On January 10th, I got on a plane for Port Au Prince, Haiti to do some work with an organization called Engineers Without Borders (EWB). I had not spent any discernible amount of time in the third world before this trip and I was ready for a life changing experience. That is exactly what I got, although not in the way that I originally expected. I have a lot of thoughts and pictures and stories. I would like to share it here in a way that is more meaningful than just a stream of consciousness brain dump. I decided that the most appropriate way to do this is to post in installments. So here goes my first installment of the Haiti blog.

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We arrive in Port Au Prince on Saturday, January 10th around noon. Representing the San Francisco chapter is Eric McDonnell - structural engineer, Kyle Carbert - civil engineer, and myself - electrical engineer. With us are two students from the University of Wisconsin student chapter; Eyleen Chou - mechanical engineer and Travis Lark - biomedical engineer. Our host for the week, Actionnel Fleurisma, is the community leader and preacher in the village we were going to be working in. He picks us up at the airport and we start the drive immediately to Bayonnais.

There doesn't seem to be many rules to the road. It looks like people generally try to stay to the right side, but there is nothing really governing this rule. No signs, no lines, sometimes there isn't even any clarity on where the borders of the road are. People pass on the left. And the right. And in the middle. Actionnel is on the horn for a significant portion of the drive. However, it's not a NYC horn honk. It's more of a "look out, i'm right here" kind of honk. Seems like the best way to alert people of your presence. There are lots of blind corners around these roads and not a lot of slowing down around them.

Every couple of miles you see a couple stands where people were selling snacks, automobile lubricants or bicycle parts. Unfortunately my camera is lost in a sea of bags in the back of the truck so I am not able to capture any of the sights.

As we get further outside Port Au Prince, the state of the roads deteriorate fast. There are huge ditches everywhere. Some parts are flooded. At one point, there is a large school bus stuck in a ditch spanning the entire width of the road. Actionnel, frustrated with the infrastructure of his country, exclaims that Haiti is a country without a head. It has a body, but no eyes to see and no ears to hear. There is evidence of this all around.

We go through the city of St Marc. There is livestock all over the place. I see goats, pigs, chickens and even cattle. There are huge unfinished buildings everywhere. I wonder who built them. I wonder why they never finished. I see transmission lines. Actionnel tells me that they are empty. No electrons. I wonder how does it happen. How do millions of dollars of infrastructure get built and then just abandoned. I understand that Haiti has enjoyed a significant amount of political unrest to say the least. I know that the level of corruption here is not minor. So all that said, and all this observed, what difference can a handful of idealistic American kids really make in a country without a head?

More to come...