100% Percent for Haiti


Welcome to the 100% for Haiti blog. Here you will find the latest updates on our activities in Haiti and much more. This blog is intended as a discussion forum on the work of small NGOs in Haiti. So please feel free to join the discussion by posting comments or sending articles to the moderator that you would like to have published.

Friday, April 8, 2011

100% For Haiti, Our History and Future!

I'd made four previous trips to Haiti in various capacities working for Haitian relief organizations, when I went back seven months after the earthquake, in August last year. It was the worst time to be there, the hottest part of the summer, dusty, filthy, and malarial - and I'd never planned to visit the area of the quake epicenter since I was already involved in some projects up in the Central Plateau. Port au Prince was still full of rubble and political rumbling, the white 4x4 vehicles of foreign aid and the UN everywhere, but doing what?
I had collected some money with a group of friends and artists living in the tiny Virgin Islands, 500 miles to the west, but we'd already committed it to some good locally run projects in other parts of Haiti, helping refugees from the city. This group, 100% for Haiti, started as an artists' club donating paintings for sale to help Haiti after the quake. I had opinions and ideas, but no resources to start a new project no matter what the need.

A good friend took me to see a school he'd been telling me about for months - run by the daughter of the original builder, it had been totally destroyed in the quake, along with the family's house. Yollande and her family and the teachers, all from that village, had carried on running the school under a tarpaulin on poles, while living in tents on the site. The school had no church affiliation, no government funding, and no outside backing, but in a poor road-side community, hardly even a village, it had run for 9 years educating between 150 and 180 children from pre-K to 6th grade, at a cost of around $26 US per year per child, though the parents struggle to pay that much. Haiti lacks school facilities for 1/3 of all children, especially in rural areas. Over the years, the 12 staff of this school, called IMECT, at Morne Tapion near Petit Gouave, have often gone unpaid, subsisting on the sporadically government-provided rice and beans that make the children’s school lunch.
I decided there had to be something I could do - even though I couldn't make any promises, and had no more than $2500 in our non-profit's bank account.

So then and there, I met with the builder, my friend the civil engineer who has run similar projects, and the teachers and parents, to propose a temporary plywood and tin 6 room school – built mainly with community labor, and locally sourced building materials. It was erected in a week, between the rains, in October 2010 – for the astonishingly small sum of $7500, which I was lucky enough to find from a private donor. That's $45 per child – for a school better than many in the country, that will last several years, probably more – while we aim to fund the reconstruction of a permanent school class by class, without the loss of years of these children’s education. The school also provides adult and teen classes, acts as a community center, and is used by local organizations, for ceremonies, weddings, meetings - plus it will act as a shelter in event of another large-scale quake. Being a temporary structure without concrete except for the floor is actually an advantage in today's Haiti - where most people are too terrified to enter concrete buildings that may trap and kill them in another quake.
I just made my second visit (Feb/Mar 2011), much delayed by the elections in Haiti, and the slow economy in the rest of the Caribbean (meaning a shortage of my own travel funds), to see what had been achieved, plan the beginning of the first permanent classroom to be rebuilt, and help paint and decorate the school. So imagine how it felt, to see the children, 168 of them aged 3 to 18, under a sound new roof, in their smart gingham uniforms, avidly absorbing the lessons.

We’re now funding teacher and support staff salaries, school lunches, first aid, and building latrines, a water tank and hand washing facilities, and leveling the ruins to start building. We are beginning many other small initiatives, providing extra curricula activities, and equipment, to make sure these kids stay in school, at least through 6th grade. (And later we hope that all those capable of continuing education can go on to secondary school nearby with a new uniform, fees paid and a scholarship towards books and transport. Each $100 in extra scholarship support will make this possible for another 2 graduates from IMECT).

This means by supporting a local community leader, local employees and local construction workers, to do what they know how to do already, we can provide primary education in an area that would otherwise now have none, for $60 per child per year, and rebuild their permanent school for another $60 per child.

It's in the nature of primary schools, like orphanages, and homes for the handicapped, that they may well never become self-funding. But what they add to the society where they are built, in educating, equalizing, bringing peace and possibilities to the population, is immeasurable. We haven't had corporate or government money, this is still a micro-project, but readily replicable all over the place - so long as it is kept local, doesn't impose foreign staff, require foreign materials to build, needs not host outside staff or volunteers who require a First World standard of living - all of which would detract from paying as many local salaries as possible, keeping as many children in school at as low a cost as possible, and disrupting the community only minimally.

What it does need is the honesty of all involved, and transparency in operation to the greatest degree possible - and this is tricky, with at least 3 languages in use, three or four currencies, huge lags in communication caused by rare internet access, dollar-a-minute phone calls on terrible lines, criminal banking fees imposed on the Third World for transfers and transactions, virtually no postal service, not to mention Haiti's notorious "Customs Service" making deliveries of donated overseas equipment almost impossible. It depends enormously on finding the right people, and letting them have the freedom to run the project they were already running until the earthquake; with the benefit of some assurance that funds are available, even though in this case, it's no more than one year at a time, to rebuild - and pay salaries and expenses while they do that.

Nobody is going to profit unduly from this. Nobody will become famous. But each year a small community will gradually become more and more literate, more aware of the world they have to live in, more able to cope - and at a miniscule cost. At the same time, we're addressing some of the pressing issues - Haiti's problems of domestic violence, low status of women and children, out of control consumerism, manipulation by religious groups, cultural impoverishment, degradation of the environment, cruelty to animals… the list could go on and on! It's my hope that we are not by so doing, also exporting all the worst problems of our own societies - we in the West have made all the mistakes in the book, can we allow others to profit from our mistakes, by avoiding them?
Mandy Thody, 5 April 2011

Mandy Thody is the Founder and Committee Director of 100% for Haiti

1 comment:

Mandy Thody said...

Our website and FB page have a Picasa slideshow about IMECT school.