Piti Piti Zwazo Fe Nich

Little by little, a bird builds its nest.

This proverb is the one that I have heard over and over again since arriving in Cange. I think it’s partly because people here just really like this proverb (we even received a report about soil samples from some students at an agronomy school nearby with this as the closing line a couple of weeks ago). But mostly, I think it’s because the people see and understand that making this transition to a completely new culture takes time and effort.

One of the hardest skills I’ve been working on over the past few months is learning Haitian Creole. I knew a few words and phrases before coming and had memorized some common vocabulary, but picking up necessary conversational skills was a lot harder to master with the surprising lack of Creole speakers in my little hometown of Lugoff, SC. Thankfully, there are a handful of English speakers here in Cange that have been helping me along the way. Greg, who I work with daily in the water testing lab, has been a tremendous resource while learning to communicate with the rest of the water team. Also, my friend Ambioli who spends his afternoons after school practicing vocabulary and sentence making with Mary Evelyn and me. One of the toughest, but most helpful tactics has been just putting myself out there and being willing to make mistakes. Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen a transformation in the ladies who cook our meals from laughing because we didn’t understand anything they would try to tell us to laughing because we actually managed to say something funny. Slowly, but surely, we’re well on our way to listing “limited, working proficiency in Haitian Creole” on our LinkedIn profiles (shameless plug to connect with me). But much more importantly, little by little, I am working to make lasting connections and friendships with the people of this community that can only come through communicating in a common language.

Myself and my friend Gaelle who wants to learn to speak English. Sometimes we practice our language skills together.

So, you may be wondering what I do around here when I’m not practicing sentence structure or making Creole flash cards. I’ve experienced so much already in my time being here that I don’t think I could put in all in one blog post, so for now, I’ll just explain a little bit about my primary purpose in being here and how this whole internship came to be. Through being involved with Clemson Engineers for Developing Countries for three years during my undergraduate years at Clemson, I was given many amazing opportunities. I worked with fellow students on a handful of water and sanitation projects for villages all over Haiti some of which have been completed and others that are still being worked on, was selected to oversee projects and help guide the overall organization while serving on the board of directors, and assisted in the development the Humanitarian Engineering Research and Design Studio in Pendleton, SC. While all of these opportunities were important, the experience that was most meaningful to me was being able to travel with nine other students to Haiti the Spring Break of my senior year. It was not only my first time to a developing country, but was also my first time to any country outside of the United States. The experience was eye-opening and at the end of the week, I knew I had the choice to either take what I had learned about the people of Haiti back to the United States with me, talk about it occasionally, and hope that somehow all of the challenges they face on a day to day basis would fix themselves, or I could choose to do more.

Greg, fellow students Lillian, Autumn, and Alex, and myself this past March when I first traveled to Haiti on Clemson Engineers for Developing Countries Spring Break Trip.

I returned to Clemson and finished my last semester of classes. I graduated in May and then was presented with the option of coming to Haiti to work on updating the water system in Cange and developing what is known as a water safety plan. As part of my everyday work here, I assist in taking water samples and testing water quality levels in hopes of creating a model that will accurately predict how much chlorine is needed in the system each morning. All of this data, along with some other work I will do when I return to Clemson in the fall will be analyzed and included in my thesis for my master’s degree. I also am working closely with our team of nine Haitian water technicians to oversee the day to day operations of managing a municipal water system and develop a plan to ensure that quality drinking water is provided by identifying and prioritizing risks to the system and making a plan to effectively prepare for and manage these risks.

While these are my main responsibilities while I am here, I also have the privilege of getting to assist students who are a part of the program back at Clemson. Every semester, Clemson Engineers for Developing Countries has somewhere around 80-100 students participating in a wide variety of projects. Whenever these projects require any sort of data from Haiti, they contact us interns to get it for them. Sometimes this includes just making a phone call and sometimes it involves hiking to a remote village in the Central Plateau. Either way, this is one of my favorite parts of the job because it really has given me the opportunity to see a wide variety of different projects.

Myself alongside the Cange Water Team (or Team Solid as they call themselves) after an afternoon working to rebuild one of the pumps in Ba Cange. A natural flowing spring in Ba Cange is the source of water for the Cange Water System as well as the power used to pump the water up to the village.

A lot of people asked me going into this what my expectations were and to be quite honest, I’m still not sure. I know that Haiti has a lot challenges that need solutions and I know that it has many people who are struggling through poverty, major health concerns, hunger, lack of adequate jobs, no access to safe drinking water, and many other things as well. I certainly don’t expect for the work I’m doing to solve all the world’s problems or even make a dent in Haiti’s, however, I do hope that while I am here, I can make just the slightest difference in the lives of the people in this small little corner of the world and produce work that can be shared with others who can make a small difference somewhere else. It takes a lot of people working together and each doing their part well in order to truly make widespread change. So for now, here I am, doing my small part in a much larger picture to make the world a better place. Little by little like a bird building its nest.