To Help

“What are you doing to help the people in Haiti?”

A young girl recently asked me this question. I was giving a presentation on life in Haiti to the students of my former elementary school. The school principal had heard about the hurricanes via my blog and contacted me with a desire to have her students contribute to relief efforts in Gonaives. Although the school is a very small school in a rural area of Wisconsin, the students managed to raise $300 for a Haitian school by saving their quarters every week.

In response to the girl’s question, I said that I was helping to plant trees—in particular, a special type of tree that produces oil, which can be used as fuel in place of wood. The answer was accurate but greatly simplified. In fact, the girl could not imagine how complex her question was and how often I have been turning that question over in my mind for the past several weeks.

Shortly after returning to the U.S., I set off on a two-week roadtrip to the Southeast. My first stop was my alma mater, Furman University, where I gave a presentation titled “Hurricanes, Hunger, and Haiti: How Human Actions Augment the Cost of Natural Disasters.” The exercise of preparing the presentation gave me the opportunity to review some of Haiti’s historic and current social, environmental, and economic troubles. I was grateful for an opportunity to share that information, as well as personal stories from my time in Haiti.

Next, I headed to Atlanta where I met with my fellow ’08 Compton Fellow, Terron Ferguson, and his friend Ryan. Terron and Ryan are cofounders of The Arché, an organization that provides community service and civic development opportunities for African American college-aged youth. In addition to catching up with each other, Terron and I discussed the possibility of bringing some members of The Arché to Haiti. In fact, one week later on my way north, I stopped in Atlanta again to meet with some of the members. We had a great brainstorming session about how their organization could help meet the needs in Haiti. I left feeling reenergized and reminded of the importance of bouncing ideas off of other people to prevent myself from feeling isolated and overwhelmed in my work.

Between the two Atlanta stops, I traveled to Miami to visit my mentor, Georges. He has had a rough few months. The economic downturn dealt a serious blow to his fledgling biodiesel business. Nonetheless, I found Georges as fiery and determined as ever. I dined with his family, visited his accountant whom I had emailed but never met, and was introduced to a Nicaraguan man who hopes to collaborate with Georges to build biodiesel processors in Haiti and Nicaragua.

After Miami, I headed to Fort Myers to seek out the proprietor of My Dream Fuel, LLC., a company that is planting jatropha in southern Florida. I had emailed and called the company to no avail, so I decided to try a last-ditch effort at making contact by stopping at the warehouse address listed on the company’s website. As luck would have it, the owner was in his office. After a bit of a cold start to the conversation, he warmed up and talked at length about his operations. He also suggested that I visit a place just down the road called ECHO to see their jatropha trees.

So I drove two exits up the interstate and found ECHO, the Educational Concerns for Hunger Organization. I was greeted by friendly and gracious people, who invited me to join the ECHO network and told me about their efforts to help international development workers improve the effectiveness of their agricultural projects. One woman even took the time to show me the jatropha trees, although it was not a scheduled tour time and she was late for a workshop.

Shortly after my return to Wisconsin, the fruits of my many new relationships began to flower. Upon the advice of a Furman development officer who had sought me out during my two days on campus, I contacted the director of an organization named Partner for People and Place (PPP). The organization has started a jatropha nursery in northeastern Haiti, so there is a strong opportunity for collaboration between my project and the work of PPP. Shortly thereafter, the program manager for another jatropha project called Haiti Biodiesel emailed me upon the referral of the My Dream Fuels owner. Then, during a phone conversation about Gonaives relief efforts with a member of the Church of the Brethren Disaster Response Committee, I discovered that the man and his wife had worked as ECHO interns.

Meanwhile, I received a forward from Furman Alum and ’07 Compton Fellow Kartikeya Singh about a University of Oregon student who is planning a trip to Haiti in December to complete a photojournalism story on climate change vulnerability. As chance would have it, the student has a friend who just spent three months with a jatropha biodiesel project in Honduras as part of a Watson Fellowship and who intends to start a soil recuperation project in Haiti within the next few years.

