School Earthquake Plan

In the 2009-2010 Student-Parent Handbook for Quisqueya Christian School, in Haiti, they have included the following clause:

      2.  The school will always have emergency supplies of food and water.

            a.  In the aftermath of a disaster (whether an earthquake, political crisis, or a similar emergency) that occurs while school is in session:

                i.  Until a general “all clear” statement is issued, students will not be permitted to leave campus without administrative consent or being accompanied by a parent or guardian.
                ii.  No student will use the QCS telephone unless directed.  Cell phones may be used with permission.

I don't remember if any of the schools I've ever been to had an earthquake-preparedness clause in their Handbook.

In an emergency response vacuum, the Quisqueya campus has become a center for relief. The first night many people slept on the soccer field, with the security of the school's wall to protect them, and the knowledge of availability of water. There are still staff and national workers living on the soccer field and one of the playgrounds is serving as temporary housing for children from a nearby orphanage.

Immediately after the quake news came to the campus that a large grocery store nearby had collapsed. A group of teachers and staff went up the road and helped pull 34 people out of the rubble.

That first morning, one lady who had been injured in the quake, a relative of a school employee, passed away. My sister wrote that it was "the saddest thing I'd ever seen."

Tomorrow the school will host a medical team that will begin assisting the many injured people in the neighborhood.  There will be a temporary hospital/operating room in the chapel and a trauma center on the basketball court.

Steve Hersey, my brother-in-law, is the director of the school. He writes on the Quisqueya website: "We hope to be able to have a water and food distribution from our campus also."

My sister and her family have fourteen people sleeping at their house. Last night they slept outside for fear of aftershocks. But for some reason their house has not been damaged structurally. That's significant when you consider that Steve writes that at least one-third of the buildings in their area are already demolished or will have to be.

They are going to have many people relying on them over the next days and months. To donate directly to Quisqueya's happening-right-now expertise-on-the-ground community relief efforts, go to the Quisqueya website and click on donate at the bottom of the screen.

How to Help in Haiti

There are a number of large agencies that are sending or have sent teams to Haiti in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake. Most are probably taking huge amounts of relief supplies: tents, food, water, blankets, medicine and other essentials.

One missionary blogging in Haiti writes:

If you don't speak Creole/Kreyol and don't have the ability to work with injured people - you should NOT come. We cannot feed you and we don't have a place to house you.

Makes sense.

My brother-in-law Steve Hersey and my sister Ruth have lived in Haiti through coups, Marine invasions, hurricanes, and the daily crisis that is life for the 80% of Haitians that live in poverty. When many left the country, they have stayed behind to serve. I don't doubt they are even now doing everything they can to serve those in terrible need around them. They speak Kreyol, they know their community, and they are strategically placed to do real good, if in a small way.

If you would like to help them help others right now, you can give to their account at Free Methodist World Missions. If you don't wish to indicate a home church in the sign-in process, just select a location and select the "UNKNOWN" option. When you get to the donation page, select #4. VISA from the list on the left and then scroll down on the right to "VISA Hersey, Steve." [Update: Even better, give to the Quisqueya Christian School relief program by going to the Quisqueya website and clicking on donate at the bottom.]

The site is a bit clumsy but it will work if you stick with it.

Family in Haiti

My sister and brother-in-law, Ruth and Steve Hersey, are missionaries serving at Quisqueya Christian School in Haiti. I've been trying to call them ever since I heard about the powerful earthquake last evening, but haven't been able to get through yet.

Today Steve was able to get to a computer briefly and sent the following update:

Quick message while I have email at a guest house.  Most communication
is down.  Little phone contact.  No internet at school or home.

This is terrible.  Spent last night outside on soccer field with
family.  We are OK.  House is structurally OK, but a mess.  School
will be closed indefinitely.

Dead bodies everywhere.  I've contacted all but 6 teachers.  Several
good friends are missing.  Many big buildings collapsed. Hopefully
we'll get communications back soon.

Many teachers involved in search and rescue.

We are OK, but please keep us in your prayers.

They will be dealing with an overwhelming amount of need over the next few weeks. They already live in a hugely needy place, and now the little that many people have has been taken from them.

Air Conditioners Make You Sick

Today's ABC Color, a Paraguayan newspaper, reports that the Paraguayan Ministry of Health has warned citizens of the danger of using their air conditioner too much. The cool air, they advise, can cause respiratory diseases. Doctor Margarita Ojeda, director of the Instituto Nacional de Enfermedades Respiratorias y del Ambiente (INERAM), the National Institute of Respiratory and Environmental Diseases, advises Paraguayans to turn on their air conditioners before lying down to sleep, cooling down the room, and then "maintain the temperature with the fan."

Keep in mind that night-time temperatures in Asuncion are expected to dip tonight to 88F, and that daytime temperatures are in the upper 90s and 100s.

