Killing It

Life for a foreigner living in Haiti isn’t what it used to be. Foreigners inevitably end up hanging out with each other because it’s easier to relate when you have a common background and it’s nice to be able to talk about the aspects of day to day living in a country which is not your own with someone who can understand. Well, most of the foreigners have left the country or are making plans to leave. In practical terms, that means for us that our social interactions have largely moved online, as was the case for so many others during the pandemic.

I’m not terribly excited about interacting with people online, so I need to make an effort. I noticed that the last time I made a blog post was November 2019, so it’s about time I made a new post! I’m going to try to write in the old-school, stream-of-consciousness type of blog writing.

I’m going to write what I’m excited about. Clean Water for Haiti is, at this moment in time, killing it. I love the work we do, and in the absence of any kind of normal social life outside of my own family, my work is the center of my existence. I really want to tell people (brag) about it!

In January 2019 one of our delivery trucks got into a terrible accident. It was a complete and utter nightmare. All 6 guys in the truck had to go to the hospital, and one of them was really very badly injured indeed. The truck was totaled, but we didn’t realize just how badly damaged it was at the time. Worse than all of that though, a woman, the passenger on the back of a motorcycle, was killed. She left 5 children, including a 3-month-old, behind. Even now it’s hard to think about those children and how their lives changed forever.

I knew immediately that this is the kind of event that could end our work altogether if things weren’t handled very carefully. Fortunately, we all went into crisis mode and dealt with one thing after another as best we could. There’s a lot I could write about all of the craziness which ensued, but I don’t want to focus on that today. The long and short of it is that we dealt with various aspects of the aftermath of the accident right through 2019 and most of 2020 and kept Clean Water for Haiti alive. The financial cost was huge, and it set back our work substantially.

Later in 2019 and into 2020 I discovered one worker after another who had been committing small-scale fraud and needed to be fired. Now for me, if someone steals from Clean Water for Haiti I take it personally. You’re going to compromise my life’s work? NO. My outlook on life, already pretty dark, became darker. At one point, I told Leslie I wanted to go ahead and fire the entire follow-up crew and start over. We had a long conversation in which she reminded me that I had never fired someone before without proof of wrongdoing, and that while I can do whatever I think is best, it would have an effect on morale. Well, I didn’t fire the whole follow-up crew. Not right then. I waited until I caught each one of them committing fraud first. It ended up not taking all that long. All told, 2020 was a terrible year. And our filter deliveries were down 40%!

At the end of 2020, I had a good think as I was hiking up the mountain behind our house. Although I care about Clean Water for Haiti and the work we do very much, why should the workers? In a community as poor as ours, charity work for others probably isn’t going to be a priority. I tried to think of a way we could improve morale with the workers, and really form a team instead of just all working in the same place. Starting January 2021 we announced bonuses. In each month that we installed 250+ filters, each worker would take home an extra day’s pay. 300+ would mean 2 days extra pay, 350+ 3 days, etcetera. In 2020, we didn’t exceed 250 filters in even a single month. Things changed very quickly. The first month, over 300 filters were installed and we had a small party to celebrate. On 9 out of 12 months last year, the workers got some kind of bonus, ending up with our most productive year ever, for a total of 3308 filters! Then, this January, 402 filters were installed! That’s 4 day’s pay – a full 19% extra pay for each of the workers! It feels good to be able to give out bonuses. (From an administrative perspective, the added drain this puts on our payroll isn’t that big a deal. The increased productivity and efficiency more than makes up for it.)

One year to the next, morale went from rock bottom to sky high – definitely for the workers but just as importantly, for me.

I made another decision at the end of 2020. I was going to do everything in my power to avoid giving revocation pay in cases of fraud. I want Clean Water for Haiti to be respected, and I want people to know that we’ll go to extreme lengths to protect it from fraud, theft, or whatever else.

In 2021, I only had to fire one person. I was able to think it through ahead of time and I recorded the conversation where laid out the situation clearly and that unlike in the past, there would not be any revocation pay. I explained that he could take us to court, but since we had him dead to rights, whatever he paid a lawyer would be money wasted. I said something along the lines of “When you steal from Clean Water for Haiti, you’re stealing from the Haitian people, and the Haitian people have had too much stolen from them already. I won’t accept that. You won’t be getting anther Gourde, and it’s time for you to leave.” I think that perhaps that one interaction was another huge step toward improving my own morale.

So where are we at now? As I stated earlier, we’re killing it. It’s not just the day-to-day activities what are going well. Clean Water for Haiti has money in the bank. Somehow last year, in spite of record production, our reserves increased. I hired two more workers in January, two more yesterday, and we’ll likely take on another two in April or May! Looking at our numbers, I can already tell we’re headed for a record year, and we’re going to DESTROY last year’s record, not just knock it over. It’s exciting!