The AIDG office is in the centre of the tightly gridded city. All roads parallel to the coastline are lettered and roads going towards the coastline are numbered. The story goes that the French colonialists had them named in words after they were built, but during the American occupation after the 1st World War, the yankee doodle dandy solders couldn't pronounce the damn names and being all military in attitude, decided to codify all the roads in numbers and letters (this is not the last time in my blogs that the US will be blamed for everything!).
View from 2nd floor balcony. The lady is walking down Rue H. The car is going down Rue 25.
The building, taking up 3 floors has the office space on the ground floor, Isnido's family on the 1st floor and visitors and interns on the 2nd floor. But 1st and 2nd floors have balconies, which are great for escaping the inside stuffiness and absorbing the breeze from the sea and hills. Also great for just watching the hustle and bustle below. The photocopy shop next shop every now and then blast music, and Ive recently noticed, giving certain songs to much airtime. All the music here is great by the way, they mainly play Haitian music of all sorts of variety, I think the only genre I wouldn't expect being played here is heavy metal. There is a roof terrace for doing the laundry. It has great views of the centre-ville and the port.
View from rooftop of surrounding hills
On the 2nd day, I was given a tour of the ongoing biodigester installations, one at school and another at a seminary. In a nutshell, for all you regular folks, cow dung powers the generation of biogas for use, in the case of the current projects, for cooking. A mixture of fresh dung and water is poured into an airtight arrangement of modified plastic tanks (and/or or brick basin), creating a nice atmosphere for good bacteria to grow and generate the gas. Pathogenic bacteria are killed in the process and the effluent that is created can be used as fertiliser.
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The seminary biodigester was built as part of a training session for the local winners and runners-up of a business plan competition in Cap Haitien organised by AIDG earlier in the year. The winners are more commercially oriented i.e. more focussed on bringing "widgets to market then taking over the world" and the runners-up are technicians in general, and will need support to get a good business model. The business plan competition was not without its politics and confrontations as you will learn in later blogs. I was lucky to arrive when the dust was just settling.
The seminary Biodigester
On the third day, our voluntary translator, Emmanuel arrived in Cap Haitien. He is a Haitian based in the US, with an excellent knack of flipping between English-French-Creole-Spanish mid-sentence. He did the written and oral translations during some introductory technical training for the business plan competition winners, given by the AIDG programme manager from Guatemala. At a press conference organised by the 1st prize winners, Coopen (Cooperation pour l'exploitation de la nature.....exploitation of a green kind, of course!....multiple meaning in Creole-French!), I learnt that translation can be a headache here because after a Haitian stands up (whether its the press or Joe Public) to ask a question, he will make a long statement turning it into an observation complete with several reasons, inadvertently answering the question. Other times, it will be a speech and the translator has to interrupt.
Steve Lee talks about AIDG at the Coopen Press Conference
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