Haven't blogged in quite a while. Not that there was nothing to write about. On the contrary it has been crazy busy. Now there is so much to tell you that I have to break it up in pieces. Just to make sure you don't fall asleep and drool all over your computer. Here we go:
Last week I was talking with some of the masons who help us build the refugee houses in Lakos. We had to make a budget and order the materials for house number two. When I asked how much gravel they ordered for the first one, they shrugged. Didn't remember that. Well, I started to explain how you can calculate that. They followed along until we decided we needed 70 cubic feet of gravel. Their response was "well it only comes in a large truck". They did not know how much one of those carried. Now since a few months we have a brand new flatbed truck. It is small enough that it can drive all the way up to the building site, whereas the big truck only can dump the gravel on the main road a quarter mile or so away. So I suggested that we would fill our own truck up at the river where the gravel is sold. I did the math and figured that two loads would suffice. They all shook their heads and said, that was not possible because we could only buy it with a big truck. I asked why this was and if we could not try to make a deal with the people there who could even make a little more profit selling it in smaller quantities. The savings for us would be to use our own truck and not having to pick it up from the road where it would be dumped. To make a long story short, it took a lot of convincing before they accepted the plan and then the first one said, "I get it, Hein is trying to tell that we can save a lot of trouble by using the small truck, It will work!" This is something I run in a lot. There are ways they do things. They just never think about how you could overcome problems or how it could be done better and maybe less expensive. These were relatively young people who went to school. That is the problem. Haitian schools do not teach students to be creative or how to find solutions on their own. They memorize tons of things, mostly useless facts. They learn math but don't know how to apply it. There is fear to do things in a new way. For Haiti to climb out of their problems we need many people who can be innovative, who dare to take risk and try new things.
This experience made me more than ever determined to start a new school for our orphans, for children in the community who do not get a chance to use their brains because they are poor, because they cannot pay
for uniforms.
Hopefully we will get the money it takes to do this. We are working on it. Oh, if you happen to have $250,000, we will even name the school after you or someone you want to honor with that. I am not joking. I did that once last year, the next day I had the $30,000 we needed. Learned my lesson, everything is possible. With God.
