Thursday, February 25, 2010

Baraderes and Coffee

Celebrating the bank account with a beer and a lobster dinner on the beach.

Baraderes, a town located in the southern part of Haiti, received 10,000 refugees from Port-au-Prince, about a 25% increase in population. The schools and medical clinic have been inundated, and many families are housing extra people. We were treking through the mountains visiting coffee fields and stopped at a home that was taking care of two sick babies from Port-au-Prince. The main problem there is food. Baraderes has no food security in normal times...people often do not eat regular meals. The additional people have turned it into a crisis for some families.

Sr. Denise, the superior of the local community of Catholic sisters, was in Port-au-Prince during the earthquake. Hers is an indigenous Haitian congregation, called the Little Sisters of St. Teresa of the Child Jesus. Like many survivors of trauma, she wanted to talk about it. She was on the third floor of the convent when the house came down. She was buried, but survived because she was on the top floor and not the bottom floor. One of their employees came looking later to see if there was anybody in the rubble, and they found her and got her out. She emerged with her prayer book and the clothes on her back, and that was all she had for more than a week. Later some people went to the rubble to dig out her personal items, and they found most of it. I wonder if many of the stories about looting we saw on the news were really just people trying to retrieve their own stuff.

Their congregation's school collapsed, and they lost many students and four nuns. Six of the students from that school have been moved to Baraderes. They are also moving their entire noviate to Baraderes. The Catholic seminary in Port-au-Prince collapsed, and they moved four students to the school in Baraderes. This is happening all over the country..everybody has to figure out how to absorb more people.

And now on to my favorite topic: coffee! I had some great meetings with the coffee growers' association (called KDB) and feel optimistic about what is happening there. I brought them their first check of profits from coffee sales. The way the project works is that they get a fair trade price for their coffee, and then after taking out expenses from the sale of it, they also receive the profits. The profit they made was higher than the original price we paid for the coffee, and the origial price was much higher than market price. It just goes to show that somebody is making a lot of money in the coffee business, and it is not the growers.

I went with them to open their bank account, where they decided that three people should be signatories, and at least two have to sign before money could be removed. They were so proud...it is the first time for any of them that they have money to open an account!

The growers are working to expand the association to include more people. During a meeting, one of the growers said to the people that we are not only just growing coffee in this project: we are regenerating the coffee business in Baraderes. Until the mid-1980s, coffee was the main industry in Baraderes. It was destroyed when the coffee market crashed all over the world. It is a long story about why it collapsed, but basically it was because of an ill-conceived USAID project that funded large plantations of poor quality coffee in Vietnam and Brazil, thereby lowering the prices all over the world and thus putting small farmers out of business and exascerbating poverty in some of the poorest places in the world, including Haiti. We are regenerating the coffee industry in Baraderes, but in a way that benefits small producers, and not planatation owners or large multinational coffee companies.

Another person talked about how the association was not just about coffee: it is also about forming community and becoming like family for each other. With their profits, one thing they have done is to create a fund that will provide money for health care if people get sick, and they are also talking about ways to provide an advance to growers on their coffee sales so that they can pay their childrens' school fees. They are also using part of their money to provide food to needy families after the earthquake (Just Haiti is also helping with that). I am proud to be a part of this, and I know that many of you are supporters in one way or another, and you should all be proud, too.

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