Haiti Project

Home Again...

2011-11-15T06:01:00.001-08:00

Safely returned November 7th. Over 425 people seen and treated by our Medical Team. Bob Fairchild, designed and built a "gassifier stove". This is incredibly exciting technology that we will be sharing about soon.
We brought back fresh roasted coffee, and some very beautiful artwork that we will be selling for this Christmas Season. We are looking forward to seeing everyone soon in our travels.
Will post more soon.
Our heartfelt thanks,
Bob and Denise

October 20th 2011 update

2011-10-20T18:15:00.000-07:00

For all of the faithful collaborators and supporters of the Haiti Project, here is a quick update. We always intend to keep everyone currant but it seems like time fly's by, and we forget to update everyone. We are a very grassroots organization, everyone volunteers, so sometimes unfortunately we get behind.

        We are preparing to leave on our eleventh trip. We are bringing a medical team and lots of mostly donated meds. We will also be surveying our newly purchased land. This property is for The Fr.Jim Bretl Agricultural Center. We need to discern how much money is needed to build a wall around the 4.5 acres. We will plant mango trees as soon as we can secure the property from goats and vandals. Once the mango trees are established we will the plant vanilla orchids. The mango trees will start producing in five years. At that point the center will begin to be self sustainable.

        Our vision is to create training and jobs in an environment that you will feel the presence of Christ when you enter.

        This center is a big vision but when we started the school lunch program that seemed impossible also.

Bob and Denise

If you would like to contribute to the shipping container this year, Please look at this list Needs of Haiti 2011

2011-02-26T10:56:00.000-08:00

Paint Plumbing Hardware /materials Tools Electric Miscellaneous Children Medical Food paint trays pipe dope cabinet locks wood chisels 24 elect ceiling lamp fixtures and bulbs folding table with adj legs Clothes Empty pill containers (with the labels removed Rice (in a plastic sealed container) rollers sealers cabinet hardware screw driver sets electric connectors wire nuts,etc duck boards shoes Ibuprofen (Adult, Infants and children's Dried Beans in a plastic sealed container brushes plumber putty keyed alike padlocks 1/2" socket set 12-2/w/grnd dish dryer racks Formula Tylenol (adult, children, and infant ladders ext and step caulk gun hardware cloth ext and adapters metal recep boxes and covers scale for weighing bags Hair Bows Liquid tears Chicken feed paint for tools handles (3colors) silicone Masonite and plywood deep well sockets receptacles dust pans School supplies Eye drops vegetable seed toilet seats nails and screws breaker bar switches brooms erasers Anti fungal cream black bd paint electric water pump to increase pressure assorted hardware electric tool kits (3) assorted plastic zip lock bags composition books Stretchers transporting the sick sinks Phillips bits generators anti biotic hand sanitizer pencils Lotion ball cock valves chicken wire meters engine cleaner chalk Cream for Vaginal yeast infection water wand fence and post Machetes carburetor cleaner small toys Vitamins (adult, children, Infants. Prenatal) hose bibs #9 wire Shovels Iron tablets laundry tubs elect fence wire and insulators Hoes maps Anti biotic Cream 3/4 and 1" fittings pvc solar lites Garden Hoses globes glue and cleaner Rakes flash cards 3/4 and 1" pvc pipes Rotor tiller class room clocks roll black pipe 3/4 Wagons 3/4 black pipe fittings Wheel Barrels Generators hammers hand saws files hack saws carpenter pencils

Volunteers?

2011-02-12T06:33:00.001-08:00

We have 2 projects that need someone to head up. 1st, we need a small engine mechanic to tune up and repair generators and other items that are donated to ship to Haiti. 2nd we need some one to head up a soap project. Any one feel called to help

How Haiti can reclaim sovereignty

2011-02-04T05:39:00.000-08:00

Follow the link to a thoughtful article on NGOs and Haiti's sovereignty. I believe the work we are doing to serve Fr.Jadotte and the people of Rivere Mancelle is in contrast to the shot gun approach of many of the well meaning groups working there. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/feb/03/haiti-voluntarysector

A perspective on where the money is being spent in Haiti.

2011-01-16T08:11:00.000-08:00

Following is quoted from Sunday, January 16, 2011 http://www.jamaicaobserver.com

...former President Bill Clinton -- who co-chairs the 26-member Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission (IHRC) -- about equal representation on the IHRC from the international donors and Haiti? Does she realise that the IHRC is dominated by non-Haitian policy-makers and management to the point of provoking complaints over 'sovereignty' from the Haitian Cabinet?

President Clinton would have told the congresswoman of some of his own deep disappointments over the US failure to match DELIVERY of aid with PLEDGES made. By last year end, an official assessment had pointed to a mere 10 per cent delivery, at best, of the original US$9 billion identified as 'recovery' aid from the US and its allies.

The Haitian professor of sociology at Wesleyan University and author of The Prophet and Power -- Jean Bertrand Aristide, the International Community and Haiti, noted in a recent article in the Washington Post that of the estimated US$267 million doled out so far in more than 1,500 contracts, only 20 of those, worth US$4.03 million, or $1.60 out of every $100: have gone to Haitian firms. The rest went to US firms with 23 per cent awarded to two large American firms in "no-bid contracts..."

In the meanwhile, the BBC, as well as CNN and other leading US media continue to report on the nightmarish existence that an estimated one million Haitian earthquake victims continue to face every day and every night. They live in the most dehumanising conditions in make-shift tents where women and girls are routinely raped and are unable to get protection from whatever the designated security arrangements might be.

In more recent reports Amnesty International and the UK-based charity, Oxfam, have expressed deep concerns about the hellish survival conditions for more than 800,000 Haitians, huddled in these tents that offer no proper security and where criminality and sexual violence against women and girls have become a way of life.

CECILE-ANNE MULLER journal of Nov trip 2010

2010-12-12T18:43:00.001-08:00

Dear family and friends,

As many of you know, I spent 2 weeks in Haiti this past month, joining a very small NGO (about a dozen volunteers), founded by a couple of fellow church members.

Before going, I promised to write an account of this trip, so here it is. Basically it’s my diary and kind of follows its timeline. It’s factual therefore pretty dry. Its primary use is to record my memories, but I hope you will enjoy it.

I apologize to those of you who speak only French. Maybe Guy-Louis could translate?

------------

I first heard of the group when the founders, Bob and Denise Snyder, talked to my church for a fundraising drive. They were charismatic and passionate about their charitable mission. They had been the first ones to enquire about that mysterious parish in Haiti with which a church authority had twinned us some time before. Usually, parish twinning means no more than an extra Sunday Mass collection every so often. But Denise was curious. And some 10 years ago she went on a fact-finding mission, just by herself. She came back appalled. Haiti has been her lifework ever since. Her husband Bob got hooked too. They have adopted this sister parish, Riviere Mancelle, located in a remote, mountainous area of Northern Haiti. They started this mini NGO, FeedHaiti.org. They gathered a few interested people and a team now goes to Haiti every year in late fall when the sun lowers its clout a bit, to implement specific projects. Bob and Denise tirelessly go from church to church of any denomination to raise funds. They will talk to anybody who’s willing to listen. They have Fr. Jadotte, the Riviere Mancelle priest, go every year to Tennessee to campaign with them.

Riviere Mancelle is the wider area that Fr. Jadotte serves, named after the eponymous river that meanders through the region. He has a main rectory in the central hamlet, Kalabat, and over half dozen chapels in remote hamlets. Chapels may be a couple miles from each other, but travel is by foot only and it can take several hours from the rectory to say mass to any one chapel. Within the Riviere Mancelle parish, there are four elementary schools supervised by Fr. Jadotte and a religious order of nuns. The academic level is low. The teachers are folks that may, or more often may not, have gone through high school. Since illiteracy among adults is close to 100%, these little kids who will at least know to read and write are bearing the seeds of a better future for Haiti. In all the hamlets, church and parish school form a closed compound, the town center, so to speak. In Kalabat and Chateau, one of the other hamlets, there are also small dispensaries.

The parish schools charge a fee: $75 a year, including books and uniforms. Few locals can afford to send their children to school at that price when their daily earning is little more than a dollar. The first project the Snyders developed ten years ago was a child adoption program to expand the school enrollment. It has been quite successful thanks to the generous response of American sponsors to the Snyders’ ceaseless and passionate fundraising efforts. The combined enrollment of the four schools we support now reaches around five hundred. It’s a lot, considering there are only a few hundred people in each hamlet.

On her first trip, Denise also noted that children were going to school munching on sugarcane. She discovered that parents gave them these to much on in lieu of meals to allay their hunger. Kids and parents alike were eating only once a day at most, in the afternoon. (Alas, some still do). So Denise started a school lunch program, again funded by American sponsors. Denise now thinks that the kids don’t seem as malnourished as in the past.

Other projects completed over the years include bringing spring water to the rectory with an outside faucet for the wider public, installing solar panels on its roof for a few hours of evening light, and building several solar ovens. As these are useless on cloudy or rainy days, our two engineers started building “rocket stoves” to replace the traditional three-stone fires that are smoky and inefficient. This year, they were planning to build several more to serve the various lunch programs.

I just had accumulated my two weeks of annual vacation when I heard the Snyders plead their cause, so the timing was right for me. This year’s mission had an urgency borne of the triple tragedy that befell that nation already under the weight of crushing poverty: The Jan 12 earthquake that killed up to 350,000 people and left over a million crowded in dingy tent cities; hurricane Tomas that ruined crops and submerged entire towns; and now, cholera. The Nepalese UN peacekeepers emptied their latrine directly in a river adjacent to their camp. Cholera is endemic in Nepal and many Nepalese are asymptomatic carriers. Once in the river, this latest scourge spread like wildfire to the whole hydrographic system, as a direct consequence of poverty:

Because there is no electricity and no running water, people wash in the rivers. For lack of latrines, they use the rivers (and anywhere on land too) to relieve their bodily needs. For lack of clean water source, they drink that river water. And for lack of roads, they use rivers to travel, crossing it over and over for hours to reach their destinations.

Tuesday, Nov 9 and Wednesday, Nov 10

So we are six to board an AA plane in Nashville on that afternoon. We get acquainted. Besides Bob and Denise, I meet Bob Fairchild an engineer, this is his 4^th trip; a true scientist, logical, methodical; I will quickly discover that there is no problem he cannot solve. There is Rita, a massage therapist who served as a pharmacist during her one previous trip. She’ll be a pharmacist again, but she will generously practice her wonderful skills on us and our patients. She brought her son Mike who just graduated from engineering school. A bear of a guy, easy going; I am pulled to model my reactions on his no sweat attitude. While Bob and Mike will do their things, Denise, Rita and I will form the medical team. We brought over 600 lbs of medicines, donated by church members who responded generously to our appeals. Among these meds were 60,000 doses of Cipro, a cholera lifesaver, donated by a Tennessee hospital.

. After spending a short night in a Miami motel, we join with our interpreter, Jean Eloizin, in the airport at 5am. Jean is an inspiring success story: He is from Riviere Mancelle, our very destination, and knows most of the people there. In his twenties, frustrated by his inability to develop his potential, he immigrated to Florida. After some years and by the grace of God, he obtained his green card. He met his Haitian wife, Melicia, in Miami. She was from Gros Morne, the town close to his village, so they were already kind of family. Their life has been one of industrious enterprise, of study, of hard work at simultaneous jobs and of saving for their growing family. They have three daughters. The oldest, Patricia, just graduated from Tufts University. While in college, she did volunteer work in Haiti on agricultural projects. The second, Erika, was born with cerebral palsy. The third, still in high school, is poised to emulate Patricia’s accomplishments. These girls represent the best hope for Haiti: Grandparents never went to school, parents never went to college, but these bright young girls will have all the skills necessary to participate to the reconstruction of their country, and thanks to their parents’ wise guidance, they have the eagerness to do so.

It is the third time that Jean serves our group as an interpreter. It gives him an opportunity to see his parents and visit with childhood friends. I am immediately won over by Jean’s wide smile, which conveys strength of soul and gentleness combined, and by his warm bear hugs. Instant affinity and trust. As we are to work close together, I’m happy that it’s going to be with him.

A last leisurely stroll on plush carpets along gourmet coffee shops, eateries for all tastes and luxury shops while waiting for the plane, and we were off. Off a world that titillates all appetites to create more cravings along a lengthening spiral of self-centeredness, a world enslaved to degrading desires, a world that sucks up the world’s resources for its selfish ends making the rest of it poorer. And into its underworld, a world of hollow bellies and minds stunned by misery.

Port-au-Prince arrivals: A hangar, bare cement floor, no air-conditioning in the stifling heat because there are no doors, just gaping holes. One carrousel for several planeloads, hundreds of people cramped together jockeying for position, and one small wooden bench for people who’d rather wait till the crowd thins out. We meet a young American family, father pushing mother in a wheelchair, 2 little girls in tow. We chat a bit while waiting. They are moving to Haiti to serve in an orphanage; unsung heroes of charity.

Finally we get our 800 lbs of luggage together. At customs, we declare we have nothing in our luggage, no food, no medicines. The agents don’t care and don’t inspect our bags. We pass the first hurdle.

Our drivers are waiting for us in the two Land Rovers of the Gros Morne nuns with whom our group partners. They help us fend off the army of porters who want our business. One Land Rover carries most of the luggage and the other the rest and the eight of us. We are very crowded. The vehicles skirt Port au Prince, so we see little of the capital: A few tent cities; some buildings with concrete floors piled up like pancakes; many wooden shacks standing, as they withstood the quake better than concrete buildings. Past the city, we see mountains on the right, deforested, with wide swaths of denuded soil falling from summit to base. We bump along a rutted road that our driver navigates skillfully. This is national road #1, the best in the country. It is paved, of sorts, until Gonaives. It has quite a few long stretches of unpaved sections, rocks more than dirt, collections of potholes. Our Land Rover slaloms between the potholes. The car rattles, shaking us this way and that. We hang on to each other. People and animals on the road, all walking. Mangy dogs, and a lot of goats. These are tiny; they are not milk goats: They are not fed but left to fend for themselves, so they never have extra milk. They are used for meat. It is the only meat we’ll ever eat in Haiti we’re told, so we better get used to the idea.

A few tap-taps, old pickup trucks that serve as public transportation. Some trucks, and a fair number of “motos”, these tiny, lightweight motorcycles driven by people of means. They are overloaded, 3, 4, 5, up to 6 people on one. We pass crowded and dusty little towns, Kabare, St Medard, and St Marc, the epicenter of the cholera epidemic.

Gonaives is a big city, couple of hundred thousands maybe. It has electricity. Jean mentions he owns a house there and if he has the time, he will go back to check on it. He’s worried because just last week, Gonaives was up to ten feet under water, thanks to hurricane Tomas. What happened to his rental unit?

After Gonaives, no more semblance of pavement. Pure dirt and rocks, all the way to Gros Morne, the big city near Riviere Mancelle. No gravel, but rocks of all size, pointy ones that protrude high over the dirt and are murder on tires. Bob comments that on a past trip he got three flat tires between Gonaives and Gros Morne. We shake like laundry in a washer. The constant jarring gives me a headache. The hope of arriving soon keeps us steady.

Gros Morne has over 20,000 people, a good size city. No electricity, no running water, not one paved road. Houses have no window panes, just big holes. Glass seems inexistent. As there are no gardens, houses are right along the dirt roads that are called streets. We can imagine the dust that must cake the walls inside.

The city is bustling: A multitude of stalls with baskets full of vegetables and cheap gadgets. Lots of school kids going back home. There must be several schools as we see different uniforms. We even pass a school bus that is full of kids for a change. Outdated American school buses usually find a second life as public transportation in Central America. Road dirt, thick and smoky, fills the air. Along the city streets I see a single outhouse. Where people do their things is a mystery. Bob the engineer, a Haiti pro, says people defecate anywhere. A refined method is to do it in a plastic bag and toss the plastic bag on the road. “Beware of plastic bags!”, he sermons. Brief stop in Gros Morne to say hello to the nuns, Sister Pat and Sister Jackie, in their compound. Pat is an agronomist among other jobs, she has reforested an entire mountain. We can’t see her right now says the volunteer who greets us, she’s in the States, visiting her gravely ill mother. Jackie is a nurse; we can’t meet her either, she practically lives in the hospital caring for cholera victims. The hospital has a generator, I’m told. I’m wondering if it has glass windows.

So we leave for our final destination, Garsen, one of the hamlets of the Riviere Mancelle parish. The 100 mile trip between Port au Prince and Gros Morne took us 4 hours. Garsen is maybe four miles away. It will take us over half an hour on the narrow rocky road. We are dead tired. It’s 4 pm and the sun is low. People walking, all carrying heavy loads on their heads, five gallon paint buckets, parcels wrapped up in twine, some with chickens hanging from the sides. Goats tied up to the side of the road munching on weeds. Rare motos flying by.

Fifteen minutes out of Gros Morne, we are stopped by a young man frantically waiving us for help. He has 2 companions near his moto, one a woman lying still on the road. The man explains she just fell ill with cholera, they are trying to bring her to the Gros Morne hospital, but she’s so weak she fell off the moto. And could we give her a ride? The woman is cachectic, immobile, like in a coma, in a pool of liquid. Her dress pulled up. She obviously had a constant outpouring of diarrhea and vomiting. In our overloaded vehicles we don’t have the space for an extra cat. What can we do? Both drivers say no. Everybody in the group hesitates too. Even Denise and Bob, the ones with the oversized heart, realize we can’t take the woman on board. And I, maybe not the only one, acknowledge the muted but rising fear of contact with the dreaded cholera. I secretly feel relieved when Denise says we can’t help. The victims’ friends will have to prop her up on the moto and make good speed to the hospital. My relief is tainted with guilt. A last thought: We give the only drink we have on board, a Coca-Cola, urging the men to force the lady to take some. And off we proceed. Shaken and silent. Will the lady survive? If not, will we be responsible for her death? How much cholera will we meet? How can we help? Out thoughts torture us.

Finally, the last climb to Garsen. Up the last hill, excited kids crowd along the cars and cheer us along. Jadotte is waiting for us. His cooks have prepared a feast on their three-stone fires outside the house proper. His house in Garsen has some evening electricity thanks to Bob’s solar panels. Not enough to heat water though, and the shower has nice but cold, oh so cold, spring water!

Our first meal is typical: Fresh avocado, fried plantain, rice with beans with a tasty red sauce, a delicious pumpkin soup, popcorn, and goat meat, “cabrit”. Freshly squeezed papaya juice. We’ll have these staples daily from now on. Goat meat is mostly bones; spices and herbs make us forget its origin. Corn is skillfully popped by hand: We’ve never had burnt popcorn in our daily servings.

For the rest of our stay, we will have avocado breakfast, lunch and dinner. Fresh juice too, mostly papaya and passion fruit but some mango too. Mango season is over but banana and papaya are going strong. Papaya, mango and banana trees abound around.

