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17 May 2005
Dear Friend,
I am sitting amidst a slew of tropical plants, surrounded by
the soft sound of rain and a small waterfall. In the distance,
to the northeast, the mountains are cloud covered, reminding me
of the cloud forest on top of a volcano near where I lived for
six years in Nicaragua. In the west, I have a view of the Caribbean
ocean—rainy day gray today, rather than the usual bright
Caribbean blue. To the south are hillsides of trees and houses,
neighborhoods canopied by mangos and umbrella trees, tropical
forest, and fruit species from all around the world. A soppy breeze
blows through the area where I’m working and my shorts feel
clammy from the humidity. Everything I see and hear and feel speaks
of green plants, growth, life. Where am I? I am in Port-au-Prince,
the capital of Haiti.
Are you surprised? Skeptical? It may be difficult for you to
square my description with the images you may have seen on television
or received through the newspapers. “Trees” and “environment”
have become difficult to find in the same sentence with “Haiti,”
let alone Port au Prince, except in statements noting the lack
of trees and the devastation of the environment. It is possible
that some of you reading this may simply not believe me, or may
have a very hard time of it. News of Haiti has been so overwhelmingly
negative, it is difficult, even for me, to openly and consistently
consider that any other reality may be possible. Others might
be asking yourselves whether my description isn’t leaving
something out. And you would be right, just as the news articles
that only describe the chaos and violence also leave much of the
other pertinent information out.
Also within my view, as I choose to see them, are house-filled
ravines, catastrophes in the making where one serious hit by a
hurricane could wash people and homes down the mountain to the
sea, taking along with them many of the children and adults living
further down, in the super-slums by the shore, where “housing”
means shacks made of scrap wood covered by cans (vegetable oil,
peanut butter, milk powder, byproducts of U.S. food aid) opened
and flattened to form the walls. These communities along Port
au Prince’s harbor have no running water, no sewage infrastructure,
minimal access to schooling for their children, and rarely any
kind of electricity, let alone proper electrical lines and hookups.
And they are exactly where all the floodwaters coming off of the
mountainsides around Port au Prince must pass through on their
way into the harbor, together with all of the raw sewage and trash
from the settlements up the hill. These are the communities of
the poorest of the poor, the foci for crime and violence; the
communities that are mostly ignored by Haiti’s current interim
government, except to run police raids, searching for the gangs
that have created so much chaos in Port au Prince. The people
living in these slums mostly come from the countryside, driven
from their homes by lack of hope, the loss of soil fertility,
and the unpredictable climate that cause crop losses as many as
three years out of five.
So, is the beauty that I see all around me today superficial?
Is it negated by the slums? That would not be my analysis. I wouldn’t
agree that beauty is skin deep. I believe that beauty reflects
the core of our very existence—God’s spirit within
each and every one of Her children. Haiti is fundamentally beautiful
and God the Creator is present here, just as She is present in
every time and every place, even unto the utmost ends of the earth—or
depths of the sea, as Jonah found out on his roundabout way to
Nineveh. This place and this moment remind me of that, even as
many of my daily experiences remind me that for many people in
Port au Prince, much of that beauty is unavailable, or difficult
to sense amidst the almost unimaginably difficult circumstances
of daily life—the grind of heat and mud and hunger and
dirt, not enough water to drink, let alone bathe thoroughly, searching
for daily sustenance and maybe a little more amid crowds of others
searching and struggling for the same, always under the menace
of bullets or some other form of violence. This place and this
moment do not provide direct answers to the misery of Port au
Prince, but they do provide space for reflection on what the realities
are and where I seem to be fitting in amidst them—the realities
of Port au Prince as well as the realities of Papay-Hinche, my
home now for just over a year, some sixty or seventy miles north
and east of the capital.
The road to Hinche, the capital of the Central Department of
Haiti, really starts just outside of Croix de Bouquets (Kwa de
Boo kay), a crossroads town just a few miles from the perimeter
of Port au Prince. The Hinche road starts where the pavement ends,
right by a Texaco gas station that hasn’t been open since
the first time I visited Hinche in October 2003. Soon after the
pavement ends, the road begins a twisted ascent known as “Goat
Mountain” (“Mòn Kabrit” in Haitian Creole).
Although entirely unpaved, part of the ascent is fairly well graded,
but for about a mile, the road narrows to one lane, with limestone
cliffs rising to the left and a sharp drop-off to the right, a
drop-off decorated with occasional carcasses of pickups and trucks
that suffered mechanical failures at the wrong time, wrong place.
