GLENWOOD SPRINGS, Colo.—A group of Roaring Fork Valley residents who are helping to build a new school in the small town of Villard, Haiti, are seeing the project through to completion and empowering workers in the poverty-stricken country to become self-sufficient.
“What’s really great about this project is that it’s one of the few where an outside group didn’t just come in and say, ‘Here, we’ll do this for you.’ We’re there providing training on some of the building techniques, but the project is really being driven by the locals,” said Tim Myers, a retired builder from Aspen who co-founded the Haiti School Project two years ago.
Myers and fellow co-founder Fred Ireland of North Carolina started the nonprofit organization not just to build the school, but to train teachers and provide textbooks for students.
School construction had barely gotten off the ground with a half-finished foundation when the 2010 earthquake devastated the country. Villard was spared from earthquake damage but suffered from the economic consequences.
Myers’ group reached out to donors across the country and around the world to help resurrect the project, and Myers lined up several of his colleagues in the construction industry locally to help.
Among them was Glenwood Springs resident Al Cunningham, a co-worker of Myers’ on numerous home projects in Aspen who is retired.
“Tim came to me after starting the project and told me what they were doing, and it sounded like they could use some help,” said Cunningham, who wrote grants to start before taking on a role as part of the construction management team in Haiti.
Most of the actual labor is being done by the people directly involved with the school and in the larger community. The project in turn has pumped more than $100,000 into the local economy.
Part of the money raised through the Haiti School Project is going to pay workers on a contract basis.
From negotiating a price and contract terms to finding local sources for the materials, it’s a skill the crew of nine or so workers who are building the school can put to use once the project is complete to make a better living for themselves, Myers said.
“It’s exciting, because one of our goals from the beginning was to employ local people,” he said. “By doing it that way, the money is also making its way around town and supporting other businesses, so it’s nice to see that happening.”
By giving the people the contract to do the work and to get things done by a certain time in order to get paid, it shows them that’s how they need to do business, he said.
Recently, the Haiti School Project was able to raise the final $10,000 needed to do the stucco and painting on the interior and exterior walls of the school.
Villard, with a population of about 5,000 people, is the center of a major rice-growing region. While it wasn’t directly impacted by the 2010 earthquake, it took a hit when relief efforts from around the world sent tons of cheap rice into the country, negatively affecting the domestic trade, Cunningham said.
The private, tuition-based school will serve about 350 students from preschool through sixth grade.
Future construction projects at the school include wiring buildings for electricity, building a backup solar photovoltaic system, constructing a water catchment system and building restrooms and a kitchen.
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Information from: Post Independent,
