Haiti: What Not To Do

Baraderes.

I returned early yesterday morning (about 3 am) after a grueling day of travel. There was severe flooding in the South parts of Haiti on Saturday as a result of torrential rains. Baraderes was deluged and people fled for the mountains. When we drove out of Les Cayes early Sunday morning we could see the devastation: the road was passable but still full of mud and rocks in places, crops were destroyed, trees were down, and animals were dead. News reports said that some people were also killed. Then just after we finished driving through the flood-ravaged areas we got into the earthquake-ravaged areas.

Six weeks after the eathquake, many people are living in tents made of sticks and bedsheets.

A lot of people ask me why Haiti is so poor. There are no easy answers, and the history is complicated, but the question is worth reflecting on, especially now that we see that Chile has suffered an earthquake of a greater magnitude than Haiti's but with far fewer deaths, and with a greater ability to recover. What follows is my reflection on one aspect of Haiti's poverty: the role of charitable aid.

In the last 25 years or so, numerous international aid organizations, churches, and governments have sent vast amounts of aid to Haiti. However they have mostly been reluctant to funnel that money through the Haitian government. As a result, aid institutions operate mostly outside of the government, and this has led to a weak underfunded government that does not have the resources or capacity to build the infrastructure that Haiti needs. In many other countries, U.S. development assistance is funneled through governments.

I know that there are a lot of people reading this who do not care too much for government (and truthfully i think that i am one of them) but we need governments for some things, including roads, electricity, water treatment, public health concerns, enforcement of building codes, protection from the greed, violence and stupidity of others, etc.

The problem with outside aid institutions, whether governmental or non-governmental, is that they tend to have their own agendas, and those agendas are often what is best for the sending countries or institutions. For example, the USAID project I mentioned in my last post was bad for small farmers all over the world, but it was good for the United States, because it brought coffee prices way down.

Another problem with aid institutions is that they come and then they go. An example of that is the hospital located about an hour and a half from Baraderes. It was run by a U.S. Baptist group, but then about a year or so ago they pulled out. Now the hospital is there but barely functions. It was the only hospital in the area.

In general, I have lost all confidence in charitable aid as any kind of solution. It often is based on the agenda of the giver, rather than the receiver. It fosters a dependency that over time becomes hard to overcome, because people come to believe that their only recourse is getting things from others. This kind of mentality leads to corruption. Charity also does not recognize the human dignity of the receiver, because human dignity requires us to be able to take care of ourselves: to enjoy the fruits of our own labor, to pay for our own school fees and health care, to provide food, shelter and clothing for our families, and to form communities that develop the structures that sustain life.

What makes sense to me are capacity-building and income-producing projects that are led by and benefit the communities they are in, and the evidence for this would be that the comunities start to be able to take care of themselves. Income-producing projects benefit everyone, because if one group of people has more money, they then spend it at the local stores, and the local schools, and the local clinic. Then the doctors and nurses and teachers and shop-owners get paid, and then they spend their money...etc. What is required by outside organizations in this case is to invest in the income-producing projects of the community and to help them with capacity-building so that they are able to sustain those projects, and then to pull out when the community does not need them any more.

Capacity-building is a term that encompasses training and formation and the creating of structures that can sustain a project.

Is charity ever the answer? For example, what about supporting schools? I think this is a really hard question. I asked myself this question when I was responsible for the St. John the Baptist (SJB) sister parish project, which sustains a lot of schools. The secondary school we built in Baraderes is one of the best schools in the country, and the whole community is proud of it. But at the end I asked myself what we had accomplished. If SJB pulled out, that school would close. What if SJB got a new pastor, or the demographics changed and the parish could no longer sustain the project? We need the community to be able to sustain its own school (and orphanage, medical clinic, and nutrition programs). In other words, it does not make sense to build programs that over the long term communities cannot pay for by themselves.

