At Pele we're laying on trusses & roofs, digging out for the toilet bloc on the South end of the site and working with the Headmaster to approve colors and patterns. To the North, part of the campus is being cleared for a basketball court!

Haiti volunteer Kaitlin Schalow guides us through all the latest deveopments - check out the past weeks' work!

First stop: the classroom block, where we're above the concrete now, adding trusses and roofing to cap the classrooms. Turns out, carrying trusses up to the roof is a team effort.

Trusses in place, roof sheeting goes up. As soon as this is done, railings will be built for the second floor and stairways will come down along the front from the center bump-out.

Truss "plates." Not what you would find on an American house, but the metal "hardware" is unavailable in Haiti. Our structural engineer specified a plywood stand-in - strong enough to do the trick!

Notice the offset of the roof pitches–the gap allows light to come in and hot air to escape the classrooms. The angle is good for shedding rainwater too - cisterns will be attached to gutters to collect the water for (non-potable) reuse. In the foreground, surveyors are mapping the slope of the ground and outlining the footprint of the next campus building - the new composting toilet bloc...

Headmaster Chedrick Caneus approved the color scheme for the classroom block - to match the colors of Pele's uniforms

Mr. Caneus also approved the window and railing patterns, to be fabricated by Haitian metalworkers. Looking great team!

On the other end of campus, the site is being cleared out for the basketball court!

The basketball court, funded in part by Nike, will be a great multi-purpose courtyard for the school.

To keep you oriented, here's the plan of the Pele campus. The basketball court is plain to see in yellow on the left (the North end). The school block being completed is Building B and the toilet bloc is Building A. You can see that rebuidling the entire campus will take some time and more funding, but these first structures are critical and will take the longest to build. As the rest of the campus phases in over the next couple years, Building B will be replicated and the process is at this point very well established.


Building B is scheduled to be completed for the start of school this Fall, which will provide 200 students with permanent classrooms. The toilet bloc and basketball court are scheduled to finish at the same time. We can't wait to finish this First Phase. It's been a difficult road at times, but in tracking the whole process we're blazing trails to providing strong and beautiful buildings for Haiti.