This past week I made my shortest trip to Haiti ever. I was in country for a record short 3 nights. It’s a long ways to travel from Washington state for such a short amount of time, however, I was able to accomplish many vitally important projects during this time. The main objective of my trip was to repair an inverter that had malfunctioned.
Although there is city power in Cap Haitien, the largest city near us, (albeit often only available a few hours each week) there is no source of power any where near the New Roots farm. For this reason we have to generate 100% of our own power. We do this with solar panels and a diesel generator.
The Inverters we use are manufactured by a company called Outback. I have been using their equipment since 2010 when I first moved to Haiti. Each of our inverters have monitoring equipment that connects to the cloud so it is possible for me to watch their performance and change settings from anywhere in the world. Typically our system is very reliable, and since we installed these inverters back in June 2019, we have had exactly 0 issues with them. My staff learn through hands on training with me. Since there have never been any issues, my staff have no experience fixing them, hence the need for me to go down.
Our problems first started during Labor Day weekend, when my staff reported some really unusual occurrences with one of our inverters. I was able to login to it, and then together with the Outback support staff, we determined that the transfer switch board had fried. They said they would mail me a new one, however, it was backordered, so it would take several weeks. The arrival of the replacement piece was delayed further due to our mail service not being able to fly because of the Nation wide manifestations.
When we left Haiti a few weeks ago the part had still not arrived and I knew that when it came in I would need to go to Haiti to help the guys get it installed.
Since there is still a lot of protesting happening in our area, I intentionally flew into Cap Haitien on Sunday as those are typically “rest days,” when no protesting is happenign. Tet, one of my main guys met me at the airport as always and we headed back to New Roots. The plane was around 2/3 full which is encouraging as it means people are still coming into Haiti. Driving home, I was amazed at how much traffic was out and about. Although people are still being cautious, Cap Haitien is no longer shut down, which was great to see. Despite all the instability people still need to live their lives and they can’t stay hunkered down in their houses forever. Haitians are problem solvers and without fuel coming up from Port au Prince they have found ways to bring it in from the Dominican Republic. Gasoline is currently selling for around $17 per gallon and is decently easy to find. This is a decrease from a few weeks ago when it was $30 a gallon. I spotted several vendors selling it on the side of the road out of clorox or vegetable oil jugs as we drove by.
Anyways, back to why I was there.
When we got to New Roots I went straight to work. Piyoup, my main maintenance person came in and several of the other guys came in to say hi and see if we needed any help. The replacement of the circuit board only ended up taking us around 30 min. It was super straight forward, consisted of a few ribbon cables and about 12 wires to unhook and re hook. While Piyoup was picking up from this I started on the programming. I had watched several videos the night before while ‘not sleeping’ in the FLL airport for 6 hours. Some of the programming was still there so I only had to change a few things and then we were back up and running! All in all I think we had the inverters repaired within 2 hours of me arriving at New Roots Haiti. It was fantastic to have something actually work the way it was supposed to.
The way the inverters are programmed is that one works as the primary and the second one only turns on when we have a large load, such as running the feed mill. Due to the broken piece, we had been down to just one inverter and therefore we had to delete all the programming to make the second inverter the primary. This meant we had to cut our energy uses down, and could no longer run our walk in freezer or feed mill. When the inverter first malfunctioned, our staff quickly made arrangements to keep operating without them until it could be repaired.
Now that this was fixed, my next job was to get the walk in freezer running again. When we powered it up, the motor ran a little and then stopped. I checked the gas (404a) levels and it seemed ok, I was able to get a few messages out to another chicken farmer who has managed to learn a lot about HVAC and he confirmed that the gas was ok. We called the local AC guy who has helped us for years and Piyoup went into town and picked him up and brought him out. He worked on it for a while and decided that the “dryer” a filter type component on the gas lines was plugged with oil. He thought he would be able to get a new one in town and bring it out the next day.
Feeling a bit defeated and exhausted from not sleeping for way too long, I went home and took a little nap. When I got up I went to the feed mill and started working on some electrical issues we were having there. In August we replaced a relay that had fried but things still weren’t working as they should be. With a new multimeter in hand I started testing everything and discovered that a safety switch on the door of the hammer mill had failed. This switch made the unit not work without ensuring that the door was properly shut. It’s an important safety switch, and I will get a new one, but in the mean time it was easy to bypass. With power now flowing, all of the switches were working properly! This was a huge win, as I had spent a few hours working on this many times before and had not solved the puzzle! I pulled in an air hose and blew out and cleaned up all the electrical boxes in the feed mill and got everything buttoned up.
Typically when the feed mill is not working properly, we can buy feed from the Dominican Republic, but with the instability it is more important than ever to have the ability to produce our own as suppliy chains and delivery are VERY unreliable.
The next two days I was able to work on several other projects, including getting the brush hog attached the the new tractor that we just imported. There were serval adjustments necessary to make the connection and it was great to be there to teach the guys how to get it going. I was able to fix several little networking issues, install and train our office crew on a new database that I have been building for tracking our Human Resource, and most importantly I had time just to connect with the staff. I truly miss working alongside them every day, and can’t wait until our family can return home full time.
Things in Haiti are hard. Really Really Hard. Before the latest crisis things were hard and it feels like no one can ever catch a break. Yet I am amazed at the grace, perseverance, and ingenuity that everyone exhibits. New Roots Haiti is transforming the village of Chiron right by simply existing. Its existence gives our community hope.
While this trip was short, it was so important, successful, and beneficial in so many ways. We long for stability to return and will continue to hold strong for our community and staff through this trying time.