It’s been a little more than eight months since Haiti was hit by the largest earthquake the country had experienced in 250 years. While reconstruction continues, ISU students are helping make a difference in unique ways.

Design Across Boundaries, a disaffiliated nonprofit group of individuals, is using the skills and talents of its members who are architecture majors, to create a community center in La Croix, Haiti.

To help carry out their project, DAB, which defines itself as “a group of individuals concerned with providing architectural design to people in crisis regions around the world,” traveled to Haiti from Aug. 2 to 9. Eight members of DAB went on the trip in addition to one faculty member and interior design professional from New York.

The members teamed up with Hope On The Horizon youth mission in La Croix, Haiti, to develop a community center.

The center is uniquely intended to be made out of shipping containers, and will include a day care, women’s care facility, media room, library and resource center, equipment storage area, office space for the foundation, and educational services to more than 60 children and young adults. The facility will be surrounded by a large playground.

The Salt Company, which sent a group over to the same mission in Haiti during Spring Break, got a chance to start on the soccer field and basketball court that will be available for the children. DAB hopes to complete its project by the spring 2012.

Behind the Scenes

The story of DAB’s beginnings can be traced back to Silentor Esthil-Henderson, a recent graduate of Iowa State and Haiti-native.

It all started when DAB member, Kristen O’Brien, met Esthil-Henderson in her listening class this past fall. One day he sat by her and referred to himself as the “Prince of Haiti” upon first mentioning his work to her.

“My responses consisted of many one-word answers as I was trying to get rid of this guy who just kept talking about himself,” O’Brien said. “When I’d run into him outside of class, his friends would be like, ‘Did he try to pull the Haiti thing?'”

This made her very unsure if he was lying to her the entire time about being Haitian. He continued to sit by her in class every day. Still skeptical of his stories, O’Brien then saw an article in the Iowa State Daily about him.

Esthil-Henderson was born in Haiti and experienced poverty first-hand. When he was 7 years old, he was unable to walk and given six months to live.

Tommy Henderson, a missionary from Iowa, adopted him from Haiti. After receiving medical care, Esthil-Henderson was able to start going to school in fifth grade. He was rescued out of a life with no resources and entered a new world full of opportunities.

Esthil-Henderson coordinates Hope on the Horizon Youth Services and is always trying to better his fellow Haitians, especially those in the communities he had left behind 13 years ago and has a vision to build the children in his village a place where “learning never stops.” He is now currently teaching in Miami in an inter-city Haitian and African-American school, giving his all to not only help abroad, but also in the U.S.

After realizing how profound and inspiring this man was, O’Brien is really glad that he willingly spewed his life story on to her. “It has turned out to be an amazing thing,” she said. O’Brien even thinks it ‘must have been fate.'”

When the earthquake hit Haiti, DAB’s members asked how it could get involved. Their group started fund raising efforts, but O’Brien also immediately remembered her passionate friend that sat by her in class the previous semester.

“It worked out perfect,” O’Brien said.

DAB was looking for a way to get involved and it just so happened Esthil-Henderson’s non-profit group, HOTH Youth Services, had it in its plans to build a youth community center in La Croix in the near future — right up their alley, especially major-wise.

After getting in contact with Esthil-Henderson’s story, their goal became to help him fulfill his vision.

“My vision for the children in Haiti is for them to realize that they are part of a world and to not be ignorance of it. Helping them realize they are as important as anyone else by giving them the tools to strive for a life-long life. This will only happen if we can educate their finite mind. I want them to believe they too can overcome the dearth they are fighting today,” Esthil-Henderson said. “I want them to live and let live.”

“I believe Kristen already had a heart for helping others,” he said. “I was just lucky to have had a listening class with her and she ended up listening with her heart.”

Esthil-Henderson said he did not make it alone and cannot help Haiti alone, but with groups such as DAB and anyone else that “wants to take up this challenge” with him, he will be able to.

Though Esthil-Henderson sees DAB helping him to fulfill his own vision, DAB members see this blessing he has given them to be fulfilling theirs.

“We never dreamed we would be given the opportunity that we have now,” said Michael Vander Ploeg, DAB member. “It is a dream come true for many of us.”

Setting the Stage

DAB started meeting right away in February, and met several times to understand more of what Esthil-Henderson’s vision was and discussed the culture and life in Haiti, which it allowed to have an impact on their design.

For the remainder of the spring semester, DAB continued design work on the community center.

“After several weekly meetings conducted over the spring semester, we developed a design and almost overnight, produced additional project models and renderings,” said Jasmine Singh, member of DAB. “The most difficult times often yield to the most fulfilling moments.”

