Today I got up around 6:30am, got dressed and came upstairs to have breakfast which consisted of coffee, toast and watermelon. I met Darren and Rickie, two more members of the team I did not get to cross paths with yesterday. Here is who actually lives in the house:
-Eric (NY), Kate (NY), Darren (Ireland), Gerry (Ireland), and Rickie (NY/London) all work as design fellows or managers here and are long term.
-Ben (NY), Sven (my roommate who moved from NY and is 1/2 German-1/2 Haitian) and me are the only volunteers currently serving. Ben and Sven have each been here a couple of months.
-The rest of the group consists of employees of Inveneo who reside on the middle floor: Andrew, Matt, Sam, and Cybil. They are independantly here but rent rooms in the house. Each floor is pretty much three times the size of my apartment back home times four floors. Nuts.
We catch a ride at 7:30am sharp to the office where we spend 8-5 working w/a lunch break. Today I was told how to use the Open Architecture Network, which is this huge file sharing program and online storage space that allows anyone around the world to share files such as CAD, Revit, Sketch-up, PDFs and JPEGs. This is great because it benefits people who do not have the time nor the resources to produce architectural drawings from scratch and it gives them an opportunity to save all the effort and money to acquire them. I am going to be uploading images and files to this network eventually once I get a handle for what I am doing.
After meeting with Darren for a while and checking out the OAN, I was given the task to research a site that just began schematic design in a slum on the eastern side of PaP, called Villa Rosa. I was sent a group of links to investigate anything that might help prior to getting too involved in design, but there were internet problems throughout the day, which caused me to not have the resources I needed to do my work, which was a bit frustrating. I spent the down time just reading word and PDF files for other projects, then once the net was back up I got back into the research.
Next problem: it was damn impossible to find anything about the site. So, I spent all day in and out of being online without accomblishing much. Kind of an anti-climactic day, but not all days will be glamorous and fun. We have a weekly meeting tomorrow so I can learn more about the other projects going on now and hear from the rest of the group.
For lunch I went about half a block from the office to a little place with Rickie and three folks that work for EVE, a construction developement company whose offices are on the second floor of the office building. I had a typical dish: rice, plantains, avocado and chicken, very good. All for about 100 gourde ($2.50 in the states). After we got home, I went straight to sleep for a couple of hours until getting up for dinner: lasagne, rice, veggies and beef.
All and all, things are great here. Comfortable weather, just making sure to keep my bug spray close by. The mystery bites on my thumb have now swollen up reather substantially to the point I think a spider must have liked me a lot yesterday during my nap. Kate was nice and gave me some benadryl lotion and pills to try to tame that. There is a community dog living here name Chance, super sweet, helping me cope with not having my pets around. She's white and brown, built like a collie, but smaller.
Probably go to bed soon, get some more rest. No plans for the weekend, we shall see what presents itself.
Cheers,
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