Marching into March
The 8th of March is International Women’s Day. Ten women’s organisations from all over Ileavache come together to celebrate the occasion. We march around the village of Madame Bernard singing songs and holding our placards. As I look around at the women of Ileavache I realise how many great role models we have here on the island and it is nice to feel that we are celebrating women in unison with people all over the world today.
March sees the start of the MTI training program with the orphanage staff. The training goes really well although MTI get one of the worst crossings on the boat and I promise them it won’t be so bad on the way home. Unfortunately that turned out not to be true and if they weren’t wet enough from the sea spray it also rained on them halfway over to Cayes. Every trip after this is going to look easy! Sr Flora has an idea to offer support to families in the community that have a person in the household with Special Needs. Haven volunteer, Katie, offers her help to carry out home assessments. Our partners in IFORHT also offer support and their nurse, Fabienne, comes over to help with the assessment process. There are twenty three names on the list. Once we have the assessment, MTI will help us devise a program for training for the parents. Sr Flora will look to Bien-Etre Social (Haitian Social Services) to provide assistance.
In the orphanage we get the go ahead to use the sand that is being pumped into Madame Bernard for our playground area. We have no machine to move it so it is a wheelbarrow effort up to the orphanage to bring in enough fill. We put in a small wall/path to stop the sand washing away when the rainy season comes in April.
Our football program is ongoing and we added the women’s team in Madame Bernard to our training schedule. They are preparing for a competition in Recife at Easter and we take them under our wing. At the first training session I get asked to be their ‘marraine’ (godmother), we tell them to wait and ask again after training! They do and still have the same request so we arrange another session for later in the week.
It’s my first St Patrick’s Day on Ileavache and I’m taking the day off. We don’t have a parade, maybe next year, but I can watch the hurling and football club All Ireland’s live online; visit the orphanage and finish the day with a St Patrick’s Day party sing song and guitar session on the front porch. Trish O’Doherty has been out to visit in February and has supplied numerous accessories for the national holiday.
The Chache Lavie program is moving along and we bring five of our community leaders to Lamardelle to see the program in action there. Our hope is that these five people will form the basis to launch Chache Lavie in Ileavache. In Western standards the people of Ileavache are very poor so the biggest surprise is our group’s perception of the poverty in Lamardelle. They all comment on this, particularly after a visit to some community houses. They start to see the strengths and resources that the FEJ team could see when they visited Ileavache in February.
The Irish bunting gets a second day out on March 21st. There are twenty one couples getting married in the church in Grand Plaine. Revel and Sauvenette have invited us all. It happens to coincide with the final day of the Six Nations. So we go to the church in the morning, back to the rugby mid-morning and back to fit in four wedding receptions for the afternoon. And of course, Ireland win in spectacular style so it has been great craic!
Remember all those plans from February, well our friends in Haven Partnership have offered to implement as much of the changes as they can during their volunteer trip in April. It’s a great boost to our plans for the orphanage that we can get that body of work finished in the early part of the year. We complete the training for our security staff to implement visiting times and general guidelines about accessing the orphanage.
Our agronomist, Isaac, from Cavaillon comes to Ileavache for a visit and reviews our garden project at the orphanage. He is very happy with what we have achieved and thinks that with mixed planting we can up our yield hugely. He is going to put together a plan for us to implement.
Ailish and Reginald are talking chickens or rather chicken production. It is part of the plan to make the orphanage more self-sustaining and we are looking at reducing the food bill while improving nutrition for the children.
The English language lessons have not progressed so Ailish needs to meet with CES and review what we can do. It is a disappointment especially as the material we have to work with meets all our needs. Week after week there have been reasons that the work hasn’t happened so using CES guidance Ailish will plan a new approach.
President Martelly and Stephanie Villedrouin, Minister of Tourism come to visit Ileavache. It is the first community visit by any President of Haiti and there is much excitement. Helicopters are flying overhead, there is an increased security presence and the whole island has turned out between Madame Bernard and Kaykok. It is like a festival day all over the island with everyone trying to get to see ‘Tet Kale’ (Shaven Head, but it also is a Kreyol expression for “All the Way”) as he was nicknamed enroute to being elected as president. That is more than enough excitement for one month, roll on April!