By the time Esthil-Henderson was getting ready to graduate in May, the group’s ideas had evolved progressively and he suggested to meet with his father and mission leader, Pastor Pierre — who runs the mission in La Croix and owns the land they were planning on building on — to see if they thought it was a project to move forward with.

Esthil-Henderson’s father and Pastor Pierre loved the design idea and suggested DAB come to Haiti to make it happen.

“We had no idea the design would be so successful,” O’Brien said. “We were sold, to say the least.”

“The most enjoyable part was presenting the project to the people of La Croix and seeing their faces light up as they imagined the possibility of what their town could become by incorporation this program,” Vander Ploeg said.

DAB bought the plane tickets and then met weekly during the summer to continue designing and planning for the trip. It realized initially there was lot in the design left unplanned, so it collaboratively decided the trip in August would be mainly to fill the blanks it had about the culture and life in Haiti as well as to get a better feel for Esthil-Henderson’s vision.

“A major part of the trip was to test the feasibility of our design against what materials and resources were actually available down there to make the building happen, but most importantly we wanted to spend the time getting to know the community, and the culture,” O’Brien said.

Finishing touches

“The most difficult task was of course designing for a place we had never been, never experienced, knew only through brief discussions with Silentor and Google Earth images,” O’Brien said. “We could do all of the research we wanted on the climate of Haiti, it’s history, traditional building practices, and so forth, but to really understand the drive behind the design, and the purpose of Silentor’s vision which was specific to his village, Haiti had to become real to us.”

After the earthquake had hit Haiti, many homes and buildings had been destroyed. With that being said, one of DAB’s goals was to develop a building that would be structurally sound, while still being sustainable and economically feasible.

The problem with the buildings when the earthquake hit was the fact that they were all mostly made out of concrete blocks. DAB brought back a sample of concrete that went down in the earthquake to test its strength. They found out that the sample’s strength was five-times less than what you need to have. It only held 500 pounds-per-square-inch, while concrete blocks used for buildings should be around 3,000 pounds-per-square-inch.

The club has to find sand in Haiti and do not measure the ingredients they put into their concrete — they virtually just “eye-ball” it and then use what they have.

In that respect DAB came up with a very unique proposal to use shipping containers as their main building module.

After the group did some research, it found out that currently there are more than 7,000 surplus shipping containers throughout the ports in Haiti, and more are coming in each day. They are already structurally sound, cheaper, more sustainable and more convenient for building purposes due to the fact they are easier to cut into, you can stack them and they are practically already built.

“There has been a lot of recent exploration with ‘container architecture,’ but not many concrete ideas, so we had to design every component from the inside out,” said Jason Kruse, member of DAB.

By applying a new design strategy with using shipping containers it allows for their group to have the opportunity to teach responsible building practices and opens up the community to more sustainable re-usage ideas as well as a new line of construction methodology. However, one of their goals was that it “wanted to teach the culture, but not change the culture,” said Scott Meade, DAB member.

“Designing for a place that is vastly different than where we live or anywhere we have designed for was an incredible challenge,” said Tom Fraser, DAB member. “You have to put aside all preconceptions about building methods, materials, systems, available tradesmen-everything. It’s a completely different ball game.”

DAB plans to purchase seven shipping containers. Each ISO container is approximately 40-by-300 square feet and is already resistant to insects, fires, earthquakes and hurricanes.

Though DAB plans to put in bleachers around the soccer field so spectators can watch and hold tournaments with other near-by teams, it is going to make it so there is good patio space so people can watch from on the building as well.

At times it can reach a 115-degree heat index, therefore in their design they are also planning for shading devices that look like bed sheets. These will not only protect people from the heat, but will collect water for the community.

By the end of the semester the group hopes to have a complete set of construction documents for the building and hopefully begin construction during winter break. DAB would like to complete the first level by next summer.

“As far as design goes, each person brought something unique to the table,” Meade said. “It was really a collaborative effort and that’s what makes this project so unique and hopefully so successful.”

DAB also hopes to bring a wide range of other disciplines into the project besides architecture, including engineering, landscape design, agriculture, agronomy and horticulture.

“It’s very rare that designers get a chance to create and take part in tangible projects at the ages we are at,” Fraser said. “To do this under mostly our own organization makes the nectar that much sweeter.”

“Not only is this a design-build project, which, by the sheer nature of it is very exciting-to see a project manifest itself into reality, is quite an accomplishment for individuals still engaged in academia,” Singh said, “but also by the circumstance and the site location in which we plan to build-this community center is bound to reinforce this community by empowering the youth.”

“And that is exactly what Haiti needs: education and discipline at the grassroots.”