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| Caribbean Property Magazine Home / August 2008 / 'Lost Among the Forgotten Pt 2 ' | SEND THIS PAGE TO A FRIEND  |
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| LOST AMONG THE FORGOTTEN, Pt 2 By Scott Sabin Sometimes you meet someone and you know your life will never be the same again. After meeting Pere Albert for the first time in early 1995, and seeing the incredible work he was doing in the mountains of Haiti, I knew I couldn’t walk away.  As the director of Floresta, a Christian nonprofit organization that was fighting deforestation and poverty in the Dominican Republic, we had been invited to meet him and see his projects in rural Haiti. However, knowing our limitations, we had come with very little intention of actually working in Haiti. This is Part 2 of 3 in our series, Lost Among The Forgotten. | ||
There is a world of difference between hiring someone and actually helping the poor – even when you have a plan, and we were still pretty weak in that department. I realized that, as I flew home from Haiti in May of 1997. But at least we had a start, and after two years of trying to convince our board and donors to support work in a new country, fundraising for it and then trying to get something going on the ground, I was happy. And Pere Albert, the Haitian Episcopal priest who had asked us to help the poor in his parish, was satisfied with our new agronomist, Dezo, and apparently had a lot of faith in him. Bob Morikawa the Canadian agricultural consultant we had hired to help Dezo get things set up seemed to like him as well. Bob would spend the summer there in Haiti, doing initial surveys, planning and setting up shop. The plan would come out of the surveys. Bob, I was learning, was a bit of a pessimist, so his confidence in Dezo was especially reassuring. (Bob once told me that if we managed to teach a few people to graft fruit trees, and distributed a few grafting knifes, he would feel like we had really accomplished something. Even today, when I am feeling particularly discouraged, I remind myself of this benchmark and it makes me feel a little better about what we have managed to accomplish). THE AVERAGE INCOME IN THE EIGHT LOCAL COMMUNITIES WE SAMPLED WAS $440 PER YEAR. One of the first steps was doing some participatory surveys. We learned that virtually all of the people in the area were farmers, although many of them had secondary sources of income. Lots of the women bought items like rice and cooking oil in the capital to resell in the local markets. Others were masons, carpenters or tailors. Just over half of the local people owned the land they farmed, while the rest either rented or sharecropped. The average income in the eight local communities we sampled was $440 per year. Assistance in farming and access to credit were two of the top needs that they expressed.  That fit right in with our own expertise: in our exiting program in the Dominican Republic, Floresta combined microcredit, agricultural assistance and reforestation into a single holistic program that sought to create virtuous cycles. Floresta’s founders had discovered that deforestation was one of the chief contributors to rural poverty, while poverty was one of the chief causes of deforestation. A poor farmer’s only real assets are soil and water. Deforestation greatly accelerates soil erosion, and destroys the health of watersheds. Instead of infiltrating the soil and replenishing the aquifers, water runs off. A deforested watershed will tend to have much greater extremes, with rivers becoming seasonal, dying during times of drought, and flooding during rainy times. Conversely, the more difficult the situation becomes for the rural poor, the more they were forced to rely on clearing new land for agriculture, or cutting trees to sell as charcoal. This is rarely a matter of education. I have had farmers provide very elegant explanations of how a watershed works. Rather, it is most often a matter of desperation – people have little choice. This was brought home to me most clearly by a story I was told a number of years ago of a Haitian man, who during a time of drought was forced to cut his mango and avocado trees to sell as firewood, because he couldn’t afford to wait the several months it would take until the fruit ripened.  Thus a reforestation program which does not take into account the economic needs of the people is bound to fail. And a rural economic development program that does not address environmental needs will fail, because ultimately the health of the farms and communities is completely dependent on the environment. Thus, whatever we did would need to address both of these issues. Dezo had some other ideas as well. Time and time again he told me that he did not want to give anything away – no handouts. The communities, no matter how poor should be seen, not as beneficiaries, but as partners in the process. "Peyizan pov se moun ponyet kout se pa moun ponyet koupe" he would say, which he translated as "poor peasants are not people without arms, but people with short arms,"We struggled with communication throughout the summer, as I returned to California. Grand Colline, where Dezo had a makeshift office in one of the cinderblock classrooms of the parish vocational school, had no telephones, no electricity and no e-mail. We had taken a satellite telephone to Pere Albert, but the language barriers seemed almost insurmountable. Ultimately, we relied on a postal connection that often took two weeks for mail to arrive. Pere Albert called me one day to let me know that