After supper we chat, old friends get reacquainted over Haitian coffee spiked with Kremas. Kremas is a delight: 1/3 rum, 2/3 sweetened condensed milk, cloves, ginger, and vanilla. Definitely jazzes up Haitian coffee whose flavor trails far behind Starbucks’. Plans are made for our work. We’ll rest at Garsen another day before proceeding to the center of the Riviere Mancelle parish, the bigger Kalabat hamlet where the rectory is. We’ll set up our clinic there. The engineers will do their thing separately. We’ll also travel to a couple of outposts.

Night comes early; it’s pitch black by 6pm. The little light bulb does not receive much nurture and won’t last long. In Miami we woke up at 4 am and we’re tired. So we’re in bed before 8pm. I room with Rita. Rooms have no window panes of course. Just gaping holes covered with a sheer flimsy curtain. Our heavy sleep doesn’t mind the constant crowing of insomniac roosters below our window.

Thursday, Nov 11

The first daily Mass, at 6:30 am. Fr. Jadotte reads the gospel by candle and flashlight. A handful of villagers, and our whole contingent of Americans. After the readings in Creole, Jadotte asks Bob Snyder to do the readings in English. Same for the homily: After Jadotte’s homily in Creole, Bob is asked to do a homily in English. Bob is a fervent Christian and his homily is uplifting.

The rest of the day we do little. The little elementary school is attached to our house. We watch the kids going to their classes. There must be close to a hundred of them. Vivacious kids, all in pink uniforms. They look so cute. They wave at us before entering their respective classes. The kindergartners look at us as if we were Martians. They’ve not seen Whites before. Some call “Blan, Blan!”

They look proud of being able to go to school. Even with the schoolchild adoption program, the children attending school form a minority. Down to the littlest ones, they all seem conscious of their privileged status.

Three rooms, two grades per room. Window holes are crossed with a cement lattice that keeps the rooms dark. Since there is no electricity, I’m wondering how teachers and kids can read their books. Wooden benches without a backrest, cement floor, a blackboard. Old, rudimentary schoolbooks, much dog eared. The teaching method is obvious: repetition. Through the window holes, we hear a teacher point to letters or numbers on the blackboard while yelling their names, and the whole class repeats in unison.

Jadotte has organized a school assembly in the church which is fifty feet from the school. Kids proudly sing to us beautiful welcoming songs in Creole and English. Next, we Americans, do speeches. Denise pours out her love for the kids. They know that if they are in school it’s thanks to her. She’s Mama Denise, their much beloved benefactor. When she comes it’s with a big check for the schools. Next is Rita, who has brought inflatable world globes, and she explains where Haiti is. It’s well above the kids’ understanding, but just right for the teachers who don’t seem to have ever seen a globe. They crowd around Rita’s and look for Haiti. They seem awed. I’m last. Being the one medical person, my speech is about cholera. As the kids are learning French in school, I speak in French; it’s good for their education. In very simple and explicit terms I describe how the germ is transmitted to the mouth by dirty hands. For the teachers I explain how to purify water with Clorox. It is sold in markets in tiny bags of a couple of ounces. Bigger bags would be too expensive. I explain to the kids why and how they must wash their hands after pooping. In real life, how do they wash their hands at home? Nobody has running water. At best people poop in the river and can wash their hands in that water. But often they poop in the field, and have no water to wash their hands with. Never mind toilet paper, it’s unknown.

I make a strong point that they have knowledge now, they must teach their parents; and I repeat it over and over: They must be their parents’ teachers. It’s true for cholera and true for everything else. Any kindergartner here reads better than his parents.

After the speeches, Denise opens several bags of candy and distributes them one by one to each kid. They are ecstatic; candies are an exceptional treat here.

Noon: School lunch time. The kitchen is close to but separate from both the school and our house. It houses two traditional, smoky three-stone fires and a preparation table. The cooks bring the rice and bean mush that forms the school lunch. Kids eat in their classrooms. After lunch they wash their tin plates in the faucet in the school yard, thanks to our engineers who installed it some years ago, drawing the water from a spring high up on the hill behind. An occasion for much splashing and fun.

Our lunch is much more substantial: Like last night, a several course meal, avocados and friend plantain, rice and beans, cabrit, fruits. Our living quarters, dining room and bedrooms, are all on the second floor over the school. The cooks have to climb up a set of outside stairs to bring us the food. They do it so graciously!

In the afternoon, a brief school session until 2 pm and the kids are out running. Many of them will walk over an hour to get back home. Most will have to cross the river many times. They take their school shoes off to keep them dry. Uniforms too have to be kept dry. They are often dirty, and that’s understandable since they are washed in the river that is turbid and muddy.

Many kids return after a short while, having changed to their usual rags. They love being around us, they giggle. The little ones touch us to see if we’re real. A few older kids go back inside their classroom and scribble on the board. There are a couple of kids, points Emmanuel the school guardian, who hang out but have never been to school. The oldest is ten, says Emmanuel; he looks like six. Shy, big eyes, more eyes than body, it seems; he’s so tiny. And more raggedy than most. His clothes are filthy. And he’s dirty from hair to toes. No shoes. But many don’t have shoes either I notice. He stays in the back, maybe he’s ashamed of not being able to go to school. His presence on school grounds betrays his yearning. Emmanuel says he’s an orphan and lives with some distant relatives who don’t have money for his schooling.

The other kid goes to school, says Emmanuel who knows everything. But his parents can no longer afford his school fee and next Monday he will not be allowed to go back to school. It looks like he knows it. He appears withdrawn. Our schoolchild adoption program doesn’t have enough sponsors. The dirt-poor school can’t make exceptions. I make a note of their names: Jonel Fadeus and Jidelson Louis Jeune, or something like that. Neither one knows how to spell his name. I promise myself to sponsor them as soon as I return to the US. Meanwhile we give them candy.

What wasted potential in these kids! A later day we saw one that took two bucket lids, placed them vertically and tied a flat piece of plank in between. A broom handle at right angle to the contraption, and voila, he got a mini-wheelbarrow to carry his bucket! In the States he would make a wonderful engineer.

With nothing much to do, we watch the engineers repair the “Gator”, this tiny vehicle with six wheels and tires made of solid rubber, a gift from some donor. The Gator can climb up any slope and cross any river providing it’s shallow enough. Jean-Louis, the illiterate jack of all trades at Garsen, is helping Bob and Mike. He can’t read or write his name but can repair anything. The Gator gets fixed quickly.

The afternoon is young. We have time to visit Boucan Richard, another hamlet in the parish. Like Garsen, it has a chapel and a small elementary school. Denise is anxious to see the school kids there. We prepare our bags of candy and we inflate our world globes and here we go. We are getting used to the bumpy roads. Short ride, less than an hour. The kids, a hundred of them, are waiting in lines for us in the courtyard around the solar oven, all in their brightly colored uniforms.

As in Garsen, the kids serenade us with welcoming songs and they sing beautifully. Some in Creole and some in English. They have rehearsed long and hard, their tunes and unison are perfect. And they have prepared gifts for us, baskets loaded with papayas, bananas, and passion fruits. They are excited to see us. Again Denise greets them with all the love in her heart. She has tears in her eyes when she addresses these kids, neatly dressed in their uniforms, intently listening to her, the hope for a better Haiti. Rita gives her globes away and I make my cholera speech. Kids and teachers alike listen somberly: They’ve seen cholera death in their midst. The high point of the assembly is when Denise empties her bags of candy in the kids’ hands.

The teachers give us a tour of the school. A copy of the one in Garsen. Wooden benches and a blackboard. No windows. Two grades per room. We can’t stay long. We’ve to leave by 4:30 if we want to return to Garsen before complete dark. Denise reassures the kids she will be back next year as always.

Back in Garsen: Before dinner I take a brief stroll in the hamlet. It’s very small. Most people are dispersed on the flanks of the various hills around us. There seems to be only a few houses near our compound. Simple affairs: slabs with four walls. One room, two at most. Wooden door, window holes. A three-stone fire outside. The paths have all kinds of litter, and the one I travel has a suspicious wetness in the middle. Kids follow me, laughing. They are very friendly. Candy is one English word they know: They want candy; alas I don’t have any.

Friday, Nov 12

Finally we leave for Kalabat. Kalabat is located in a different valley. To reach it we have to go back to Gros Morne and start in a new valley, of Riviere Mancelle.

On the way, we pass the place where the cholera victim was; no sign of the trio. Yesterday we learned that the Gros Morne hospital has been so deluged with cholera patients that it has locked its doors and is turning patients away. Did that lady on the road make it in time? A prayer for her, hoping she did and that it was not too late for her. Leaving Gros Morne, we follow the Riviere Mancelle bed. For many miles we are actually in the river bed, half dry in that season. The driver carefully selects dry segments when they are available, and has to go in the water when they are not. It is always risky because it is hard to judge the depth of the river. Teeden, our expert driver, has done it many times, it’s no sweat for him, but it looks scary to me, river naïve as I am. It’s when we have to go in the water that the ride is bumpiest; the river bottom is not as flat as the dry sections.

Midway to Kalabat, the Land Rovers have had it. Some days they can go all the way, and some days they can’t. It depends on the water level. Today, the level is too high at this point. At L’Attrell, we all alight, people and the mountain of luggage. The rest will be by foot, a forty-five minutes walk/wading combo. Porters are waiting for us; skinny people used to carry heavy loads. Women grab our suitcases and swing them onto their heads, 40lbs bags, and proceed walking. Bob Snyder has a handicap and must use a donkey. Two other donkeys carry the heaviest bags, a good 200lbs per donkey. There are no horses in Haiti, no cows either.

So we walk. The river gorge is narrow. The path sometimes ends against a cliff. It’s time to cross the river and go to the other side to pick up a new path. Same thing for that path: It ends against another cliff and we have to cross the river again to grab another path. And so on. Thus, we cross the river about 22 times. The water is not too swift, and never reaches higher than the knees. At times, we meet women doing their laundry, with naked toddlers playing and doing their thing in that water, contributing to the spread of fecal-borne diseases. There are no fish in any Haitian waters. Killed a long time ago. Pollution I presume? After a while, I enjoy the river crossings better that the walking on land. The paths are filthy, somewhat muddy, so full of donkey poop that it hard not to avoid stepping on some. Bob keeps reminding us that people too poop on the road. We have to learn to differentiate the two. So, I prefer the river. Since we can’t see its bottom, I don’t have to worry about what I’m stepping on. As long as we don’t put our feet in our mouths, we will be safe. The only nuisance is the gravel that inserts itself under the feet. I have to empty my shoes often. And I skid several times. One of the porters, a lady carrying one of our heavy bags on her head, notices my lack of balance and grabs my arm with her free hand, steering me along the best shallows.

Finally, Kalabat! A hamlet on a hill overlooking the river, the center of the Riviere Mancelle area, with the church/rectory/school/dispensary compound at the highest point. The rectory is brand new, as the old one was destroyed in the recent earthquake, although over a 100 miles away from the epicenter. It is big, two floors, seven bedrooms. The kitchen is separate, as usual, but it’s an enclosed building, fancy! The dishes are washed under an outside faucet. As Denise humorously states, there are many bedrooms, but not a single sink in the house. There is one flush toilet, and one shower with no windows. So at night we have to hang a flashlight over the shower head. Cold water of course. That makes for economy: Only Jean, Haitian born and used to cold water from birth on, takes long showers. The rest of us Americans, we take our showers at lightning speed. Since there are no sinks, we use water in a cup to brush our teeth and spit it outside the window. First, we warn people below, of course. Jadotte uses bleach to purify the spring water we use for drinking.

Jadotte has 3 cooks in Kalabat, and one lady who does the dishwashing. The cooks are young girls, smart and efficient. The dishwasher is an elderly widow that Jadotte employs to give her a little money. Perhaps feeling guilty about her severe stutter that makes her unintelligible, she smiles broadly all the time, displaying her toothless gums. As in Garsen, we feast on avocado, papaya and mango juice, fried plantain, cabrit and more cabrit, rice and beans with delicious sauces, some green veggies, potato cakes for dessert. And the heavenly Kremas to enliven a dull (to my taste) cup of coffee.

The church is less than 100 feet from the rectory. It too has suffered from the earthquake: Long cracks from top to bottom on the right side of the façade. On the apse, even bigger cracks. Jadotte has no money for repairs. The school behind the church has suffered from the quake, and is close to being unusable. Bob Snyder is planning to rebuild it. Next to the school is the nuns’ residence. There used to be two nuns, but there is only one at the moment. The grapevine whispers that the one who left couldn’t stand the one who’s staying and she quit. It’s hard to live together if you’re only two and don’t like each other.

Before dinner, I take a leisurely stroll down to the river. There is a permanent little market by the shore. Three women squatting near their baskets of rice and beans and some trinkets. The passersby don’t respond to their calling. The women don’t mind, they’re busy chatting.

Again I room with Rita, in a tiny room with glass-less windows that let in strong, cooling breezes at night. The climate is tropical, and we need only a sheet at night. We keep the door wide open, it’s too hot.

Saturday morning, Nov 13

While the two engineers are busy building rocket stoves, our medical team finally gets to work. We’ll operate from the little dispensary behind the school. It’s a tiny three-room, dilapidated building that doesn’t deserve its name. Two rooms in front and in the back, a dark room that serves as a pharmacy. No lighting.

Up front, the room on the left is where we will be seeing patients; it has a rickety table, an old exam bed and a cabinet with a few meds in complete disarray. The room on the right is the nursing room, with four cots touching each other. When we enter it this morning, we find all the cots occupied with people, all silent and still. They look like skin and bones, and are hooked to IV bags hanging from nails in the wall plaster.

A young lady comes out from the back. She is Philo, a recent graduate from nursing school. She was visiting the area when cholera struck. She was hired by the nun who directs the parish school and is staying until the epidemic is over. We’ll quickly discover how precious Philo is and we’ll bless God ceaselessly for sending her to Kalabat. As she introduces herself to us, she mentions that since the onset of the epidemic, a week or so ago, she’s seen 30 cases of cholera just in Kalabat, this little hamlet of a few hundreds. And no deaths!, she smiles proudly.

There is no governmental presence here, and no big relief agency like Doctors Without Borders or World Vision or the like, nobody but little Philo who dropped in from nowhere. She has no medicines but she gets IV bags from the Gros Morne hospital. When she has to, she walks/wades to Gros Morne, two hours away if she can’t rent a moto on the way. I suppose that on the way back, she carries the case of IV bags on her head, like everybody else.

We unpack our meds, and give Philo tons of Cipro. We also have antiemetics for the vomiting, and antidiarrheals for diarrhea although their use is controversial in cholera. “What providence!” she thanks us. She had no oral medicines at all until we came.

For the sake of hygiene, we’ll conduct our clinic in the left room without going to the cholera room on the right, unless Philo needs our help. She will need it only once. She is well organized and nothing fazes her.

Cholera

In the days to come, cholera will intensify its grip. An average of six patients will come in daily, usually brought in on homemade stretchers by relatives; and at any time of day or night. We will often be awakened by the shouts of people passing by our dorm on their way to the dispensary. We learned later that Philo slept only 3-4 hours a night during our stay.

No deaths until we came. Alas, death did come. By the time we left, the hamlet had had ten deaths, just at the dispensary. In the remotest areas there were many more deaths reported by the grapevine, of people who did not make it to the dispensary. Kids and old people.

In the dispensary, the cholera victims were mostly elderly. The only child that died in the dispensary was a twelve year old girl who was brought to us so dehydrated that she was beyond salvation. Philo managed to put several bags on saline in her and she revived a little. But Philo’s efforts were too late: The little girl died a few hours later. All that was left of her was a tiny lump under a blanket, waiting for the parents to build a casket for her.

Death knocked even around the rectory where there is spring water and where Jadotte is purifying the drinking water with Clorox. He has given strict orders to the cooks. Fresh produce is thoroughly washed with clean water before consumption. I did observe the cooks washing their hands frequently at the spring water faucet. Despite all these precautions, Paulo, the compound guardian who lives on site, had two relatives who died of cholera during our stay. We, Americans, are on guard. We’re constantly rubbing our hands with the antibacterial gel we brought, and never, never touching our mouths with our hands. Alas, Haitians don’t, can’t imitate us.

The cholera toxin opens the flood gates that hold body water behind the colon. When these gates open, there is a deluge of tissue fluids pouring through the colon and exiting the body en masse out of both ends. Bodies can lose 20 lbs of water in a day. The body tissues become as dry as beef jerky. Dehydration is so massive and so quickly massive, that cholera can kill within hours of the first symptom. That’s why rehydration is so vital. Alas, when people often come too late; even if they start early for the dispensary, it may take them 4 hours or more to get here, like folks in Danti, a parish hamlet we did not visit because it’s that far. By the time these folks get here, they’re half dead, veins are flat, with their walls sucked up as if they had been vacuumed out. The only time Philo called me for help, she had tried to stick a poor cholera lady over a dozen times without success. She wanted me to try too. With less experience than her in that field, I gave her little hope. Late that night, with Philo holding a candle for lighting, I tried arms, hands, feet, even neck, without success. The lady had lost so much water that she was weighing 60 lbs at best. Seeing our failure, her relatives carried her to a Voodoo priest nearby. He was not successful either: she died an hour later. As days went on, we heard more and more funeral wails rising from the river, that crossroads to everywhere. As sad as it was, we had to get used to them. For the sake of efficiency, emotions had to be checked.

During our stay, the cots were always all occupied, and the one baby crib as well. Every morning, before seeing our regular patients that were waiting outside in a long line, I used to check the cholera room to say hello to the new arrivals and find out who survived. Mostly to bring a smile and words of hope to these people waiting between life and death. Patients couldn’t answer my greetings; they were still, too weak to move or speak. By the time they reached us, they usually had lost all the water they could lose without dying; so there was little diarrhea on the cots. We were grateful for that as we didn’t have a single basin that fit under the patients’ bottoms. Still some residual retching. They were all so gaunt! The lifeless skin was stretched tight over their bones, the muscle layer that dried up was almost absent. That they were surviving was a tribute to the resiliency of the human body.

Relatives squatted near their sick loved ones, holding their heads over a bowl while they were vomiting, wiping their drool, trying their best to make them comfortable. There was little room for these relatives as there was barely enough for the four cots. Most relatives waited outside sitting on the steps or on the dirt. At dusk Philo lighted a candle so the insiders could see a little.

Treatment was simple: immediate IV bags, one in each arm at the same time, running as fast as we could make them run, over and over, until the patient could sit up. Phenergan as antiemetic. By mouth, as we had it only as pills. One pill after another. Despite the continual vomiting, a little got absorbed in time, and slowly it was taking effect. Then and only then could we give the lifesaving Cipro. We didn’t bother with oral rehydration solutions: By the time Philo’s patients came in they no longer were able to swallow anything. We relied on IV saline. The method worked when patients did not come too late. Thank God Philo never ran out of IV bags, although she had to walk hours to get them.

