Students Build a School in Haiti and Visit a Village Bakery!

buildOn has been constructing schools in Haiti for over a decade now, and for the first time ever we shared our work in this remarkable country with our youth service students from the US. A team of buildOn program students from California just returned from our first school building trip to Haiti, and next week we’ll be profiling the full experience on the blog.

All of our school building trips involve cultural activities — visits to local midwifes, landmarks, and more that provide a deeper understanding of the way people in remote villages live. One of the cultural activities offered in Haiti was a trip to the local baker — a man who bakes bread twice a week using a huge concrete oven in the back of his home.

A group of students gathered around to watch the baker knead the bread dough using a slab roller. Each of them took turns helping to crank the rolling mechanism that allows the baker to make bread in large enough quantities for his entire village.

The dough gets kneaded through the slab roller into flat squares that are then placed in the oven until they rise.

The end result is similar to French bread; soft, doughy, warm, and delicious!