But then you end up in going in circles, because you need educated people for successful income-producing projects, and you also need training and formation for those who lack formal education. I think the answer has to be that you need both together, and not to support a school without working with the community on how they will sustain it in the long run. Education, training, and income-producing projects go together.

In the U.S., public schools get paid for by taxes, and private schools get paid for by fees and endowments. Taxes, fees, and endowments all come from people who have income. It feels good to outside donors to build something for someone else, but it does not help the community if they cannot sustain it themselves.

The problem is that it is not so hard to find people willing to start up or support charitable aid projects, including schools (or orphanages, or feeding programs, or homeless shelters), but really hard to find a genuine community-led income-producing project that benefits the producers and the community they are in, as opposed to one that primarily benefits some multinational corporation and its stockholders in developed countries. Just Haiti is a lot of work and it will take a real investment in time and money before the growers are independent. But we are working for that day.

But now the conversation gets even more complicated. Those multinational corporations and their stockholders are providing the income that enables the high standard of living in developed countries. One of the ways that they do that is to pay producers and laborers in underdeveloped countries wages that do not provide a sustainable living. In other words, they keep them poor. So actually those income-producing projects that benefit producers in underdeveloped countries that we are talking about are not in the interest of wealthy people in developed countries if they want to maintain their current standard of living.

Hmmm. So now we begin to understand why there is so much more charity than justice. Charity keeps people poor and dependent, and poverty makes people willing to accept substandard wages, and then they take more charity, and the cycle continues. And because of Haiti’s history (which I have not gone into) Haiti has been on the receiving end of charity in the extreme. As such, Haiti becomes a case study in what not to do.

My deep frustration (to the point of sarcasm) with this lies in the fact that so many of the charities providing aid are church-based, including the vast network of sister parishes in Haiti. The people involved usually do not understand the difference between charity and justice, and have not been educated to understand the difference or how it connects to their faith. Many church people want to be heroes, swooping into Haiti to save the day. I think that this feeling is fine and normal, but needs to be channeled in a more productive way.

Many people, including church people, are suspicious of income-producing projects as somehow threatening to our capitalist culture. And it is true: if everyone did as i am suggesting, the incomes of those who profit from the labor of others would go down, or prices would go up (which amounts to the same thing). This is what gets people really upset: my view is that would be fine. People in the U.S. are not accustomed to paying the full value of the goods they consume, because they get them from cheap labor that does not sustain life. And just how many houses and cars do people need?

Catastrophes are the one time that institutional charity makes sense to me. People need help to pick up the pieces (and to pay school fees) after everything has been destroyed. But it should not end there, and ususally it does. And there is something seriously wrong with our system of disaster relief: why are there so many relief workers driving around in new jeeps, while Haitians are still living in tents made of sticks and bedsheets?

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.

Haiti Earthquake

I arrived in Haiti without incident, but there was definitely something more emotional than usual about the flight. Mine was one of the first commercial flights. Usually planes to Haiti are filled with U.S. church people on one kind of mission or another (it seems like everyone and their cousin has some kind of project in Haiti, and that was before the earthquake), and you can tell which ones they are because they often wear matching hats or t-shirts...and sometimes great big crosses. There was one such group this time, but there were also groups with t-shirts that said things like "hazmat team," and there was one obvious medical team as well. The one church group had matching combat vests, and i saw one of them reading a manual entitled "hostage survival." I think they have been watching too many sensationalistic news reports. And you can imagine that i have some choice words to say about equating church ministry with combat.

But the vast majority of passengers were Haitians visiting their relatives, all of them carrying stuff. Many people had tents and sleeping bags as their hand luggage...maybe for themselves but more likely for relatives who are still sleeping outside. People were also carrying bags of toiletry items...probably because their checked bag was overweight, and so they had to take it out and carry it on (i did the same thing...i had 150 pounds of luggage and had to stuff things into my carry-on while at the check-in counter so they wouldn't charge another 100 bucks for being overweight). Several people were carrying on giant teddy bears. That was what nearly moved me to tears.