the checks I had been sending to pay Dezo’s tiny staff had apparently been stolen. The group hadn’t been paid in over a month, but thankfully stayed on the job. In a moment of impulse, I wired the money directly to the same bank account in which all of the other checks had been deposited, assuming it to be the parish account. Pere Albert called me later in the week to get an update and I told him what I had done. “Scott, you don’t understand,” he said in a shocked voice, “We don’t have a bank account. I sell the checks to a man on the street in Port au Prince, who cashes them for me.” I felt sick to my stomach. Not only had the first set of paychecks been stolen, but I had compounded the mistake by depositing the same amount into someone else’s account…and our workers still hadn’t been paid. As it turned out the Haitian bank which had cashed the original checks was responsible for the mistake, and so refunded us while the Haitian check casher refunded the money back into our account, but the incident was emblematic of our growing pains. Somehow though, the work got done. Dezo held environmental classes through the summer and gave certificates to several dozen students, mostly adults for their training in environmental education. He started teaching sustainable agriculture classes in the vocational school. And he began organizing community groups in surrounding villages for agricultural training, reforestation, and eventually, small business loans.  It was December when I was able to return. The afternoon was sweltering as Bob, Dezo and I made our way to Kavanac, one of the local communities. The narrow path was rocky and steep. Young corn struggled through the rocks on either side of us. We were walking between hillside farms, the tiny fields separated from one another by loose rock walls. I wasn’t feeling well. We got to the crest of the ridge then started down before tackling another long slope and I needed a rest. As I sat on a large stone, contemplating the hill in front of me, two elderly women, with five gallon buckets of water balanced on their heads, came up the hill. “Bon swa, blan,” they greeted me. They asked where we were going and Dezo said we were headed to a village meeting in Kavanac. With a grin, the two women said that they were on their way to the same meeting, and, “we’ll let them know that you will be along in a while.” | ||
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Despite their good-humored teasing, it was pretty dejected group that we finally encountered when we got to the top of the last ridge. Meeting in an opened sided lean-to made of wood and corrugated tin, about forty farmers, men and women, waited for us. As I surveyed the spectacular setting – from the top of the ridge, the Caribbean was clearly visible to the south, Haiti’s tallest mountain, Pic La Selle was in the clouds to the east, and the brilliant blue water of the Bay of Port au Prince sparkled to the north - several people sidled up to me and discreetly held out their hands while rubbing their stomachs. As the meeting moved past pleasantries to serious questions, a woman stood up and in a confrontational tone told me about the other humanitarian agencies that had worked in the area. “Agency X was here, they gave us food, and they are gone,” she said, as she listed them. “How is Floresta going to be any different?” “WELL FIRST OF ALL WE ARE NOT GOING TO GIVE YOU ANYTHING. SECONDLY, WE ARE NOT GOING UNTIL YOU ASK US TO.” I have heard similar questions many times now, but at the time this took me aback. After giving it some consideration, I responded, “Well first of all we are not going to give you anything. Secondly we are not going to leave until you ask us to.” It was her turn to be taken aback. Dezo and our local staff continued meeting with the farmers groups in Kavanac and the other communities on a regular basis. They facilitated planning, provided training in agriculture and small business management and organized loan groups. There was an air of expectancy, but a growing realization that this would take a little time. Some of the early enthusiasts began to lose interest when the handouts didn’t appear. On a morning walk I passed an old man, white headed, grizzled, rail thin, with skin hanging limp on his frame. He was crouching in torn trousers and weeding a cornfield that was growing in soil that was nothing but smooth stones. There was no earth whatsoever visible where he was working. “Bonjou. How is it going?” we asked. “Barely getting by,” he answered, “not even enough to survive.” He picked up a handful of stones and let them fall from his hand as if he were sifting soil. We mentioned the Floresta program to him, and he laughed, giving us a bitter and toothless grin. He said “Ha, I have no interest in something that will help me in a few years. I am hungry now. Give me something to eat now.” He went back to his weeding. However, again and again I heard Dezo articulate the Floresta vision. Again and again I heard people tell me how unusual it was for an organization to expect people to participate in their own development. Most people, they said, just gave them things and then left. This new empowerment philosophy from Floresta was a little hard for them to understand, but it gave them hope. In one community, Davi, a bearded old man with wizened eyes looked around him at the barren hills, and said “I remember when Haiti was green and beautiful and all these hills were covered with vegetation. I would love to see the hills planted with trees again. But I am old and I don’t think I will live long enough to see that again. With Floresta I have hope that one day they will be restored.” In the town of Mayer the entire group, some thirty people proudly showed me the A-frames that our team had taught them to make in order to more accurately terrace the soil. One man, with a hand-drawn Nike logo on his straw hat, demonstrated how to make and use the A-frame, utilizing a rock on a plum line to determine a level contour.  