Dear friends, thank you for taking time to opening up this blog. Welcome to any new viewers and welcome back for those who have been following my blog for a while. Below, I will share a bit about one of my most personally impactful trips. And this one, my youngest daughter Juliana was with me:
One week after leaving Haiti, I look back and remark on the events of this project and how it was different than other Engineering Ministry International (EMI) projects I have been involved in.
Verrettes is a beautiful area, but if you read the recent news about rioting in Haiti; it is a country struggling to recover from natural disasters, chronic corruption and unemployment among other things. To ignore this fact is like choosing not to deal with some of the unpleasant realities of the world we all called to live in.
It is only in this context that we begin to understand what motivates missionaries like Ricardo Pierre-Louis to return home to Haiti to try and give people hope and opportunity. His story is compelling and you can read more about it here.
Figure 2: Photo of Ricardo on site by Hildebrand, Peter (EMI Volunteer, Architect), February 2019
As part of the EMI team, we were privileged to be able to partner with Ricardo and his foundation MSAV Lespwa Lavi (MSAV) to help design the new campus which includes a church, clinic and soccer academy. A generous donor provided MSAV, 13 acres of land for this new campus.
Below is a glimpse of the process driven approach we took as part of the EMI team.
To begin with, we all walked the site to gain a more intimate understanding of the site, its grading, contours and boundaries:
Figure 3: Photo of site by Plett, Leon (EMI Structural Engineer, volunteer), February 2019
Figure 4: Photo by Chong, Juliana (EMI volunteer), February 2019
Next, we surveyed the site (with a drone, nonetheless) and drew the site to scale and placed the soccer pitch, buildings and other program functions on the site to see how it should be organized and arranged.
Unfortunately, we discovered right away that the site was too narrow to adequately house the soccer field and buildings that the ministry needed to be considered a truly accredited academy. Without the accreditation, there was no point in building the academy on this site. These are the sort of things that can stop a project and end a trip early.
Figure 7: Site plan by Hildebrand, Peter (EMI Volunteer, Architect), February 2019
Although we prayed about what the next steps should be, we were genuinely unsure of what the answers would be. Having met the neighbour who originally donated the land, we all knew he was a generous man. It was going to be a big ask, but our Clients (Ricardo) nonetheless asked the neighbour if he would consider donating even more land to make this campus work. When the donor agreed, we knew that it was God's favour that we were witnessing and not something of our own efforts.
As an aside: on the flight out of Port au Prince, I was reading Psalm 127:1-2 (A song of ascents. Of Solomon)
"Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labour in vain.
Unless the Lord watches over the city, the guards stand watch in vain."
This was so true for our first steps on this project. Without the added land, we would be unsure if this project could advance. Without the Lord's favour, we would have built in vain.
After a brief moment of celebration, we continued planning the campus with wider and more forgiving site in mind:
Figure 8: Site plan sketch by Young, Greg (EMI Project leader, Architect), February 2019
Since, the soccer field was the largest piece of programming to place - once that was placed; the more public buildings (church, clinic and admin buildings) was the next logical thing to locate at the main entry. And then moving onto the more private areas like the school buildings and courtyard:
Figure 9: Main entry sketch by Jones, Dan (EMI volunteer, Landscape Architect), February 2019
Things moved fast after that. It is amazing how quickly things come together when the whole team have similar design ideas. Here is the team working late at night (our hosts were kind enough to provide us valuable fuel for generators to keep the power on in the evenings):
Figure 10: Photo by Plett, Leon (EMI Structural Engineer, volunteer), February 2019
Below shows the steep sloping challenges to overcome with "cutting" and "filling" of earth when a level soccer field needs to be placed:
Figures 11 and 12: Site renderings by Hildebrand, Peter (EMI Volunteer, Architect), February 2019
Below is an example of one way buildings are designed on one of these trips. The Client wanted a church to seat 500. Like many other designers, I will start with pen and paper. One of the reasons to do this is to work out the primary structure and location of shear walls with the structural engineer who was sitting next to me:
How the building looks from the outside and the context is also considered. One of the best ways to do so when explaining to Clients are three dimensional renderings, which happens quickly after CAD plans are done:
Since we are all together in the same room, the structural engineer (Leon Plett) is designing the major structural components at the same time. We go back and forth to make sure that the architecture and the structure of the building is coordinated:
Figure 15: Rendering of church framing by Hildebrand, Peter (EMI Volunteer, Architect), February 2019
Not unlike the early church in the book of Acts, churches in the majority world can sometimes grow much faster than ones in North America. That is why thought of future church expansion (above and beyond 500) is also considered:
Figure 16: Proposed church CAD floor plans with expansion by Chong, Dan (EMI Co-leader, Architect), February 2019.
Lastly, it was not all just work. Since Ricardo is somewhat of a soccer celebrity - we got to enjoy a game with his colleagues:
Here is a photo of Peter, me, my daughter Juliana and the Duvalsaint since we were all sporting the EMI T-shirts that day. Duvalsaint is the executive director of MSAV in Haiti. It is folks like Duvalsaint who are in country all the time to make sure that things go smoothly for this ministry. As westerners, we do get to leave the country in times of civil unrest, but for folks like Duvalsaint - he is vested for the long game in country:
The EMI team with our ministry partners from MSAV, from left to right:
Nika Pierre-Louis (Lespwa Lavi President), Berthony Duvalsaint (Lespwa Lavi Director), Dan Chong (EMI co-lead), Sydnie McClean (EMI Intern), Juliana Chong (EMI volunteer), Caleb Grove (Electrical Engineer), Leon Plett (Structural Engineer), Peter Hildebrand (Architect), Greg Young (EMI project leader), Connor Young (EMI volunteer), Dr. Kadon Hintz (Lespwa Lavi VP), Dan Jones (Landscape Architect), Josiah Plett (EMI volunteer),
Follow along with our host ministry here: https://lespwalavi.org/blog/building-progress
