Baby Jesus leaves Christianville

     It’s been a couple months since my departure from Haiti.  Since then, I have travelled to Colorado where I washed dishes for food, to Texas to visit family, to Florida to pack up the vestiges of my university life, and am now headed back to Texas for a job as an “environmental educator.”  I’d like to think there is some continuity between my endeavors in Christianville and this forthcoming employment.

     My second trip to Haiti was much like a condensed version of the first: hot and frustrating.  After initially overcoming the ennui of having all of my previous projects fall apart, it was determined by my superiors and myself that it would be best to focus on one task that might have a lasting influence.  As forecasted in my preceding post, this was accomplished by tying up fifty-two 2meter segments of bamboo in a single pond.  The idea is that algae (a.k.a. periphyton) will grow on the bamboo as a source of supplementary food for the tilapia.  The algae will use carbon from the bamboo and CO₂ from the water, along with nitrogen and other nutrients from fish waste, to grow.  Additionally, the bamboo/algae combination will provide some cover for the fish. The shading and protection will replicate a more natural environment, possibly contributing to stress reduction.  Perhaps that’s wishful thinking.  But one of the greatest benefits is that the system requires [edit: almost] no maintenance by the farm workers.

No, this is not a high school science project.
It is the month's work of a college graduate.

     The bamboo setup hardly consumed all of my time whilst there.  Over the course of the month, I spent less time on the farm than my previous visit.  I would otherwise chat with missionaries, take walks or runs in the local area, relax at the new Haiti Made Café, or spend time with the Christianville orphans.  One of the Americans had nicknamed me ‘Baby Jesus’ (much to my chagrin), which many of the Haitian staff members found to be highly comical.  I couldn’t wash a dish without people chiming out, “Thank you, Baby Jesus!”

     During my final week, several of the Christianville administers approached me with the possibility of a paid position.  My response was equal parts interested and hesitant.  I wasn’t sure if I wanted to commit to the year they were considering offering.  But the complications of developmental work prevailed, and I was never officially offered a job.  Perhaps that’s for the best.

     I very much intend to return to Haiti, especially the Gressier area where I made so many wonderful connections.  The Americans and Haitians who are together striving for a better existence are a testament to the profundity of human collaboration.  I have great hope for a better life, not only in Haiti but the world, due to the small successes and smiles I encountered as an intern at Christianville’s fish farm. 

     Devoted goodness has and will distribute justice in our international, ambivalent society.  I thank everyone who has had the patience to teach me a little more.

Tall Tale

May 21 – June 4

     Allow me to tell you a story.

     You work at a medium-sized company and it’s your job to make reports regarding the performance and finances of all the other departments.  The company is large enough that it warrants a fulltime, paid employee for this task (you), but it is small enough that you are the only one in this Evaluations department.

     You originally went to school to be an engineer, so this line of work is quite out of your area of experience.  Still, you had fantastic references, so the board of executives, who you report to directly, was eager to have you onboard.  As soon as you were hired you were pretty much left to your own devices.  With all the pressure of running your own department, you struggled to learn as much as you could as quickly as possible – you went to other companies to study their Evaluations departments, you did every kind of research possible, you worked enormous overtime hours without additional pay – all while still managing to do your job of collecting various kinds of information from each department of your company and compiling it comprehensively.  Not to mention that the board of executives is constantly implying that if you fail to do your job correctly, the whole company could fail (although this probably isn’t true). 

     After a couple months with your nose to the grindstone, you really get the hang of it.  In fact, the company starts to increase its efficiency due to your evaluations.  The board of executives, however, starts to push more than ever that you improve your reports.  This is due to the company losing customers, and thus losing profits.  Everyone is feeling the strain.  You indeed work harder in hopes that the board’s insinuation of a raise will come to fruition.  When this fails to come about, you establish a routine operation that is much less stressful and you continue working a status quo for many months.

     One day, the board introduces an eager young guy to work alongside you.  You’re not sure if he is an intern or an independent contractor, but he seems nice enough.  He admits to you that his experience is with Human Resources, not Evaluations.  This becomes evident as you walk him step-by-step through the data collection process, which he knows very little about.  Turns out that he isn’t completely ignorant, though.  He shows you how to better format the reports and make them more presentable.  This may be somewhat superficial, but you recognize its value. 

     The young guy is full of ideas about how to improve the Evaluations department.  He seems to have a line of communication with the board of executives, so you’re happy to experiment.  He’s right there with you as the two of you try novel methods of data collection and analysis.  He realizes very quickly that the company is struggling due to the decline in customers and sales.  As he tries to develop standards for the new ways of data collection and analysis, which add significantly more work for you to do, he also begins his own project of marketing to gather more customers.  Initially the board of executives seems wary, but they begin to catch on as it shows promise.

     After a few months of slightly improving the Evaluations with a lot of additional work and gaining a whole new batch of customers, it is the young guy’s time to leave.  He writes down a set of standard operating procedures for the new methods the two of you developed.  The board seems quite pleased with his attraction of new customers and sales.  This happened to coincide with an exponentially larger increase of customers due to the company’s new product, but the small sales boost he brought helped tide the company over.  The guy promises to be back soon, encouraging you to maintain the boatload of work the two of you started.

     As the months pass on without his return, the board continues to vaguely pressure you to improve your reports, without mention of the young guy’s previous projects.  Since they are so labor intensive and you aren’t getting paid extra whether you do them or not, you slowly get out of the habit of maintaining them.  You return to your previous routine and the company continues to chug along doing well enough. 

     Oh, and the air conditioner was broken the whole time.

     The end.

     Not exactly an Aesop’s fable, is it?

Meh. 5 out of 10.

     I tell this story from the perspective of the workers at the fish farm.  You can guess what role I plaid in it.

     There’s a reason that work in development is difficult.  A lot of reasons, really.  The point being that it’s easy to go somewhere and do something and feel good about it, but it’s hard to make lasting improvements. 

     So I’m starting over, albeit a little older and more experienced.  This time I’m trying to focus on one solid objective: get a large pond (25ft x 100ft) filled with suspended bamboo.  The purpose of this is to use the nutrients in the pond to grow algae on the bamboo, which the fish can graze on.  Supposedly this can increase fish production by up to 30%.  While initially labor intensive to install, it requires no maintenance, making it ideal.  As long as no one cuts the chord that holds it in place, the bamboo will do just fine on its own.

     I’m also interested in helping a nearby ministry, Juniper Missions, plant some trees.  We have some extra moringa saplings that would do nicely on their hilltop.  There seems to me great potential for moringa.  Once established, it is drought-resistant, its leaves are highly nutritious, and its seeds can be pressed for a high quality oil.  In addition, planting moringa on the woodless mountains could help reestablish topsoil as the roots break up the rock and the trees’ litter decomposes to humus.

     Hypothetically speaking, of course.  But it’s worth a shot.