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A letter from Mark Hare in Haiti |
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May 26, 2004
Hey Friend,
It’s the time of year in these parts when the rainy season
is starting again. That means we go from dust and more dust to
mud and more mud. Both are inconvenient if you are the one trying
to keep inside spaces respectable; in every other sense, rain
is a blessing. Two days ago, the rain started in mid-afternoon
and lasted late into the night. A solid, constant rain, the kind
that with a little imagination you can hear the soil opening its
pores wide to let the moisture sink in, sink in, sink in. Earlier
rains had already enticed some local farmers here in central Haiti
to work up the soil, but those with hearts brave enough to begin
planting were surely feeling their crops’ pain, because
the last good rain was more than fifteen days before this latest.
Fifteen days without a good rain will stress plants even in the
best of soils, but in soils that are overused and heavily eroded,
fifteen days without rain can kill off your crop before it ever
gets going. This is true anywhere in the world, but in countries
such as Haiti, the loss of a crop can make the difference between
sending your children to school, or not; between producing enough
food to keep your family well nourished, or not. |
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A farmer who works with an MPP community group on land that is part
of an irrigation project. It will be planted with tomatoes, peppers,
and other vegetable crops. |
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Farmers here in Haiti, as in Nicaragua, define
the term “hardworking.” When I went walking in the countryside
last week Monday, around 5:00 a.m., every household I passed was
awake and working—chopping weeds, hoeing up the soil, or planting.
Every bit of more-or-less-flat land had already been plowed or hoed,
or was in the process of being worked. |
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Farm families here work hard,
but the energy expended can be a devastating loss without rain.
And soil that is plowed but can’t be planted is left without
cover and is susceptible to erosion from both wind and rain. The
solid rain two days ago was an answer to prayers spoken in sweat.
Agricultural development work is about working alongside farmers
and farm families, looking for ways to work with God’s creation
and with each other that will unleash the abundance that God promises
to every one of God’s children. Often, agricultural development
work involves projects that protect and restore soil fertility
and introduces crop management techniques that can produce more
while reducing losses to insects and rodents. It also includes
looking for ways to improve the marketing of surplus production,
which may include exploring ways to increase the value of crops
by processing them into secondary goods, such as molasses from
sugar cane or peanut butter from peanuts. Agricultural development
work also means helping people in rural communities to join together
in community groups and helping those community groups to come
together in broad coalitions in order to organize their work more
effectively and to challenge national and international policies
that threaten to damage or destroy the integrity of the rural
communities. |
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Some of you had already heard that I was to start
working in Haiti this year with an organization called MPP. In the
Haitian language, those letters stand for “Mouvman Peyizan
Papay.” In English, that roughly translates to “Farmer’s
Movement of Papaye.” Papaye is French for a tropical fruit
called papaya, but in this case, it refers to a fairly small community
in central Haiti, about three and a half miles east of the city
of Hinche (pronounced “Ensh”) which is one of the main
cities in the heart of what’s called the Central Plateau.
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Entrance to MPP's training center where they train promoters from
all over Haiti to work with and support community groups. |
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MPP is 31 years old this year and
has grown from a farmer’s organization with just a few members
to a broad scale grassroots movement made up of hundreds of community
groups and farming cooperatives representing thousands of farmers,
including men, women, and youth living in all parts of Haiti. Chavannes
Jean Baptiste is MPP’s director and was one of the initial
catalysts in MPP’s formation. For those of you with Presbyterian
connections, the organization of MPP is very similar to our church’s
political organization, with local churches (farmer’s groups)
that come together to form a presbytery (a “local”)
and a series of presbyteries that come together to form a synod
(a “region”) and a series of synods that coordinate
their work through the General Assembly, which in MPP is also called
the General Assembly. The work MPP carries out with its members
includes everything I mentioned above and more. My work here will
be to reinforce the agricultural work with what I’ve learned
at Rancho Ebenezer in Nicaragua, including the diversification and
integration of small animal production with vegetables and other
crops in the small areas surrounding each family’s home, as
well as developing a nutrition project with the Moringa tree, a
tree with highly nutritional edible leaves. |
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Goats are one of God's blessings present in abundance in Haiti.
They can be difficult to work with, but I learned to enjoy working
with them at Ebenezer. |
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A common question over the last seven
months since I decided to accept the position with MPP is why I
would leave the work in Nicaragua to come work in Haiti. I have
known that I wanted to return to work in Haiti since I worked here
in 1997, before starting my work in Nicaragua, but if I’d
known I’d have a chance to work with an organization such
as MPP, I would have wanted to come back much sooner. By God’s
grace, I was given six years to experiment and learn and teach and
share at Rancho Ebenezer in Nicaragua and I could have worked there
much longer and learned much more. It is the richness of that experience
that underlies my confidence in the ideas and knowledge that I have
to share with farmers and agronomists here in MPP. |
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But what draws me to Haiti? One
way to explain the pull it has on me is to talk about the mystery
of Haiti. When I say that, I’m not talking about voodoo
or the African-based culture which are fundamental components
of life here, although those things are part of the challenge
and the excitement of living here. When I talk about the “mystery
of Haiti” what I mean is the enormous gulf that exists between
the sense that people outside of Haiti have about it and the reality
that I experience when I am here.
The gulf between image and reality is a theme I hope to talk
about more in future letters, but for this time, let me compare
the image of Haiti as a dry, desolate, barren country with the
orange orchard I visited with a young friend last Friday. Duveron
had invited me to visit his garden and his house on Monday last
week, the first day we started working together, but it wasn’t
until Friday that things worked out and I walked with him up the
mountain about three miles, first on a broad unpaved road and
then off onto farm trails that took us up and down through one
or two valleys until we reached a piece of land that stretched
hundreds of yards along the river that drains most of the hills
in this area. Besides bananas and okra and melon and pasture grass
that Duveron has planted, he also has a small orchard of several
dozen naval orange trees, most of which were in full bloom. If
you haven’t smelled an orange tree in blossom, it is hard
to describe, but they smell almost better than a good sweet orange
tastes. The trees were covered white with blossoms and swarming
with honeybees. Duveron promised to bring me back up as often
as I wanted starting in September when the first crop begins to
ripen. The orange trees themselves are interspersed with mango
groves, which are in full production right now. This is the season
when every child’s belly (and many adults’ as well)
is full to bursting with mangos. The mangos come in multiple varieties,
each with a distinct shape and flavor, so many that hundreds lie
rotting in Duveron’s soil because nobody can eat all that
there are.
That is one of the realities of Haiti. Hunger is here; it is
part of Haiti’s reality, but God’s abundance is present
and accounted for as well, and it is waiting to burst forth in
all of its manifestations, again and again, as often as we are
ready to search it out and let it in.
From Haiti, a land of abundance.
In Christ.
Mark
The 2004 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p.
140 |
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