Day Four
“Port au Prince”
People often treat long drives as a burden, but I like to think that a long drive through the countryside of an unfamiliar place is one of the best ways to see a new place.
In order to actually use solar energy at the orphanage, we first need solar panels, photovoltaic cables, a charge controller, batteries, an inverter, and more. We decided the nation’s capital was a good place to start looking for this. Our group had been in contact with a few local Port au Prince vendors, so we set off from Gonaives this morning with vague addresses written on a paper and the hopes that we’d find these places. On a good day / time, Gonaives is around 2.5 hours from Port au Prince. You’ll pass rice paddies, banana farms, many a street vendor, unexpectedly beautiful mountains, and lots of those packed and colorful pick up trucks on your way — like I said, one of the greatest ways to see a country in a day. The bad part about driving all this way? The rock solid traffic you’ll run into when you are anywhere near Port au Prince at the wrong time. Even on the outskirts it seemed as if we honked and shimmied our way through traffic jams for an hour before reaching our first vendor. The wonderful part about Haitians? Every five minutes our driver and friend would stop to ask an unassuming pedestrian for directions, and each time we were met with smiles and a friendly point in the right direction. This game would continue forever until we finally reached a destination — and we magically got everywhere we needed to be.
The first vendor we spoke to was a hidden gem- he sat for hours helping us recalculate our orphanage’s load and what it would take to repurpose some solar panels on the mission’s property, walked us through the sizing of each necessary component to our future solar system, even gave us a price we liked and encouraged us to do all of the installation on our own for education’s sake. Safe to say we learned a lot today, about electricity and solar energy and the nature of renewable energy systems in Haiti. But most importantly, any appliance with a heating element (cough cough irons and hot plates) can double the necessary size of a solar system-consider yourself warned!!
Port au Prince is beautiful in its own way. Our second vendor’s store was way up in a little village called Petionville, in the foothills of the mountains. We got there way later than a Haitian store should be open, but they welcomed us and showed us around and offered to help design our system. They eagerly showed us a 150 KW solar system (this is HUGE) that they’d helped World Bank install in downtown Port au Prince, a system that’s been sitting dormant (we’re talking tons of energy) for two years until the city installs street lamps. This is the nature of this work here; there are enthusiastic goals set, but reaching them is challenging. As we drove down the mountain to start home, the storm clouds cleared and the rainbow of tiny houses tucked into Port au Prince’s mountains were illuminated by that beautiful, post-storm, early evening glow. We had a long, sticky ride back to Gonaives ahead of us, but things seemed right today. Our project is back on track.
PSA: please excuse the lack of photos on any of these posts — I’ve been taking hundreds and am excited to share but the internet connection isn’t quite strong enough to download a single one. Pictures to come soon (:





