Our Trip to Léogâne

On Wednesday night I had the great honor of meeting Michael Ritter, the founder of Gadyen Dlo.  It turns out, Dr. Abbey actually knew him and lived in the same aid house when she was down in Haiti after the earthquake.  After Peterson (Gadyen Dlo Supervisor) told us that he couldn’t get anyone from the Gadyen Dlo production facility in Léogâne to deliver him any more chlorine for our newly trained team, we decided we would just try to contact Michael directly.  It turned out to be perfect timing for him, and he suggested he come to Matana on Wednesday night from Port-Au-Prince where he was flying into.  Because I have been studying the Gadyen Dlo program for the past 8 months, I really sort of felt like I was meeting a celebrity!

Michael first started developing the program for a business plan competition back in undergrad.  Then throughout his MPH he continued to work on the program and became more familiar with the water situation in Haiti, eventually working on it for his thesis, and implementing Gadyen Dlo shortly after graduation.

For the past several years, he’s lived in Haiti full time, and is running Gadyen Dlo out of a property he rents in Leogane, where they also produce the hypochlorite solution.  Because Abbey was leaving Thursday morning for Port-Au-Prince to begin the second leg of her time in Haiti, we decided that we could all go together, drop her off, and then continue on to Léogâne;  both to give Michael a ride home, and to pick up the chlorine we needed for our Arcahaie Gadyen Dlo program.

In true Haitian style, our plan was slightly delayed due to some car trouble Peterson was having Thursday morning.  But he eventually found a friend who was willing to drive us in his cousin’s car.  Only problem was that the new car wasn’t an SUV like Peterson was going to take us in originally, it was a BMW sedan.  (An older one, but still, I really got a kick out the fact that I was road tripping around Haiti in a bimmer.) So, for the first hour we had to squeeze 4 of us in the back seat, because Peterson, and the car owner’s cousin (Pepe) were in the front.

After dropping off Abbey we made our way to Léogâne and toured the facility (see pictures below).  We couldn’t stay too long because we had a 3 hour drive home, but regardless, it was great to see how the Gadyen Dlo chlorine solution is produced in person, and to have had all that time to talk with Michael on the car ride there.

The two pictures below are just some of the shots I got from the car as we drove through various suburbs of Port-Au-Prince.

Notice the color of this water that people are bathing in and collecting in their buckets. (No, its not a dirt road, its some sort of water way.)

Our drive home was fairly uneventful, aside from our 30 minute delay when some armed government officers detained our vehicle at a random checkpoint.  They asked for our driver’s papers, and then apparently it took about an 80 dollar bride and a lot of heated debate for us to finally drive away.  The whole exchange and conversation between Peterson, Pepe and the guards, took place outside of our vehicle while Liz and I just sat in the back seat and watched.  At one point we really started wondering if any of these guards would even check on us, to make sure we weren’t kidnapped or something.  Interestingly, the first guard that came over to talked to us asked us both right away if we were married, saying that he was really interested in finding an American wife… Then he just kept asking for our phone numbers.  Eventually, a second guard walked over and much more seriously asked us if we were ok.  Overall it was another one of these incidents where recounting it makes me realize how relatively crazy an experience it was, but at the time Liz and I weren’t surprised at all that we had been detained—or that the solution ultimately was to pay the officers a bribe.