When one died, we covered the body with a blanket and waited for relatives to pick up the body. The cot was quickly cleaned up with the poor means available as it often was needed soon after.

Saturday, Nov 13 and Monday Nov 15---Thursday, Nov 18

So, we set up clinic on that first day in Kalabat. We quickly establish a routine: We’ll see patients in the room on the left, the way I do in my clinic in the US. Jean and I sit together by the table, I talk and he interprets. Knowing his folks, he also advises me, and his advice is precious. He sees signs I don’t see. He knows how much pain actually lies behind the poorly worded pleas and he knows the reason why; he knows what it means when people say “I feel air in my heart” and weird things like that; he knows how people live and asks for the details that are clue to a diagnosis; he knows who’s poor and who’s poorer. How much medicine we give depends heavily on his estimates. After the consult, I write the “prescriptions” on a piece of paper, and the patient shows it to Rita and Denise in the pharmacy room, and they in turn give the needed meds, if we have them. Jean gives the final instructions in Creole. A long line patiently awaits us every morning, sitting outside on the one bench or standing. They arrive early to make sure to be seen, some at dawn, and it’s about 5 or 5:30pm by the time we see the last one. For many it may be the only time in their lives that they will receive any medical care. This became the pattern until we left for the US. We see an average of 35 patients a day. We cannot work too late because the building has no lighting and the windows are small. After 5pm we have to use flashlights. We do the best we can. Without any diagnostic tools, it is difficult to ascertain the true conditions of the patients. And our means are so little for the severity of the conditions we meet!

When patients finally get their turn to see me, I always ask their age. The old people lower their heads, giggle, smile embarrassingly and confess they don’t know it. They’ve never known it. Jean expertly eyeballs patients’ age and it’s always less than I think. He knows how fast people age here.

They barely know their names either, don’t even know how to pronounce them correctly and, not knowing the alphabet, have no idea how to spell them. Even some younger folks have difficulty estimating their age. Only among the older school kids do I find people who do.

Many old folks complain they can’t see. Their thick cataracts are obvious. Alas, nothing can be done. The closest ophthalmologist is so far, he is as unreachable as the moon, and as expensive. Most old folks are edentate. Younger ones have mouths full of rotten teeth. How can I advocate tooth brushing when they don’t know what a toothbrush is? And knowing that if they ever used one, it would be with river water, no cleaner than a cesspool?

Of the women, I always ask how many kids they have and how many are living. It’s always around ten, sometimes more, and many have died in infancy. All women complain of vaginal infections. No wonder, knowing in what water they bathe and how they live. Lodgings are a cement slab at best, enclosed by four walls with holes for windows and a wooden door, the whole thing topped by a tin roof. Sometimes that slab is divided by a wall, forming two small rooms. Banana mats on the floor. Usually not a piece of furniture besides the essential five-gallon paint bucket people use to gather river water for their daily needs. That water will be used mostly for drinking and cooking since all washing, body and clothes, is done in the river.

We’ve not brought enough antifungal cream and we quickly run out of it. All we have left is some ineffective anti-itch cream. And there is no way of finding out if their pain is due to a more serious sexually transmitted disease.

Women age prematurely. A thirty year old looks forty and a forty year old looks fifty. After that, most have lost their teeth and their faces are lined deep with hardships.

In addition to the meds that they may need, I prescribe massages since Rita, our self-styled pharmacist is also a wonderful masseuse. This is the only time in their lives these women will have been pampered. So, whether they really need it or not, they get a massage.

The most common complaints are gastrointestinal, pain, bloating, burning. We dispense a lot of antacids. I suspect a lot of conditions are due to parasites. By luck I discover a cache of expensive worm medicines in the cabinet and I prescribe them liberally.

Among adults, there are many backaches and other musculoskeletal complaints. Knowing their hard lives, bent down scratching the earth for grain little better than chickens, or carrying heavy loads on their heads over rough terrain, no wonder. All we have is ibuprofen and Tylenol.

There are a lot of skin diseases, some unidentifiable. There is this cute little one and a half month old baby, nice and plump thanks to a healthy mother’s milk, but he is covered in sores: Whether it is scabies, fungi, bacteria, or any of a number of parasites, it seems to be all of them at the same time, and then some. I don’t know what to give him. I finally give him a little of everything.

Many, many kids are mangy. Sores over their heads, and most of their skins.

As a rule, all little kids are small for their age. Every kid I see in the clinic looks malnourished. Stunted growth in most of them despite Denise’s school lunch program. Jean Eloizin laments that people are so small nowadays that Haiti no longer has a soccer team that can compete internationally.

A 12 year old boy with the stature of a 7 year old complains he has stomach pain all the time. After poking into the nature of his pain, it looks like his cramps were just hunger pangs. I ask him: “How many meals a day do you eat?”

He lowers his head, “Once”.

“And what do you eat?”

“Rice, some beans if we have some”

“Can you show me with your hands how much you eat?”

He makes a small fist.

No wonder he has stomach cramps! The children’s vitamins we brought would do nothing for them. It is useless to prescribe more food when it’s not available. This kid was not going to school so had no meal there. Even the school kids may be underfed. Some parents take advantage of the school lunch program to save on home staples at night. The kids we see have their shares of big bellies and stick legs, and reddish hair instead of black. All signs of malnutrition.

A couple of kids come in with 106 degree fever. They had walked an hour to see us. We load them with fever reducer and antibiotics, and make them wait until their fever drops to 102 before letting them go. Another day, a six-year old little girl comes with a severe otitis, pus flowing out of her ear like water from a faucet. She is screaming. Probably has mastoiditis. I urge parents to bring her to the hospital in Gros Morne. But they have gone once already, the treatment there didn’t do anything, so they refuse to go back again. I do load her with antibiotics but I know she needs surgery. What will happen to that child?

I see several huge goiters, all in women. Nothing I can do for them. They need serious testing, not available here. So many severe conditions, things we don’t see in the States, I begin to take them lightly. What can I do for them?

Big facial tumors. Huge scrotal hernias. An enormous bony tumor in a young man, on the side of his right arm near the wrist, bigger than a grapefruit. One horrible thing after another; as time goes on I get inured to these tragedies. One afternoon, a couple brings their seven month old baby girl. They’re concerned that her head has been getting big for a while. I almost recoil in horror: The child has a humongous hydrocephalus! It is busting her eyes out. Her protruding fontanel is so tight it feels ready to pop out. She’s not reactive, she may already be brain dead. I implore them to bring her right away to the hospital. I tell all of these patients to go to the hospital in Gros Morne. Most say they can’t do it. The hospital charges a fee that they can’t afford.

On the first day, the last patient is a skinny lady, as they all are, hiding something under a neck scarf. “I’m Stephanie” she says while cautiously unrolling her scarf to reveal a huge abscess, a good five-six inches long, at the base of the neck on the right. So swollen with pus, two inches tall. I have to lance it and evacuate that pus. Thank God I find a scalpel, forceps and scissors laying around, plus packing tape. Alcohol for sterilization. Lortab for anesthetic. She cries when I cut the abscess open, and cries louder when I extrude the pus by big gobs. There are many onlookers, so I order them to sing church hymns to comfort the patient. They do, and it is the most beautiful religious concert choir we’ve ever heard. They are Seven Day Adventists, they tell me. The lady quiets down and I can finish the procedure in a good enough fashion. But what is the infectious agent? Impossible to do a culture. Besides the usual culprits, it could be TB. Not knowing, I give her multiple antibiotics by mouth and schedule repacking daily. Next day she comes, and everyday; little by little the infection abates and the wound is getting clean. But it is not closed by the time we have to return to the US. I tell her she must go to the Gros Morne hospital for follow up. I fervently hope she does, but will she? In her living conditions, it is a sure thing that the abscess will reform without proper care.

In the US, we had collected a dozen pairs of no longer used prescription glasses. People in need of glasses try them one after the other. They always find one that fits their needs. How moving to see their joy at being able to see! This is one program we’ll have to expand.

A man comes in one day, crazy with grief. He buried his only child the afternoon before, a 16-year old boy, felled by cholera. The man is here for stomach pain. While he is waiting in line to see me, a neighbor runs to him and tells him his wife just died. “Of grief” says the neighbor. Whether grief or cholera, this poor man had lost his whole family in one day, and is overwhelmed with grief himself; and likely with cholera too. No fancy support system here. Besides cholera treatment, all I can do for him is to give him a sleeping pill.

Everyday I see mild cholera cases, leaving the serious ones to Philo, the IV specialist. When people come with vomiting and diarrhea, I ascertain how many people live in the household and give enough medicines for all of them. One young lady has sixteen relatives living in the same house. When sixteen people live in a small shack and drink from the same pail, they will all eventually get the germ. We have plenty of antibiotics and I dispense them freely.

So, day after day the line waits patiently for us outside the dispensary, hoping for miracles. They gratefully thank us for what they think are wonder drugs. Alas, it is mostly some ibuprofen and an antacid, and never enough to treat their multitude of problems.

Their multitude of complaints spans the whole body from head to toe, with heavier grip on the digestive and musculoskeletal. Little things, like the ever-present abdominal pain, and big things, like the emaciated, jaundiced elder with a belly like a nine-month pregnant lady, with prominent veins. Probably liver cancer. I have nothing to give him besides ibuprofen and a sleeping pill.

Friday, Nov 19

Johnny is passing by to say hello. He’s a young man who does sundry things around here for a living. He was orphaned at a young age. He has no family left and has gone only to elementary school. He is ambitious and wants to go to high school but he has no money. One of his part-time jobs is with Sister Pat of Gros Morne, the agronomist. One of her projects is to make bleach from scratch and sell it cheaper than what’s found on the market. As Johnny explains, it is easy to synthesize: The ingredients are just table salt and water. The last ingredient is difficult to obtain: electricity. A byproduct of electrolysis is bleach. So Pat and Johnny have this mom and pop operation in the nun’s compound. The electricity comes from the solar panels on the roof. These can’t keep up with the demand and our self-made chemists have to wait until the evening to use what’s left of the available electricity. But they have a fairly smooth operation by now. They sell bleach at a quarter of the price of bleach on the market. And they sell selectively to the poor. Bleach is a lifesaver at 30 drops per bucket of dirty water.

A break in our routine today: We travel to Chateau, a hamlet up the river from Kalabat. Once more we crisscross the river many times. Since we are going up river, the current is swifter. It is harder to keep a good balance. A school kid going back home keeps tabs on me like an angel and grabs me whenever he sees me slipping. On the way we pass a market, Provo. People are lining the path with baskets full of rice, beans, fruits and other staples, as well as trifles and trinkets. Much calling and yelling. People jostling each other. Donkeys laden with heavy packages. The path is wet with water obviously mixed with a fair amount of urine of various origins, and dotted with donkey poop and other kinds of poop. Dodging these is a skill, and not always successful. I do prefer walking in the water. After Provo, a last steep hill that is breathtaking, and finally, after walking an hour and twenty minutes, we reach Chateau. It’s a tiny hamlet, a few houses, doesn’t look that it has a hundred people. Jadotte has the usual compound church/ school/ and dispensary. The dispensary is not staffed; the nurse quit the week before without giving a notice.

So, again we open our bags of medicine and set up shop. The population is so scarce that we see fewer than 20 people. Same complaints as in Kalabat, mostly enteritis and backaches. We have plenty of time to relax, munch on the lunch we have brought and enjoy the magnificent view of the mountains, the palm trees, the fat papayas and bananas that are protruding from their trees all around us, the shimmering river meandering way below, and the gentle breeze that is caressing our skin. The smoke that is rising far away is a voodoo ceremony, says Jean who knows everything. On the mountain opposite us, we spot the thin silhouette of a woman slowly trudging up the steep slope with a hand raised up to steady the five-gallon bucket of water perched on her head, holding a little child with the other. She looks so graceful, she makes it look so easy! But it is so far up from the river! How can she do that everyday, as she must? I am awed by the hard life of people here.

Such a lush landscape! Haiti could be a Tahiti or a Hawaii, a little paradise, instead of the failed country that it is. How it is what it is and not what it could be is a mystery to me. It is a generous earth, eager to reward those with the skills and the tools to tend it. Jadotte has a bamboo tree in his yard. Last year it was cut to the ground. Today, it is a good fifty feet tall.

To compare with Guatemala, a country that I know a little, villages there have a tight society with directing and respected elders; people work together within communities. Not so in Haiti where poverty has reached rock bottom and people are no longer able to help each other. In addition, in Guatemala, there is a minimum of infrastructure: The countryside everywhere is rapidly getting electricity; the government is paving a lot of roads. Not so at all in Haiti. No electricity anywhere beyond the few big cities, not even in good size cities. No good paved roads beyond the capital. The country is frozen in the Medieval Ages.

People have such potential! I see it in the kid with an engineer’s mind, in illiterate Jean-Louis who can disassemble an engine and put it together perfectly, in Johnny who’s not gone past 6^th grade but knows how to make bleach, and in so many others. But the only potential that can express itself here and flower is the capacity to endure. And endure they do: backbreaking labor, futile labor, filth, hunger, diseases of all kinds, endless suffering.

On our way back to Kalabat, we pass Provo. Market has ended; the path is strewn with litter. The return trip is easier since we are going down river. Back home, we all take long showers to scrape that slimy river water off our skin. Coffee with Kremas does the rest to restore our spirits. I check the cholera room: Still full; no deaths today.

We see little of Fr. Jadotte during our stay. He is traveling from hamlet to hamlet for his priestly duties and to Gros Morne on errands. He walks endless hours a day. To get to Gros Morne he uses a moto part of the way and the bouncing is giving him a serious backache and a sciatica. He can’t sit up and can’t sleep. Rita gives him massages and is teaching the cooks how to give massage. We give him ibuprofen for the day plus a Flexeril for a good night sleep. We usually see him for dinner, or after dinner whenever he can return. Thank God he was here when a tarantula a good six inches wide ventured in the dining room during our supper. He was prepared: he grabbed a can of Baygon and smothered the poor thing to death.

Saturday, Nov 20

This is our last clinic day before packing for the return trip. More of the same. Another long line of people outside the dispensary. The lame, the blind, the skinny mangy toddlers, the babies whining in their mothers’ arms, the bent over elderly that walk supported by a relative, it looks like a biblical scene. How I wish Christ was here! Alas, we don’t perform miracles. As each one unfolds a lifelong list of miseries, I realize that perhaps the best healing agent right now is our listening. With all the compassion that their infirmities easily elicit, we listen attentively. It looks like nobody ever listened to them before. And the more I realize my little pills are useless for their huge problems, the more hope and encouragement I offer.

I see that this never ending flow of suffering is hard on Jean. In the tottering elders he recognizes the energetic men of his youth. This edentate woman is his aunt. Many patients were the playmates of his childhood. He hears the good news and the bad. “And what happened to cousin so and so?” he enquires. “Oh, he died a while ago!” The comparison is striking: Jean is a vigorous man who has acquired some of the American thickness in the middle, he wears prescription glasses and his perfect teeth show skilled care. The friends he left behind are thin and wiry, with not an ounce of fat on their bodies. There is some tiredness in their stride, born of too many long walks with too heavy loads. Their carriage betrays a life of exertion. Most of their teeth are gone. It’s among his old friends that Jean sees the lame and the blind, and the ones with inoperable tumors. They chat about old times, but in his strained smile and a hint of sadness in his voice, I feel the desperation that seeps in him.

A little lassitude sets in among the four of us, compounded by a sense of frustration, of the futility of our efforts. The engineers can see the results of their work: At Boucan Richard, they have hooked up an electrified fence to the solar panels to protect the storeroom where the sacks of rice for the school lunch program are kept. Last month, hungry thieves broke into that room and stole the sacks. The engineers have also built three rocket stoves and the cooks won’t have to breathe smoke for hours. Plus they’ll save trees by using less charcoal.

But the medical team does not have this sense of accomplishment. Most of our meds have indeed been distributed. But they can’t produce lasting good. All we could give for chronic problems was for a few weeks treatment. Not enough. Pain will be back too soon.

We are feeling the inadequacy of our help. No testing, not enough meds, not the right meds. And mostly, our help was not the appropriate kind. The most urgent help is better hygiene. A monstrous problem in this medieval society. People need clean water first of all. And latrines, which are inexistent. And they need many, many more things.

Convinced too of the importance of proper excreta disposal, Denise says she will be applying for a grant to build latrines. Building materials, shovels, etc, demand some outlay. Donations have precipitated to a low with the recession, and the FeedHaiti project has no money.

We’ve done our part in teaching. We’ve gone to every classroom in every one of the four parish schools. We have talked about germs, dirty and clean water, about washing hands after pooping, how to purify water, etc. We have instructed the teachers to instruct the kids. We have talked to kids individually and in groups. We have supervised hand washing sessions. We have planted a seed. There is hope for the next generation.

What troubles me is that the only adults we’ve seen are the sick ones who visited the clinic; very few. With no or few tools, farming requires backbreaking work. Men are tied up to their fields. Women are forever fetching river water in their paint buckets, washing clothes in the river, and cooking for hours over a smoky fire. What is fun for American Boy Scouts is slavery here.

On previous missions, our teams have installed a public faucet on each of the four church grounds; they deliver spring water captured from high up on the mountain. It may not be completely clean but is much safer than the river water. People who live near the churches come get this water for their daily needs. But many more, in this area where people live far apart on plots hanging on mountainsides, cannot get this clean water. For them, the river is more accessible.

I can’t wait to work with the group on the latrine project. If only people wouldn’t leave their excreta in the water or on the bare soil! Simple trench latrines would be a gigantic step forward. Until then, the cholera will maintain its virulence for a long time. Estimates predict that a cholera epidemic can last up to a year. In areas where people are cholera naïve and have no immunity to it, cholera can decimate the population. We have to do more to stem its onslaught.

The number of cases reported by the press is vastly underestimated. In the many remote villages of the countryside like ours, cases are not reported, period, because there is no governmental or NGO presence at all. We had ten deaths in one week in a tiny hamlet, of which there are hundreds, maybe thousands in Haiti. And that number was itself an underestimate since these are only the cases we’ve seen in our dispensary. Most deaths have been at home, unknown to all but close relatives.

Sunday, Nov 21

The trip is winding to a close. It is drizzling. It is Christ the King Day. The church is full. Long, beautiful Mass, gorgeous Creole songs. Vibrant harmonies are flowing to Christ crucified; songs of love to the One who understands their sufferings. Faith here is not tepid, its expression not languid. People are belting out their faith, their hope of redemption. If their souls can be redeemed, why not their very lives? Christ is King, and people are feeling comforted by the promise of His kingdom where there is no hunger, no death, and no cholera. Fr. Jadotte preaches a stirring homily. Even though it is in Creole, we intuit the content from his passionate tone and we are moved.

