KALONA

The “real world” looms for Dordt University graduate and Hillcrest Academy alum Noah Miller; in fact, by the time you read this, he’ll already be living in it, working as a mechanical designer for Shive-Hattery, the Iowa City-based architecture and engineering firm.

But for a brief period of time this summer, that float between college and career, he wanted to do something meaningful before becoming responsible. That’s how he ended up in Haiti.

“Throughout my high school years, I never really had an opportunity to go abroad on a service trip of any kind,” he says. “I missed out a couple times with my church group at Kalona Mennonite, and just wanted an opportunity to go do that, and I figured, well, what better time than just delaying starting work right after I graduate to go and serve somewhere?”

Folks from church connected him with Troy Miller (no relation), who has spent the last 19 years living in Haiti working with Water For Life, the organization headquartered in Kalona and co-founded by his grandfather. Next thing you know, Noah was boarding one of few flights to the beleaguered country, where he would spend six weeks putting his skills to use building useful things for local people.

From the moment he arrived in Les Cayes, a coastal city about a day’s drive from Port-au-Prince, Noah knew he wasn’t in Iowa anymore.

“It’s just people living on top of each other,” he says. “It’s just so eye-opening to see. I mean, you’ve got a whole family living in a small shack on the side of the road, and that’s just what they have and they’re happy with it. It’s a totally different world.”

The average salary of folks living in Les Cayes, where agriculture and fishing are the main economic drivers, might be $200 a month. Just obtaining clean water for drinking, crops, and livestock is a challenge – hence the need for wells that Water For Life drills and maintains. But ironically, Wi-Fi access is widespread, thanks to discounted pricing.

“Most of the people down there actually have Starlink Wi-Fi and are connected to the same digital world that the rest of us are,” Noah notes.

Shack life wasn’t in the cards for him, fortunately; Noah stayed with the Miller family, who have a block house with faucets, running water, and “a real toilet, an American toilet, and that doesn’t happen hardly anywhere in the country,” Noah says. Solar panels with batteries provide electricity, which is mostly reliable if not overused, and he had “a super nice bed to sleep on.”

If there was a hardship, it was the lack of air-conditioning.

“It’s just 80 to 85 degrees all the time. So, you’re out hard at work during the day. You’re sweating. Then you come home to your house, and then you continue to sweat when you’re sitting on the couch,” Noah says. “That definitely pushed me outside my comfort zone.”

But there were things to do besides pine for a Frigidaire.

“Luckily for me, I always had my hands on something. I was always doing a project of some kind,” he says, and those tasks included designing and constructing storage cubbies, a solar array, and a rabbit hutch, as well as pulling water pumps, framing interior walls, and picking up mail for missionaries directly from the plane.

“I was glad that I was able to use my construction experience and help them down there,” Noah says. “Special thanks to Randy Rempel [of Rempel Construction & Cabinets, Iowa City] for hiring me those four years and teaching me everything I know.”

In case you’re thinking all those projects sound doable, keep in mind they’re being achieved in a developing country, which increases the difficulty. Take, for example, the solar array Noah built for an irrigation pump at Water For Life’s learning center.

“That involved mixing concrete from the raw ingredients. There’s no cement trucks down there, no cement delivery, no concrete truck delivery, so we had to mix it all by hand,” he explains. “We got piles of rock, piles of sand, and bags of Porland cement, and we mixed them all together and poured them down into the holes that we had dug, threw in some structure, and got the panels up. We got it all wired in and then the pump [we started on Monday] was working on Friday.”

Noah saw his hard work pay off quickly.

“The Monday after, they already had sprinklers hooked up and were already watering the crops,” he says. “It was a big difference. The crops really shot up after they were getting water. [That] makes sense here [in Iowa], but it’s a little bit harder to get a steady supply of water down there.”

Something similar happened at the workshop, where “the workers wanted a place to put their backpacks, their clothes, stuff like that.” Noah designed and built a set of cubbies, and the next workday “all the guys had their backpacks and shoes and stuff in the cubbies already, so I didn’t have to worry about delayed gratification at all.”

When it came to the rabbit hutch he designed and built for the Miller family so they could raise rabbits for food, however, Noah was happy he wasn’t around for the payoff.

“I am glad that I had left before I would have been eating [the rabbits],” he says. “I don’t know how I would have felt about that.”

Which brings us around to the food, “probably my favorite part” of his experience, Noah says.

“The cuisine is very clean, it’s very simple. All of it is locally grown – they don’t really import anything as a nation. So that means lots of rice, lots of beans, and whatever meat you can get your hands on. Most of the time, for me, that was chicken.”

The full meat menu over his June and July stay included beef (“a lot lower quality than the beef we have here in Iowa”), lobster, pork, and goat.

“That was the only what I would call ‘crazy’ meat that I tried, and it wasn’t bad,” he says. “The goat actually tasted pretty similar to pork.”

The fried smashed plantains were good. The pikliz – a tangy pickled vegetable relish – was good. But the stand-out Haitian eats? Fresh fruit.

“We’re talking like a mango that you walk out and pick by hand and then cut it up and it’s perfect. Same thing with bananas and pineapples. I’ve never had anything even close to the same quality as the ones down there,” Noah says.

The banana varietal stayed green when ripe. The pineapple flesh was more white than yellow. The coconuts could be enjoyed straight off the tree by slicing off the top, poking in a straw, and drinking the water – and then the coconut meat could be eaten too.

“Definitely my favorite food experience was getting to eat all the fresh, local fruit,” he says.

As Noah begins his “real job”, he goes into it a slightly different person thanks to his experience serving in Haiti.

He witnessed God’s providence in a whole new way. He awakened to how blessed he is to be an American, with the support and freedom to pursue his goals and realize his ambitions. He gained a deeper understanding of human nature and behavior.

“It’s so hard for [people in Haiti] to actually pursue [their dreams] because there’s no infrastructure around them to allow them to use those talents. Here in the States, if you have an idea, you can go and pursue it. There’s people around you, there’s resources that are willing to make it happen for you,” he says. “It makes me feel like, because I’ve been blessed with the area that I’m in, that I need to do something with it, right? If you have access to the tools, then what’s stopping you from using those tools for something good?”

If he has advice for others seeking growth, or a fresh perspective, it’s this:

“Seek discomfort,” he says. “We learn more about who we are and where we come from when we’re out of our comfort zone and we get our worldview challenged and our biases challenged. I think nothing but good will come out of that, when you can come back and see the world through a different lens and have more of an understanding of why people are the way they are, and why we do what we do.”

Noah thanks his church family at Kalona Mennonite for their prayers and support, and notes that “it was a blessing” to have spent time with Troy Miller, who has “the biggest heart I have ever seen,” while in Haiti.