With all of this communication and collaboration, you would think I’d feel secure in the direction of my work and the achievability of my goals. Yet that young girl’s question has been haunting me since before she verbalized it. What am I doing to help? Or: what can I do to help?

My initial three months in Haiti, particularly the two post-hurricane months, revealed just how difficult it is to pick up the pieces of a country that has been broken by centuries of external profiteering, internal corruption, and environmental degradation. Here is one quick example of the challenges of working in Haiti: shortly before the hurricanes, the agronomist Dumond suggested that we purchase a few watering cans for the nursery. I agreed and told him to let me know the price once he found someone who was selling them. It took him one week to find watering cans. I gave Dumond the money to buy the watering cans on Monday, September 1st. By Tuesday afternoon, my neighbors and I were flooded out of our houses, the first 1,000 jatropha seedlings were under water, and all roads out of the mission were blocked by the floods.

When I left Haiti, my house and the nursery were still flooded. The lake blocking the main road toward Port-au-Prince had not budged. Dumond was living in a different location from his wife and children and walking miles through muddy streets to come to work everyday. The Gonaives bank systems were down, preventing me from withdrawing any money to purchase supplies or pay the workers. Money would have helped little anyway since there were few supplies in Gonaives to be purchased.

I did not realize how deeply this state of affairs had affected me until I read fellow Furman Alum and ’08 Compton Fellow Angel Cruz’s blog about her struggles to combat poverty in El Salvador. I burst into tears as I sat before my computer reading Angel’s words. I did not cry because things were so bad there. I cried because they sounded so good compared to Haiti.

I constantly struggle with how to help Haiti. I want to rehabilitate the environment, but I know that can only be done if the economy is simultaneously rehabilitated. Jatropha looks like a promising solution, but the more I read and talk with others, the more I learn just how untested jatropha biofuels are. Haitian peasants cannot wait two years to try a new crop before receiving any benefits from it. Therefore, I am reaching the conclusion that a multi-pronged approach, which meets immediate and long-term needs for food and fuel, is imperative in Haiti.

I am realizing everyday that I do not know enough. I don’t know enough about agronomy. I don’t know enough about international shipping. I don’t know enough about helping in a way that empowers rather than encourages dependency.

Yet I am learning. And I am planning. And I am revising. My current plans include three broad goals:

1) Tree nursery. Upon my return to Haiti, I will bring supplies to restart the tree nursery at Eben-Ezer Mission. This time, jatropha will be a part of the nursery but not the sole tree. Fruit trees will be an important component. I even plan to plant fast-growing trees that can be managed for sustainable charcoal production until the jatropha matures to the point where it can offer an alternative fuel. This goal requires researching plant species, procuring seeds and other supplies, and transporting the supplies that cannot be purchased in Haiti.

2) Education. More than half of Haitians are 20 years or younger (more than 40 percent are 14 or younger). By 1986, less than 2 percent of Haiti’s forest cover remained. This means that most Haitians do not know what a forested landscape is. How can they care about something that they don’t know is missing? I plan to implement an intensive environmental science course for a select group of 10 young adults. With Dumond’s help, I will teach the students about environmental rehabilitation and encourage them to develop a management plan for the tree nursery. I will charge them to each take what they learn and teach 10 other young adults. This goal involves developing lesson plans and finding stories of role models, such as Nobel Peace Prize Winner Wangari Maathai, who can inspire these young Haitians with badly needed hope.

3) Documentation. Since I first designed my Compton project, documentation has been a primary goal of my fellowship year. The responses I have received from my hurricane relief blog have reminded me what a powerful tool writing can be. The story of Haiti must be told for many reasons. First, Americans must recognize that Haitians do not live in misery because they are lazy or incapable but because of structural injustices. Furthermore, I want others to know not only the sadness and horror of Haitian life but also the beauty and courageousness of the Haitian people. Finally, the tragic state of the Haitian environment offers a warning to all of us about the consequences of decoupling humans from nature.

This year, I might not be staying up until the early hours of the morning writing papers or cramming for tests. However, I find myself faced with the most challenging work I have ever attempted. This is the kind of work that occupies your mind at all hours of the day and night as every possible solution is marred with the uncertainty of what it really means to help.