A Trip to Paul

Saturday was really interesting and pretty fun. I got up around 5:30 AM to go up to the community of Paul and fix two wells there. Now there are two unbelievable things about this last sentence. First off, when I say “I went to fix wells” I don’t mean that I went alone to fix an entire well. I basically tagged along with Mark Gilbert and Dave Errett, two volunteers from the US who are very knowledgeable on well maintenance. Mark has been a commercial builder for over thirty years and Dave has been an environmental engineer for over thirty years. Both of these guys are incredibly knowledgeable and dedicated to the mission. I basically serve as their lackey who helps with the more mundane tasks while they do the big thinking. I have learned so much from both of them and I am incredibly grateful for the work they do, not only for the sake of the community but for my learning as well. I feel quite confident now on the basics of water well maintenance thanks to their help. And second, yes, I did voluntarily wake up at 5:30 AM on a Saturday to go do work. If there is any mark this experience has made me a changed person, look no further

Paul is up in the mountains and the road to get there is not as much a road as it is a dirt path with stones every where. Sure it’s clear of all brush and there are no buildings on it, but driving on it is kind of like riding a roller coaster, except there is nothing holding you down or keeping your car from falling uncontrollably. I generally have a pretty tough stomach for heights and relatively dangerous driving situations, but there were a few points today when I was worried the car would over turn and we’d go flying down the hill. The road is literally up a mountain, and there is no pavement or guardrail, so as I was forcefully bouncing up the mountains, my eye would occasionally catch the 4000 foot drop just three feet away. Even if the car kept on the road I was being jostled around so much I was worried I might just fly out the window if the car took a sharp enough turn. Fortunately everything was fine. Mark was driving and he did a great job.

When we got to the clinic at Paul, the location of the first well we unloaded and went to see the status of the well. Every well the mission maintains has at least one person who looks over it and keeps it locked up. Though I was tired from the early wake up, I was glad to be out early because it was nice and cool in the morning. We got to the first well at the clinic, and when we tried to pump water out everything seemed just fine. The pump seemed heavy, but water was coming up so we decided to move on and look at the next well.

We got to the next well, about a mile away, and we met with Tony, the member of the community who has been charged with maintaining the well. He said that we would have to walk about a half mile with all of our supplies to get to the well. There was a road but it was wet from the rain. We decided to drive and we were fine. The road was no worse than the other six miles we’d already driven that day. This is a somewhat interesting difference between most Haitians and Americans, most Haitians don’t really understand the capability of a car. Most Haitians don’t know how to drive, let alone what ideal road conditions are like. Tony wasn’t sure what the road would be like or if it would create any problems, but he was being considerate, he didn’t want us to get stuck. I don’t think he took into consideration the 100 plus pounds of equipment we had with us, but I appreciated his hesitation.

We got to the well and started pumping water. The handle was very difficult to pump, but the water was flowing. Then all of a sudden the water stopped coming up. We weren’t sure what was happening, so we began to take the well apart. This is one of the coolest things I’ve done, and I owe all of the success to Mark, Dave, and Roland. We basically had the Haitians all do the work while he instructed them on what to do. We did not do this out of laziness, but in order for the community to care about this well, we need to get them involved in the project. The work we had them do was very respectable work but it was hard. We wanted to give these people a sense of ownership for the community resources we give them. This will encourage them to take care of the well, and will hopefully erode the culture of handouts. We started by taking the wellhead off and arranged the sucker rod so that we could begin to pull the piping out  (the sucker rod is attached to the handle and when the handle is pulled this rod pulls on a neoprene cloth that creates a suction and draws the water up). Taking the well head off is a fairly complicated procedure, and if its not done correctly it could ruin the well, so we did that ourselves, but the rest of the project we had the Haitians work on.

There were three Haitian men under Mark’s direction, and they pulled the ninety feet or pipe out of the ground. We had them do this by have each Haitian worker fasten a pipe wrench onto the well pipe, and then lifting it as far as they could. Once they had lifted it as far as they could (usually about three or four feet) Mark would fasten a clamp at the base of the pipe while the three Haitians dropped their wrenches down three or more feet, and then they lifted again. This was a very slow process but it worked. We picked the well pipe up three feet at a time, and eventually got all ninety feet out.

The part of the well that does all of the work sits at the bottom of ninety feet of pipe. This section of the well is made of brass, and its basically a three foot cylinder with a small cone on the bottom that draws the water up. Inside is a neoprene cloth that, when pulled up, creates a suction and draws the water up. Eventually, when the pump is pumped enough that water comes up to the surface. Dave and Mark fixed one of the valves and then began the whole process of putting the well back together, basically lowering each section of pipe the same way they pulled it up.

The well was eventually put back together and the people began to pump out water. The pump was still “hard”, in that one had to push very hard repeatedly for the flow of water to begin. There were also random points in which there would be no water emerging from the nozzle on well, but it would be coming out the sides. This was very bizarre, but after about twenty minutes of ground water CSI, Mark and Dave realized that the pump was drawing water out faster than the ground water source could supply it. This meant that sometimes the pump was drawing up air instead of water. There is nothing that can be done to fix this, unless you want to dig a new well. What we could do however was to help educate the people on how to properly pump. Basically what we had to tell them is that they needed to pump slowly, with full strokes.

This was really great not only because we helped repair a well, but we got to see the Haitians take over and do what we needed them to do. We got to see the Haitians taking care of their community. All I can hope in the future is that at some point in the future, hopefully sooner rather than later, there will be a Haitian filling and taking care of this without me ever being there.