Andrew Chaggar

Three weeks today I’m leaving Haiti and EDV will end its international volunteer operations in country.  It will have been 18 months since I first glimpsed the vast tent cities of Port-au-Prince as my plane came into land in the country’s stricken capital.  It’s been quite a  journey since then with many ups and downs in between.

The past few weeks have been particularly anxiety provoking and our entire crew have been working flat out to complete the projects that are coming to an end and transition those that will be continuing under Haitian leadership.  This week though, thanks to the amazing efforts of our many volunteers, I’m finally starting to exhale.

Construction was one area where I was getting a little worried about how much we had left to do.  With two fairly large projects still on-going at the beginning of last week I was concerned we were rapidly running out of time.  However, we currently have an amazing building team with us and in just nine short days they managed to construct five classrooms and so complete one of our outstanding
projects.

The team hard at work framing the classrooms (click for more pics)

And just a few days later the work is almost completed

Thanks to this we’re now well on track to complete all the building work we’ve committed to before our volunteers leave.

Even after our volunteers depart, EDV will be continuing its work in Haiti by supporting education in the form of primary school scholarships and English classes for adults.  The English programme will be led by six Haitian teachers but one of the issues we’ve been facing is that the teachers are also students themselves as English is their second language.

To deal with this our English team have been “teaching the teachers” throughout the course of EDV’s time in Haiti.  As the main body of students have progressed many of them are due to move up a level next year.  This means that the teachers themselves also have to pass exams to keep ahead of the students and remain qualified to do the job.

Our volunteers have been working intensively with the Haitian teachers to run group seminars as well as one-on-one tutorials to tackle individual areas of previous weakness.  Thanks to these efforts by our volunteers the final two teachers are well on course to pass their exams tomorrow and we’ll be all set for next years classes.

Schneider, one of the Haitian teachers, presenting a happy student with his exam certificate (click for more pics)

One of the things I find amazing in the case of these two projects is that not only have volunteers implemented them but they’ve also been a driving force behind funding them too.

The five classrooms recently completed were paid for using the proceeds of a fundraising event that one of our volunteers, Christian, ran at home in Germany.  He then flew to Haiti to help with the construction.  In the case of English, Debra, the volunteer who developed the project and is now managing the transition, has now raised enough money to fund the on-going classes for at least six months after we leave.

To me these examples show the power of the volunteer model and Christian and Debra are only two of the amazing people who’ve made EDV a success in Haiti.

The unsung heroes of the office team have recently been crunching the numbers ahead of our end of year appeal and post-Haiti reporting.  To date we’ve welcomed 182 international volunteers from 19 countries spread across 6 continents.  18 of those individuals have volunteered with us twice and 3 of them are now on their third trip.  Together they’ve donated 51,728 hours of work in Haiti and they should all be very proud of what they’ve achieved.

From me and all our beneficiaries, I will end this post by simply saying a huge thank you!

Although EDV’s volunteers are leaving we’ll be continuing to invest in Haiti’s future through education.  We have 50 children enrolled in our Scholarship programme and 120 adults in our English classes.  As Thanksgiving, Christmas and the New Year approach please consider Giving the Gift of Education so Haitians can build a brighter future for themselves.