Headliners for Haiti!

We've finalised the details on our first fundraiser, which will actually be the second fundraiser in the series.

I really wanted to make the fundraisers fun for everyone — fundraisers that I would want to go to. So I tried to think of what fundraiser I'd been to in the last year that I didn't go to because of the cause or because a friend was on the board. This winter I went to a fundraiser for a Little League team! LITTLE LEAGUE. A non-hockey-playing group of child-people — can you think of anything I would care about less?

And what made me hand over my money for 50/50 tickets and basket raffles and bar food? Comedy. And not even the cool Neitzsche's comedy, because I'm still mad at Nietzsche's for making me share the bar with a cat all those years and then not letting my dog in. No, this was SUBURBAN comedy. Rob's Comedy Playhouse in Williamsville. Which sounded really far away to me, but really only took me twenty minutes to get to, so I should stop my whining about that.

Here's the thing about Rob's Comedy Playhouse. It's in Dandelions, on North Forest Road. I grew up on North Forest Road, just past the next intersection from Dandelions. And my next-door neighbour owned Dandelions. While I lived there. But this winter was the very first time I went inSIDE of Dandelions, reinforcing my long-held belief that I actually never go anywhere.

So, join us on July 22nd at Rob's Comedy Playhouse, on North Forest near the corner of Maple Road. Tickets are $25, and include your first two drinks. Doors open at 6.30, show goes 7.30-9.00. Basket raffles (plenty of hockey stuff, of course) and a 50/50 (no, we probably can't convince a Sabres Alum to do the draw), and hilarious laughs courtesy of Rob Lederman and Mark Saldana!


Look for the Pay Now button in the right-hand column to purchase tickets to Headliners for Haiti!

An Important Question

Anyone who has travelled with me will not be surprised to know that I have a perpetual packing list. I'm still not at all comfortable travelling, and I have to be prepared for every eventuality in order to minimise my anxiety when I leave home. This is known to the rest of the world as "over-packing." Mock if you want, but the other option is to stay home where I know all my stuff is. So I accept my over-packing and I get out of my rut and I go. Call it a coping mechanism.


My roommate for the 2006 build in India, Tammy has travelled with me on many occasions now, and is the only person I know with whom I can travel for a week and still have something to talk about on the way to the airport to go home. One day I'm going to make her a trophy for that talent.


In 2008, neither of us were able to make the Carter Work Project, so she asked me to go on a mission trip with her church to build a dental clinic in Guatemala instead. (This was actually the trip that got me over my white-knuckle fear of flying, from which I graduated to just being very, very bad at flying.) We roomed together on the trip, which required a GREAT deal of patience on her part. I felt I made up for being a pain in the ass a little bit because whenever she needed something she hadn't packed, I was able to accommodate her from my enormous array of luggage. It's a long story, but I even had a soccer ball and a slinky.


One day, she asked if I had a comb. "A comb? You didn't even pack a comb?" Tammy unapologetically explained her strategy: "I knew I didn't have to pack much, since you'd have everything." Huh. Not just a hat rack.


So, on this perpetual packing list, I've collected some quotes and poems and one joke that I like to review when I'm travelling to alleviate my anxiety. (To take some of the suspense out of it, I now e-mail my packing list du voyage to Tammy shortly before we go anywhere together. Now it's over-packing for the good of the many.) The joke is from Reader's Digest, the back-issues of which I read voraciously all summer long as a child, which may explain my digest-sized attention span now. As I'm getting ready for a Carter-cation today, I reread the joke, and it put me in mind of last year's Haiti build. And, for no other reason than that, I'm sharing it here...

IN A REMOTE VILLAGE in Sierra Leone, West Africa, I befriended Alpha, one of the local men on our building crew.

Alpha was impressed with my tool set and was amazed to find a woman working in construction. He'd bring extra rice and greens for lunch and we'd sit and talk. He asked about my husband, and I told him I wasn't married.

Alpha said he wanted sons and that he would marry soon. He wondered whether I'd stay in his country, and then surprised me by saying he had an important question for me. 

I was nervous about his impending marriage proposal, and the next day Alpha was solemn as he asked if I was ready to answer his question. I nodded. "When you go back to America," he said, "may I have your trowel? "  

— "All In a Day's Work"

Game on!

This post was written on 04 April, but I was waiting to finish posting from last year's build so they'd all be in consecutive order...

I got the acceptance email today - God willing and the creek don't rise, I'll be going to Haiti again for this year's Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter Work Project. I think this is the most excited I have ever been to get that email - even more excited when I found out I was going to India for my first build in 2006.