People are decked in their finest. All clothes here are rejects from third hand American stores. What Americans no longer want ends up in Central America or Haiti. No cotton in a world that can’t iron it. It’s all polyester. Kids are so cute and their mothers look so regal in their brightly colored Sunday clothes! Their joyous smiles are hiding the toils that keep these clothes clean.

But they promptly go home to change and in the afternoon we see them in their usual rags doing what they do constantly, getting water. They start early: We see five-year olds carrying quarts or gallon jugs over their heads. By the time they are twelve, they’ve graduated to the five-gallon buckets.

Fr. Jadotte again is in agony with his sciatica. After lunch, Rita and her trainees, the two young cooks, give him a long massage. We make a note to send him some lidocaine patches.

We pack up and clean up. Monday we are leaving early. The flight is at 5 pm and we have a five hour drive ahead. A treat is awaiting us: We won’t have to walk/wade to L’Attrel, the midpoint to Gros Morne. The water is low and Teeden will pick us up right at Kalabat and drive us to Port au Prince. We will stop in Gros Morne to give Sister Jackie the remainder of our medicines. We are so grateful not to have to crisscross that river, that harbinger of disease, the nemesis of all who have to live by it and off it, that cruel master that hides seeds of death within its gift of life!

Monday, Nov 22

After an early breakfast, it is time for the last photos, the last gifts and the last goodbyes. We thank the cooks and the dishwasher who also did our laundry by hand. We even thank Paulo, a ne’er do well, whose laziness irritated us constantly. His main job is to sweep. He does little of it, and he does it badly. He grabs his broom only when he sees Jadotte coming around the corner. When he sweeps the church steps, he starts on the lower one, pushing the dirt to the ground below. Then he goes to the second step and pushes its dirt onto the first step. And so on. At the end, the only clean thing is the top step. As to the pile at the bottom, he leaves it there. When it’s time for a clinic day faraway, he puts the heaviest bags on the head of women while he selects the lightest for himself. Jadotte has scared him at times with threats of suspending his pay, but it’s not effective. Today, Paulo is all smiles; so we hug him as we hug his coworkers. He lost two family members to cholera after all.

Denise is almost crying about Willy. William is a tiny black goat, a gift from a grateful lady. Her house had been destroyed in the January earthquake and Denise had it rebuilt for her. Bigger, two rooms instead of one. The cooks took Willy and put it in the antechamber of death behind the kitchen where the dishwasher was just hanging the head of our preceding dinner upside down to dry, it was still bleeding. Politely the cooks were waiting until Denise left to lead Willy to its predestined fate. Since the gift a couple of days ago Denise has been talking about starting a Save Willy website. But she knows it’s useless. Willy is a goat and goats are dinner, and that’s that. Denise doesn’t give up. She begs Jadotte to spare Willy. At the last minute, a compromise is reached. He will give Willy back to its original owner and urge her to spare his life. Denise is happy.

It is time to board the familiar Land Rovers. The bouncing and jarring are no longer bothering us. Between Kalabat and Gros Morne we cross the river fifty times maybe, following people and donkeys that are doing the same. While we are approaching the big city of Gros Morne, we see hordes of women doing their laundry in the shallows, and hordes of kids playing in the water, many stark naked.

In Gros Morne we have a brief stop at the nuns’ to give our medicines away and to buy some Haitian crafts for fundraising resale in the US. Sister Jackie gives us a last gift of freshly squeezed mango juice, such a treat!

Back on the road to Port au Prince, we see columns of UN peacekeeping trucks and tanks. Indeed the soldiers look Nepalese. There have been some protests against them in Cap Haitien, the second biggest city on the North coast. Fire has been exchanged, a civilian died.

In Port au Prince, we intend to stop at Matthew 25, this hospitality house that has wonderful arts and crafts for sale. It is downtown so we cross the city. But first, Jean wants to show us a property he has there. When we get there, he discovers that his property has been transformed in a tent city. Tent after tent stuck to each other in long rows separated by a narrow path wide enough for a single file; one toilet for hundred persons, as typical. No work, the few people we see look bored, hopeless; most of them are on the streets, in the markets, where there is life and activity. Kids will always find a way to play: They are kicking an orange for a lively game of soccer. Jean didn’t know his property had been requisitioned. He is happy that it is being put to good use.

He is leaving us at this point: He wants to spend one more day in Port au Prince where he has family and friends. Sad, emotional goodbyes. Jean is a wonderful person. He is enterprising, selfless, and dedicated. The best interpreter we could have hoped for. We couldn’t have done our work without him. In Riviere Mancelle, the locals know him as the boy who made it and made it big. He was always accosted by people who were begging him for money. Prepared, he had filled his pockets with bills and was giving them away freely. At times he had to hide. Like when he went to see his parents who live some distance from the hamlet: He waited until dark to escape under the cover of the night. Or when he took a day off to see his house in Gonaives. He came back at night, crossing the river in the dark. He was depressed on his return: His house had been covered with mud up to the roof during the hurricane and was unlivable. It was not even accessible, as the road in front was not passable. Yes, I’ll miss Jean, my Haitian half.

Leaving his tent city property, we see more and more of the same. These tent cities cover the whole city and beyond, they occupy all previously free spaces, and they can be huge, miles long. We see more tent cities that upstanding buildings: They are everywhere, on our left, on our right, in front of us and behind us, above us on the hill and below us. Seas of white and blue tents. They are housing 1.3 million people. For these folks these tents will be home for a long time to come, an unforeseeable future. It is dry today but during the recent hurricane the tents were invaded by mud.

Humongous traffic jams in that city where the traffic lights no longer work. Choking dust everywhere. Little by little we inch our way towards Matthew 25. An island of peace and serenity in this city that lacks both. This house of hospitality is part of the Parish Twinning Program of the Americas and is directed by Sister Mary Finnick. Mary radiates goodness and love. She has many charitable projects besides hosting volunteers on their way somewhere. One of them is sponsoring local artists and using some of the profits from the sales for her various charities. Beautifully carved sculptures of Christ, Mary, Joseph, and of the suffering people of Haiti. Brightly colored metal work. Hand woven baskets, clothes embroidered by hand. We buy as much as we can stock in our luggage.

At the airport the departure wing is pleasantly air conditioned, unlike the arrivals hangar. Employees pay no attention to the prominently displayed weight of our baggage on the scale. Most of them are exceeding the 50lbs limit, but nobody cares.

Finally, we are off to Miami and Nashville. How easy it is to forget misery! While waiting in Miami for the next plane, we splurge on greasy, overprocessed American fast food. It would seem decadent if we reflected on what we’ve seen in Haiti, but we are not reflecting, we are regressing.

Back around 1am at the Snyders where I left my car. The Snyders were predestined to end up in Riviere Mancelle: To get to their property, we turn off the road onto a dirt path. This path crosses a little river, no bridge, just like in Haiti! We have to be careful as the water can get high. Denise says that at times it is not passable, and they just stay home.

And back to my own home in Cookeville around 2 am. The first thing I do is to strip before entering the house and take a shower until I run out of hot water. I frantically scrape the Haitian grime and germs off my skin until it gets raw. I put my shoes in bleach till morning and immediately do two loads of wash. I can’t go to sleep until I have eliminated all traces of Haitian misery. It is past 4 am when I finally get satisfied and go to bed.

But I was not satisfied for long. Discovering the utter destitution that grips Haiti was a life changing event for me. If the Guatemala that I know is a third world country, Haiti belongs to the 4^th world; and at times, it seemed like the netherworld, horrifyingly inhumane and hopeless.

The faces of the living in their suffering and of the dead after their final struggle are now haunting me. I see the brain damaged baby and her parents who didn’t know it, the little girl screaming with mastoiditis, the old man supporting his cancerous liver with such dignity, the man disfigured by his huge facial tumor, they are all at the top of death’s list and I hear their cries of anguish. They may be forgotten by the world, but I want to immortalize them here: Baby Ouesbellie Duplan, little Oudjina Alizot, Mr. Oradie Tazin, and Mr. Aurelius Oralio, may your sufferings not be for naught; may they find relief in our compassion and our prayers.

I worry about Stephanie who may not have gone to the hospital to continue her much needed care. And I see so many more in those waiting lines, new faces every day, but all quietly bearing their suffering and yielding to fate because they have no other options!

These are the faces of Christ and they are my faces. We are our brothers’ keepers because we are all one in humanity and in Christ. How can I put that misery aside in a corner of my life and live the rest of it in luxury? These Lazarus are begging for crumbs under my table. I have much to ponder but the call resonates loud and clear. I hear John the Baptist claiming “Pharisee, produce good fruit as evidence of your repentance!” and Christ himself “Whatever you do for one of the least brothers of mine, you are doing to me.”

As long as I need to work for a living I will spend every annual vacation time in Haiti in fraternity with these brothers and sisters of ours. Denise and Bob have several projects to which I can participate: latrines, medical services, school lunches, child sponsoring, etc. I’m starting to study Creole which, for the French native that I am, shouldn’t be difficult. I hope to be proficient in it by my next visit.

Love and Charity are the staff of life, indeed the very life we share.

God bless you all,

Cecile-Anne

CECILE-ANNE MULLER journal of Nov trip 2010

2010-12-12T18:43:00.000-08:00

Dear family and friends,

As many of you know, I spent 2 weeks in Haiti this past month, joining a very small NGO (about a dozen volunteers), founded by a couple of fellow church members.

I apologize to those of you who speak only French. Maybe Guy-Louis could translate?

------------

Tuesday, Nov 9 and Wednesday, Nov 10

Thursday, Nov 11

After the speeches, Denise opens several bags of candy and distributes them one by one to each kid. They are ecstatic; candies are an exceptional treat here.

Friday, Nov 12

Finally we leave for Kalabat. Kalabat is located in a different valley. To reach it we have to go back to Gros Morne and start in a new valley, of Riviere Mancelle.

Saturday morning, Nov 13

Cholera

When one died, we covered the body with a blanket and waited for relatives to pick up the body. The cot was quickly cleaned up with the poor means available as it often was needed soon after.

Saturday, Nov 13 and Monday Nov 15---Thursday, Nov 18

Women age prematurely. A thirty year old looks forty and a forty year old looks fifty. After that, most have lost their teeth and their faces are lined deep with hardships.

Many, many kids are mangy. Sores over their heads, and most of their skins.

He lowers his head, “Once”.

“And what do you eat?”

“Rice, some beans if we have some”

“Can you show me with your hands how much you eat?”

He makes a small fist.

Friday, Nov 19

Saturday, Nov 20

Sunday, Nov 21

Fr. Jadotte again is in agony with his sciatica. After lunch, Rita and her trainees, the two young cooks, give him a long massage. We make a note to send him some lidocaine patches.

Monday, Nov 22

Love and Charity are the staff of life, indeed the very life we share.

God bless you all,

Cecile-Anne

Ritas Letter about our Trip

2010-11-30T08:00:00.000-08:00

Thanks to all of you who kept our team in prayer while in Haiti.  I

was down with a bug (I think it was flu) the past few days, but I'm

trying to catch up on a month's worth of

My son and I had a very busy and interesting experience there this

time.  Roads were washed out, so we had to do much more walking than

last time.  We were in the heart of the cholera outbreak.   Thank God

for hand sanitizer!  And bleach!  Those are things not readily

available to the Haitian people and it was difficult trying to teach

them to wash their hands (then they use filthy water).  It's all

about the education thing and it's very basic.

We tried, but I don't know how much we did in two weeks.  Did save

some lives, though.  Our nurse practitioner spoke French and was able

to reach the people through speaking at the churches and to the

children in the schools.

I worked the clinic with the medical mission--I was "pharmacy tech"

(there's way too many drugs out there) by flashlight.  We worked in

the clinic in a room that was in the center of the building and

isolated from the cholera patients--it had no windows and the only

light came in from the outer doors of the building.  I filled

prescriptions written by our nurse practitioner and I was massage

therapist for the team and for the Haitians.  Turns out that Fr.

Jadotte, the pastor of the area we worked, was in desperate need of

massage--he had hurt his back.  That gave me something to do in my

spare time.  I also taught his maids some basic massage to help keep

him up and running. He has a vast area with 6 churches, 4 schools and

10 remote outposts.  The man does some travelling and it's mostly on

foot.  Sometimes he gets a ride on a moped "taxi".

Mike became a "rocket stove scientist"  this trip.  He and another

engineer built rocket stoves--4 of them--at various missions, all

about 3 hours apart-- walking.  They had to make two trips to each to

build them because cement had to dry in between each stage.  It's an

efficient way to use fire wood which is in short supply there.

Mike was like the "pied piper" there.  He had a passel of little

Haitian boys following him wherever he went.  They were amazed to see

a "blanc" (white) guy as big as him and as friendly, too.  They took

to him like fish to water!

He and Bob also rewired an electrical system that was wired wrong and

was blowing out the lights.  They fixed the John Deere Gator, an ATV

and did various other "fix it" projects including work on the solar

systems and each of the churches.  They stayed busy, too.  They did

their thing and we did ours and I didn't even see him for the first

week we were there.

They were trying to fix a butane powered refrigerator (they tried to

explain to me how fire cools a refrigerator, but my feeble mind did

not comprehend) and accidentally broke the regulator valve off the

butane tank.  This was at the clinic we were working in.  They

cleared the place out in mere seconds!  I was kind of funny, now that

I look back.  It wasn't when it happened...

Funny thing about the trip,  none of us got sick the whole time we

were in Haiti.  BUT, American Airlines ran out of snacks on the trip

back and we were hungry, so after clearing customs in Miami, we

decided to get some Chinese food and the 3 of us who ate there got a

little queazy!

Just thank God for all we have here in the USA.  We truly are blessed!

I hope you had a Happy Thanksgiving. Have a blessed and Merry Christmas, too.

Blessings,

Rita

2010-11-23T06:00:00.001-08:00

We are home. Got in after midnight. Left Garcen at 6:00 am. Cholera will take about a month to run its course. I know that we made a difference, but the needs are so overwhelming it is so inadequate.
Have LOTS of coffee.
Fresh roasted on a three stone fire while we were there, PLUS green beans. We will be custom roasting them.
More updates when I am able.

Mission trip

2010-11-07T16:43:00.000-08:00

Headed for Haiti this Tuesday, so many needs so few resources, we have been blessed with some cholera anti-biotic. It has spread to the area we are working in. On the upside we will be bringing in some fresh green mountain grown organic coffee beans we will be custom roasting here and selling. We will also bring back the best vanilla and almond extract in the world. Please pray for us and the people we serve.

Please donate what you are able, we promise you that every penny donated goes to where it is supposed to.

Fr. Jim

2010-10-09T15:06:00.001-07:00

For those of you who have not heard, Fr Jim passed away this past week. He was instrumental in the forming of the Haiti Project. Memorial Mass will be October 13th in McMinnville.He will be missed by all.

Fr. Jadotte leaves today

2010-09-13T07:57:00.001-07:00

Thank you all for your support.

Fr. Jadotte leaves Monday

2010-09-11T07:38:00.001-07:00

We will speaking at McMinnville and Sparta this Weekend.

Open House in Nashville this Friday

2010-09-08T04:40:00.001-07:00

Please join us on Friday, September 10th for an open house for Father Jadotte and the Feed Haiti Project.

Father Jadotte will be joining us for an open house from 5-8 pm, drop by at anytime to meet this amazing priest from Riviere' Mancelle, Haiti. A village of 45,000 people located 70 miles North of Port-au-Prince.

827 West Argyle Ave
Nashville, Tennessee 37203

Riviere Mancelle is the Mango capitol of Haiti.

2010-09-07T15:55:00.001-07:00

Dear friends of Haiti,
We had our mango processing workshop. Had over fifteen active participants and several spectators. Canned 11 quarts of pulp. Made two gallons
of half pulp, half fresh cane water and drank it with lunch. People liked it.
One of the local groups bought our food mill. Several others want one. Should get more down here asap.

if you would like to make a donation to buy one we will purchase it and take care of shipping there. If you would like to donate one, you can go online and have it shipped to us and we will take care of shipping to Haiti. go to:
http://www.amazon.com/B2B-Food-Strainer-Sauce-Maker/dp/B000I4Y4PK/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=home-garden&qid=1281048686&sr=8-7
Maybe get some small ones too:
http://www.amazon.com/Norpro-Quart-Multipurpose-Food-Mill/dp/B0002IBOB4/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=home-garden&qid=1281048269&sr=8-5
They're mostly interested in making fresh juice for sale rather than canning at this stage.

Robert Fairchild update of last trip

2010-09-04T11:33:00.001-07:00

I've posted the trip report with links and pictures at:
http://haitireconstruction.ning.com/page/gros-morne-july-25aug-9-2010

Huntsville Alabama

2010-09-02T14:21:00.001-07:00

Fr. Jadotte and I will be speaking at Saturday and Sunday Masses at St. Joesphs this weekend.We will have coffee and school sponsorship picts and letters.

Fr. Jadotte message to the churches 2010

2010-08-30T11:22:00.001-07:00

August 27, .2010

Dear Brothers and Sisters,
I would like to give you some idea about Riviere Mancelle and to thank you Riviere Mancelle is a countryside parish laying about in the Northwest of Haiti. Coming from the town of Gros Morne, people have to cross a river twenty times to get there. Only one priest (me) and two nuns work with volunteers, and catechists, members of liturgy committees, teachers…
My parish has a main church with 4 chapels and seven posts, 4 elementary schools, 2 dispensaries, 1 welcome house for visitors. We get minimal electricity at the main mission and in the dispensaries from solar panels.
Spring water is available at the main mission and all of the chapels. Three schools have sun ovens to cook lunch for school children and purify water.

Aside my current activities as priest in church, we realized from September 2009 to July 2010, the following activities in my parish:
• To build 24 rock gabions to protect the property the main mission sits on.
• To start a tree nursery at Garcin.
• To build rocket stove at Garcin for the school lunch program.
• To construct a public fountain at Danty.
• To install a sun oven at Chateau for the school lunch.\to rebuild the rectory at Riviere Mancelle, the rectory was badly damaged in the earthquake of January 12, 2010.
• To plant trees (over 1700 trees) at Delva.
• To begin to build, at Riviere Mancelle, two family houses for two families, so populous of children. One of the two old houses was badly damaged in the earthquake, the others one was not safe enough for people to live in..
• To relieve with some money survivors ( their relatives and friends) of the earthquake.( they came from Port-au-Prince, capital city.)
• To buy seeds and garden tools for the groups of planters in Danty.
• To buy medicine for the two dispensaries in Riviere Mancelle and Chateau.
Also, we continue the projects of school lunch and school children sponsorships and to help the poor and the students.
For all those realizations, we got help from you, from the Salvatorian Order, from lent collections, from a special collection in favor of survivors of the quake of January 2010, from a lady in New Hampshire, from St. Thomas, St. Andrew, and St. Gregory. Many thanks to everyone here, to all of them for supporting so much to improve my parish.
Many thanks to all the volunteers for their kindly services in favor of the people in Riviere Mancelle.
Many thanks to Fr. Jim Bretl for supporting my parish in many ways every year.
Many thanks to all those people for visiting my parish once or many times.
Many thanks to Mr. , Mrs. Bob and Denise Snyder for welcoming me so generously in their home for one and a half months( since nine years) every summer.
May God Bless you and your family.
Fr. Jadotte Joseph

Cookeville this weekend

2010-08-28T07:25:00.001-07:00

We will be at Cookeville for mass this weekend with Fr. Jadotte. We will have coffee, vanilla, almond extract, and some crafts. Fr. will speak about events since his last visit.

