John Winings Blog

Maybe it’s this year’s El Niño, or maybe it is normal variation. Several reports from Haiti confirm that rain has been falling regularly since the end of January. I noticed the change while I was there through the first days of February. Also, the same is true of Southern Florida and the Bahamas. Normally, the […]

Elections held in Haiti are a quite a contrast from the ones in the US and Canada.

Tree nurseries are the key to sustainable agricultural development in rural Haiti, where the Comprehensive Development Project has mastered a reliable system with over 70 nurseries throughout the CODEP zone.

Living near a highway in Haiti you typically hear a loud bang once or twice a week. These are tire blowouts, something very rare in the states. Haiti roads are rough, often with potholes, and vehicles of all kinds come and go – large and small – trucks, cars, tractors with long wagons, and pickups called tap-taps loaded with people. Also, most roads are loaded with pedestrians who walk with the stream of traffic, not against it.

My first trip to Europe was in 1961 with the University of Illinois Varsity Men’s Glee Club. We sang a series of ten concerts in Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Germany and France. What an eye-opening series of events for a young Illinois dairy farmer! The University of Bergen (Norway) Men’s Glee club, for example, is a lifelong membership; our joint concert had singers many years our seniors. In Germany, the Berlin Wall was just two weeks old. So when we arrived in Berlin, there was an intensely political climate, particularly since we were an official US State Department-sponsored tour.