I decided to sit down today and do the edits to our website that I had been putting off. Some of them were just text and photo edits that needed to be refreshed, but others were due to all of the changes we’ve had at Clean Water for Haiti in recent months. When I came to the blog page on the site and saw Chris’ last post, dated the first week of October, I couldn’t help but think that we had no idea that we’d be making the decisions we did just over 10 days later. The decision to move our family out of Haiti. The initial belief that we’d have to shut everything down and walk away, then the dec ..read more

This is my third attempt in three weeks at writing a blog post. The first two tries needed to be recycled because they veered into politics. Politics are inappropriate for Clean Water for Haiti’s blog, and it would be unwise to discuss politics in a country with a recent presidential assassination. Haiti has a cement plant located about 25 miles from here. All of our cement normally comes from there. It’s nice that one of our main inputs is locally produced. However, there has been a supply interruption caused by the extreme criminal activity Haiti has been experiencing. Today I was surprised ..read more

I have a lot of thoughts swirling around so this will probably be more of a stream of consciousness type post than anything that comes out well written and cohesive. That’s just the way things are rolling today, so we’re going to go with it. This week has been a hard week here in Haiti. The country is in turmoil. There are so many reasons for why, and I always hesitate to be the one to try to explain, because Haiti is so complex that it’s never just one thing. I/we, don’t want to sound like any kind of expert on the country, the problems, or what the solutions might be. When I first moved her ..read more

Sadly, when discussing the current state of affairs in Haiti, the assassination of the president looms larger than anything else. The assassination: I wrote a post about the state of Haiti back in November 2019: https://cleanwaterforhaiti.org/i-dont-know-whats-going-on-in-haiti-but-im-trying-to-figure-it-out/ I think I ended up giving a pretty good explanation of the state of affairs in Haiti at the time. I just reread the post, and funnily enough I mentioned assassination: “I don’t believe a new leader coming along is going to fix everything. It’s wishful thinking. As far as I can see, the ..read more

I’ve been sitting here watching the screen for our blog trying to load for several minutes. I finally gave up and decided I’d start this in Word, then copy and paste it into our blog editor later. Friends, the struggle is real! It’s 2022 and our internet is like a roller coaster of emotions. In case you weren’t aware of it, our internet system is, shall we say, complicated? Yes, let’s call it “complicated”. When we moved to Camp Marie, there was no available option for internet, other than what we could get through our cell phone data plan. And that, that was 2G, if we were lucky. After we mov ..read more

After neglecting this blog for years, I finally made a few posts with the intention of making one post per month. I wrote another post for June, but it ended up being way too long. It also wandered from point to point and had a lot of numbers and metrics in it that would cause most readers to lose interest. I love numbers and metrics, but most readers don’t! I’ll try to do better this time around. Why is cost per filter important to us? Well, we have chosen to do a single thing and do it really, really well. We build and install biosand filters, and include an education and follow up program ..read more

My latest blog post may be a bit boring for the most people. So why am I writing about how Clean Water for Haiti is governed? Well, there are certain donors, who tend to be larger donors or people representing foundations or corporate entities, who realize just how important it is for an organization to be governed properly. This post is for them. It was a lot of work to set up Clean Water for Haiti’s solid foundation, so this is where I’m going to celebrate that and brag about Clean Water for Haiti’s Joint Charitable Activities Committee and the good governance they’re committed to. Clean Wat ..read more

In my last post, I wrote about how well Clean Water for Haiti is doing. It’s true. We are absolutely killing it, and will continue to kill it barring unforeseen circumstances. However, much was left out of that post. Several years ago we came up with an expansion plan. The filter project is modest; perhaps 25,000 of our filters are currently in use, providing water to perhaps 125,000 people. Of those people, many many of them are still alive because they drink safe water that they get from their filter and never caught a deadly disease. 125,000 people represents just over 1% of Haiti’s populat ..read more

Life for a foreigner living in Haiti isn’t what it used to be. Foreigners inevitably end up hanging out with each other because it’s easier to relate when you have a common background and it’s nice to be able to talk about the aspects of day to day living in a country which is not your own with someone who can understand. Well, most of the foreigners have left the country or are making plans to leave. In practical terms, that means for us that our social interactions have largely moved online, as was the case for so many others during the pandemic. I’m not terribly excited about interacting wi ..read more

In the past few days we’ve had a lot of people reach out to us as more and more of you are hearing news out of Haiti. I thought it would be easiest, and give me more room, to write a blog post rather than a shorter update on social media so I could address some of the key concerns that have come up. Photo copyright – Getty Images/1001Nights Embassies advising foreigners leave? In the process of checking on us, many have asked us if we’ve seen the news stories and advisories and were aware of the Embassies urging citizens to leave? We so appreciate that you’ve wanted to check on us and make us ..read more