Haiti splashes slum with psychedelic colors

Published: March 25, 2013

By TRENTON DANIEL — Associated Press

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — One of Haiti's biggest shantytowns, a vast expanse of grim cinderblock homes on a mountainside in the nation's capital, is getting a psychedelic makeover that aims to be part art and part homage.

Workers this month began painting the concrete facades of buildings in Jalousie slum a rainbow of purple, peach, lime and cream, inspired by the dazzling "cities-in-the-skies" of well-known Haitian painter Prefete Duffaut, who died last year.

The $1.4 million effort titled "Beauty versus Poverty: Jalousie in Colors" is part of a government project to relocate people from the displacement camps that sprouted up after Haiti's 2010 earthquake. The relocation has targeted a handful of high-profile camps in Port-au-Prince by paying a year's worth of rent subsidies for residents to move into neighborhoods like Jalousie. The government is now trying to spruce up these poor neighborhoods and introduce city services.

"We're not trying to do Coconut Grove. We're not trying to do South Beach," said Clement Belizaire, director of the government's housing relocation program, referring to Miami neighborhoods. "The goal that we are shooting for is a neighborhood that is modest but decent, where residents are proud to be from that area."

While most residents welcome the attempt to beautify Jalousie, a slum of 45,000 inhabitants, critics say the project is the latest example of cosmetic changes carried out by a government that has done little to improve people's lives in the Western Hemisphere's poorest country.

"This is just to make it look like they're doing something for the people but in reality they are not," said Sen. Moise Jean-Charles, an outspoken critic of President Michel Martelly, arguing that the money could have been better spent.

Amid its narrow corridors and steep steps, Jalousie has no traditional sewage system or electric grid. The slum is lit at night by candles and a web of wires that tap illegally into the public power system, dangling above the concrete homes. Water is provided by an outdoor spigot where people line up with buckets.
Some people wonder why Jalousie was chosen for the makeover, though officials say they plan to expand the project to other Port-au-Prince shantytowns.

Jalousie is unique in that its mountainside presence makes it visible to people living in the wealthy district of Petionville. Critics have suggested that the choice of Jalousie is as much about giving the posh hotels of Petionville a pretty view as helping the slum's residents.

Belizaire said he welcomes controversy, adding that the project's visibility is important. It's a concrete accomplishment for the government and he contends that it does indeed help Jalousie residents.

"People are sitting on the balcony, having a beer, smoking a cigarette - whatever - and you have all of Port-au-Prince at your feet, and you're living in colors," Belizaire said, sitting in his office.

Jalousie, perched above rich Petionville, has become a flashpoint for class controversy in Haiti recently. It is among many slums that have sprawled across the hills of Port-au-Prince in recent decades because governments past and present have failed to provide affordable housing and basic services. Many of the homes crash down the hills every year during the country's rainy seasons.

Haiti's class divisions spilled into the streets last year when more than 1,000 people from Jalousie protested in central Port-au-Prince. They threw rocks at a luxury hotel and criticized rich Haitians, threatening to burn down Petionville if the government followed through with a plan to demolish their homes. Officials had wanted to tear down the homes next to a ravine to build a flood-protection project. During heavy rainfall, rocks from the ravine clog the entrance to a private school for the children of diplomats and wealthy Haitians.

The demolition never happened.

These days, most people in Jalousie chalk the protests up to a "misunderstanding," and talk about the project with pride.

"It's beautiful. Jalousie is not the same anymore," Resilia Pierre, a 53-year-old wife and mother, said as she waited at a well to buy water. "We don't have the means to do it ourselves. I would like to say 'thank you' to the people who did that."

The government's goal it to eventually paint 1,000 homes and other buildings.

Workers hired by three companies began two weeks ago by putting concrete finishes on the ash-colored facades of the slum's cinderblock houses. Then they paint over the finish with bright colors using rollers, standing atop wobbly ladders next to buckets of paint. The entire effort is supposed to take six months.
Duffaut, one of Haiti's most famous painters, was born in the country's south in 1923. He studied at the Centre D'Art in the late 1940s and his work, appearing in museums worldwide, has long been a source of national pride.

