursements.

Third

We are still working on the tax-exempt rating from the IRS for Hearts of Concrete. Latest word is that it will be granted in July, or they will tell us in October why it was not granted. We will notify you when things are ready.

As money becomes available, we can keep a team of instructors busy traveling around Haiti teaching engineers, architects, and contractors who want to know how to build better and safer homes.

When Hearts of Concrete becomes a reality, we plan to address the requests from Cameroon, Ghana, and Uganda to bring the technology to them.

The Goal

What started out in 2013 as an impossible and ludicrous dream has become a Haitian reality. Help it spread to all who need the same technology.