I still didn’t understand Haiti. Actually, as a friend once told me, in Haiti, the more you know, the less you understand. Jack, a Canadian Mennonite, had lived in Haiti off and on since 1967 and ran an organization to assist Haitians with agricultural cooperatives. He and his wife also operated a guesthouse where I often stayed in Port au Prince. Off of Rue Delmas, in a suburban neighborhood, it is separated from the road by a five-foot cinderblock wall, and a metal gate painted with a bright mural. Inside there are several dormitory rooms, a communal dining room and a small but popular swimming pool. In the mornings, souvenir vendors peer over the wall like dozens of Kilroys. It is a homey and unassuming place, with admonishments such as “if it’s yellow, let it mellow” posted in the bathrooms. THIRTY-THREE YEARS IN HAITI WOULD MAKE ANYONE ECCENTRIC. Thirty-three years in Haiti would make anyone eccentric. The least that can be said about Jack was that he was eccentric. A large, weather-beaten man with a stiff, shuffling gait, he has a face like an old soccer ball and a forbidding way of looking at you, as if sizing you up. No matter how often I stayed at the guesthouse he never recognized me. Whenever I reintroduced myself, he broke into a broad grin, banishing the gruff appearance. His warm handshake left no doubt that he had spent his life doing hard work. I wanted advice. We had been working in Haiti for a few years now, but had not officially registered with the Haitian government and I knew Jack was familiar with the procedure. He sat down on the bed across from me, looking me over again. After a moment he began, his voice like rusted machinery, “So you want to start a non-profit to help Haiti.” “It depends on where you are from. You see, I am Canadian. In Canada you start a NGO. In America you register with the IRS…” He had misunderstood the question. I looked for an opportunity to interrupt. “No, I mean here in Haiti.” “Oh…in Haiti? Well, you can do that. Let me tell you about Haiti though… See the problem here in Haiti is…” I waited expectantly - it was thirty-three years of experience talking. He interrupted himself, describing the UN withdrawal. He chose another tack, “You see, we have created a country of beggars! People come down here and they think they are going to help, and they end up giving things away. We have taught them to beg. And we’ve been doing this for years.” He was rising to an angry crescendo, punctuating the air with his index finger. He stopped suddenly, grinning. “You got me going! Now, what were you asking?” He paused. “Oh. You want start a non-profit to help Haiti.” He began again, “I’ll tell you about Haiti…” He began talking about Vodou, then farmers’ cooperatives. He switched to the economy. I was having trouble following the parade of topics, but strove for the pearls I knew were there. With each subject, his passion grew and he seemed to stop seeing me. Then he would catch himself and return to my question, before digressing again.  He continued, “This guy who lives up the street - has a store just back of here. He was running for congress. The Tonton Macoutes - they didn’t like him, so they shot out the front of his building. Drove by, and,” he was chuckling now, “just kept shooting, all the way down the block. I…I can take you out back and show you the bullet holes down the side of the guesthouse!” He trailed off into belly laughter. One of his Haitian employees walked in. Jack introduced me, saying, “Mathieu, this young man is here to start a non-profit to help Haiti…” The guesthouse collects an eclectic group. Who stays in Port-au-Prince, after all? Usually there is an assortment of church groups passing through. Many of the guests are volunteers with Sisters of Charity. There were also several very eccentric missionaries who lived there on a more permanent basis. One was a retired engineer who favored a pith helmet and khaki shorts. I once took a tap tap ride with him during which he proudly told me that the Haitians were his people and vigorously patted several embarrassed strangers to demonstrate his point. TALKING WITH HIM MADE ME REALIZE THAT HE WAS A CONSPIRACY THEORIST IN A CONSPIRACY THEORIST’S PARADISE.. Another time I was approached by a short, clean-cut man in his early forties with an overeager way of leaning into you while talked. He was a freelance missionary who operated a well drilling rig. Just a few minutes of talking with him made me realize that he was a conspiracy theorist in a conspiracy theorist’s paradise.  