This mountain pass, and all of the rest of the fifty miles of
unpaved road leading to Hinche, last saw grading equipment four
or five years ago. According to what I’ve been told, project
money for paving the first half of the route, provided by the
European community two or three years ago, disappeared entirely
into one or more government pockets. Newspaper articles quote
current government officials talking about the importance of infrastructure
for improving the situation in Haiti, but talk has remained talk,
at least as far as this road is concerned— Highway 3, as
it is officially known.
The trip to Hinche on 3 takes between three and five hours—five
if you worry about vehicle longevity or are already concerned
about a potential problem that might be aggravated by the jarring
ruts. Narrow passes blocked by brokendown cargo trucks can add
an hour or two to the trip as well, as can mechanical problems—flat
tires, lost oil plugs, problematic brakes. But when I catch a
ride with one of the vehicles from MPP (Farmer’s Organization
of Papaye), the organization I have been assigned to work with
by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) for three years, the slow
ride offers quality time for conversation with fellow members
of MPP’s work team. Sunday, when we rode from Hinche into
Port au Prince together, the conversation ranged from politics
to religion and included spontaneous singing, including choruses
from traditional French hymns as well as protest songs sung in
Haitian Creole—songs praising the struggles of the Haitian
farmer, calling for the rural poor to organize to improve their
lives, and detailing the historical corruption of the Haitian
government.
The slow trip also offers plenty of time to admire sweeping vistas
of the Central Plateau’s agricultural land dotted by small
groves of palms and fruit and lumber trees. The flatter areas
are green green green right now, after about three weeks of consistent
rainfall, and the number of trees belies the figure of 1 or 2
percent tree cover that I often hear quoted. Mountaintops and
ridges are frequently stark and bare, far too many devastated
by agriculture and charcoal production, scrubbed down to bare
rock by the torrential downpours during the five or six months
of rainfall each year. But the lower areas and the areas of undulating
plains are painted with trees. Not natural forest, but tree cover
nonetheless, productive, rejuvenating, beautiful.
I take the trip to and from Port au Prince about once a month,
sometimes skipping out on travel by road and taking one of the
small, single prop planes that provide passenger service to and
from Hinche, courtesy of MAF (Mission Aviation Foundation). Round-trip,
the cost is $60.00 and takes only twenty minutes one way. By the
time you realize how scary it is to fly in such a small plane,
you are already halfway to your destination. Most of my time in
Papaye, a small community about three miles northeast of Hinche,
is spent at MPP’s 10-acre training center, working with
about half an acre of land where we are beginning to establish
the same kind of intensive, integrated, diversified production
system that I learned to work with in Nicaragua at Rancho Ebenezer,
where I served as a PC(USA) mission volunteer for six years.
Working with a crew of four or five local farmers—all
members of community groups associated with MPP—the techniques
we are testing and developing are focused on what a rural family
could produce right around their home. There are many good reasons
for using this kind of strategy, but the compelling one is our
underlying objective of producing more food with less work. Because
the home is the focal point of the energy of the family as a whole,
it makes sense to put the most intensive production where this
energy can be best organized and directed, particularly because
agricultural components that are the most productive often require
the most attention. For example, goats raised in small sheds require
several visits a day. Keeping them close to the house avoids wasting
too much energy getting to them. Putting the goat shed even at
a distance of a hundred yards from the house will result in enormous
losses of energy during the year, leaving less time and energy
for other productive activities.
We call our project The “Road to Life Yard,” a name
provided by one of the Haitian crew members. Besides the vegetables,
fruit trees, forage species, goats, redworms (and soon we’ll
add chickens) that we have established or are establishing, we
are also working with Moringa oleifera, a multiple-use tree species
that can be used to provide a highly nutritious supplement to
the daily diet. Last year we established in our half acre approximately
three hundred moringa trees, and within the next three weeks we
will be planting approximately 500 additional trees in an area
adjacent to our yard. Leaves from the moringa tree are high in
protein, calcium, iron, and vitamin A. The young, tender leaves
can be cooked like spinach and the mature leaves dried to make
moringa leaf powder. We dry and pulverize the mature leaves, then
sift the resulting powder through a sieve to remove the pieces
of stem, creating a powder that can be added to juices, soups,
and other foods to increase their nutritional value. All the powder
we can produce right now is spoken for before we even have it
made. Our biggest client is Dr. Agathe, the director of MPP’s
integrated health clinic. Dr. Agathe provides the powder to some
nursing mothers for children suffering malnutrition.
