Electricity for >2000 people in rural Haiti

For years – after Hurricane Matthew, after the earthquake that rocked the South, after the roads were cut off by gangs, in the midst of fuel crises, my ever-positive colleague, Jean, who had lived through the 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake and gone on to earn an electrical engineering degree, would unfailingly laugh when a new challenge arouse and say, “well, at least it can’t get any worse!”

About two years ago, not long after the Haitian president’s assassination, Jean stopped saying that. No one knows what’s going to happen next in Haiti, and there’s good reason to believe it might get worse.

In parallel with the cascading crises, many people are working very hard to make things better.

From the pinhole vantage point of Haiti that is EarthSpark, I see the dedication of colleagues, counterparts, and community members. A community member is working to donate land for a future microgrid solar array. A government engineer is out assessing sites for civil works. Teams of familiar voices report regularly to video calls from their homes in Port-au-Prince.

It’s jarring to absorb the constant political and security updates, ever-contingency planning while also working to stay the course for the long-planned microgrid expansion. As we scan increasingly grim news, we also celebrate small advances.

The solar-powered Les Anglais community microgrid continues to power on. The microgrid-connected solar+battery system we installed years ago in Tiburon to provide ‘redundant resiliency’ to the health clinic and the telecommunication tower is doing its job.

Conditions have not been easy in the rural areas where we work, but we are relatively very fortunate.

In October, right before the fire in the Tibuorn generation system, kidnappings and terror had arrived in the region where EarthSpark’s grids operate. Indeed, the first images of the plumes of smoke I saw from that fire sent me into a panic that it was a trap set to draw our colleagues to the scene to be kidnapped. (I have to laugh with tears as I type, “Fortunately it was just a normal awful fire – yay!”) A successful police raid of the incumbent gang in the Tiburon mountains has restored relative security in the area, and everyone is extremely grateful for the relative calm if leery of more violence re-erupting.

We achingly wish we could do more right now, but we remain committed to working alongside communities and partners to deliver reliable electricity and build opportunity in spite of the challenges. We are hoping and planning for better days. Whatever comes next, local, reliable energy systems will remain a helpful input to the peaceful prosperity we all hope to see soon.

Thank you, as always, for your kind and continued support of our work.