Mission of Hope to Complete Last of 615 Quake-Resistant Houses in Haiti
Quake-resistant houses have no electricity or running water, but they have yards for farming and a communal water supply.
COURTESY OF MISSION OF HOPE
With the last of the 615 houses in Leveque, Haiti, set to be finished next month, the nonprofit Mission of Hope is moving on to build another village of 100 simple, quake-resistant houses. Since the Jan. 12, 2010, magnitude-7 earthquake that devastated Haiti, MOH also has built a school, a church and a community center in Leveque.
Leveque contains three-room houses, made from reinforced-concrete masonry units. The 400-sq-ft houses replace a temporary tent village. The new homes have no running water or electricity, but each has an outhouse and a yard for farming.
“We’re more a developer than a relief organization,” says Brad Johnson, MOH president. After the earthquake, “we went to the government and told them we wanted to build homes,” he adds.
The Interim Haiti Relief Commission soon granted MOH 100 barren acres across the street from the 500 tent homes.
Planning began in 2010, and the first house was completed in January 2011. “The houses had to be structurally sound, withstand an earthquake, be made from local materials and use Haitian labor,” says Johnson.
The village was developed by MOH and its many partners, which raised $6,000 per house. One partner—New Story, a startup that mainly uses crowd-funding technology to raise money—paid for 151 houses. The nonprofit International Deaf Emergency Inc. funded an additional 115. Another nonprofit, Water Mission, implemented a communal safe-water project, consisting of a solar pumping system, multistage granular media filtration and chlorine disinfection.
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