As we were landing in Port-au Prince I could see from the window vast tent cities. The nicer ones were relief workers, complete with supplies piled high. When we were driving through Port-au-Prince, i could see that some of the Haitian tent cities had matching canvas tents which were obviously donated by some agency or another. But many of them were tents made of any kind of thing: tin, plastic, cardboard, sheets...whatever. They were packed into places where the rubble had been cleared. There was plenty of substandard housing like this in Port-au-Prince before (something that many relief workers likely do not know) but now it has multiplied and is located in places where it never was before. And they are all suffering from lack of sanitary facilities, clean water, or food.

You have all seen pictures of the devastation, so there is no need to repeat it here. Basically, there are piles of rubble everywhere.

I am in Les Cayes now and leave for Baraderes tomorrow. I am staying with my friend Pascal, who is also housing a group of medical relief workers from Mexico. I had an interesting discussion with them this morning. They were telling me about their work, which involves treating amputees and all kinds of injuries from the earthquake. Some people were lucky enough to make their way to Les Cayes for treatment, and they are still arriving. Many of them have received no medical treatment whatsoever since the earthquake. They say the hospitals here are saturated.

They told me the story of one man who was trapped under the rubble and he cut off his own arm to escape. He arrived at the hospital some time later, with his arm wrapped but the bone and muscle hanging out. And they said there are many such stories.

Then we got into a discussion about what they have learned from being here. They are horrified at the extent of the poverty, and that it is the whole country, and not just isolated or small pockets. They don't understand why it is like this, but by and large they blame the government. They said they felt "impotent" here...that they could not even make a dent in the need. (I have heard medical people say that before. I think they are used to being able to fix things.) They are amazed at the resilience of people (like someone cutting off his arm, and then surviving for several weeks before making his way to another city because he heard there were foreign doctors there). They said it made them think about their own lives in Mexico. Haiti does that to people.

They said that they learned that life is short, too short to just conform to social norms and live a life according to the expectations of status and success. They said you have to do at least one good thing with your life. One young nurse told me that she thinks this trip was not that thing...that she has to think of something to do with her life that will affect others long term... not to save the whole world, but affect some small group or groups where she is. It was good to reflect with them. I hope those sentiments last.

God's Grace in Haiti

I returned last week from an excellent trip to Haiti. The idea was to iron out shipping procedures, meet with the coffee growers to evaluate the project so far, and see what our next steps will be. We got a good sense of what we will need to do for shipping, and anticipate testing the system this fall. That is, if the road between Port-au-Prince, the capital, and Les Cayes, the nearest city to where the growers are, gets repaired. It is currently covered with water from the recent flooding. If there is a road, then we feel prettyconfident we will be able to get a good-sized shipment in time for Christmas sales.

Check our website regularly (www.justhaiti.org), or sign up for our mailing list, if you are interested in buying the coffee for Christmas. We will have special packages and cards and all kinds of things!

The evaluation from the farmers was awesome. They talked about the importance of the training we gave them, and also of the agronomist we hired to work with them.They have put into practice new production and processing methods, which has led to increased yield and higher quality beans. They are now no longer using the "fermentation" method of processing, but the wet method common to most coffee purchased in the export market. I tried it...it is really good!

But the wet method is very labor intensive, and so now they want the machines that will make it easier. We are planningto give them a no-interest loan to purchase the machines, once everyone figures out the cost and how to get them there. We are trying to raise money for our loan fund right now as well.

For me, the trip was really rewarding. The growers referred to the project as "God's grace." I felt so proud to have started something that they perceive of as God's grace. I was also proud that in the mission statement of their association, they wrote that they want to improve their own situation, but also the situation of their neighbors. They are returning generosity with generosity. I was also excited to see how empowering the formation of the association has been for them. They talked about how they are developing relationships with each other that they never had before, sharing ideas, meeting regularly, and working together for a common goal. It is awesome to be a part of this, and I know that many of you who receive my emails are also a part of it. I hope that in reading this you also feel proud of what you are doing and the difference we are making in this little corner of Haiti.

