MORE ABOUT HAITI
Desks And Pews
St. Mary’s next major endeavor began in the summer of 2002. We decided to begin the process of manufacturing 120 school desks and 120 church pews which we would send by sea container. Doug Granlund spearheaded an all-summer-long project of designing, cutting, sanding, planing, routing and staining all the wood to assemble the desks and pews. All the holes for nuts and bolts were also pre-drilled. Each desk and pew was individually packaged with each piece necessary to assemble that desk or pew. That way if one package was lost in shipping, only one unit would be affected and no more.
The final load was sent shortly after Thanksgiving by semi-trailer from Lafayette to Miami and then by ship to Port-de-Paix (on the north coast of Haiti). We also sent two electric drills and three battery operated drills (and four battery chargers) for our assembly project on the December 2002 visit to Pendus. Allen Banning and Jeff Newell joined Doug Granlund on this trip to help lead the assembly process.
There were a couple aspects of this assembly project none of us truly appreciated ahead of time. First was the enormous interest on the part of all the people of Pendus – men (both young and old), the teenagers and even the women – in wanting to participate. Second was the amount of time it took us to “train” most of them in the use of the power tools. Not only had most of them never used a power tool before, but most had never even seen one. There were a few exceptions – particularly Jean Marie, Ken and Kevin. All three were very mechanically inclined and quickly became the leaders of the desk and pew assembly crews. Finally we did not appreciate how frugal, and needy, the people were. All of the desks and pews were wrapped in cardboard with a banding holding them together for shipping. They did not throw away any of the cardboard. Instead, they has us save all the pieces so they could be used for mats to sleep on (at least until they got too wet to be of any further use.)
All the school rooms at St. Joseph received desks as did some of the rooms at Massacre. The pews (which had both seat backs and kneelers built into them) were used at St. Joseph Church and some at the chapel at Massacre. It was awesome to see the eight foot pews being carried on their heads two hours up that mountain.
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