I think I'm excited because we were there, because we saw what needs to be done. We saw the acres and acres of tents organised into makeshift communities, with businesses like banks and barbers and markets set up in plywood shacks. We saw the desperation of the people we passed who resented the project because they weren't one of the lucky ones getting a home or even a job. We witnessed the extreme concern for our safety, traveling only in convoys, with armed guards on every bus and police escorts taking us between the build and the camp in which we lived. We heard stories about the protests at the pre-builds - protestors throwing rocks over the fences at the volunteers, rumored to have taken Haitian jobs, and digging trenches in the roads to prevent the buses from leaving the build site.

I also think I'm excited because last year was so amazing.  I judge the intensity of an experience by how long it takes me to stop seeing it every time I close my eyes. Haiti took almost a full month. I met such wonderful people, had great tent-mates, had great crew members. How can we top that? This year the build is after Thanksgiving, so we won't repeat the moving ceremony for Remembrance/Veteran's Day. With a full 50% increase in the number volunteers, if Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood give a concert again, will it feel as intimate? Heck, with a full 50% increase in the number of volunteers, will there be enough beer and electrical outlets?

I'm also excited to see how I'm going to raise $5000. Last year my friends were so quick with their generosity that I was done in half the time. This year I'd like to not barrage my Facebook page with fundraising information and try to increase awareness of the project by getting local businesses to sponsor. Might actually get a press release out, since I have a better idea of what to expect and could actually answer questions.

One theme was constant last year: after the build, go out and tell Haiti's story. They need people to remember that it's not a country that can fix itself, and the corruption is keeping even outside aid from getting to the intended recipients.

Last year President Carter sat down with the President of Haiti. Eschewing pleasantries, he simply said, "You can go down in history as the president who stopped the corruption and helped his own people, or you can be just another president." this year we'll get an idea of which path he chose.

In the meantime, the next seven months will be about telling Haiti’s story to my already generous friends. Game on.

Post-Build 2011

I judge how intense an experience is by how long it takes me to stop seeing it every time I close my eyes. Every nap, every dream, every time I closed my eyes for almost four weeks after I got home, I saw the Haiti build. So it makes a little bit of sense to me that I was so overwhelmed by the experience that I never posted my last blog entry, even though it was already written. So, here it is, written 13 November 2011, posted 15 April 2012:

It seemed like my tent went on forever, because I kept meeting people on the bus or the build site all week who were in it, like Allison the Canadian. (Remember the woman who yelled at me the first day who turned out to be in my tent? On the third day, she saw me at the build and smiled and said hello, and then asked which houses were mine. She never recognized me as the truss screw-up!)

Despite the fact that the tent seemed to be infinite, there was actually very little space between cots — about 10 inches. This time, when I woke up at 1.00 a.m. and couldn’t sleep, I was grateful that the party was still going on and that, with a 2.30 a.m. wake-up call, no one was planning on going to bed at all tonight. My cot-neighbour Deb was at that party, and that gave me TWENTY inches of space to manoeuvre in once I moved her cot over. I’d packed earlier, of course, and  — after one last frozen shower — was already wearing what I planned to wear for the flight to Atlanta, but there was the matter of actually removing my giant bags from underneath the cot once and for all in the morning.

After that shower, I ran into Jeff Carter and Matt on a Hot Tin Roof at the bar, and we all sat up front together for the Closing Ceremonies. The ceremonies were shorter than usual, with just our own talent and no outside entertainment. One tradition in the closing ceremonies is the announcement of the location of the next year’s build and the passing of the shovel from the head of local Habitat to the head of Habitat at next year’s location. The JRCWP is returning to Haiti next year, so we even skipped that part. The highlight is always the slideshow of the build, with photos and videos that elicit applause from the friends of whomever is shown in the moment. I hope that one of those photo-every-hour progress videos gets posted at some point. Watching the slideshow makes me feel as though Day One was a month ago; I’d be interested to see the month-long week compressed into five minutes.

We were at the bar (surprise!) when the first announcement came: they’d decided they didn’t want to wait until 11.00 p.m. to give us all our passports back, so we needed to go get them now (as part of our special tour through Customs and Immigration, we handed over our passports on the trip down to be held by Habitat, contrary to everything they’ve ever told you about travelling abroad). I made one side trip to my tent to grab everything I was leaving for donations (tools, clothes, Sue Campbell’s work boots), and rushed to the meal tent to get my passport. By the time I got there, only ten remained — apparently I wasn’t the only one made anxious by the distance between myself and my passport.