Bob and Jan Fairchild have returned.

2010-08-11T14:48:00.001-07:00

To recap, the major accomplishments were:
1. Stove building workshop with three rocket stoves constructed at Fon Imbo
2. New rocket stove constructed at Garsen
3. Fixed sun oven at Boucan Richard
4. Delivered parts for Gator, now fixed and running again
5. Mango processing workshop with mango nectar production and canning of mango pulp demonstration
6. Started rocket stove at Kalabat
7. Construction of better incinerator at Kay Se.
8. Construction and installation of compost barrel at Kay Se.
9. Design and construction of prototype composting toilet system to be tested by workshop artists.
10. Design and construction of household rocket stove for demonstration

It was a busy two weeks!

Gator fixed!

2010-08-04T04:45:00.001-07:00

Dear Bob and Denise,
Tiden got the Gator put back together again yesterday. I was at Garcen where we sorted through more drums. They only sent one paint stirrer. I'll
contact the paint people. Got a new stove stsrted at Garcen. It's a two day process because the insulating concrete needs to set up and the 30
gallon barrel form removed before we can pour the regular concrete and add the lnsulating fire cement skirt on top of it.
Jean Louis drove the Gator down today. We went to Fon Imbo for bricks and it started smoking. We eventually drove it up to Tiden's "shop".(Now just
the side of the road. Somebody built in that lot he used to use.) They eventually decided it had been overheating due to water pump problem and fan
problem. They got them both working and we headed up to Kalabat. Jan had lost all confidence in the Gator and had found the ride atrocious so she
came back to the house. Jean Louis and I made it to Kalabat with a couple stops to add water and retwist the fan wire to the other wire it was now
twisted around. Polo says hello. Looking forward to seeing you in October. We got the stove started in the school kitchen. The first half is only
two hours with all the bricks precut. Toured the schools and took pictures. I didn't see any structural cracks but didn't get into everywhere. Jan
is leaning toward building rainwater cisterns at Food for the Poor houses if/when
she brings students. I'm also developing a composting toilet with urine diverter using those green mineral tubs. That might have promise too as a
project.
We made it back to Gros Morne with only one stop to retwist the fan wire. (put a 12V soldering iron with battery clips, no corrosive flux, and
electrical solder (NOT lead free!) on the list).
I'm planning to start the household stove here tomorrow morning, (It should be pretty portable.) then go up to Garsen in the afternoon to put on
the skirt there. Jean Louis will remove the insulating concrete form (there are two now, one at Garsen, one at Kalabat) and surround with regular
concrete in the morning.
Then we'll haul down the medical barrels for Jackie and a couple more barrels for a better incinerator and a firewood dryer. I've already got a
couple of them perforated for here for composting barrels. The composting toilets will use a perforated barrel for the actual composting. A bucket
for feces collection. Still working on urine diverter.
Thursday is mango day at St Gabriel's in town.
Friday maybe back to Kalabat. Polo didn't have a key to get the cookpots. We need one to design the skirt there.
The Gator could use a roof attachment if there is one. Also the brakes sound horrible, work poorly, and need to be fixed.
Keeping busy,
Bob

latest form Bob Fairchild in Haiti

2010-07-29T04:29:00.001-07:00

Bob and Denise,
We went up to Garsen yesterday and found our barrels of stove stuff and pulled them to the front. We unpacked one of the barrels full of tools and hardware into the workshop. Combined what stuff we could and relabeled some of it correctly. We found the sun oven screw mechanism for Boucan Richard so headed up there and installed it. The gate was locked and the key was apparently unavailable so we (me, Mich, and Jean Louis) climbed in and out over the gate. It took all of ten minutes to get the new screw on. We opened the reflectors and checked the glass and it was fine One of the big bent angles that the reflectors lean against was bent and we straightened it as best we could.
Today we sorted through all the stove barrels with the help of a couple of the sisters' volunteers, put only one type of brick, insulation, or mortar into their own barrels and moved half of everything down to Fon Imbo. Jan and I went back after lunch and split and cut various bricks as needed for one big stove and split and cut a mouth notch in a 30 gallon barrel and put hinges on both seams so we could pull pins to remove it as the the form for the insulating concrete(no more cookie sheets!.) We had plenty of help from the guardian Claude and other local men and children. Jan took some pictures.
Tomorrow we start the stove building class at Fon Imbo. We hope to get their four stoves built tomorrow and Friday. I may need to put finishing touches on them over the weekend.
Tell Jadotte he needs to get the road up to Garsen worked on. It's a mess, especially right past that first little right fork. Barak said they had a hard time getting the big truck up with the barrels. He had trouble today getting his truck up. It took him about 15 minutes to get his truck up the hill to the school.
We only found one of the buckets of paint so far. In one of the 16 gallon barrels in a 30 gallon barrel. Where is the second one?
We're talking about doing the mango nectar some time next week.
Hope to get up to Kalabat to check out damaged school and the impressive terracing I heard about. Is Palo around up there?
We'll be getting a long tour at Grepin as that's where we'll stay if Jan brings students.
Can I cut the bottoms off a few beat up barrels to make little firewood dryers and compost bins? Some are too banged up for stoves. The empties are really starting to pile up.
Say hello to Jadotte. Tell him it is not far....
Peace,
Bob

Fr. Jadotte

2010-07-28T10:47:00.001-07:00

Fr. Jadotte has arrived and will be here until Sept. 13th.
We are working on visiting plans now.

Bob and Jan Fairchild are safe in Gros Morne

2010-07-27T05:08:00.000-07:00

We left for Lexington airport at 11:15 am Sunday arriving Miami via Dallas Fort Worth at 7:40 pm. We went to dinner and spent the night with Marie and Lenny Anglin, the Haitian American Nurse and Jamaican Doctor we met in the departure lounge in PaP on my first trip with you.
We left Miami at 9:40 am this morning arriving PaP at 11 am. We met up with Tiden and other volunteers, stopped at Kaliko to put down our deposit and made it to Kay Jezi Mari without any problems.
All our luggage arrived safely including 28 one quart canning jars, enough for 4 batches of mango nectar. Also three mini tent ceiling fans, two solar security lights, and the squeezo and stainless steel boiling water canner. (In retrospect we could probably use the big pots that came with the solar cookers which may be enamelware boiling water canners. I'll check them out at Garcen tomorrow.)
The stove building workshop schedule may be a bit overambitious. They're talking about starting Wednesday, which gives me one day to find stuff, get it to Fon Imbo, and get everything ready. I suppose we could start with a day of design theory, but that may be a stretch and won't really give me any extra time. I think I'll talk to Pat about starting Thursday.
I'll keep you updated.
Thanks,
Bob

Very well thought out article

2010-07-24T05:53:00.000-07:00

HAITI’S ANSWER for Six Months & Sixty Years

Monday, July 12th, 2010

By Melinda Miles, Let Haiti Live

a project of TransAfrica Forum

July 12, 2010

I. Introduction

“People died because centralization forced everyone to be in Port-au-Prince – everything goes via the central authority: there’s no ability for local government to do anything. All the major universities, to get a passport, or a driving permit, means coming to the capital. So, when Port-au-Prince collapsed, the state collapsed, and the people with it.”

- Reflections on reconstruction, Oxfam meeting, March 5, 2010

“We have to take advantage of this catastrophe and say, ‘The clock is set at zero.’ We have to build another Haiti that doesn’t have anything to do with the Haiti we had before. A Haiti that is sovereign politically and that has food sovereignty.”

- Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, Executive Director of the Peasant Movement of Papaye, “The Clock is Set at Zero” by Beverly Bell, Other Worlds, March 3, 2010

The question in Haiti today is more profound than most realize. As we commemorate the six month anniversary of the devastating 7.0 earthquake on January 12, 2010, international aid agencies, the United Nations and NGOs are focused on transitions: transitional shelters, transitional camps, transition plans. All of this begs the question, to what is Haiti transitioning? The answer to this question has been shockingly absent from debates in the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) Clusters, coordination meetings for those engaged in the earthquake response. All the dimensions of the interim response and the short-term solutions are debated and discussed, but the elephant in the room remains the biggest question of all: what will finally emerge from Haiti’s recovery process?

The plan for Haiti’s future must include and be guided by the vision of those who are living the reality of life after the quake, those who will carry it forward: Haitians. They have articulated this vision already, many times, before and after hurricanes, political upheavals and the earthquake. Decentralization.

For decades, centuries even, Haiti’s finances and politics have been centralized in one capital city, leading to a severe inequality in the distribution of resources and ultimately causing the gross overpopulation of the capital, as the hope for access to resources and work lured millions to migrate there. Aid from the international community has reinforced this imbalance between distribution of the population and distribution of development projects, investment, infrastructure and other resources. Consider, for example, that although the agricultural sector is the source of livelihood for the majority of Haitians, only 3-4% of the national budget is allocated to the Ministry of Agriculture[1].

Well before the earthquake, living conditions for the majority of Port au Prince residents had been steadily deteriorating due to the fact that the city was built to accommodate a population of a few hundred thousand, not the nearly three million that reside there.

_____________________

[1] Camille Chalmers, PAPDA in MCC’s “Disaster to Decentralization: Haiti’s long term recovery.”

This population concentration created the conditions for more than 230,000 people to die unnecessarily during and in the aftermath of the earthquake. This fact is arguably one of the gravest indicators for the need to decentralize. Finances, politics, education and health care cannot continue to be concentrated in only this one urban area. Haitians are calling, as they have in the past, for a new Haiti, a Haiti that is more than just the Republic of Port-au-Prince. While there are more than two million people living in Port-au-Prince, the other eight million live outside the capital, mainly in rural areas.

Will the country be rebuilt to what it once was, or will a better Haiti be founded on the ruins left by the earthquake?

Millions of lives and billions of dollars hang in the balance of this unanswered question. Not one more life needs to be lost and not one cent needs to be spent to keep Haiti in its current position — at the bottom — in terms of standard of living, access to health care, education, food security and other key indicators. The competing development and recovery plans for Haiti - that of the international community (where the majority of financial resource is held) vs. that of the Haitian people – must come together in one unified plan. The international community must listen to the Haitian people about how they envision the focus of the recovery through decentralization; after all, they have repeated over and over this vision and plan for Haiti.

Concrete and realistic steps to decentralize governance, investment, infrastructure, production and development have been articulated in strategies from international economists, the Haitian government, the International Monetary Fund, the Haitian Constitution and most recently in the blueprint for investment in Haiti’s future: the Action Plan for the Reconstruction and National Development of Haiti.
On the six-month anniversary of the earthquake, the international community must step back and look at the answer Haitians have known for many years. Decentralization is the key to unlocking Haiti’s potential to produce enough food for everyone to eat, to create jobs to keep the youth in the provinces and to sustain and grow livelihoods outside of the capital. In addition to these long-term solutions, decentralization is also the answer to the short-term crisis, the goal of the transition. In other words, investing in the development of the Haiti that is outside of Port-au-Prince and locating a vast array of development projects as well as cash for work in rural areas gives the incentive necessary for the internally-displaced people (IDPs) of the most heavily earthquake-damaged areas to leave the tent cities and return to their families outside of Port-au-Prince. Without immediate, concrete action, Port-au-Prince will become a city of slums, not just a city with slums, and Haiti will forever be a fragile state in need of assistance.

II. Centralized Haiti: The Republic of Port-au-Prince

As much as the quake was natural and unexpected, the extensive destruction it created, particularly in the capital, was precipitated by the historic centralization of finance, commerce and politics in Port-au-Prince, and the lack of investment in the countryside. Decades of neglect have turned huge swaths of Haiti’s agricultural land, at one time some of the richest and most fertile in the world, into desolate areas that produce partial harvests at best; as a result many rural people migrated to the cities in search of work.

The centralization actually began under the colonial regime, when the French set up a capital city at the port of Cap-Francois, now the city of Cap-Haitien. After the Haitian revolution, though, eleven regional centers were created in an effort to develop urban areas outside of the capital, and to increase the capacity of rural areas. This system functioned, albeit imperfectly, and represented a long period of a somewhat decentralized economy. The U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934 changed this system of eleven regional centers to one centralized capital of politics and commerce, a change that brought widespread poverty to Haiti for the first time.[2]

Pre-earthquake Haiti suffered from a deep inequality in the distribution of schools and health care facilities, in addition to the centralization of government and markets in Port-au-Prince. The only international airport and the most important seaport are in the capital, as well as nearly all of the universities. Rural areas have primary schools at best; all secondary schools are located in urban areas. Although assembly factories have long been touted as key to Haiti’s development, only two free trade zones exist, and the majority of Haiti’s factories are also in Port-au-Prince.

All of these factors contributed to the heavy concentration of people in the capital city and its large metropolitan area. Aerial views of Port-au-Prince are almost completely devoid of green and filled with the gray of concrete block buildings. In fact, there was hardly an open space in the city before the quake, and densely packed poor neighborhoods known as bidonvil climbed the steep hillsides all around the city.

Many have pointed out that there were too many people living in Port-au-Prince, and that victims died because of their anarchic building practices. That is only one small piece of the story, though. It does not explain or even consider why so many people were so desperate that they had to migrate to and live in an unsafe shantytown in Port au Prince in the first place. The fundamental cause of population concentration in Port-au-Prince, however, was the decades-old policy of devaluing agriculture and the refusal to invest in rural areas. The result: conditions that precipitated the extremely high loss of life. In addition, lack of investment in infrastructure and ports outside of the capital posed serious challenges to the emergency response after the earthquake. Haiti’s one international runway and the damaged wharf in the Bay of Port-au-Prince slowed the delivery of aid and human resources, and resulted in many preventable deaths.

______________________

[2] Georges Werleigh interview with the author, January 12, 2003. Quoted in “Let Haiti Live: Unjust U.S. Policies Towards Its Oldest Neighbor”, eds. M. Miles & E. Charles

III. The Immediate Need: IDPs at Six Months

“Plans for moving the displaced population out of tent cities and into more durable shelter, not to mention permanent housing, remain in early draft form.”

- “Haiti at a Crossroads” U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, June 2010

The biggest obstacle to moving people out of the unhealthy, inhumane and dangerous spontaneous communities that sprang up in the aftermath of the earthquake is the question of where to relocate these internally displaced people (IDPs). Due to the confusion that has been created by the outrageous idea that somehow property rights – the ability to lay claim to a piece of land and have the sole ability to exploit and profit from said land – are on par with the right to survive, Haitians have been left to suffer in tent cities that don’t even deserve to be called camps. The Haitian government is not invoking eminent domain to make land available to families that are living in the parks, streets, and medians of Port-au-Prince, Leogane and Jacmel.

The tent cities are so overcrowded that they do not meet international standards for camps; only one temporary settlement in the country meets those standards at the present time. OCHA has stated that it is not actually possible – nor is it desirable – to bring the camps up to the standards. In reality these are new slums. Every open space, every park and yard, is now occupied by people with nowhere to go. There is no protection for the population living in camps and an epidemic of gang rape has been sweeping through the Port-au-Prince camps for months.

The aid community has intentionally left the inhabitants of camps without access to better basic services. It is a strategy underway right now to avoid luring people back from the countryside with the promise of services in the camps. But there is something perversely blame-the-victim about implying that people would prefer to live in these dangerous, violent slums in the midst of the rubble of Port-au-Prince.

In reality, people are staying because there is nowhere else for them to go. Without investment in the countryside, rural areas have been on a steady decline. Of the 600,000 survivors who left the capital after the earthquake, many have returned because the provincial areas are not able to absorb more people. However the fact is that people would leave, and want to leave, the terrible conditions in the Port-au-Prince camps. No one would choose to live with such indignity, in squalor, with no protection.

Haitians would leave Port-au-Prince if there were jobs and services in the other parts of the country. Ideally, the Government of Haiti would resolve the land policy issues and begin making land available to survivors in Port-au-Prince. However, it is very likely that this obstacle will continue to prevent the Government from relocating people. If the right investments are made now, the people will go where they have opportunities, and they will stay where they see a future for their families.

IV. The Answer: Concretizing Decentralization

“In the longer term, the Government needs to consider more permanent solutions to the problems that plague Port-au-Prince including land scarcity, over-crowding, and an unsustainable strain on services. In particular, this means seriously considering the concept of ‘decentralization,’ and whether to invest significant resources into developing alternate economic centers away from Port-au-Prince.”

“There is an agreed upon development framework for Haiti rebuilding [Action Plan for National Recovery and Development in Haiti]. The Government of Haiti, donors, and NGOs now need to come together and determine specific details of this plan in order to begin implementing key priorities.”

- “Haiti at a Crossroads” report by the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, June 2010

Decentralization is the short-term immediate solution to the terrible living conditions of Haiti’s IDPs, and at the same time it is the long-awaited manifestation of the majority of the population’s deepest desire and dream for their future: it is a long-term strategy to redistribute resources and bring the Haitian people out of desperate poverty.

The first concrete step in the realization of decentralization is recognition by all the actors involved in Haiti’s recovery that there is a plan already on the table. If each actor then played its proper role, the process of decentralization could commence.

Key Actors and Their Roles:

1. The Government of Haiti has created the Action Plan for the Reconstruction and National Development of Haiti contingent to the Post-Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA) that was conducted by national and international experts and was open to NGO and civil society participations. The Action Plan integrated a number of strategies already articulated in the Poverty Reduction and Growth Strategy (the DSNCRP) written in November 2007 with the intent of “making a quantitative lead forward” between 2008 and 2010. The DSNCRP itself drew from the Statement of General Policy ratified by the Parliament in June 2006 as a follow up to the Interim Cooperation Framework adopted in 2004-2005.

Now that the Action Plan exists, it is critical for the Government of Haiti to take action to begin the decentralization of its own administration, by following the steps laid out in the Action Plan, which is summarized below.

2. The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) is co-chaired by Haiti’s Prime Minister Jean Max Bellerive and former U.S. President Bill Clinton and is tasked with the coordination, planning and execution of development projects, including the review and approval of projects. Although it was slow in getting stated, the IHRC is now in place and should move immediately to fund the Government of Haiti’s Action Plan.