I know that many of you are wondering how hard they were hit by the hurricanes and flooding. Baraderes was flooded, worse than usual, I think. (As many of you know, the river in Baraderes floods after every major storm.) By the time I got there it was a sea of mud, but the waters had receded from most of the town. The rivers were still very high, and the ground saturated, and there was widespread fear of a malaria epidemic. I know that there is some emergency aid flowing into Haiti, but I doubt much of it will get to isolated Baraderes.

I often think about how much emergency aid has flowed into Haiti over the years, and how little it has accomplished. After 50 years of international relief, Haiti is still the poorest country in the world. I feel very confident that projects like ours are a better solution. We want people to gain the self-sufficiency needed in order to build their own infrastructure and take care of their own medical needs. Relief leads to dependence, and people seem to lose the ability to come up with their own solutions.

It is one of the most exciting things about our coffee project: for the first time, these growers have hope for their own futures. They are planning for themselves, and talking about how they will use their newly-earned income. They never had any reason to hope before, because no-one was ever willing to invest in them. Investment is a lot different than relief.

Announcing Just Haiti

It's official. We filled out all the forms for non-profit status last spring and were granted it this fall. We are officially Just Haiti, and you can find us at http://www.justhaiti.org/.

Our broad mission is working for justice, peace, and poverty alleviation in Haiti...but our project right now is working with a group of subsistence farmers in Baraderes (where we have a long-term relationship with the community) to help them form a legal cooperative, improve the quality of their coffee, and sell it for a higher price in the organic fair trade export market.

Why Haiti? you may be asking. Partly it is due to our relationship with the community. When I left my position at St. John's I did not want to just forget about Baraderes, and it seemed clear that St. John's was not going to further expand their work in the community. Another reason is that Haiti is still the poorest country in our hemisphere, and perhaps in the world. It seems to me that we have a chance to facilitate the bringing of a more dignified life to this community, and I do not want to let that chance pass by.

I also have enormous admiration for Haitians. They were brought to the island from different parts of Africa through the Atlantic slave trade..in fact, at one point half of the slave trade went to Haiti. Out of disparate tribal origins, in an environment of incredible violence and cruelty, they formed a new culture, religion, and language, and came together as a people to overthrow the slaveholders and to become the first colony in the Western hemisphere to declare their independence. An interesting fact is that the reason so many slaves were sent to tiny Haiti was because they had to keep replenishing the plantation workers: they died too quickly to reproduce.

We traveled to Baraderes in January to begin a process of formation for the farmers so that they will understand better what they need to do to produce coffee for the export market. We brought with us a team from the Mexican cooperative Cafe Justo, which I had encountered while working on the U.S. Mexico border in 2005. The Cafe Justo folks formed their cooperative, with the assistance of the Presbyterian border ministries, as a way to help subsistence farmers stay on their land, so they would not have to make the dangerous migration north, across the border, in search of a liveable wage.

The Cafe Justo model not only guarantees their cooperative members a fair trade price, but it also owns the roasting business, where most of the profitis made in the coffee business. As a result of the money brought in by the roasting business, Cafe Justo has provided health care for all its members, a water purification system for their community, and improved buildings and infrastructure. Note that the community is providing this for itself, as the fruits of their own labor, rather than through charity from the north. We want to use their model in Haiti, which is why we brought them with us.

The Cafe Justo guys conducted a two-day training for about 25 Haitian farmers representing 18 very small rural communities. They basically went through a step by step process of explaining everything they did to create a successful business. Imagine this: the guys from Just Coffee spoke in Spanish, and then it had to be translated into English, and then from English to Haitian Creole! What was exciting for me about this was the idea of campesinos from one country supporting campesinos from another country. The guys from Mexico, who are rural poor themselves, were shocked at the extent of the poverty they witnessed in Haiti. At the end, they said they would like to remain involved.