We said our goodnights (and our goodbyes to the people on Flight 2, whose paths we would not cross in the morning), and I tried to be a good girl and go to bed at 11.00 p.m. I’d hit a wall. I figured I could sleep. Because I can’t get me enough Haiti, I was up two hours later, wide awake. So, I moved Deb’s cot a bit, reassembled my luggage one last time, and left behind gifts for the Irish (a lovely light/fan combination, inflatable mattress pad, and the balance of a bottle of Bacardi Gold were sacrificed to our lovely and generous hosts).

Of course, Matt and the other regular insomniacs were at the meal tent getting coffee already, and we just stayed up until it was time to get our shit together. We were supposed to be boarding buses at 3.00 a.m. for our 7.00 a.m. flight, even though my tent once again showed little signs of life when I wanted them to be awake and chatty at 3. Matt and I continued our meal tent conversation at the campsite gate, which would unlock and slide open momentarily so that we could board the buses. First in line meant we would be in the back of the first bus — we had no idea for how long.

We got to the airport fairly quickly, fortunately not before it was light enough to see what was in our weird-sandwich-of-the day – eggs, some cheese product, and onions because we didn’t smell bad enough already (bringing enough gum for everyone made me a hero). But then we waited. For a long, long, long time and for no discernable reason. Through the magic of technology, I had a lively half-hour text conversation with my friend Karen Haycox on another bus about, well, waiting. This is when I really got my whining on…

“I was hoping they wouldn’t make us get off the bus right away, You never get good waiting in, back in the States.”

“With the exchange rate, you get so much more waiting for your money here.”

“We didn’t bring a lot of waiting down with us, wasn’t sure it would last a week – good thing they had so much here already!”

“They should think about packaging it and exporting it – places like NYC need a little more waiting. That NYC minute is so short it’s sad.”

“If we get into the airport, I’m grabbing some at Duty Free.”

“Apparently there’s a time difference of which we were not aware…”

“I’ve just been informed the International Date Line is in Group 2.”

“Our agent sucks.”

“And this getting paid in Nature Valley Granola Bars isn’t as good a deal as it sounded.”

“Next time I’m asking for TWO entrees, and for lunch I’d like them to stop telling us what’s in the sandwiches and make us guess. The Pepsi-only clause was also a mistake.” (and it really, really was…)

“I picked the right week to really pick up my drinking. Next week I’m going to try sitting down some and sleeping, see how that goes.”

“A few more minutes, we’re going rogue. Going to start smoking so they kick us off the bus.”

“ ‘We’re looking for 7 volunteers to act as customs officials… 7 volunteers, please come to the front of the bus!’ “

(think Garth Brooks here…) “Ooooh, I’ve got friends on coach buses, who can hammer nails and lift trusses, on other days, but on the bus we stay…”

If you know us, you know who said what.

We were the only people at the airport, but things still did no go smoothly. Our flight was even delayed an hour, which I don’t understand, but I don’t know how (a) charter flights, and (b) Haiti work. I was in the last row again, this time on the right side. God put me in an awesome tent and on a great build site, so it’s only right that the up-front seats should be reserved for someone else who wasn’t as lucky all week long.

Of course, somehow travel arrangements worked out so that Sue’s car was waiting for me at the Atlanta airport — we have a tradition along those lines, where Sue is always flying out when I’m coming in, so she just texts me where she parks and leaves the key in an undisclosed location.  Part of that tradition is my filling the tank in her car because then I'll drive it around a lot. Sue's sister Chris is actually the one who left it at the airport when she flew home that morning, and she forgot to put gas in it. Entirely. I filled it up at the gas station closest to the airport — less than a mile away — and put 21.926 gallons into a tank that holds 22 gallons. That's my new record. And a sign that when you do good in the world, God will push your car to the gas station for you.

Of course, then Sue and I went for 2-hour massages. Isaac showed a particular affinity for a certain body part – no matter what he was massaging, his hands always seemed to end up on… well, we call him Isaac the Ass-Man now. I felt like tipping him was superfluous.

Finally got my Haitian rum (the Duty Free cart at the airport wasn’t open at 6.30 a.m.), at the liquor store next to Massage Heights in Sandy Springs. Drank some with Diet Coke-not-Pepsi with our all-Greek dinner. Watched just enough of the Sabres-Bruins game to see Lucic’s nasty run on Miller, and hit the wall at 9.00 p.m. I couldn’t even stay awake for the rest of the game. I couldn’t even stay awake long enough to switch my laundry to the dryer – the Home of Wayward Women did that for me. I slept like a rock until 4, grateful to be in a beautiful home and a comfy bed, but wondering who was going to hang out with me at the meal tent now.