Dinwiddie teen’s book has positive message

August 19, 2013 | Volume 88, Number 21

by Steve Neill
of The Catholic Virginian

Being positive and upbeat is normally a good thing and one should practice it 365 days a year.

This is the premise of a new book “Looking Up 365” by David Buenrostro, a 19-year-old college sophomore whose proceeds from book sales will go to help a parish in Haiti which is in a twinning relationship with St. John Parish in Dinwiddie.

“The title ‘Looking Up’ is meant to be staying positive, keeping your chin up,” David told The Catholic Virginian. “And 365 means keeping it going for the whole year.”

“I’m trying to show people to be happy and positive for what you have from the Lord, instead of complaining about what you don’t have.”

“I’m trying to show people to be happy and positive for what you have from the Lord, instead of complaining about what you don’t have.”

There is an individual message for each day of the year.

Born in El Paso, David is the second of three children of a Mexican-born father and California-born mother of Mexican heritage. The family moved to Virginia in October 2005 when his father was assigned to Fort Lee with the U.S. Army.

After graduating from Dinwiddie County High School as ninth in his class of 360 and as a member of the National Honor Society, David enrolled at Virginia Commonwealth University where he is majoring in biology with a minor in chemistry.

Asked about the 80-page book, he explained that he wrote it during his senior year of high school and it took him a month to complete.

“I thought I’d knock it out in two days,” David said, smiling, “but I still had school classes, I had to correct my own mistakes with the layout and then I just needed to have a break at times.

“I was the editor, the content maker and did the layout and design,” he continued. “I have much more appreciation now for people who do that for a living.”

Why did he write the book?

“My faith is important to me because without it, nothing really matters,” David said. “God has given us the things in this world.”

He is active at St. John’s as an altar server and is willing to perform what might seem as meager tasks that need to be done. “I’ve washed some windows,” he said.

With the book completed, his next concern was how to publish it.

“I asked one of our family friends if she knew the tools to use to publish a book,” he said.

He was referred to a self-publishing website “blurb” which gave direction on how to proceed.

“It was very user-friendly and you didn’t need other guidance,” David said.

In an attempt to market the book, he spoke to the congregation at St. John’s and was invited to speak at two other churches.

“I was able to get pre-orders from Smyrna Baptist Church in Dinwiddie and at Unity Baptist Church in Petersburg,” he said.

“I visited both churches and spoke at their Sunday services.”

To date, he says he has sold “80-plus copies.”

As for recreation, David plays football, soccer and basketball “just with my friends when we have free time.”

During this summer he is working as a server at Red Lobster in Colonial Heights. In the fall, he’ll begin classes at Richard Bland Community College and then resume studies at VCU in the spring semester. He explained that he can take the same courses this semester as those offered at VCU and they will be transferred to his record.

“In the meantime I’ll be having classes much closer to home and will be able to save money,” he said.

David is open to invitations to speak to other church groups about his Christian message of positive thinking and feels he has learned how to connect with his audience.

“Sometimes during the first few minutes I’ll see people looking down, but after a few more minutes, I’ll see them looking right at me and I know I have their attention,” he said.

“I want to spread the message that God gives us many things to be thankful for and he wants us to help others.”

Do Christains Love Poverty?

Children leave St. Jude Church in Athi River, Kenya. About half the population of rural Kenya lives in poverty.
(CNS photo)

August 16, 2013

James V. Schall, S. J.

I.

For some time, after listening to much of their rhetoric on the topic, the question has bothered me: Do Christians love poverty as such, as a positive good? Do they want people to be poor so that they can be loveable? Somewhere in my memory, I recall a similar question: If we love our neighbor because we are “commanded” to love him, do we really love him? Or are we just obeying the commandment? Will the person we say we love recognize that what is really going on is that we are gaining points for virtue for ourselves by making it seem like we love him by law? These are questions asked without guile.

Poverty is not just a Christian concern, but also a socialist and a liberal one, though both may have gotten the idea one way or another from Christians. Are the poor the moral basis that justifies the actions of the government or the philanthropists? In lieu of God, does concern for the poor become a substitute for God as the only visible way to prove that we are not just being selfish? In either case, the poor and “options” for them are but tools that rationalize self-centered lives that have no other reason for existing but their own self-esteem.