One thing we learned from the whole thing is that the Haitian farmers are growing the exact same type of coffee under very similar weather and shade conditions as the Cafe Justo farmers. The difference is that in Haiti they are using a fermentation (dry) process of drying the beans that saves time and requires less equipment (and therefore less expense) but leaves the coffee with a slightly unusual taste. This is okay forthe domestic market, but internationally people are not used to the taste. So in order for this to work, the Haitians will have to change their production methods.

An interesting side note is that in the 18th century Haiti supplied half of Europe'scoffee.

They now know what they have to do, and we heard over and over again how pleased they were with the training. These are the methods that their forebears used, but had been largely forgotten. We have hired a local agronomist to work withthem half-time, and we have told them that once they are ready we will provide them with a very low or no-interest loan to buy the machinery they need, to be paid back out of coffee sales. Meanwhile, we are working on our side to figure out how to get the coffee out of Haiti and where to sell it. As they pay the loan back to us, we will be able to do the samething in other communities, which is what Cafe Justo has done.

For Love of Coffee

I cannot describe in words the economic poverty in Haiti. I have worked and lived all over the place, and still never seen anything like Haiti. I thought Bolivia would compare, but it does not. I notice that I now use Haiti as the benchmark....arethe roads as bad as in Haiti? Are there as many people living without clean water, electricity, and something besides an open fire for cooking? Is adult illiteracyas high? Are there as many houses that look substandard?

The answer is always no. I hate writing this, truthfully, because I feel like all my Haitian friends who receive these emails will be horrified. Haiti is much more than economic deprivation. As I write this, I am drinking Haitian rum and thinking about past fun times in Baraderes (...singing Haitian folk songs in the rectory in Baraderes at the top of our lungs, teaching the middle school students how to sing "We Are Marching in the Light of God" in 5 languages, drinking Prestige beer on the balcony...). Haiti remains in my heart, which explains why I spent 9 days of my vacation there.

And yes, it has more to offer than just fine alcoholic beverages.....When I was working on the US-Mexico Border last summer, one of the groups CPT worked with was called JustCoffee, which is the brand name of a cooperative of coffee farmers in Chiapas, Mexico. The organization buys the coffee from its members at a fair trade price, then roasts, bags, markets, and ships it to the north. Providing a just price to the farmers and keeping the jobs in Mexico is way of facilitating people being able to stay on their land, instead of migrating through the dangerous desert heat and the Border Patrol in order to findbetter wages up north, in the US.

I began to think that perhaps we could replicate the JustCoffee model in Baraderes. I knew from past work that there are coffee farmers in Baraderes, and also that at one time Haiti produced some of the best coffee in the world. I also knew that St. John's has done awesome work in Baraderes with education and public health, but while the children are being educated and staying healthier, there are still no jobs. Anyway, long story short, a group of us assembled to test out the idea, and found it warmly received by the coffee producers in Baraderes. So we traveled in October to talk to the farmers and see the coffee farms.

The trip to the growers involved a long and grueling hike in the heat and humidity. When we reached the top of the mountain, the site of the home of one of the growers, his wife greeted us with freshly-prepared coffee served on fine china. This was in a home with no sanitation facilities and with dirt floors.

We are all learning a great deal about coffee production. These are useful things that they do not teach you in seminary, such as what color the berry has to be when you pick it, how to husk them by hand, and what is the most common coffee bean pest. I am now the proud owner of two manuals about management of the commoncoffee borer.

We are still processing what we learned in Baraderes and have not made any decisions about how we will proceed next. We brought back about 25 lbs. of green beans for quality testing and will evaluate the results. As the project continues to unfold, I will write about it.