3. Non-governmental organizations and international charities have already received over one billion dollars in donations to help Haiti, but the vast majority of this money has not yet been put into action. Now is the time for NGOs to coordinate with the Government of Haiti’s Action Plan and to undertake complementary and supportive projects throughout the country. For the past several months the NGO community has claimed there is no clear plan, and many of the charities and NGOs that are currently sitting on millions of dollars in donations are devising their own ten-year plans for the reconstruction of Haiti. However it is the national Haitian plan that must be prioritized.

4. The international community, especially donor institutions and governments, must meet their pledges for the response in Haiti. Many have waited for the IHRC to be ready to coordinate and supervise the distribution of aid. Now that it has been established and is ready to function, there is no excuse for pledges to remain unfulfilled.

5. The most important actors in the future of Haiti, the Haitian people who make up the civil society, must organize themselves and advocate for their rights and for their vision of the future of Haiti. It has been over twenty years since the Haitian Constitution was revised to reflect the desire of Haitians and the utter necessity for decentralization in order to establish a strong economy and better standards of living for all Haitians. In addition to advocating for their vision and getting their needs heard and met, Haitian civil society – including all community-based, grassroots oriented organizations as well as NGOs – must be vigilant monitors of their government, the IHRC and the NGOs in the country to ensure that they are honest stewards of funds entrusted to them, and that they carry out the Action Plan with integrity.

Concrete Steps to Decentralize:

Several strategic plans and critiques already exist including the 1987 Constitution, the November 2007 Poverty Reduction and Growth Strategy, the December 2008 report by Oxford Economist Paul Collier for the UN, the March 2010 Action Plan for the Reconstruction and National Development of Haiti based on the earthquake Post-Disaster Needs Assessment, and the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s “Haiti At A Crossroads” report, released in June 2010.

The following four themes are all addressed in the Action Plan, and most are also treated in at least one of the pre-existing plans/reports. There is no better time to launch these efforts than immediately. Hundreds of thousands of survivors already left Port-au-Prince and other earthquake-affected areas and returned to the countryside. One example of the window of opportunity is the number of educated individuals who have returned to the countryside, and the larger number of children in rural areas in need of schools. Building more schools now takes advantage of potential teachers and creates incentives for families to remain in the countryside, while at the same time beginning to fill a gap in access to education, an endemic problem.

Here is a summary of the concrete strategies to solve Haiti’s biggest challenges via decentralization:

1. Infrastructure:

The Collier report encouraged focusing “infrastructure provision on breaking bottlenecks in the economy.” He specifically talked about building better “feeder roads to potentially productive areas” improving “access to inputs as well as access to markets for outputs.” In order to maximize the profitability of mango exportation, one of Collier’s key recommendations to strengthen Haiti’s economy, he stated: “the export of mangoes requires better road networks in mango-growing areas.”

The DSNCRP also laid out plans for more balanced national road network that could encourage regional development to reach its potential in hopes of “re-establishing balance by fostering the emergence of big regional metropolises” and “guaranteeing consistent connections throughout the country.” It also called for strengthening the capacity of international seaports in the provinces, and developing “a road network to improve regional integration with the Dominican Republic.”

The Action Plan is very specific about roads and ports, stating that: “a proper road network is essential.” There are 500km of roads that need to be finished, and the Plan calls the road construction “a precondition for effective decentralization and devolution, including that of the state.” The Action Plan also states that the international air traffic into Haiti “will be spread over three major airports located close to major cities: Cap Haitien, Port-au-Prince and Les Cayes” effectively ending the capital’s monopoly on international air travel. Sea ports are also included in the Action Plan’s strategy: “other port infrastructure will be rehabilitated or constructed to enable the industrialization of other areas of the country to split the job opportunities in the territory and promote the creation of clusters and sub-regional poles for development.”

2. Basic services

The DSNCRP includes some of the richest strategies to decentralize basic services. In terms of education, it calls for at least one public school through grade six in each of Haiti’s 565 communal sections. This would “reduce the disparities between geographical departments and between urban and rural areas in the distribution of available schools.” For health care, the plan calls for the restoration of referral hospitals at the departmental level, the rehabilitation and construction of health centers, and the rehabilitation of specialized hospitals throughout the country.

The Collier report recommends that electricity be made available in regions outside of Port-au-Prince to power what he calls factory “islands” like the free trade zone in Ouanaminthe. Unlike Port-au-Prince based factories, this trade zone in the northeast buys its electricity from across the border in the Dominican Republic and therefore enjoys stable and reliable power. Although it is arguable whether or not industrialization based on assembly for export is a desirable form of development for Haiti, it is clearly on the agenda of the international community and Haitian Government, and if Collier’s strategy is implemented, industry would be developed in pockets of the country where employment, roads, and energy infrastructure are badly needed, and would bring these advantages to various regions.

The Action Plan also includes a strategy for expanding the delivery of electricity in the “developing zones and sub-zones of the country, particularly in the main towns of departments and districts” and specifically calls for the construction of a hydroelectric dam in the Artibonite, the construction of a power substation in Tabarre, and the “development of different local distribution networks of electric power to fuel growth sectors”. To expand the availability of health care, the Action Plan urges the” construction of eight referral hospitals in the administrative centers of the departments at an average cost of $30 million USD each.” Related to health is waste management, and the Action Plan speaks of waste removal from ten major urban areas.

3. Political and governance

Haiti’s 1987 Constitution is the best source of concrete steps to decentralize governance. Recently, the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti released a comprehensive report on political participation and elections that includes a thorough explanation of one of the key measures described in the Constitution to decentralize decision-making:

“The ASEC system is a large pyramid structure, designed to decentralize democracy by ensuring that those in power are involved in politics at the very local level, where it is hard for centralized money to penetrate. ASECS (Assemblés des Sections Communales) are the foundation of the pyramid structure. Haiti is divided into 10 Departments, each Department is divided into municipalities (or communes), and each municipality is split into communal sections. Each communal section elects a Sectional Assembly (or ASEC). The ASECS play an advisory role to the CASECS, which administer local government. The ASECS also look over the CASECS’ shoulders, to make sure they are spending the money well.

“Each ASEC sends a representative to the Municipal Assembly. The Municipal Assembly plays a similar watchdog/advisor role at the municipal level. The mayor is supposed to report to it on the use of municipal resources, and cannot sell state lands in the commune without the Assembly’s approval. The Municipal Assembly is also responsible for drawing up the list of nominees for judges in the peace courts in the Department.

“Each Municipal Assembly sends a representative to the Departmental Assembly. The Departmental Assembly selects the members of the Departmental Council, which administers the Department. Departmental Assemblies plays a similar watchdog/advisor role at the Departmental level, and the Departmental Council reports to it. The Departmental Assembly is also responsible for drawing up the list of nominees for judges in the trial courts and appeals courts in the Department. Each Departmental Assembly sends a representative to the Interdepartmental Assembly. The Interdepartmental Assembly helps the executive branch and is involved in policy planning. The Assembly is entitled to attend and vote at Ministerial Council meetings that deal with issues within its domain.”

The DSNCRP emphasizes territorial development for economic growth and security, stating: “political and economic decentralization should be synchronized.” It describes six major reform programs to modernize the State including the “effective launching of the decentralization process” as defined in the 1987 Constitution. Concretely, this means the establishment of the three levels of territorial governments (theCollectivités Territoriales) who influence the executive, the judiciary and the electoral system (as described above). The legal framework for decentralization is the Charter for Territorial Government, because “territorial development entails decentralization.” The specific strategic lines of action:
- Reorganization of the Ministry of Planning and External Cooperation
- Finalization of the law on territorial improvement and local development
- Decentralization of the MPCE to the arrondissement level
- Preparation of the new national master plan for territorial improvement and development
- Preparation of local master plans for territorial development and improvement in the arrondissements
- Revision of the way the national territory is subdivided
- Introduction of operational planning instruments
- Reorganization of the public investment program into a national component and local component
- Structuring of development stakeholders
- Supervision of territorial governments in the area of development planning
- Promotion of territorial development.

The Action Plan also includes specific steps to create “a Unitary State which is strong, acts as a guarantor of the general interest and is highly devolved and decentralized.” The Plan outlines measures costing $175 million for a twelve-month period including these objectives:
- Within 5 years, reduce the proportion of State functionaries in administration to 20% and bring that of decentralized services to 80%
- Completion of administrative centers in departments and districts, encouraging government officers to settle in the provinces by providing beneficiary incentives and housing help and also by offering career development advantages.
- Within 5 years, regional development centers have local services provided by their municipality, including water, sewers, solid waste, and maintenance of municipal roads. 50% within 5 years, the entire population within 10 years.
- Training and recruitment of executives (at least 3 senior executives per municipality) and building offices with technical equipment in regional development centers.

In their report, “Haiti At A Crossroads”, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee encouraged a de-consolidation of decision-making power, specifically encouraging President Preval to “empower his lieutenants to make key development decisions about where to permanently house displaced citizens, where to allocate resources, and how to prioritize rebuilding.”

4. Agriculture and national production

The Action Plan contains the best instructions for “boosting domestic production” by investing in rural areas outside of the urban centers. First it explains: “agriculture, livestock and fisheries, together constitute one of the primary forces of economic revitalization and recovery of regional and local economies.” Five programs are targeted for implementation:

Funding for purchase of distribution of fertilizer, seeds, plowing equipment, tractors, tools, and fishing equipment at reasonable prices to increase productivity.
Funding for digging hill lakes and construction of irrigation networks to improve water management and increase agricultural productivity.
Finance the construction of rural roads to open up farming zones.
Finance the recapitalization of agricultural enterprise with access to credit for farmers, financing the development of small and medium enterprises that increase the value added to production, limit the losses incurred during transformation of products and increase incomes of farmers.
Finance the improvement of conditions for slaughter and preservation of meat, to guarantee quality and increase profitability.

V. Conclusion: Six Months and Sixty Years

“There must be a strategy that is centered on the needs of the people. That’s what is most important. There must be an economic strategy that is focused on the international market and an economic strategy based on how the state can support the most dynamic players in the economy.

“The most dynamic actors, up until the present, are within the peasant sector. Despite the fact that 50% of the population works in the agricultural sector, despite the fact that it produces about half the food consumed in the country, it is a sector that has been completely neglected, with very little investment by the state.”

- Camille Chalmers, PAPDA, MCC’s “Disaster to Decentralization: Haiti’s long term recovery.” June 8, 2010

“A strategy that can take the society beyond recovery to economic security.”

- Haiti: From National Catastrophe to Economic Security, A Report for the Secretary General of the United Nations, by Paul Collier, December 2008

Many of the agencies engaged in post-earthquake rebuilding are facing a fundamental question, whether they realize it or not. Will the millions of dollars earmarked for Haiti today be used to build a better Haiti, or will the international community simply restore Haiti to where it was before the earthquake, unchallenged in its title of “poorest country in the Western Hemisphere”?
The Government of Haiti’s Action Plan outlines concrete steps that can have both immediate and long-term impact on the living conditions of the majority of Haitians. The real solution is a decentralized Haiti and the de-concentration of the population in Port-au-Prince. It is a solution for today, six months after the earthquake that shattered Haiti’s capital city. It is also a solution for sixty years from now, for a hundred years from now, because it creates the means necessary for resources to be redistributed in Haiti. It creates the circumstances Haitians need so they all can access basic services and employment, no matter the region of the country in which they reside.

It seems unlikely, unfortunately, that the Government of Haiti will solve the land policy issues that are currently preventing it from creating viable options for survivors currently living in tent cities. Even with pressure and/or support from the international community, those with a vested interest in private property continue to have more access and capacity to pressure the government. Decentralization can and will ameliorate the situation of people living in the inhuman living conditions in the camps, which is an urgent and absolute need. If IDPs cannot be given land or permanent homes, decentralization promises that they do not have to remain in Port au Prince for survival. Projects outlined in decentralization plans are exactly what are needed to reverse the problem of overpopulation in Port au Prince; they offer all Haitians hope for jobs, health care and education outside of Port au Prince. These plans are accomplishable, and they provide truly Haitian answers to Haiti’s longest standing challenge: pulling the majority of the population out of poverty that is misery.

Reports Cited:

Haiti: From National Catastrophe to Economic Security, A Report for the Secretary General of the United Nations, by Paul Collier, Department of Economics at Oxford University, December 27, 2008. Read it here:www.focal.ca/pdf/haiticollier.pd

The International Community Should Pressure the Haitian Government For Prompt And Fair Elections, The Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, June 30, 2010. Read the full report here:http://ijdh.org/archives/13140

Plan D’Action Pour Le Relèvement et Le Développement National, English translation: Action Plan for the Reconstruction and National Development of Haiti, Government of the Republic of Haiti, March 2010. Read the plan in English here: researchforhaiti.typepad.com/files/pdna_english-1.pdf

National Growth and Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper, DSNCRP, prepared by the International Monetary Fund, March 2008. Read the English translation here: http://bit.ly/cyZpIU

Haiti At A Crossroads, U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, June 2010. Report available here:http://wwww.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/MYAI-86Q5C4?OpenDocument

Disaster to Decentralization: Haiti’s long term recovery, film by the Mennonite Central Committee, June 8, 2010. See the film here: http://mcc.org/stories/videos/disaster-decentralization

school supplies

2010-07-19T15:12:00.000-07:00

We would like to send globes and maps for the schools. We are also looking for a source of old fashioned writing tablets, the kind with a stylus that erase when you lift the top sheet.

This is where we stay in Port au Prince

2010-07-19T05:34:00.001-07:00

Haiti rehabilitation camp run by nun with N.J. ties offers hope, haven for earthquake victims

Published: Sunday, July 18, 2010, 6:30 AM Updated: Sunday, July 18, 2010, 7:45 AM

Bob Braun/Star-Ledger Columnist
Follow

Story tools

Aristide Economopoulos/The Star-LedgerIn the tent city Sister Mary with residents Katiana Yeye, 10, left, and Marvice Dorleis, 10. Sister Mary Finnick, who runs the retreat house Matthew 25, has housed at the peak 2,000 people in a tent city after the earthquake in the backyard of the house where a soccer field and basketball court used to be. (Aristide Economopoulos/The Star-Ledger)Nun runs rehabilition center in Haiti gallery (12 photos)

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Mita Jean Louis, wearing a bright, floral blouse and pink shorts, stares into a mirror, unmindful of the people around her. She is smiling, and someone asks if she’s smiling because she sees the reflection of such a beautiful young woman.

The smile vanishes. "I don’t know,’’ says the 19-year-old, instantly shy. She puts the mirror away in a makeshift cabinet, and lowers herself onto her bed. The bandage that covers the stump of her thigh shows through below her shorts.

7Share

Mita turns her face into the shoulder of another teenager. This girl, 17-year-old Reginette Sinelien, has lost a leg, too.

"They have come a long way,’’ says Sister Mary Finnick, "but they still have a long way to go.’’

The 77-year-old nun runs what has to be one of the most unusual places in Haiti, perhaps anywhere in the world. It is a rehabilitation center for those badly hurt in the earthquake, a refugee camp, a haven for the displaced, a magnet for the altruistic, an incubator of new green businesses, a gallery of Haitian art, and even a soccer center.

The dining room table in what had once had been the mansion of a wealthy Haitian businessman served as an operating table in the hours following the quake. What had been a chapel became a pharmacy. Its grand soccer field became a tent city that included a place for victims like Mita to recuperate from amputations and find artificial limbs.

"I guess, in a way, we were the only game in town,’’ says Finnick, who grew up in Lowell, Mass., but summered as a nun in Cape May.

The "we" is Matthew 25, a place established in 2005 as a way of "twinning" Catholic parishes in the United States — including three in New Jersey—with those in Haiti. The building is a guest house, open in the past mostly to those from America who wanted to work for the poor in Haiti.

It came through the earthquake only slightly damaged, while other houses in the Delmas 33 neighborhood crumbled into debris. The center — named for the Gospel exhortation by Christ to help "the least of my people" — instantly became a center for all manner of groups who responded in the aftermath of the disaster.

The international Lions Clubs designated it as a camp and sent sturdy blue tents to house what, at its peak, were 2,000 homeless refugees from the quake, people selected by a committee headed by a local soccer star, Pierre Michel Tanis. He is a coach and player on the Full Techniques, a local traveling soccer club that played its games on a field now covered with blue tents.

"The people were here so we lost our field. We wanted it organized well — first, to help the people, and then to make sure they move off the field,’’ says Tanis, better known by his playing name of Tye.

The team now can play only on what’s left of what had been a huge open area — on a concrete basketball court—without knee pads.

Word spread quickly about what Sister Mary was doing. Doctors from the United States and Portugal arrived, some to perform amputations.

Sue Morrison of Mountain Lakes, a surgeon who had been involved in the twinning parishes program, came to help. A friend, medical student Sarah Connelly from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, contacted a prosthetics company that put together a foundation to help those, like Mita, who lost limbs when concrete walls fell on them.

"We’re here to provide quality care to people like Mita,’’ says Dennis Acton of Manchester, N.H., a prosethetics producer who began the foundation.

Aristide Economopoulos/The Star-LedgerAmputee Mita Jeanlouis, 19, has her hair done by Danie Preal while a friend mends a tent in the tent city.

"All kinds of people have come through here,’’ says Finnick, including "Acupuncturists without Borders" and a plumber who donated and installed modern dual-flush toilets.

It also drew a group that wants to start a business building geodesic dome homes for Haitians, and another seeking to create organic compost-based toilet systems.

"I think having the word ‘sister’ in your name makes people guilty," says Finnick who once headed her order, the Gray Nuns of Yardley, Pa. She recently retired as a nursing professor at the University of Buffalo.

One recent night, guests included coaches from an organization in Massachusetts who want to train Haitian players and coaches, and a teacher from White Plains who had come to volunteer. A local artist named Einstein Albert sells his works there.

"I guess I have a knack for putting people together who want to do something good for others,’’ Finnick says.

Shipping Container has arrived

2010-07-07T11:29:00.000-07:00

The shipping container has arrived, Bob Fairchild and his wive Jan are traveling to Haiti the end of this month. Bobs goal is to build to teach how and to build 10 rocket stoves for the school lunch progarm with materials sent. Jan is laying the founcation for a trip next year with some of her students from Berea (sp?) college. Jadotte will be here with us soon.

Haitian point of view on farming

2010-07-07T11:24:00.000-07:00

Your request is being processed...

Crossover Dreams

A blog on migration by writers for IPS, a global non-profit newswire

Posted: July 5, 2010 07:32 PM

BIO Become a Fan

Get Email Alerts Bloggers' Index

digg
facebook Twitter stumble reddit del.ico.us

Important
Fascinating
Typical
Scary
Outrageous
Amazing
Infuriating
Beautiful

Read More: Agriculture , Farming , Haiti , Peasants , Rural Environment , Seeds , Small Farmers , Via Campesina , World News

54
75views

Get World Alerts

Email

Comments 11

By Peter Costantini ~ Seattle

Mouvman Peyizan Papay demonstrators at Hinche June 4, 2010. Photo credit: La Via Campesina

To: Hugh Grant, President and CEO, Monsanto

As you are no doubt aware, your offer to donate hybrid corn and vegetable seeds has stirred up quite a controversy in Haiti.

