My Experience with Construction in Haiti

by Leanne Meyer-Smith, AIA, NEI Treasurer

My involvement with Haiti began in 1999 when my church, St.Thomas the Apostle, was looking for a team to go on a fact-finding trip to determine if our parish should commit to a long-term relationship with a Catholic parish in Duchity, Haiti.  A colleague, Chuck Newman, AIA, had experience with developing schools in Honduras and he recommended that I go on the trip to assess buildings and infrastructure. As a result of that first trip, our parish did join over 350 parishes from the United States in The Parish Twinnings Programs of America.  Our twin, Ste. Marie-Madelaine in located in Duchity, a mountain village in the center of the western panhandle of Haiti.  Since 1999, I have traveled to Haiti three times to help with planning construction projects for a church, school and a medical clinic.  Others in our parish travel to Duchity several times a year to provide medical, optical, dental, education, and infrastructure support. 

Our approach to building in Haiti has been to offer planning support.  We meet with local villagers to determine their goals, needs and wants.  Once all agree on a concept, we prepare a design that can be illustrated for the villagers and shared with potential donors.  Over the first few years, we developed a relationship with a reputable general contractor in Port-au-Prince.  While he is often too busy and too expensive to hire full-time as the general contractor on our projects in Duchity, we do enlist his expertise for cost-estimating, on-site training of villagers as laborers, periodic review of the work to assure quality, and contractor payment disbursement.  Our Haitian contracting partner also provides the structural engineering based on best practices in the area.  

Construction in Haiti is typically a phased process.   Materials are never readily available and even when they may become available, transporting the materials to remote villages is very challenging due to lack of roads and vehicles large enough to carry building materials.  Haitian buildings are constructed with cast-in-place concrete and site formed concrete block units.  Reinforcing bars are available and are used for vertical and horizontal reinforcing of concrete columns, beams, and floor/roof slabs, however formed steel shapes and steel joists are close to impossible to find in this country. Even if large steel shapes could be imported, much of the country outside of Port-au-Prince is mountainous and the roads are little more than rock paths that are not large enough for a truck carrying long steel shapes. In addition, cranes are not available to erect large steel beams or trusses.  Years of deforestation by the people using trees for cooking and home-building excludes wood from being used for any larger-scale construction.

There are no building codes, permits or inspectors. There are no concrete mix design approvals, concrete strength tests, rebar shop drawings, or material certifications.  Rock, sand, and contaminated water are gathered from as close as possible to the construction site.   I have witnessed concrete and mortar being mixed with sticks on the ground within an earth-damned circle that keeps the water contained during the mixing process.  Concrete block units are often formed on site and left in the sun to dry. Trial and error determines when the blocks are dry enough to lay up the wall.

Moving forward from this disaster, the country needs experienced city planners, civil engineers, structural engineers and architects that can partner with the Haitian people to develop a master plan for sustainable infrastructure and building development.  They need clean water and sewer systems to be developed in conjunction with the re-building of homes and roads.

Often,  “poorest country in the Western Hemisphere” is attached to Haiti in every sentence.  Haitians are hopeful that the world will change this tagline to, “Haiti, the country with the most potential in the Western Hemisphere.”      

*****************************************************************************************************************                                                                                                                     

(YouTube broadcast of WGN TV interview with Leanne Meyer-Smith: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3np6WGCWZk)