For Case, Haiti Presentation Hits Home

For one Montville High School student, world traveler Eugene Lewis brought a message of sadness and hope.

Lewis, known as “The Most Interesting Man in the World,” visited a group of Robert Thorn’s English Language Learners students at the high school, and talked to them about his current project, helping rebuild Haiti and, in particularly, to improve education in that country.

Love Case, one of the ELL students, is a native Haitian, who lived there for 13 years, arriving in the U.S. three years ago.

She remembers Haiti before the earthquake as a beautiful place, where she was happy. A place with trees and greenery, where birds flew and sang, and children laughed and played.

This is not the Haiti of today.

A 2010 earthquake ravaged Haitian cities and infrastructure. Lewis showed slides of the devastation, a year after the quake. Buildings are still crumbled, roads are still broken, debris is still piled up.

"One hundred million cubic feet of rubble needed to be moved," Lewis said.

And yet, life is going on. In a slide of a marketplace - focusing on a woman selling a basket of her possessions - Case recognized the home of a distant aunt. In another, she saw the aunt herself.

The market was thriving, even amid debris and open sewer lines in the street.

Lewis, who was the chairman of the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of New Brunswick, has worked on projects around the world.

In addition to working to raise funds for the program “Educating Haitians for Life,” he worked in Haiti recently to build an orphanage, using shipping containers as buildings.

Lewis’s daughter, Sue Osborne, is the director of food services at Montville High School, and she – and other Connecticut food service purveyors – donated cooking implements for the orphanage project. Lewis was delayed by the Haitian government, and so he stopped to visit his daughter and speak to the ELL students.

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