I'd like to call your attention to an article I wrote on this issue recently for Inter Press Service. While I was in Haiti for the month of May, I had a conversation with Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, the head of a major Haitian peasant organization and a leader of the international confederation La Via Campesina. He criticized your donation from a perspective on seeds and agriculture based on a very different world view that might be worth your time to understand.

Your company blog says that the idea to donate seeds to Haiti came to you and Executive Vice President Jerry Steiner at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. As you worked the crowd at that upscale ski resort, the place must have been crawling with Corporate Masters of the Universe and Brilliant Thinkers, who congregate yearly there to deliberate on the world's problems and how to solve them. But -- going out on a limb here -- I'm guessing there were not many Haitian Peasant Farmers.

While I'm sure some of the ideas on Haiti discussed there are worth pursuing, if you want to understand what Haiti's farmers need in the wake of the January 12 earthquake and the hurricanes of two years ago, I highly recommend going to Haiti to talk to some of them and to people who work closely with them. Travel in most rural areas is excruciatingly difficult on the ground, which is a reality farmers have to live with, but you could always rent a helicopter. I expect you would encounter a very different range of perspectives.

Your communications people say you did contact the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture and got their approval to donate seeds. That's a good first step, but it doesn't take a Macarthur Grant to figure out that even the best-intentioned people behind the desks in a ministry, especially one that has just suffered heavy losses in an earthquake, might not always represent the final word on what impoverished farmers deep in the countryside are thinking. And perhaps they wouldn't want to offend a corporation as wealthy and powerful as yours.

The U.S. Agency for International Development says they are going to use the seeds for a project called WINNER. They may have some interesting ideas on how to use them. Perhaps they have found some Haitian farmers who are willing to try them. But they are an arm of the U.S. State Department, and they ultimately represent the interests of the U.S. government, not Haitians.

Fortunately, though, it's not hard to find a wide range of opinion in the Haitian countryside. During my time in Haiti, I encountered large, sophisticated organizations of peasant farmers there that were very happy to talk to me. And there are plenty of smart, experienced Haitian agronomists and economists who are in intimate contact with realities in the fields. I spent a week outside of Port-au-Prince and more time in the city interviewing farmers, agronomists and others. I'd be glad to put you in touch with some of them.

Even if your travel budget is a little thin after those outrageously overpriced hotel rooms in Davos, I want to reassure you that right on the Internet you can find some excellent information from these people and organizations.

Jean-Baptiste's group, Mouvman Peyizan Papay (MPP - Peasant Movement of Papaye), is one of the biggest peasant organizations and has a web site that talks about its philosophies and practices. Having survived decades of political violence and the recent destruction by the 2008 hurricanes and the January earthquake, groups such as the MPP and Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan Ayisyen (Heads Together Small Haitian Farmers) remain among the strongest democratic grassroots organizations in the country.

Plateforme Haïtienne de Plaidoyer pour un Développement Alternatif (PAPDA - H-aitian Platform to Argue for Alternative Development) is a coalition of many urban and rural groups. Surfing its site, you can find articles on agriculture, economic development and democracy from a range of Haitian and international perspectives.

A non-profit that has long worked closely with small farmers' groups, Grassroots International, has done a sad but compelling documentary on the destruction of Creole pigs at the behest of the United States and international financial institutions in the 80s: Haiti's Piggy Bank. You should really watch it if you're interested in avoiding the mistakes made back then that helped to cripple Haitian agriculture.

For a thoughtful outline of agricultural policies that would benefit the majority of Haitians, read: A Future for Agriculture, a Future for Haiti by Beverly Bell of Other Worlds, who has decades of experience with Haitian popular organizations.

A macroeconomic and historical perspective on how to correct some past mistakes is offered by Tim Wise, the Deputy Director of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University in Medford, MA, in Aiding Haiti: Let's get it right this time.

And if you're looking for a model of how to do a detailed on-the-ground study of agricultural needs, try Edward Walters & Dina Brick's study, A Rapid Seed Assessment in the Southern Department of Haiti. It's the kind of data you should have collected before deciding to make a donation of seeds.

Bill Clinton recently apologized before the U.S. Senate for the U.S. trade and aid policies that led to the destruction of Haiti's capacity to feed itself. Monsanto is a charter member of the industrial-agricultural complex that has long driven those policies in the U.S. government and international institutions, exploiting every opening to break down local agriculture and open the floodgates for subsidized U.S. products and technologies. The large-scale export agriculture model imposed on Haiti then seems to be exactly what you are promoting with the donation of hybrid seeds. Or can you propose a way Haitian farmers could use them that would not ultimately end up costing most of them more than they can afford and driving them off the land?

Unfortunately, Monsanto's own corporate history doesn't inspire a lot of trust, and Haitian farmers are not alone in their skepticism of your model and embrace of alternatives.

Beginning with its production of the carcinogenic defoliant Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, Monsanto has been a lightning rod for criticisms by environmental, agricultural and public-health groups. In a more recent example, your company reportedly provided the potent herbicide Roundup Ultra to the U.S. government for anti-drug fumigation efforts in Colombia, drawing criticism from community and human rights groups there that the chemical destroys their food crops, poisons their water, and has led to increases in cancer and birth defects.

Your lawsuits against small farmers who protest that their fields have been contaminated by neighboring Roundup Ready GMO crops have not made you a lot of friends. Monsanto's genetically modified alfalfa has been challenged all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in Monsanto v. Geertson Seed Farms, with mixed results, and will no doubt face further opposition.

Perhaps you'd like to put all this behind you. So would small farmers around the world, who can't afford to forget that history because it frequently comes back to bite them.

The question is not ultimately how productive your hybrid corn seeds are, whether they can be used without manufactured fertilizers and pesticides, or whether they can be saved and reused under some circumstances. You are not, as your donation suggests you believe, sending those seeds into a vacuum full of ignorant, benighted people looking for any kind of help you decide to offer them.

Most of the Haitian countryside was not directly damaged by the earthquake, but rather has been ruined and impoverished over decades by human practices and human-made disasters, many of them imported. Haitian farmers, along with small farmers in neighbor countries like Mexico, have a deeply rooted culture of peasant agriculture. They have agronomists and scientists to back their efforts with research, and they have networks to share knowledge and best practices around the Haitian countryside and across the globe.

The peasant organizations at the demonstration in Hinche weren't simply rejecting your model of agriculture: they are proposing an integrated one of their own. After burning the batch of Monsanto seeds, they handed out native Creole seeds to the farmers there.

Straw hats and burning hybrid seeds. Photo credit: La Via Campesina

Haitian small farmers have centuries of experience breeding and saving seeds that grow well in the Haitian climate and their own local ecosystems. To measure their value, you have to take into account the environmental, economic and social externalities that imported hybrid seeds, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides often introduce.

To increase their productivity, Haitian farmers need virtually everything except imported seeds: hand tools, locally produced fertilizer, machinery, livestock, irrigation, storage and processing facilities, roads to get their products to market, and reforestation to reduce flooding. From a macroeconomic point of view, Haiti desperately needs to grow its domestic markets and suppliers, not import new products, such as your seeds, that they previously produced themselves.

Volny Paultre, the chief agronomist of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Haiti, could offer you the benefit of decades of knowledge of these issues at a scientific and policy level. I did an interview with him in May. The FAO has been working effectively all over rural Haiti for years, and many of their representatives are Haitian agronomists. Before trying to do anything to help Haitian farmers, you should talk to them at length about their programs.

The deep roots of peasant agriculture are not restricted to Haiti. In a recent article in The Nation, Retreat to Subsistence, Peter Canby describes how the indigenous small farmers of Oaxaca, Mexico are defending their ancient corn culture and the biodiversity of their seeds and milpas, and resisting being driven off the land. Sister cultures survive in many parts of the world, but many others are also endangered.

Beyond places with strong indigenous peasant cultures, alternative models of agriculture are attracting interest around the world. Just in the past few months, two important academic studies have been published that provide some data on the value of organic, small-scale farming methods.

A study of potato farming published in Nature by Washington State University scientists found that organic methods did a better job of reducing pests and increasing plant size than conventional ones using pesticides. In another paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the University of Michigan found that in tropical regions, small-scale family agriculture can be equally or more productive than industrial farming, while doing a better job of preserving biodiversity in the face of deforestation.

As you also may have learned, the protests against your seed donation weren't limited to Hinche. In cities across Haiti, the U.S., the Dominican Republic and Brazil, supporters of the Haitian farmers, including international environmental groups such as Greenpeace and the Organic Consumers Association, reportedly demonstrated in solidarity.

"With their deadly gift ... Monsanto and its accomplices are worsening the situation of the Haitian peasantry. This is a new earthquake," declared La Via Campesina, a confederation of peasant organizations in 70 countries to which the march organizers belong. "While this move comes at a time of dire need in Haiti, many feel it will undermine rather than bolster the country's food security," the group said in a public statement. Clearly, if you go ahead with your current policies you will have a tough row to hoe with this movement and its supporters.

If Bill Clinton can apologize for his role in destroying the capacity of Haiti to feed itself, can you take a cue from him and reverse your course in Haiti before Monsanto compounds the damage?

Sincerely yours,

Peter Costantini

We are starting to pack for the shipping container

2010-03-09T04:54:00.001-08:00

Please start returning your shoe boxes and donations.
We are specifically looking for used chain link fencing. We will be using it to make gabions (rock filled baskets to prevent erosion) at the main rectory. The river is undercutting the side of the mountain where it and the church are built. Last year we built 22 4x4x16 ft gabions with a grant from the Salvatorians. The wire baskets cost us $125 American each. So if you know where there is someone replacing there fence, or of a fence company in your area, please see if you can get it for the mission.
God Bless.

Latest info on missionaries arrested for kidnapping

2010-03-09T04:46:00.001-08:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/08/AR2010030802211.html

update from Parish Twiining Program

2010-02-26T08:12:00.001-08:00

Dear All,

I just have a few brief messages today.

Sr. Mary Finnick at Matthew 25 House has made a request particularly for dentists and for ophthalmologists. Also, she needs two people to help out at Matthew 25 House for the month of April and for two weeks in May. She not only will be celebrating her 60th Jubilee in April, but she is also long overdue for a rest from six exhausting weeks in providing care for so many earthquake victims. It would be best if a commitment could be made for at least a month rather than having a lot of folks coming and going for only a week. If you want to contact Sr. Mary directly at matthew25house@yahoo.com, could you please copy me on your e-mail. Thanks.

Also, if you are sending your parish funds to Haiti through Fonkoze, you may send your letter and check two to one of the following addresses:

City National Bank OR City National Bank
382 West 125th Street 900 Broad Street
New York, New York 10027 Newark, New Jersey 07102
Attn: Sabrina Brice Attn: Juanita Fields

Smith Thompson and Raymond Lochard have been the two primary representatives in the Fonkoze Haiti office that you have been sending your e-mail's to, however, Smith Thompson is no longer at Fonkoze and Raymond Lochard, unfortunately, was killed in the earthquake. You may now address your e-mail's to either Anancaona Adamson or Natacha Blanc. The e-mail address is still the same (fundnotice@fonkoze.org) and the number to call is (800) 293-0308.

I continue to be overwhelmed at how generous you have been to PTPA and Matthew 25 House. Know that we are deeply grateful for your generosity and that you have been in our prayers.

The sea container information will be mailed out late next week. The collection periods are still April 19-30.

Blessings,

Theresa
Parish Twinning Program

Gros Morne Update

2010-02-24T12:14:00.001-08:00

Gros Morne, February 22, 2010
The national day—weekend—of mourning was over a week ago but families continue to mourn their loved ones and the injured, among the 21,000 plus who have returned from PAP, continue to heal slowly. And we continue to live in fear of aftershocks or the more forceful earthquake that we have heard is possible. That possibility is what makes the cracks in buildings here appear so threatening. A week ago some of the religious in the parish met to exchange information on the damage we have seen. As Fr. Wilner noted, we have been slow to register the extant of the damage.
Here is a partial list of the Catholic buildings that need to be evaluated for safety:
In Town
St. Gabriel’s School and the sisters’ residence on the 2nd floor. The government inspector would not go upstairs. The sisters are living on the first floor and will move to a box tent in the yard. Most schools reopened Feb. 8 but St. Gabriel is only opening today with tarps in the yard.
The Gros Morne rectory has cracks. Fr. Nesly is living at the Jean Marie Vincent formation center in Grepin.
Notre Dame de la Chandeleur church, which was being enlarged, has new cracks.
Pendus
Fr. Wilner has told Ma Marcel that he doesn’t want her working inside the dispensary. It has cracks in all the rooms and across the floor.
The visitors’ house has cracks as does the church.
Pewou (parish of Decostiere—7th communal section of Gros Morne)
The church in Pewou (chapel of Fr. Nesly’s parish of Decostiere) which houses two classes has many cracks and so do both school buildings. Some cracks go down one side (inside and out) across the floor and up the wall on the other side.
Kalabat (Parish of Riviere Mancelle—1st and 2nd communal sections of Gros Morne)
The 2 story rectory/guest house is damaged. Fr. Jadotte is sleeping in an adjacent one-story room.
Last Thursday we expected an engineer to evaluate the damage but his plans were changed.

Synopsis of effects of earthquake at Rivere Mancelle

2010-02-20T04:17:00.000-08:00

When the earthquake struck Port au Prince on January 12th, Fr Jadotte was at a retreat along with other priest and seminarians. When the earthquake struck he was able to escape along with everyone except one other priest and 9 seminarians.
We have very sketchy communications, but we do know that our main school was damaged beyond repair. This school serves between 300 and 500 students.The children are still attending class outside in makeshift shelter. We are very proud of their perseverance. Most other schools in the area cancelled classes.
The rectory at Rivere Mancell, and the one in Gros Morne, were damaged moderatly. They are not presently safe to occupy.
We have had an influx of people from Port au Prince of excess of 3,000 people. This is creating even more shortages of food and basic needs.
Our first response to the earthquake was to do something immediately. After the shock wore off, we realized that our mission was to carry on and step up our support of the people in our rural area. Even more now is their need to develop their own resources for sustainable living.

Perspective

2010-02-19T06:43:00.001-08:00

We of the human race have the unique ability to not only experience perspective, but to willingly change it. First withen ourselves, by seeking, and then in others by planting seeds.
Our weekness is when we think our current one is the only true one.

2010-02-16T02:34:00.001-08:00

Our fight, our struggle, is not with men and women or their institutions.
It is with the darkness that seeks to cover the heart.
And that fight begins with our own heart.

Faith, Hope, and Love. The greatest of these is Love.

2010-02-15T06:31:00.001-08:00

We have seen with our own eyes, that love planting the seeds of hope, bears bountiful fruit.Do not despair, Have Faith.

follow link to story about northern Haiti

2010-02-11T07:05:00.000-08:00

http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/1000572.htm

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION A last chance to make things right for Haiti By: Dan Lett

2010-02-08T08:43:00.001-08:00

The view from the air was both startling and sad.

Startling because so many buildings remained standing in Port-au-Prince. Media coverage suggested the city had been razed. But as our Canadian Forces Griffon helicopter floated over the city, the flat-topped houses and seamless shanty towns seemed remarkably intact. It looked more like someone had thrown a shovel of gravel on top of the city. At ground level, a closer examination revealed the sadness: cracks, crumbling walls, twisted rebar. Many larger structures -- hospitals and schools in particular -- had totally disintegrated.

Also visible from the air were the enormous tent cities that had been established to give the homeless somewhere to escape evening rains. These stood out as brilliant blue patches against the light grey of the demolished city. The blue was emergency tarps provided by the United Nations.

It was a surreal site. With the naked eye, we could see clearly the throngs of prospective refugees crammed outside the gates of the Canadian Embassy. Nearby, a dozen soldiers, their nationality a mystery, toss food aid off the back of a military truck into a group of Haitians.

Outside Port-au-Prince, where the population isn't nearly as dense, the destruction was no less startling. Small clusters of homes with lush green yards and small stone walls seemed, at first examination, to be largely intact. In fact, only the roofs were mostly intact, but they lay on the ground, the walls underneath having simply evaporated.

My visit to Haiti was brief and hastily arranged. The Free Press had been invited to accompany Maj.-Gen. Yvan Blondin, commander of Canada's air force, to witness first-hand a remarkable "air bridge" established to supply Haiti with humanitarian aid. Against the odds, Blondin found a way of getting C-130 Hercules planes in and out of a tiny airstrip in Jacmel, on Haiti's southern coast, doubling the number of Canadian aircraft landing each day. It was not my first experience in this troubled country. I visited Haiti in 1996, when Canada was leading a United Nations mission to bring stability to the chronically unstable nation.

Despite the better efforts of former president Jean Bertrand Aristide, there was little hope among Haitians. The police were in shambles. Unable to get their weekly wages with any regularity, those few police officers who did show up for work often communicated their anger by arriving in civilian clothes. They would go out on patrol in rusty Suburbans, with a dozen or so of them packed into the lumbering truck, the barrels of their sidearms pointed out the windows.
After nearly two weeks of patrols and visits to aid projects, it was hard not to feel despondent. The country was barely functioning. There was no reliable provision of water or electricity. Garbage had been left unattended for so long in Port-au-Prince streets, it was not unusual to find entire streets blocked off by metres-high mounds of rotting waste. I was with Canadian peacekeepers when they swept inner-city parks for preying pedophiles, or patrolling the cemeteries where the more desperate among the homeless sometimes moved into crypts that had been emptied by grave robbers.
I have often replayed those images as Haiti moved from one political and economic crisis to another. And while there have been some improvements in health care, education and the economy, the pace of progress seems out of step with the magnitude of the investment by foreign nations.

It is mostly true Haiti has been hurt as much as it has been helped by our best efforts to fix it. From the indiscriminate kindness of countries like Canada, to the more self-interested meddling of the United States, Haiti is a product of all that is good and bad about humanitarian aid.

If there is hope to be found in this horrible disaster, it is the suggestion an event like this is an opportunity to rebuild the country from the ground up. The big question facing the world is what authority will oversee this reconstruction. Haitian President Rene Preval's administration seems woefully unprepared to undertake a campaign of this magnitude. In Washington, there is talk of "a receivership" that might put the reconstruction efforts in the hand of an as-yet unidentified international organization, or coalition of organizations. Canadians familiar with the concept of "co-management" of First Nations know stripping an afflicted people of self-determination is a desperate measure that has no immediate prospect for lasting success.