While the project in Jalousie may be inspired by Duffaut, when completed it will still require a bit of imagination by the viewer to see his psychedelic cities in the sky, with their dazzling colors and surreal tiers that seemingly hovering in the air.

What residents will have in their neighborhood high up on a mountainside will be a lot of bright colors and a love of the artist.

"The people of Jalousie," said Jamesson Misery, a coordinator of the project who lives in the slum, "we plan to honor Prefete Duffaut."

Read more here: http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2013/03/25/2937238/haiti-splashes-slum-with-psychedelic.html#storylink=cpy

Haiti Doesn't Need Our Help

Advisor Network  3/22/2013

Tim Maurer, Contributor

Anne Reynolds and her daughter, Stephanie, put boots on the ground in Haiti in the year 2000, quite accidentally.  They were vacationing in the Dominican Republic and inadvertently crossed the border into the western half of the island of Hispaniola, which they found a great deal more difficult to depart than to enter.  So, while biding time until their documentation was cleared, they decided to explore the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, which has groaned under an eerie cloud of systemic dysfunction for most of its recorded history.

While Anne and Stephanie indeed saw signs of the discouraging plot lines most often associated with the Haitian narrative, the lasting impression of their visit was a stark and hopeful contrast.  They were so captivated by the intersection of the inspiring people and abundant natural resources that they decided to invest their lives’ work becoming part of the Haitian story themselves.  And as they began to mirror the indomitable spirit of the people they served, this sex educator and student from Alabama have helped create an agribusiness enterprise worthy of recognition in Forbes and a model for a new rendition of helping that I hope and pray the world’s aid organizations and NGOs consider adopting.

The ingredients for their success are the following: humility, curiosity, collaboration and vanilla (yes, vanilla).

Humility, Curiosity and Collaboration

Anne and Stephanie carry themselves with humility and insist that they are guests in this foreign land, not affluent do-gooders come to save a wayward people. That Americanized view of helping is often referred to as paternalism.  Here’s how Brian Fikkert, author of When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor, explains “resource paternalism”:

Being from a materialistic culture, North Americans often view the solution to poverty in material terms and tend to pour financial and other material resources into situations in which the real need is for the local people to steward their own resources.  In addition, legitimate local business can be undermined when outsiders bring in such things as free clothes or building supplies, undercutting the price that these local businesses need to survive.

Paternalism takes many forms—resource, spiritual, knowledge, labor and managerial—but they all boil down to doing things for people that they can do for themselves.  Its roots are found in ignorance and a false sense of superiority tied to the internalized “messages of centuries of colonialism, slavery, and racism,” on the part of helpers and short-sighted pragmatism on the part of those in desperate need of help.  The unfortunate result of so much of the well-meaning aid that is provided throughout the world by governments, NGOs, small groups and individuals is a subconscious condescension on the part of givers and a culture of dependency on the part of recipients.

Reynolds acknowledges that she brought her Americanized view of helping to Haiti, but it was the people of Haiti who helped teach her.  She required only the humility and the curiosity to be taught.  She did what so many of us are prone to avoid when faced with discomfort personified—she looked people in the eyes.  She saw them as people not as projects, and she came to know them, their joys and their struggles.  Anne describes the moment at which it all became clear for her: she was getting ready to come home to the States and one of the Haitian farmers she’d been working closely with asked her, “Are you coming back?”
“Haiti doesn’t want or need our help,” Anne says.  “They want our collaboration.”

The Vanilla Project

Anne’s initial assessment was that the remote village in Haiti, with which she and her daughter, Stephanie, had fallen in love, was in need of some basic necessities.  First, they helped create a feeding program to ensure the children were receiving adequate nutrition.  And there was no school, so Anne relied on her background in education to help build and staff a school.  This was all in 2000, long before Haiti became part of the global conversation following the earthquake that devastated the capital city of Port-au-Prince and many surrounding areas on January 12, 2010.

But Anne’s insistence that her work not merely create a cycle of dependency led her to search beyond the boundaries of her education and experience to find a way to introduce a sustainable source of revenue that could ably support the village into perpetuity.  Certainly, she might help introduce some expertise to enhance their primary vocation—farming, specifically cacao used to make chocolate—but doing so might only serve to stabilize the village economically to the point of subsistence.  In order to actually grow their micro-economy, they would need to introduce something new.  Having the second most popular ice cream flavor already covered, Anne and Stephanie pondered the world’s most popular—vanilla.

