Madison Architect's Relief Trip Confirms Much Work Yet To Be Done in Haiti

Online, August 24, 2010 (Newswire.com) - Madison architect Janine Glaeser returned from a relief trip to Haiti in July with stories to tell about the compromised condition of the beleagured country's architecture as a result of the earthquakes that hit the island in January. She presented a report of her work with Architects Without Borders at the August meeting of AIA Southwest Wisconsin.

Glaeser discovered Architects Without Borders-Seattle when she was searching online for a way to put her professional expertise to a larger purpose. When she found the organization, it was planning its second relief visit to Haiti. Within a month, she had raised the funds, secured permission from her employer to take the time off, and joined the group headed to Petit Goave, the epicenter of the 5.9 magnitude aftershock that hit the island a week after the 7.0 earthquake in mid-January Of the group of seven engineers and five architects on the trip, Janine was the only one from Wisconsin.

The sight that greeted them upon leaving the airport shocked the van into silence: row after row of tents lining both sides of the road, along open sewers and heaps of garbage. The stench was overwhelming.

"I know people's animals that live better than this," says Glaeser. "It's been six months since the earthquake. I don't care if this is the poorest country in the world. Nobody deserves to live this way."

One reason people are still living in tents is that they are afraid to go into buildings. The group's mission was to assess the structural soundness of the area's houses, the first step to getting fearful residents back in their homes.

But what they found when they arrived obliged them to revise their plan. "The basic infrastructure that we thought had been assessed -- the schools, clinics, and hospitals -- hadn't been touched," Glaeser says. "We felt like we were beating our heads against the wall, trying to work with the local government." The group quickly determined that the only way to make progress would be to work with the NGOs (non-government organizations) that had already made the critical local connections they needed.

They met with relief workers from organizations such as Hands On Disaster Response, the Global Education Cluster, the Inter-Agency Standing Committee, CHF International, and GVC Italia. The NGOs welcomed them with a list of schools, churches, hospitals, businesses, and homes that needed assessment. With their help, the group obtained a letter from the mayor's office to introduce them to building owners.

The volunteers sorted themselves into four teams of three and spent fifteen days in Haiti walking through damaged buildings and assessing how safe they were to enter or occupy. Nearly half of the buildings assessed were tagged as safe for occupation, and another third were tagged for restricted use. The group also identified 45 buildings with potential as hurricane shelters and 70 that could serve as shelter during earthquakes. They left behind written repair guidelines for use by the buildings' owners.

"It was scary every single day," recalls Glaeser. "Walking through these buildings was the least of it. Getting to the sites was terrifying, driving on perilous mountain roads in that suffocating heat to those remote sites with little food or fresh water. Everything took so much effort and twice as much time as we thought it would. But you get to the point where you stop thinking about yourself. You're on a mission: to find some ounce of salvageability in a building."

Together, the twelve volunteer architects and engineers evaluated three hundred damaged buildings, yet Glaeser came home feeling discouraged. It wasn't until she began pulling together a presentation about the relief trip for AIA Southwest Wisconsin in mid-August that she started feeling they had made some progress.

Much more work remains to be done in the region. Glaeser herself hopes to return, perhaps with a group of architects, engineers, and contractors from among her Wisconsin peers. She is currently exploring the feasibility of establishing an Architects Without Borders organization in Madison. Her hope is that AWB can move beyond assessment to helping with repairs.

"The people of Petit Goave are so sweet and generous," says Glaeser. "They have nothing in materials but an abundance in faith and generosity. They are the wealthy ones, not us."

Architects without Borders-Seattle, a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, is part of an international coalition of designers committed to providing services to communities in need. Architects Without Borders-Seattle has [issued] a call for its next relief trip to Haiti in November/December 2010. For more information, or to donate funds to support its Haiti relief efforts, visit http://awb-seattle.org/haiti-rebuilding-effort/

Janine M. Glaeser is an architect based in Madison, WI, who specializes in sustainable design and historic preservation. As an officer in the Southwest Wisconsin chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), she provides continuing education programming for members. For more information, contact her at 608-576-7176 or [email protected].