Haiti volunteer

Noel Ryan, a student at Athlone IT, and former chef in the town, has just returned from his sixth visit to earthquake-devastated Haiti as a volunteer worker. 

And already he is making plans for his seventh trip to the impoverished country with Irish charity Haven.

A former chef who has worked in the Wineport, Grogans and Ericsson over the past two decades, Noel, who is in his mid 40s, has returned to college and just completed an access course at AIT.

He described the experience in AIT as “fantastic” and said he plans to study “science, chemistry and biology hopefully in September.”

With 25 years experience as a chef, Noel has worked all over Ireland. “For the past 10, 20 years really I have worked worked around the Athlone area. Ericsson for ten years, Wineport, Grogans ...they were all my favourite,” he diplomatically remarked when asked to chose.

Noel has been involved in aid work in Haiti since 2011, on occasion making two trips to the Caribbean country in the same year.

“A cousin of mine had travelled to Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake in 2010 and he had gone out with Haven,” Noel explained.

As Haiti is such a poor country, Haven had already been an established charity there before the devastating 2010 earthquake.

When his cousin told Noel of his plans to return in order to help out poverty-stricken families, Noel decided to go too.

“This was after the earthquake, my first time was in 2011. On that particular trip there were 350 Irish people and we were meeting up with roughly 700 Americans as well.”

The group were travelling out to build hurricane proof houses for those left homeless by the earthquake. They travelled to an area close to the earthquake’s epicentre at Léogâne, near the capital.

On flying into the capital, Port-au-Prince, Noel was struck by the level of devastation.

“There was no airport, it was demolished,” he recalled. “We flew in over Port-au-Prince we could see all the blue tarpaulins.”

When they touched down there was no security, no passport checks, the group just picked up their baggage and headed to a bus.

“We were like kids going on holidays, all full of the joys,” Noel said. The holiday atmosphere was brought to a swift end when the charity workers set off.

“The buses just went silent because you were confronted with just a sea of people living under plastic,” he explained. “It was just like the earthquake was just after happening and this was a year after.

“It was just very hard to take in what you were looking at right in front of you. There were over 250,000 people killed in the city and there were a million and a half left homeless.'

Noel noted: “It was the poorest country in the western hemisphere, even before the earthquake.”

The poor nation was unprepared and unable to cope with the devastation of the earthquake. Still today, around 500,000 people are living under plastic in Haiti, he said.

During his first trip, Noel was building houses to help transform the lives of those left living under plastic tarpaulins. He was struck by the camaraderie of the volunteers, who varied in age and came from all walks of life.

“There is something that just grips you when you go out there and when you join with a group of volunteers,” he remarked. “There was just such a bond of friendship between us.”

He described the Haitian people as “just remarkable people.”

'They really, really do live in squalor, a lot of them,” he said, adding he was inspired by their strength of character.

“They have great resilience, they have great spirit, their will to survive to overcome the conditions they live in is just unbelievable.”

The experience has given Noel perspective and he said the conditions he witnessed in Haiti, “makes our own problems here trivial.”

For Noel, there is nothing more rewarding then supplying a family with a source of fresh drinking water or seeing a family move out from under a makeshift plastic covered dwelling into a small home of their own.

On his most recent visit, he was working in Ile a Vache, an island off the South coast of Haiti. The aid workers had intended on returning to Léogâne. However, as often happens in Haiti, according to Noel, the plan was changed due to a local land dispute and they ended up working in Ile a Vache.

There are around 15,000 Haitians living on Ile a Vache, an island measuring 20 square miles. The majority of residents on the island live in wood or stone houses with corrugated iron roofed houses and have neither running water nor electricity.

As there is little by way of development and no road, electrical or other major infrastructure, the island’s residents escaped harm in the earthquake. “It has two orphanages, a couple of schools, a couple of churches,” Noel said.

The workers were involved in a number of projects on the island, where Haven assist with “clean water, sexual health and job creation projects based on the Irish cottage industry idea.”

The work included helping out at an orphanage on the island called Saint Francois.

“The guys at the orphanage, they were making beds for the kids; shelves, lockers, that sort of thing,” Noel said.

He was involved in a number of projects, including a very simple but effective measure to help families living on the island. Haven is providing each of the families with two cherry trees.

The large trees provide shade from the heat, vitamins from the fruit and produce two to four crops every year.

Some charity workers also carried out repairs at the local school but for Noel the most important work was the completion of a pathway which took two years to build.

He said the “pathway probably half a mile long and it goes from the main village of Madame Bernard up a very steep hill to the orphanage.” The original pathway was uneven and “dangerous” particularly in rainy weather, he explained.

According to Noel, the orphanage has 70 children and 30 of them would have physical and mental disabilities.

As there are no facilities, the children who require physio are brought, in wheelchairs, down the path to the seaside where they can be treated in the sea.

Due to the treacherous nature of the pathway it used to take up to three people to transfer a single child. He described the construction of the pathway as “life-changing for everybody on the island.”

Just over a month since his last visit Noel is already planning his return to Haiti. In order to support the ongoing work in Haiti, volunteers have to raise several thousand euro in order to pay their way.

The charity workers generally go out in groups of 30 or 35 and stay for between eight and ten days.

When they sign up for the work, the volunteers are not given any indication of exactly where they might be needed. Haven Director in Haiti John Moore decides on the location and the project which most needs attention.

“He travels around the country all the time checking on their ongoing projects,” Noel explained. The volunteers are representative of the general population and come from a variety of backgrounds and age groups.

Although many of the Irish volunteers carry out the work on a regular basis, Noel said: “there is always a couple of new faces.”

Despite the poverty, he is excited about the prospect of returning to Haiti. “I didn’t think I would be going back a second time never mind a seventh,” he admitted.