There is much good news about introducing vanilla as a crop.  This adaptable spice, both sweet and savory, is the second most expensive in the world, after saffron.  To put it in perspective, you’ll pay over nine dollars online for McCormick’s Gourmet Collection vanilla beans jar at Walmart—and it includes exactly two beans!  One of the reasons that the Reynolds women were so attracted to vanilla is that a single producing vanilla vine can support an entire Haitian family financially for a year, much as a cow might help a poor farmer subsist.  Haiti’s nearby neighbor, the United States, imports 70% of the world’s vanilla, while the largest producers of vanilla globally—Indonesia and Madagascar, are worlds away.  So why not make Haiti a major producer of vanilla, raising the standard of living of this impoverished nation?

Enter the bad news.  Vanilla is expensive for a reason—it’s very hard to grow.  Vanilla is only indigenous to Mexico, where it is pollinated successfully by the local variety of the Melipona bee.  The rest of the world learned of vanilla’s existence after Cortez brought it back to Europe, along with chocolate, in the 1520s.  Mexico remained the world’s dominant producer of vanilla for three centuries until an adventurous botanist discovered that it could actually be pollinated by hand in the mid-1800s.  Since the plants must be pollinated within a mere twelve hour window, the crop didn’t proliferate outside of Mexico until later that century, but now nearly all of the world’s vanilla is hand-pollinated.  Doing so is work-intensive and requires training—and not only of the farmers, but also the plant.  Vanilla is a vine that requires a tutor, another plant or tree on which to grow, and some work better than others.  Oh, and it takes five years to produce fruit—not optimal for families in dire need of an economic boost now.

Undeterred, the Reynolds women and their Haitian counterparts brought vanilla plants to Haiti to begin test trials in 2002.  With the help of “The Vanilla Queen,” Patricia Rain, they solicited the expertise of agronomist, David Gardella, who conducted a scientific feasibility study and confirmed success was a possibility.  But yet again, the only way success was possible was through collaboration.  They needed to find the optimal tutor for the vanilla vines.  And after many attempts to court a suitable tutor, the most natural partner of all accepted the vanilla vine’s proposal—cacao—chocolate.

The potential was extraordinary.  “If this works,” Anne thought, “we’d have a vanilla rainforest extending for hundreds of acres.  And with sizable cacao growing regions in both the north and the south, a new industry could potentially be born!  Paris of the Antilles [an 18^th century nickname for the northern coastal city of present-day Cap-Haitien] is still here, and it’s capable of being cultivated!”  But it would take over a decade of dedication—and more partnerships, ideally with an ice cream company that needed a lot of vanilla—to make it possible.  “More” called in March of 2012, in the form of Darius Wilmore, a former Def Jam Records Art Director, known for working with artists Jay-Z, LL Cool J, Run DMC and Haiti’s own, Wyclef Jean.  But it wasn’t music Wilmore wanted to discuss with Anne Reynolds.  He wanted to talk about ice cream.  Darius, a Severna Park, Maryland native, had left the corporate realm to put his creative weight behind a fledgling social enterprise in Baltimore called Taharka Brothers Ice Cream, and they were interested in Anne’s Vanilla Project and Haiti, in particular.  Wilmore found Anne at the end of a Google search for “Can you grow vanilla in Haiti?”  So he picked up the phone and called.

Taharka Brothers Ice Cream

Taharka Brothers bears the name of Taharka McKoy, a young man who grew up, and sadly died, in the Baltimore city housing projects.  The trajectory of his life was re-directed several times as he was mentored as a teen, watched his mother rebuild her life and interacted with the criminal justice system, but as a young man of 25, he had become a neighborhood activist for social change.  He was tragically and fatally shot wrestling a gun out of the hands of a boy he mentored, only 14.  Mirroring their namesake, Taharka Brothers Ice Cream is now owned and operated by young men who are attempting to rise above the culture of drugs and violence in Baltimore’s toughest neighborhoods.  Although it was founded as a charitable non-profit, Taharka is now an employee-owned B-Corp—a benefit corporation, or for-profit company with a charitable mission. 

Creative capitalism as a tool for social change.