In the beginning, I would like to affirm that, in my opinion, it is not the purpose of Christianity to make men poor or to keep them that way, granted that riches or wealth can, if not ordered, be morally dangerous. They (“all those beautiful things”) can become, as Augustine reflected, a means to obtain whatever we want. Several Latin American economists have remarked that the reason evangelical Christians make such headway in Latin America is because they perceive the need for discipline, work, virtue, honesty, knowledge, enterprise, and other aspects of learning to become productive—of becoming “not poor.”

Catholics, by contrast, (shades of Max Weber’s famous thesis in Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism), seem content with the status quo and with a static distribution or redistribution of existing goods that pits one group against another. The Catholics are not concerned with creating more goods, more wealth. In an honorable and effective way they think in terms of distributing their own, someone else’s, or the state’s limited store of goods, not of producing more goods, of increasing the whole of what is available. Though this thesis about Catholics economically lagging behind was challenged by people like George O’Brien and Amintore Fanfani, they did so by pointing to those Catholics, usually German or northern Italian, who did understand growth and innovation as something that can be learned and put into practice.

No doubt, we can also distinguish between loving or helping the poor persons—real individuals in need here and now—and loving “poverty” as such, an abstraction. It would seem that our love of the poor, in some basic sense, ought to include not just our helping the poor in his immediate needs but mainly inciting his capacity to help himself. We want him not to need us to help him except in the sense that we all need an economic and social system that works for everyone. We want this system to be growing; we do not want a stagnant system which always produces the same or lesser amounts of available goods. We want and need people who do not think solely or mainly in terms of distributing existing goods, which they often conceive to have been ill-gotten simply because someone has more than others.

The poor man is not really much interested in our love of him or his poverty if we do not know how not to be poor. He does not want our love if it strikes him to be, on our part, an exercise in behalf of our private virtue and vanity—“See how I am concerned with the poor!” We do not, furthermore, need good will towards or “love” of poor wrapped around ways of politics or economics that would, if put into practice, only make things worse or more totalitarian for everyone, including the poor. Almost all modern tyranny has ridden to power on a claim, sometimes even a sincere claim, to help the poor. We cannot avoid asking where claims to help the poor actually lead, not just where they say they do. In that sense, claiming to “be on the side of” or to help the poor might well be something both of a Christian heresy and a failure of reason.

The “cause” of poverty elimination, even when sincerely (if not naively) intended, has become too much tied up with political and economic systems that seek complete control over citizens and economy in the name of the “common good” and “social justice.” We cannot just think of the poor or poverty without likewise thinking of freedom, virtue, reason, and experience.

II.

Part of the reason that I bring this issue up is because of a letter I recently received from a Midwestern correspondent whom I have never met. She wrote the following:

I have been reading Anne Carey’s revised book about religious sisters [Sisters in Crisis: Revisited]. They have a very strange attitude toward the poor and the “marginalized.” I’ve noticed—they seem to like them to be poor and marginalized. They seem to want them to stay that way. In the meantime, they themselves, the most educated group of women ever who can pretty much count on being taken care of, can think of themselves as champions of the poor and downtrodden. They are not all like that, of course, I know some really wonderful women who are members of some of the wacky congregations. But there really is a strange dichotomy among many of these.

This bluntly stated observation of an ordinary housewife does not just apply to some religious women from, as it were, “wacky” congregations. Whenever someone, religious or secular, tells us that he wants to “identify” with the poor, especially someone who has little clue about the causes of wealth and poverty, we can suspect that the poor are being used as a cloak to justify a political or personal agenda that needs careful examination.

Both the Old and New Testaments, as well as other literature, are, no doubt, filled with admonitions that urge us to give to and care for the poor. As such, no one can have much of a problem with this admonition. The New Testament also assumes that “the poor will always be with us” (Matt 26:11). In the course of history, two kinds of poverty, as it were, have been distinguished. In part, this distinction had to do with the meaning of what we now call works of “charity.” That is, some people are poor because of natural or accidental defects in intelligence or health, whereby it was impossible for them to care for themselves and their own interests. Someone else had to care for them at least in part. This group was really what Aristotle meant by “slaves,” people by nature or accident who were unable to care for themselves.