He thought that for some reason Aristide was personally out to get him. As we talked, we heard a pop in the distance. “That’s just the beginning,” he said. “You'll hear a lot more later tonight. There’s something really big going down tonight, in Cite Soleil. Really big.” Another friend pointed out that rumor chasing is the all consuming hobby and sometime disease of the expatriate community. This is the big leagues for the black helicopter set. Local newspapers are no help. Every story has at least two sides and usually they are one hundred eighty degrees different. Jack was right. The more you knew about Haiti the less you understood. For several years I felt as if the culture was opaque. I felt instantly at home in the Dominican Republic, or Mexico, I couldn’t connect with Haiti. As I flew out of Port-au-Prince after a visit, I picked up my book for the trip home: Edwidge Danticat’s collection of short stories Krik? Krak! By the time we were over the Bahamas I was sobbing. I had to stop and look out the window to collect myself. Suddenly the boat people had flesh. Suddenly the nightmare my Haitian friends were trying so hard to wake from had a name and a form. Four times on the flight home I had to stop reading. But by the time I reached home I felt I had begun to understand Haiti. I had begun to understand the pride and the hard work and the earnestness of a people who have never been given an even break, who have never been dealt a winning hand. And I began to understand why it was the graveyard of good intentions: because in spite of everything that has gone on, the Haitians are not a beaten people. Too many well-intentioned people want to do for the Haitians what they so desperately want to be able to do for themselves. Dezo was right. We could assist, but ultimately the farmers must be agents of their own development. I had been back to Kavanc couple of times since my first visit in 1997, but three years later, I again made the trek up the stony ridges to the tiny meeting house on the spine of Haiti’s southern peninsula and was met by a very different group. No one asked me for money. They were eager to tell me all that had been accomplished in the community. A credit group had been formed and they were receiving loans. Hundreds of trees had been planted. Rainwater harvesting systems and cisterns had been constructed. Families were buying the land they had formerly rented or sharecropped. Fruit trees had been grafted. But the highlight of the meeting occurred when Madam Forvil stood up and proudly told me: “What Floresta has given us is the knowledge that we are not helpless, but that God has given us talents that we can use to change our community.” Author: Scott Sabin is the Executive Director of Floresta USA, a humanitarian organization that brings hope, training and loans to various high need projects in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Africa and Mexico. Read more about Floresta. | ||
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| June 2008 | ||
| A Desperate Journey: Fighting Deforestation & Poverty in Haiti | ||
| Sometimes you meet someone and you know your life will never be the same again. After meeting Pere Albert for the first time in early 1995, and seeing the incredible work he was doing in the mountains of Haiti, I knew I couldn’t walk away. As the director of Floresta, a Christian nonprofit organization that was fighting deforestation and poverty in the Dominican Republic, we had been invited to meet him and see his projects in rural Haiti. However, knowing our limitations, we had come with very little intention of actually working in Haiti. ---> Read More | ||
| May 2008 | ||
| Living Waters | ||
| Like the many who are working for a better Haiti, I proudly found myself part of a journey without regret. I have found the people to be loving and caring, and they will bend over backwards to make a visitor’s stay in their country as comfortable as possible. Although Haiti is one of the most abused and ignored countries in the Western Hemisphere, the Haitian people are very resourceful in surviving under the most difficult of circumstances and unheard of poverty levels. ---> Read More | ||
| May 2008 | ||
| Lost Among The Forgotten | ||
| As the rain swept across the canyon towards the jagged ridge where we stood, I wondered if I could be considered guilty of kidnapping under Haitian law, and what the penalty might be. We were lost, nearly out of gas, and we didn’t know where we had found the teenage girl who had been riding with us for the last hour. Most importantly, we didn’t know how to get her home. ---> Read More | ||
| May 2008 | ||
| From El Dorado To Haiti: Saving The Children | ||
| She will celebrate her 91st birthday with a trip to the remote mountains of Southern Haiti this month. This remarkable woman from El Dorado has replaced Voodoo doctors with churches and poverty with education in the mountains of Haiti. Thirty years ago she witnessed the poverty stricken children, with bloated stomachs and blank stares roamed around aimlessly with a look of hopelessness in their sad eyes and determined to help, raised money for one school of 400 children, established in 1981. Today, her Haiti Education Foundation supports 40 elementary schools and 10 high schools, educating over 10,000 students in Haiti. ---> Read More | ||
| May 2008 | ||
| A Country in Transition | ||
| Haiti is a country in transition and the transition has been set in to motion by many grassroots and humanitarian organizations such as Yele Haiti, Institute for Justice and Democracy, KOFAVIV and Oasis which are intent on initiating positive change for Haiti`s future. ---> Read More | ||
| May 2007 | ||
| Orphanage in Haiti : An OASIS for Children | ||
| The orphanage is home to eight girls and one boy. Luceanna had planned to make the orphanage all-girls, but a dying 6 month old boy, too weak to lift his head, was enough for her to change her mind. OASIS, an acronym for Our Attempt at Saving Innocent Souls, is dedicated to saving the lives of the Haitian children by providing a safe environment, health care, education, love and a deep spiritual foundation in God. ---> Read More | ||
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