 While the Taharka Brothers vision has never faltered, the company has limped along for the bulk of its existence, but after surviving the Great Recession (when most of the local and regional ice cream producers in Baltimore folded), Taharka Brothers is picking up steam.  They’re being served at nearly 60 scoop shops and some of the finest restaurants in Baltimore.  And orders from outside of Baltimore are also coming in, including a recent boon from the renowned DC-centric restaurant chain and “community where racial and cultural connections are consciously uplifted,” Busboys and Poets.  Taharka Brothers acquired a larger production facility that is helping them keep up with demand, and Darius Wilmore is helping to crystalize their brand and tell their story.

 Taharka Brothers’ interest in the Vanilla Project was twofold: First, they need vanilla—lots of it.  In addition to vanilla ice cream, the spice is a primary ingredient in many of their delectable flavors (like Blueberry Pancake, Gravel Road and my personal favorite, Honey Graham, as well as the more culturally significant, the Jazz Man’s Blues and A Richard Pryor Moment).  Second, Wilmore’s appreciation of black history led him right to Haiti, to which he feels black Americans owe their freedom in part.  What? Long story short, the indigenous population of Haiti was decimated shortly after the Europeans landed in the late 15^th and early 16^th centuries.  Beginning with Spain, European powers battled over the territory until France officially colonized it in 1664, then repopulating it with African slaves to work the plantations rich in natural resources.  The Haitian Revolution—a slave revolt—began in 1791 and finally rebuffed Napoleon’s last gasp effort, to become a free black republic in 1804, emboldening future abolition efforts in Britain and the United States.  Essentially, as Darius puts it, “The fall of the African slave trade began with Haiti’s revolution.”
 
Wilmore’s fascination with the role that the Haitian Revolution played in the fall of slavery in the States was spurred by a visit from a delegation of Haitian government officials and media representatives, who ended up tasting Taharka Brothers ice cream and the spirit behind it on a U.S. tour following the devastating earthquake.  They were searching for social enterprise business models to emulate in Port-au-Prince, and the World Trade Center Institute in Baltimore connected them to Taharka.

But it’s not African Americans alone who have the Haitian Revolution to thank, Wilmore posits.  “Americans of every color, from the Mid-West to the left coast don’t speak French today because of, in large part, the Haitian revolution.”  Indeed, the loss of his Caribbean jewel, the key to Napoleon’s dreams of a western empire built on trade, significantly devalued his American assets and likely hastened the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.  So as far as Darius and Taharka Brothers are concerned, “Black folk, as well as all Americans, we feel, owe the people of Haiti a debt and not charity.  A debt.”

These sentiments are also echoed by Anne and Stephanie Reynolds.  Stephanie has complemented her work in Haiti with a Master’s degree concentrating in African American and Latin American/Caribbean studies, and the Haitian Revolution specifically.  “Being from Montgomery, Alabama—a city that prides itself on being the ‘birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement’—we see the Haitian Revolution as a pivotal event that paved the way for domestic progress,” says Stephanie. “Given that so many of our nation’s own policies have negatively impacted the economy of Haiti, we have an obligation to do what we can to improve the economy of Haiti today. To do so is to carry on the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement.”

The Big Payback

The collective effort to repay the debt is called “The Big Payback.” Why?  “Snatched from the chorus of one of James Brown’s greatest funk singles—1971’s ‘The Payback’—the song has lived forever immortal in the music collections of the African American community since its release and has been the funk foundation of countless rap and R&B songs up until the present day,” Wilmore educates.  He saw the youth and vibe represented in the ice cream company harmonizing with their partners in Haiti, a country in which 60% of the population is under the age of 24, and deeply impacted by music.  “The least Taharka Brothers could do, being a company primarily run by young black men under the age of 25, would be to buy ice cream flavor ingredients from the farmers of Haiti as ‘payback’ and thank you for their ancestors’ courage and for their continued perseverance over tremendous daily struggle.”

While waiting for the vanilla project’s expansion into mass production, De La Sol: Haiti was born.  The De La Sol / Taharka connection began with a single employee in Haiti on a makeshift rooftop factory, using a grinder attached to a lawnmower motor.  “Six months later,” says Darius Wilmore, “that one person has ballooned to eight people (and growing), working in a new facility as of March 1, 2013. These are people who did not have jobs six months ago, and who spent their days trying to figure out how to eat. It’s been an incredible thing to have helped instigate and to see blossom.”