A friend told me yesterday that they had resolved not to turn on their air conditioner but when their upstairs bedroom hit 108 they had to relent.

Interestingly, the same newspaper reports that ANDE, the national electric company, had the previous night reported a record peak in power consumption. At 10 pm last night Paraguayan consumers were using 1,830 megawatts, up from last year's peak of 1,713.

My understanding is that 100% of Paraguay's power needs are supplied by three hydroelectric plants, one of which, Itaipú, has the highest output of any power plant in the world.

But an aging distribution system means that Paraguayan consumers can't always get the maximum benefit from their dams. Transformers blow, switches fail, and inefficient power lines cause significant losses.

The coincidence of the two articles appearing on the same day was not lost on Paraguayan readers, several of whom commented that the government should just be honest about where the request for moderate air conditioner use was really coming from. A couple even challenged the Minister of Health to follow her own advice and try to get a good night's sleep.

Some New Features

I've added a link to our latest newsletter, which you can access at the bottom of the left column. And be sure to check out our photos by clicking on one of the slideshows in the right column!

Dos mil diez (2010)

Our New Year's Eve was pretty tranquil. Since we're in the US this year we're living near my family, which means we get to spend time with them. My parents and my brother and his family came over for dinner.

Lizet made salteñas. Salteñas are a delicious pastry from Santa Cruz, Bolivia, where Lizet's from. They're a version of the pan-Latin empanada, a flour pastry filled with chicken, beef, cheese, or other things, and often deep-fried. The salteña, though, is baked. It can be filled with beef, either fresh or in the form of charque, which is sun-dried. Or it can have chicken, which is how Lizet usually makes it, along with raisins, boiled eggs, onion, garlic, olives, cumin, salt, and pepper.

One unique feature of salteñas from Santa Cruz is that the pastry has an orange tint. This comes from the addition to the dough of the extract of the urucú seed. Urucú is the achiote plant, which grows in Bolivia and Paraguay, and from which the international food industry gets the natural food coloring anatto.

Lizet's salteñas are delicious and always a hit. In fact, she's really a talented cook, which is something I didn't realize until after we were married!

After dinner, Mom & Dad left, we put the boys to bed, and my brother and his family stayed until shortly after ten, playing 'Whoonu' which we had never played before. Anna and Lizet and I stayed up for a while watching the celebration in Times Square but Lizet and I were in bed well before midnight.

In Paraguay we would probably have been up adding to the cacophony of fireworks, though in our neighborhood, as rural as it is, the cacophony is pretty subdued. We shot some off last year but Timothy was pretty scared of them, and Oso didn't like them at all. Lizet's parents and her sisters were there to share the celebration with us.

Here's to a surprise-filled 2010!

Learning Guarani Online

There don't seem to be a whole lot of good resources online to learn Guarani. Recently a colleague sent me a link to LearnGuarani.com, a site that's under development by Stephen. So far so good. I'm hoping this will develop into a useful resource for beginning Guarani learners.

If you want to learn Guarani not just as a linguistic exercise--that is, if you're interested in actually communicating with mother-tongue Paraguayan Guarani speakers--you need to keep a couple of issues in mind:

First, there's a movement to "purify" Guarani by removing as much Spanish vocabulary from it as possible. There is a sense in this movement that Guarani is somehow weakened, corrupted, or made less beautiful by the inclusion of loanwords. Whether that is true or not is a subject for another posting, but suffice it to say that if you want to use a Guarani that actually communicates, you should focus on "Guarani-Jopara," (mixed Guarani,) or Paraguayan Popular Guarani, which does include a lot of Spanish loanwords. The words that academics have either created to reference new concepts or revived from archaic sources will leave most Paraguayan speakers perplexed and instead of promoting relationship will tend to increase distance between you and your listener.

Second, if you are learning Guarani with a Paraguayan Guarani-speaker as a resource, generally speaking he or she will not be confident about writing in Guarani. Paraguayan children now learn to write in Guarani in school but this wasn't always the case. I do not mean to suggest that Paraguayans are illiterate but most adult Paraguayans feel much more confident reading and writing in Spanish than in Guarani, even if Guarani is their first language. Unless your Guarani resource person has studied Guarani, either he/she will be reluctant to tell you how to spell things in Guarani or he/she will spell it in a way that diverges from the accepted orthography.

For this reason you are likely to come across a number of different spellings for the same word, such as: jaé, jhaé, jha'e, or ha'e, (meaning he/she/it,) only the last of which is written in the currently accepted way. (Just look at any map of Paraguay and you'll see a dozen Guarani place names spelled in an orthography based on Spanish that is diferent from the current official orthography!) This can be confusing to the beginner but it's by no means insurmountable. You have to learn to hear the sounds and transcribe what you hear. With practice you'll do this with little difficulty.

If anyone comes across any good online resources for learning Guarani-Jopara, I'd be happy to know about them.