Demolition goes on and on

The soundtrack to my life is the pounding of sledgehammers as the demolition crew takes down the remains of St Joseph's. On days when I don't have to go out, I frequently put on my work clothes and my Haiti bandana and go to work too. Sometimes I'm shoveling, sometimes I'm filling wheelbarrows, sometimes I'm handing buckets down a chain of workers. I am usually the only white person working and I am ALWAYS the only female. It's a blast.


What's not a blast is when they decide to do daredevil feats like removing the huge slab of concrete that you see in the above photo. To the right of the slab, you are looking at the roof of my Shoebox. If the crew slips up just a bit, that slab lands on my house and I am homeless. Needless to say, I was a bit nervous that weekend.


To my great relief, the slab came down without squashing my house. Yay! But the drama was not over yet. The whole next week, we were working on the courtyard between the old building and the new one that they have just purchased. Hanging over us were chunks of the roof that were anchored by rebar, but we figured they'd been hanging securely for months, so we have nothing to worry about.

I got a phone call as I walking out of church on Sunday. One of those giant pieces of roof had come down unexpectedly while some Americans were moving things on the roof. It landed precisely where we had been working all week. If it hadn't been Sunday...



This week, the team is back on the roof, taking down the remaining hanging pieces and clearing off the layers of roof, chapel floor, and dance floor. They chop it up, load it into buckets or wheelbarrows and dump it 2 stories down to the street in front of my house or beside my house. The dust cloud each time a load falls is impressive. My whole home is coated in a fine layer of white dust. I am coated in a fine layer of white dust. My laptop as I type this post is coated in a fine layer of white dust (wait, that can't be good for it!). I am deeply grateful that I have never suffered from dust allergies and I am pretty sure that the entire country is going to have "quake lung" within the next year or two.