And they’re just getting started.  After a year of working with everyone from the Haitian farmers to the country’s Embassy, they expect to begin buying 100 pounds of cacao monthly “for starters.”  Then next year, they’ll begin importing the precious vanilla that will be ready to harvest, as well as sea salt, coffee, mango, cinnamon and other delectables that will find their way into ice cream consumed by Baltimore and beyond.
Humility, curiosity, collaboration and vanilla; and now, chocolate, sea salt, coffee, mango and cinnamon.  Inspiring, isn’t it, to hear a story about young black men in Baltimore that isn’t stereotypically about guns and drugs, and of Haiti that isn’t about what the country lacks, but about beauty and abundance?  How much, furthermore, could the practice and business of helping improve over the next generation if we began to focus less on what hurting people need and more on what they have to offer?

The Way We Think About Charity Is Dead Wrong

Cubs unveil plans for new Dominican academy

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic -- The Cubs are starting fresh in Latin America and making a big splash in the Dominican Republic.

At a news conference Thursday at El Embajador Hotel in the country's capital, Cubs chairman Tom Ricketts and members of his family, pitcher Carlos Marmol, shortstop Starlin Castro and a contingent of club personnel unveiled renderings of a new academy that will be constructed over the next two years.
"It's about doing everything we can to be the best organization in baseball, and you can't be the best organization in baseball unless you have a strong presence in the Dominican and a strong presence in Latin America," Ricketts said. "Obviously, Latin America is very important to us. We feel we have a great director [of Latin American scouting] in Jose Serra, and we feel we have great scouts, coaches and great trainers. Soon, we will have a great facility for those people to work in, plus take care of all those players that come into the academy."

Located in La Gina, outside of Santo Domingo, the facility will span 50 acres, making it the largest academy in the country. It will be open year-round, complete with baseball fields and training facilities, housing for Minor League players during the season and for Major Leaguers in the offseason, and will serve as an education center for Cubs prospects.


The new academy will serve players from across the world, including Venezuela, Panama, Colombia, Brazil, Nicaragua, Aruba, Curacao and Mexico, in addition to the Dominican Republic.

"We have been to the Dominican Republic three times," Ricketts said. "On the first trip, we wanted to see how we treated the players and what kind of facilities they had to make sure it was consistent with how we want to treat people in our organization. And what we found out was that people treated the people very well but the facilities were behind. [During] the second trip [we] decided to get some land and address the issues we recognized. We have spent the last couple of years getting ready for this trip to finalize the plans."
The academy will feature four fields, including one with artificial turf, four covered batting cages, eight bullpens, a weight room, a cafeteria and kitchen, two locker rooms, two meeting rooms, a large classroom that can be converted to four smaller classrooms, plus a theatre and video room. An on-site dormitory will house up to 80 players and eight staff members.

The academy will serve as an educational center equipped with classrooms and staff to teach English and Spanish to players and personnel, and players will be able to earn their GED high school equivalents. The Cubs say the center will place an emphasis on education, health and nutrition.

"A project like this is very important because all the players on the island are getting the opportunity to train in the type of facility the Cubs will have if they sign," said Castro, who signed out of the Dominican with Chicago in 2006. "We have an owner that really cares about the players and the people on this island. This is going to be the best academy in Latin America."

The Cubs estimate the complex will take 12-18 months to build and will cost the club between $6-8 million to complete.

"What the Ricketts family has done to support our Latin Players and our Latin players of the future makes you feel lucky to be a part of it," said Oneri Fleita, the club's vice president of player personnel. "I have been here 18 years and I feel like this is my first day and I've just started with this organization for the first time."
The Ricketts family also recently donated to the Institute for Latin American Concern to help fund a clinic whose goal is to reduce hypertension and diabetes in the northern part of the country.

"We very much care about the players we sign," Ricketts said. "Very few make it to the financial stability of a Major League contract, but we will treat them all the same and recognize that these are all valuable years for them even if they are not going to be players in the U.S."

Dominican Republic wins World Baseball Classic

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