Recent high school graduates Harrison Scheib, from left, Chase McElhaney and Tim Thompson recently traveled to Haiti, where they helped build a school for an orphanage.

Tim Thompson and Chase McElhaney, both recent Lawrence High graduates, help pour concrete pillars earlier this month to add a second floor to a school at the Ebenezer Glenn Orphanage in Dessalines, Haiti. They went to Haiti with their friend Harrison Scheib, a recent Free State graduate.

Chase McElhaney wasn’t surprised his good friend Harrison Scheib asked him and friend Tim Thompson to go on a trip for the summer.

It was just where Scheib asked them to go: to help build an orphanage school in Haiti — and just a month after they had graduated from high school.

“It was a shock,” McElhaney said. “You’d think it would be like a vacation spot, but it was definitely cool that he asked us to go to Haiti. That’s pretty remarkable.”

The three friends — McElhaney and Thompson are Lawrence High graduates and Scheib went to Free State — spent July 1 to July 15 helping add concrete pillars for a second floor to a school at Ebenezer Glenn Orphanage in Dessalines, Haiti.

Scheib’s uncle, Steve Scheib of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, has been helping there for about three decades.

“There’s nothing else I would have rather done with my summer now that I’m looking back on it,” Harrison Scheib said.

When they landed in Port-au-Prince, which was leveled by the Jan. 12 earthquake, the signs of the disaster were everywhere.

“It was eye-opening seeing all of the rubble,” Scheib said. “Not a lot has gotten done, so it was pretty crazy driving through the street.”

On such poor roads, it took more than four hours to drive 90 miles to Dessalines, where they were to work.

The earthquake did not damage Dessalines, but refugees are staying there.

It was difficult work in the heat, plus the crew didn’t have the luxury of much construction technology.

Workers would mix the cement and bring it over in wheelbarrows, where it had to be shoveled out into buckets. Then the buckets would need to be passed up a ladder to the person on top who would pour the concrete into the form and throw the bucket back down for more.

“It took 45 buckets for each form,” Thompson said. “If we would have had a truck, we could have poured each column in five minutes, but there it takes 20 to 30 minutes to pour one.”

They were happy to finish their task before they had to come back home.

Thompson suffered heat exhaustion one day and had to get seven stitches in his right leg in another work mishap, but he’s fine.

“We struggled at the beginning,” McElhaney said. “Things got started off really slow, but as things went, a lot of things went off really smoothly. Things got done.”

They helped lay groundwork for other work groups that will be trying to finish the school’s addition. Even with a language barrier, Scheib, McElhaney and Thompson interacted with children, playing soccer and dominoes.

They stayed in a guest house at the orphanage. The three graduates all used part of their own graduation gift money to fund some of their trip. They said they were just happy to help and hoped Haiti continues to get help.

“I just hope the school goes up completely,” McElhaney said, “and that it looks well so they can have a place to go.”