Last year, another crew member and I visited a moringa project
on the island of La Gonâve sponsored by the West Indies
Self-Help Project (W.I.S.H.), which led us to begin of the leaf
powder project. This year, there will be at least one more visit
to La Gonâve project, as well as visits to goat projects
in southern and northeastern Haiti. One of my goals is eventually
to have a small herd of hardy goats, part Haitian, part dairy
breed, which produce sufficient milk for consumption by the crew
and eventually enough surplus for cheese.
We also recently designed a small office-storage space for our
tools and produce which we will build using super adobe, a simple
technique for construction which uses sacks, soil and a little
bit of cement to build very cheap walls. And we’re starting
to look in our yard for where we can put cisterns for collecting
rainwater from the closest buildings. Before the next dry season,
we hope to have sufficient water stored to avoid or at least limit
our use of the scarce potable water for vegetable production.
At the beginning of this year, we finally finished a simple filtration
system which removes the soap and grease from shower water, making
it available for watering. Now we need to build a cistern for
that water as well, so that it can collect over a day or so in
sufficient quantities to make it worth using for watering. I learned
this system at the Central American Agricultural Conference, which
took place in Nicaragua in July 2004. This year I will attend
that conference again, together with the coordinator of MPP’s
technical team, Mulaire Michel.
Making moringa leaf powder, along with many of the other techniques
we use in the project, were part of a workshop put together by
the Road to Life Yard crew this past April. Fifteen farmers from
two local communities, including five women, participated in the
four-day workshop. We will hold at least one and as many as three
additional workshops this year. Evaluations from the participants
were enthusiastic, and some have implemented some of the techniques
they heard about and practiced, particularly those relating to
moringa.
Based on our experiences with Moringa in the Road to Life Yard
and the reports we gave on the trip to La Gonâve, one of
the farming cooperatives supported by MPP decided to write a project
developing the system on more land and with more labor dedicated
specifically to Moringa production and transformation of mature
leaves into leaf powder. I helped the director and the agronomist
serving the Colladère (Kole a dare) cooperative put together
the proposal and the budget for the project. This project has
also been approved for funding by the Presbyterian Hunger Program.
The cooperative held its first half-day workshop last week, providing
a basic introduction to moringa, its importance in general and
its importance for the cooperative. Part of the work of this project
will be to help increase the number of households that grow and
use moringa.
Besides the day-to-day work of the Road to Life Yard project,
and the soon-to-be-increasing work with the Colladère project,
I am responsible for writing monthly and quarterly work plans
and evaluations in Haitian Creole, as well as participating in
the monthly and quarterly meetings for the whole MPP staff. Meetings
are almost always tedious, in any country, and I can rarely sit
out the whole two days of the MPP meetings. But I am completely
convinced of their importance. The information I do manage to
absorb before I become antsy and brain-dead (my Creole has improved
significantly, but large group meetings stretch me to my maximum)
is incredibly important for giving me direction and purpose in
the work I do. It is also energizing when I feel part of a larger
effort—when I feel that the grains of sand that I move
and place and shake are part of a larger pattern within the organization.
After one year with MPP, I can use an analogy that my father
shared with me a few years ago. My father observed that organizations
can be like finely sewn jackets. They can be very elegant on the
outside, but once you begin to turn them inside out, you will
start to see the stitching that holds them together, and they
will seem less elegant. I am privileged to work with an organization
such as MPP, which has been struggling and organizing, learning
and sharing knowledge for thirty years, searching always for ways
to create a new society in Haiti, where everyone can live with
dignity. It is an enormous task, and it requires a good bit of
stitching, some of which looks a little ragged some days. And
still, it is an elegant organization. It is the work of MPP, and
other similar organizations throughout Haiti, that hold the ultimate
answer to the misery of Port au Prince. Until the opportunities
and the resources in the rural areas of Haiti are adequate for
the needs and dreams of the people, the rural families will continue
to look for answers in the cities, and ultimately in the United
States and other countries that offer the hope of economic improvement.
But once possibilities and hope are firmly established in the
countryside, farmers and farmer families will stay in the countryside
and look again to the land for the source of their life, their
love, their beauty.
But you, O mountains of Israel, will produce branches and fruit
for my people Israel, for they will soon come home. I am concerned
for you and will look on you with favor; you will be plowed
and sown...I will settle people on you as in the past and will
make you prosper more than before. Then you will know that I
am the LORD. I will cause people, my people Israel, to walk
upon you. They will possess you, and you will be their inheritance;
you will never again deprive them of their children.
Ezekiel 36: 8-12
Many blessings.
Mark
The 2005 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p.
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