We’re happy to say that we’ve continued to make great amounts of progress. Of the twelve houses we will be building, we have finished seven and started the last five. We’re confident that we’ll be able to finish the houses in Jacmel by our goal, the end of August, and the meetings in Esperanza have been going excellently the past month.
During a meeting ice-breaker, Moiz is blind-folded while he touches Ricardo, trying to guess who he is based on his facial characteristics.
Since the start of July we have had five meetings. The progress the community members have made in just a few weeks and the initiative they are taking is truly impressive. At the first meeting when we asked questions like, “Why are we here?” and “What do you want from this move?” we received responses along the lines of, “I don’t know, why don’t you tell us!” Those responses were honestly a bit discouraging at the time, but after reaching out to several people who have experience in community development and working more with the families, we are feeling very optimistic.
To be honest, we were getting reactions like that because the foundation has guaranteed so much support to them when we arrive that they saw it only as something we are doing for them, rather than something they are doing for themselves. With this start, we have had some work to do on empowering them to take responsibility for their decision to move their lives to Jacmel.
Community members participating during a meeting activity
The community members are quickly becoming more involved. Several people, both men and women, are stepping up during meetings and leading the rest. This involvement is a great relief and a wonderful thing to watch. With just a little bit of empowerment, our families are taking responsibility for what they want and expect. We’ve come up with the themes of the meetings such as communicating effectively, leadership roles, how they want to govern themselves, etc, but we try our hardest to stick to asking questions instead of making statements and allowing them to come up with the answers instead of giving them. For each of the last three meetings, we have had volunteers who help plan, prepare for, and execute the meetings. It’s been a great time for us to speak with them one-on-one, hear some personal concerns, and get a better idea of how they feel about the activities and topics we are hitting on. It also gives anyone who would like an opportunity to test out a leading role.
Friends Franciska and Daniela hanging out.
Financially, we are holding up. We are still lacking funds to build a complete foundation structure, and, until then, we’ll have one open space that will serve as a dining area and classroom. We are in the running for receiving a couple grants and a CNN journalist came down in late July. We are hopeful he’ll come out with an article about our situation by September.