There will be money, and there will be good intentions. Two trips to Haiti, 14 years apart, suggest to one observer this is the best, but perhaps last, chance for the world to make it right.

dan.lett@shaw.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 8, 2010 A

From Parish Twinning Program

2010-02-04T04:28:00.001-08:00

Dear All,

First of all, I want to impart to you a thought to promote in the media or any avenue you might have that would impact the rebuilding of Haiti.

As I'm sure you agree this tragedy has just defied all comprehension. I pray that out of the destruction and suffering some good will come to Haiti -- and that with the exodus of people from PAP, the world will focus on rebuilding the heart of Haiti -- the rural areas. Just think of the possibilities if roads, water, electricity, schools and medical facilities could be brought to those who have suffered the most (for centuries) in Haiti. With the infrastructure in place, the businesses and jobs will come. Give the government a temporary space to operate while funneling funds to all the exterior outreaches of Haiti. Give even more Haitians a reason to stay in their original homes instead of migrating to the big city. We need to demand that the people in the rural areas not be forgotten.

Secondly, I would like to encourage all of you to make an effort to approach a neighboring parish, a parish of a family member in another state, or a parish that you think would be receptive to reaching out to Haiti in order to twin with a parish in Haiti. If you have anyone interested, please contact me and I will send them information. I'm receiving a lot of requests from priests as many families and individuals from Port-au-Prince return to their former communities and are in need of food, water and shelter.

SEA CONTAINER: We are still planning the April Sea container with the collection times from Monday, April 19 to Friday, April 30. We will soon be mailing out the information with a notice that if we run into complications with the port, customs or government offices, we will notify you. Domond, our Coordinator in Haiti, says that his does not currently don't know the status of the Ministry of Planification, however, the military is presently reconstructing the Ministry of Finance and customs has established offices at the airport.

FONKOZE: Fonkoze in PAP is now operating and you can safely send your checks to City National Bank, c/o Sabrina Brice, 382 125th Street, New York, NY 10027. They are temporarily waiving the $10.00 deposit fee. If you are sending a large amount to your sister parish, the pastor may not be able to withdraw all of the funds at once. However, he can eventually obtain all of the funds with a second or third trip to the bank.

MATTHEW 25 HOUSE: For those of you who may not have received a recent announcement from Pat Tortora at Matthew 25 House, he has forwarded some
information regarding your questions and concerns about your parish or medical visits to Haiti, the status of the house and accommodating guests.

Many of you have been so generous in supporting the post-earthquake work at Matthew 25 and in your offer to help us renovate, rebuild or move Matthew 25 if necessary. We thank you for that and ask that you keep us in mind as you share your donations. Matthew 25 House accommodated over 2200 people last year and in order for us to continue to offer hospitality and many other services to you, we may need you help. We attempting to locate the owner so that we can make a decision as soon as possible on the future of Matthew 25. When we do have more information, we will share it with you.

Our deep gratitude to all of you for your concern and generous gifts to PTPA & Matthew 25 House.

Blessings,

Theresa Patterson
Executive Director
Parish Twinning Program

Haitian Proverb

2010-02-02T09:15:00.001-08:00

Little by little, the bird builds its nest.
Piti, piti,wazo fe niche li.

Recently ran across the report on CARE's project in the Gros Morne area at:

2010-02-02T05:47:00.001-08:00

http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PDACN808.pdf

Email from SrPat and FrJadotte

2010-01-30T10:01:00.001-08:00

Hi Denise, Fr. Jadotte is here with me. CRS is sending a shipment of food
but the logistics keep changing so he is reorienting people as plans
change. The rectory is not habitable and will cost an estimated $14,000
USD to repair. I have the estimate. Love, Pat and Pe Jadotte

Haitian Proverb

2010-01-29T06:59:00.001-08:00

What the eye doesn't see
dosesn't move the heart

Sa je pa we' ke' tounen

Dear Pat Robertson, Please read John 9:3

2010-01-28T07:23:00.001-08:00

3"Neither this man nor his parents sinned," said Jesus, "but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life. 4As long as it is day, we must do the work of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. 5While I am in the world, I am the light of the world."

Television Interview

2010-01-25T09:37:00.001-08:00

We will be on channel 22 Cookeville tonight at 7:00 pm for an interview on Haiti. Tune in if you can.
Bob and Denise

We have a new web site:

2010-01-23T06:34:00.001-08:00

http://www.feedhaiti.org/

Information from the Sisters we work with in Gros Morne

2010-01-23T05:42:00.001-08:00

The Religious of Jesus and Mary - U.S. Province
RJM

Get Involved: Haiti Disaster Relief Donations Needed
UPDATE JAN. 20, 2010 We just heard on the news about the strong aftershock (6.1 magnitude) to hit outside of Port-au-Prince. We have heard, as of 1:30 p.m., that Sr. Jackie, Sr. Isa and Brittany are fine in Port au Prince. As we live in the mystery of this heart-wrenching tragedy, please know that the RJM community continues to be grateful for the tremendous outpouring of donations to the RJM earthquake relief fund ? P A P E R ( Port-au-Prince Earthquake Relief).

Hait MapJAN. 20, 2010 - As you know from the news, the needs of the Haitian people were overwhelming prior to the earthquake and continue to be so today. The scope and depth of this tragedy continue to call for both immediate and sustained, long-term intervention. Our commitment to serve in Haiti remains strong. We intend to be there for the long haul.

The Religious of Jesus and Mary, a Roman Catholic Congregation of Sisters, have ministered in Haiti since 1997. We know that our six sisters, two candidates, and one volunteer are alive, and we count that as a blessing. Our present situation is the following: Sister Vivian is receiving medical help in Rhode Island. Sisters Jackie and Isa and our volunteer, Brittany, are in Port-au-Prince helping with relief efforts in and around Sacre Coeur Hospital. Sister Pat is coordinating communication from Gros Morne ? a place that now has 3000 refugees.
Haiti Disaster
Photo by Sean Barth

Efforts are underway in GM to get food, medical help and sleeping mats. Sisters Nazareth and Rose have provided a bus to bring Jean Rabel people from PAP; they are also involved in meetings to access the needs and to see how best to respond. Gardyne, our candidate, sadly lost her brother in the earthquake and is with her family. Middia, our pre-candidate, is still in need of orthopedic care and several people are working to find her the needed assistance. Our convent in Port-au-Prince has been severely damaged by the earthquake.

We are committed to sharing ourselves and our goods with our Haitian brothers and sisters for as long as we are able. To this end, we invite and welcome your prayers and financial support. No donation is too small!

The RJMs have set up an earth quake relief fund ? P A P E R ? i.e. Port-au-Prince Earthquake Relief. Donations can be sent directly to that fund:

c/o Sr. Janet Stolba, RJM
Religious of Jesus and Mary
125 Michigan Ave. N. E. 4th floor
Washington, DC 20017

Or you can donate online through our website:
Donate to Haiti Disaster Relief

Select "RJM Haiti Fund" in the Program Designation drop-down menu, and your donation will go for immediate disaster relief.
Correspondence regarding RJM Earthquake Relief may be sent to Sr. Janet Stolba at:
rjmearthquakerelief@yahoo.com.
Notre Dame in Haiti: Before and After
Photo by Sean Barth
Haiti Presidential PalaceL before and After
Photo by Sean Barth

You can also donate through other relief organizations such as Catholic Relief Services.

For those interested in volunteering, please phone
Theresa Patterson at (615) 673-3501, as she organizes volunteer groups. Or Google search PTPA (Parish Twinning of America).

Plans are underway to have a special Mass for the victims of the earthquake.

Go to the The Religious of Jesus and Mary U.S. Province website.
RJM
The Religious of Jesus and Mary - U.S. Province

Fr Jadotte update

2010-01-22T10:14:00.001-08:00

Just heard that the rectory where Fr. Jadotte stays in Gros Morne on Mondays and Tuesdays was severely damaged. Gros Morne is the city that is closest to the villages where he works.

from Voice of America

2010-01-22T06:57:00.000-08:00

Haitian Government to Relocate 400,000 Displaced by Quake

VOA News 22 January 2010

Photo: AP

Displaced people camping in the streets awake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 21 Jan 2010

Haitian government officials say an estimated 400,000 residents displaced by last week's earthquake will be moved to new villages to be set up outside the devastated capital, Port-au-Prince.

Officials said Thursday they will provide transportation for the residents and hope to begin moving them as soon as possible. The 7.0 magnitude quake left an estimated 1.5 million people homeless, and earthquake survivors have been living outside in overcrowded camps with little or no sanitation.

Also on Thursday, U.S. military announced it had reopened the heavily damaged seaport in the Haitian capital to help improve the flow of aid to earthquake victims.

The commander of the U.S. Southern Command, General Douglas Fraser, said the port should be able to handle the movement of about 150 containers of relief daily.

The port's capacity is expected grow to at least 250 containers a day Friday, when a commercial vessel arrives.

Debris around the port, wrecked roads and congestion at the damaged main airport in the capital have made delivering relief to earthquake survivors difficult.

Fraser also said three new airports have opened in Haiti and the neighboring Dominican Republic for relief supplies.

Meanwhile, U.S. aviation authorities say they have sent a temporary control tower to Haiti to help with the flights bringing in earthquake aid from around the world. The tower will come with two diesel-powered generators and supporting fuel tanks.

Separately, aid workers on the ground in Haiti say they are making progress getting food and water to survivors, but the death toll could rise because of untreated injuries and disease. The aid group, Doctors Without Borders, says patients are dying of sepsis (an infection in the blood) from untreated wounds and that some of the group's surgical sites have 10- to 12-day backlogs of patients.

The January 12 quake killed an estimated 200,000 people and affected 3 million people -- about one-third of Haiti's population.

The U.S. Defense Department said Thursday that the number of American troops taking part in relief efforts will grow to 20,000 by Sunday, including troops on the ground and on the many ships in the area.

The U.S. Navy ship, USNS Comfort, reached Haiti Wednesday and its crew has treated more than 230 patients from 10 hospital sites.

Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.

2010-01-22T06:39:00.000-08:00

If you can not prepare for something, do not worry about it. Have faith, have hope, have love. Peace be with us all.

News From FR Jadotte!!!

2010-01-21T09:27:00.001-08:00

Denise just recieved this email from SrPat and FrJadotte

Denise, This is Pat writing with Fr. Jadotte. Along with other
Montfortains, Fr. J barely got out of their house before it collapsed.
One of their Priest is still buried in the rubble. They lost nine of
their seminarians at CIFOR- the theology school. IN Riviere Mancelle the church and the rectory are cracking. They will try to repair
the rectory. The school which was in bad shape is worse. The students
can't go on the second floor. They are using leave coverings outdoors.
The 5th and 6th graders are in the church. In the other chapels the
schools are open. ( Pat says compliments to them--other schools are closed
even thought they could open.) However the price of food stuff has risen
so they will need more money to feed the children.. Do you know anything
about the gator parts?? Father wants you to know the rocket stove is
working very well--people are very happy with it--in less than 30 min rice
is cooked and less smoke. (I'm jealous) The cooks like it very much.
Thanks for all your prayers. Fr. Jadotte and Pat We have a web site
www.rjm-us.org and you probably have received the HPTP updates

President Preval article follow link

2010-01-21T06:51:00.001-08:00

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/laplaza/2010/01/haiti-earthquake-after-a-week-preval-speaks.html

Information from Mattew 25, The guest house in Port au Prince

2010-01-19T16:41:00.001-08:00

Earthquake Update on Matthew 25 House ETC.

Dear All,

Thank you for your concern for Sr. Mary, Pat, Vivian, Domond and his family and the clinic at Petite Riviere de Nippes. I received news early last evening that Domond and his family were okay, but was not able to get any word from Matthew 25 until very early this morning. Gras a Dieu, thanks to God, everyone is safe and well. I am going to copy below some of what Sr. Mary has written. I am communicating with Dr. Gil Irwin in Manassas, VA to see if there is a way that we can mobilize medical people to go into PAP, such as through the military. I have had many calls from medical personnel offering to go to Haiti, but the first obstacle to hurdle will be how to get into the country in these next few days. Sr. Mary has indicated that they could potentially have visiting medical personnel sleep in the soccer field and the land behind Matthew 25. She said that they are in great need of medical supplies, bandages, betadine, analgesics, etc. Just as soon as I have any information, I will share it with you.

I have received a lot of inquiries also as to how one can help. As I have done on many other occasions, such as with the hurricanes in Gonaives, I directed money I received to the Bishops or sources where I thought the funds would be utilized best. For now, I feel medical needs are going to be a priority. Long-term, we will also need to make repairs to the house. As Sr. Mary has indicated in her e-mail below, the upstairs of the house has been damaged and we cannot have people stay in those rooms. A lot of reconstruction and rebuilding, particularly in Port-au-Prince, is going to be a necessity in the aftermath of the earthquake.

My word from Petite Riviere de Nippes is that the clinic essentially withstood the major quake and tremors. Our Clinic Administrator writes today that fissures or cracks have occurred in numerous places in the clinic as a result of all of the aftershocks. Otherwise, all of the employees are fine physically, but very disturbed emotionally. Most of them have families back in Port-au-Prince. The medical personnel living at our staff house spent the entire night outside for fear of the building collapsing from the aftershocks. They are prepared today to treat anyone needing medical assistance.

I will stay in touch with Sr. Mary and others in Haiti to assess where we can help most. And, I will also keep you apprised of any information worth sharing. If you know of anyone wishing to make a donation, they can direct it to Parish Twinning Program and put on the memo line for "earthquake relief" -- or if you are able to assist with medical treatment and repairs at Visitation Clinic, you would make a check out to Visitation Hospital Foundation with the same information on the memo line.

Please keep the people of Haiti in your prayers.

Blessings,

Theresa Patterson
Parish Twinning Program
Visitation Hospital Foundation

FROM SR. MARY FINNICK IN PORT-AU-PRINCE:

We are all OK physically at the house. We were home when it hit. The downstairs part of the house stood up well, does not appear to be any serious structural damage. But, there has been some considerable damage upstairs. Matthew 25 cooked up 4 big pots of soup for the people coming for treatment, and we served as a triage and treatment center. We were able to climb over the fallen bookcases and shelves and retrieve a lot of meds and supplies we had in our depot.

Sr Mary, Vivian and our 6 guests performed superbly in treating many injured. Eventually, 3 Haitian doctors showed up, I think when they heard we had supplies. Worked til about one in the morning. We were also one of the few houses to have power with our inverters and batteries, so we set up 3 or 4 lights on the soccer field to help with the treatment. The hospitals are either badly damaged or destroyed and have stopped taking patients as they are overwhelmed.

Pray for our sisters and brothers.

Pat, Viv, Sr. Mary

It is morning and I can give you a better assessment of the house. The first floor is covered with all the things that came out of the closets but there isn't any big structural problem. The divider between the depot and the store fell in as did most of the other book cases in the office and in my room. The 2nd floor is different The side facing the soccer field has more damage and the cement walls and some of the boards have been knocked around. The 3rd floor stairs are just hanging there. The cement in front of the bathroom is badly damaged. On the other side the bathroom wall on the outside is damaged but there doesn't seem to be as much structural problems. The wall between us and the neighbor has quite a large hole. I don't know yet what to tell folks about coming but I don't think we can use the rooms upstairs. I've been trying to answer and reassure folks we are ok.

We used everything I had as I triaged along with 3 MD's and our guests. Vivian and Pat had the important job of getting to our supplies as that whole area is under debris; making pots of soup etc. We finally cut up pillow cases for bandages. I think planes are flying out today but I haven't heard from the folks who are in country and supposed to return to PAP. Our electricity continues but the container holding 12 of the batteries is damaged. All the cars survived.

Domond just came over and said his house is not safe because of the damage upstairs. He did ask to have you contact any medical groups planning to come to see if they still planned to and then ask if they would stay in PAP as this the most needy place right now. We can use the soccer field and out back for sleeping area and the kitchen for cooking in the back is OK. But there is a great need for medical supplies, suturing, betadine, analgesics...everything... and personnel to bring it.

Haiti Project

Home Again...

October 20th 2011 update

If you would like to contribute to the shipping container this year, Please look at this list Needs of Haiti 2011

Volunteers?

We have 2 projects that need someone to head up. 1st, we need a small engine mechanic to tune up and repair generators and other items that are donated to ship to Haiti. 2nd we need some one to head up a soap project. Any one feel called to help

How Haiti can reclaim sovereignty

A perspective on where the money is being spent in Haiti.

CECILE-ANNE MULLER journal of Nov trip 2010

CECILE-ANNE MULLER journal of Nov trip 2010

Ritas Letter about our Trip

Mission trip

Fr. Jim

Fr. Jadotte leaves today

Fr. Jadotte leaves Monday

Open House in Nashville this Friday

Riviere Mancelle is the Mango capitol of Haiti.

Robert Fairchild update of last trip

Huntsville Alabama

Fr. Jadotte message to the churches 2010

Cookeville this weekend

Bob and Jan Fairchild have returned.

Gator fixed!

latest form Bob Fairchild in Haiti

Fr. Jadotte

Bob and Jan Fairchild are safe in Gros Morne

Very well thought out article

Tèt Ansanm pou Yon Nouvo Ayiti

HAITI’S ANSWER for Six Months & Sixty Years

Monday, July 12th, 2010

[1] Camille Chalmers, PAPDA in MCC’s “Disaster to Decentralization: Haiti’s long term recovery.”

[2] Georges Werleigh interview with the author, January 12, 2003. Quoted in “Let Haiti Live: Unjust U.S. Policies Towards Its Oldest Neighbor”, eds. M. Miles & E. Charles

school supplies

This is where we stay in Port au Prince

Haiti rehabilitation camp run by nun with N.J. ties offers hope, haven for earthquake victims

Published: Sunday, July 18, 2010, 6:30 AM Updated: Sunday, July 18, 2010, 7:45 AM

Shipping Container has arrived

Haitian point of view on farming

Crossover Dreams

We are starting to pack for the shipping container

Latest info on missionaries arrested for kidnapping

update from Parish Twiining Program

Gros Morne Update

Synopsis of effects of earthquake at Rivere Mancelle

Perspective

Faith, Hope, and Love. The greatest of these is Love.

follow link to story about northern Haiti

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION A last chance to make things right for Haiti By: Dan Lett

From Parish Twinning Program

Haitian Proverb

Recently ran across the report on CARE's project in the Gros Morne area at:

Email from SrPat and FrJadotte

Haitian Proverb

Dear Pat Robertson, Please read John 9:3

Television Interview

We have a new web site:

Information from the Sisters we work with in Gros Morne

Fr Jadotte update

from Voice of America

Haitian Government to Relocate 400,000 Displaced by Quake

Photo: AP

Share This

Related Articles

If you can not prepare for something, do not worry about it. Have faith, have hope, have love. Peace be with us all.

News From FR Jadotte!!!

President Preval article follow link

Information from Mattew 25, The guest house in Port au Prince