Sunday = Fun Day (part 2)

As for the rest of the week, I worked on the same two projects I have been on the whole time I have been here: both the Villa Rosa and Santo communities redevelopment projects. Santo had it's ground breaking last week and Villa Rosa is still in the research stage and will be going into schematic design really soon. Everyday I kind of jump back and forth between the two projects depending on what needs to be done whenever that is. The office is always busy, everyone is constantly working together, meeting, organizing site visits, it is quite impressive. It seems to go so fluidly I don't think of too much to discuss, like 'work as usual' now. But there were two exciting things to happen this week with getting out of the office:

Wednesday we went back to the Villa Rosa site, met with current residents to find out what kind of current living situations they are in and how to improve that; Thursday I went to another ground breaking, this one being a school site north of here by about 45 minutes, but only a few miles away. Long, 4 wheel drive road to get there.Going back to Villa Rosa is always cool for me.
The neighborhood is extremely dense and offers us endless amounts of design potential. Half the structures are completely gone or in such bad shape they need to be demo'd. What is so interesting about the area is that everyone still lives such normal lives, it seems. I mean, not compared to our 'white picket fence' prototype, but neighbors still hanging out gossiping on front steps, children running and playing with new, invented toys (lid of a 5 gallon bucket and a wire hanger pushing the lid around, etc.), running around and laughing. Darren and I mainly went to organize some major routes to incorporate into the design we come up with. Main walking paths tend to die off into structures that make it difficult to get through the area, and we are trying to make it so there are more direct ways to get around. After we gathered a lot of information, we met back up with Natalie (a local Haitian that is volunteering at AFH) and Nancy (design associate from DC), who had organized the group meeting and took good notes from the residents in the first zone set for construction. We met as a group later in the day and gathered info, then sent it out to Mari, a woman that currently works for AFH at the San Francisco office and is planning on coming out here in a couple weeks. We have been meeting villa Skype with her and she has been a big help.

Thursday morning, I got to go to a site currently set to start construction very soon by Haiti Partners, BAR Architecture (from SF) with funding by a church group from Michigan. Craziest part was, a lot of the church members are from Holland, Michigan...where Nicole went to see Lindsay and Alex tie the knot last week. Small world! The site was AMAZING. Overlooking the entire valley nestled in this green mountainous area where you can still see the ocean. Beautiful. It differed quite a bit from last weeks ground breaking in Santo. There were at least 100 people there, kids, adults, a cute choir, really fun. A festive, great group of people excited for this new school to be developed. There were dozens of photo friendly kids, priceless. The school design was done by BAR Architects in San Francisco, who used our offices to create the design. It is a really cool design, love the renderings, check it out.Friday, I got back to the grind with compiling graphics and construction pages for Santo, which we have a deadline of next week to turn in all the stuff we have to get the entire project going. We need to send out the info for the school and market plans to see who would like to fund that part of the project, since the homes are already being built by Habitat for Humanity. I have been working in CAD, Illustrator and Photoshop, having a bunch of fun with it.

After working all day on that, we finished off with our weekly meeting. It was a really constructive one this time, because normally we just run through all the projects and see where they are all atcurrently, but this time it was an open forum to have people suggest how we can improve our efforts and create a more productive working environment for the local economy.

We aren't here to take design work away from Haiti, we are here to provide advice and to show how to make buildings the right way, to change the terrible methods that have been used as common practice here for so long.

It was a gooddiscussion, I was suggesting the concept of design/build, where we work with local enthusiastic builders and contractors through the design process so they have a better understanding of how the buildings get put together. It is crazy to know that AFH has only been here for only 18 months and has done SO much to help this country get back on track. Amazing, so glad I can be a part of this.

Well, hope to watch the Chargers game later today. I subscribed to justin.tv for the month and I am able to see the Pats/Bills game pretty well to start the day, lets hope the same happens for my game and they can get over that bad loss last week to NE. Enjoy the rest of your weekend everyone!! Here is a video from the ground breaking...