Hope?

When I landed to Haiti after few hours and days my feeling for Haiti was “hopeless”. Rough!!! After 9 months in the country what will be my opinion. As you can notice I’m still in the country. Maybe in the darkness I see alight for Haiti. So what changed? Maybe nothing or maybe I am used to leave here, not sure.

I can remember the second day of my arrival as yesterday. We had to cross a part of Port-Au-Prince (the capital) to reach one sub-base on the field (that was my house office during 2 months). We took more than 2 hours to reach there (for 50 kilometers) and trust me we took a very good driver. My first impression as I told you was nothing to do here.

Tomorrow morning I will have a meeting in Port-Au-Prince. Do you thing that I have to wake up in the middle of the night to be on time. If you think so, let me tell you wrong. Now at the right time we need 45 minute to reach the middle of the PAP. But we can’t still prevent a traffic jam.

Here it is in 9 months I can say I have seen changes. If I take the same road as my first travel in the country I will see people that gather waste around the market where there were mounts of garbage. It’s not Singapore but it’s a huge improvement. Today when I check the news on the web what I saw was impressive. 200 000 objects in Styrofoam were seizure in groceries. If you see outside it’s nothing but it’s a good start. A recent law (10 July 2013) banish those types of material mainly used for take away food, or cups…Could you believe that a country where a part of his population is dying from hunger, were the cholera is killing every week…that can establish this kind of law for the next generation, I call this hope. When recall myself that it’s not so long time ago that in my country the plastic bag was declared forbidden. It’s only few years ago that all incandescent bulb light was definitely replace by low consumption bulb light.

Now let see in my own field. I was invited by the National authority of water and sanitation for a meeting. They present to all invited (organization, firms…) a document of thousands pages, including more than 100 individual documents. What it is? A guide regarding everything concerning water and sanitation. Standards that should be followed subject to prosecution if not respected. All of this compacted in a soft copy. Trust me build something like this after such events, built something like this from nothing, attempt to place order when it’s the chaos so fast it’s a miracle.

Maybe that’s why I’m still in Haiti.



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