The other group contained those who could care for themselves if they had an opportunity to do so. Ideally, they would be able to get themselves out of poverty if they lived in a place or in a system that allowed or encouraged them to do so. Not every economic or political system can or will do this. Mankind’s history reveals a slow learning process whereby lessons are learned. The best intentions in the world or the highest talents and discipline will not work if either the system is disordered or the people are not basically virtuous. Some economic theorists claim, no doubt, that vice, waste, and luxury are the primary motives for growth. And they do cause a certain kind of development.

Let us ask, however, why did God give us a world in which all things were not provided to us by nature? We can best answer this query by affirming that God intended for us to learn by ourselves how to take the raw earth and transform it into something that served our transcendent purposes. The greater good was not that everything was provided for us with no input of our own. The greater good was that we actually had something to learn and do, something that included our responsibility to others and to what works. That is why we were given reason and time, nothing much else but a planet and cosmos full of riches if we could but learn of them.

We have to think of these two groups in different ways. The first group will always need someone else to care for them. The latter will not, if they learn or are taught how not to be poor. Laziness and sloth are real negative factors. When religion confuses these two groups, it identifies itself with the poor in the second sense as if they were poor in the first sense. They will look on the poor as permanently in a condition of need. The justification for one’s religious life is then to “care” for the poor rather than discover ways to teach the poor not to be poor.

III.

If we add to this mix the issue of the vow of “poverty,” we find, along with the classic philosophers like Socrates, a voluntary choice not to be rich, not to be bothered by the cares that having wealth of whatever size may bring. This choice did not mean that those with vows of poverty did not themselves need enough riches to care for themselves. It meant that they were free to do myriads of other worthy things like philosophizing or, if they chose, assisting those who were poor. St. Benedict, in a famous phrase, said that the monks are both to pray and to work. St. Ignatius said that we can pray in anything we do. Later economists have realized that this monastic working and not spending was the origin of savings. By being poor, they became rich. This wealth enabled further growth to take place, a growth that built some of the most beautiful places on our planet.

One other caution needs to be added here. The distinction of wealth and poverty is not necessarily a distinction between good people and bad. We can find robbers and cheats among the poor and among the rich, as we can find virtue among both. Poverty, furthermore, is relative and must usually be thought in the context of envy. One’s sense of one’s own poverty does usually have something to do with “keeping up with the Jones.” The transportation union of the BART system in San Francisco talked of a strike even if they were among the highest paid workers in the country. The poor in the United States or Europe, while still “feeling” poor, have more income and facilities at their disposal than many of those thought to be rich in the rest of the world. Moreover, poverty is not the only cause of civic unsettlement. The Muslim world, in spite of huge oil revenues, is one of the poorest areas in the world. This largely is a result of ideas. The main Islamic concern is not to be rich but to establish the law of Mohammed everywhere so that Allah will be praised.

In conclusion, I want to return to issue of the Christian relation to poverty and the poor. But first let me note one school of thought that we hear of whenever anyone wants to build something noble or beautiful. We suddenly hear cries, first spoken by Judas, that “It would better to use the money for the poor” (Jn 13:29). This is the passage in Scripture designed to show that poverty was not always the most important thing to consider. It has always been my contention that money spent on beautiful things is money spent for the poor. The poor have need of beauty as much as they do bread. And if we insist that the only thing the poor need in their poverty is bread, we will not only insult the poor who can appreciate beauty but we will lock him into a world with no signs of transcendence. The alternative is not beauty or helping the poor, but both. It is always worth meditation for economists and theologians to wonder how small towns of two or three thousand inhabitants—poor people by our standards—managed over the course of centuries to build some of the most beautiful things in the world. Henry Adams talked of this in speaking of the Virgin and the Dynamo.

My main thesis, however, is that Catholic social thought should shift the direction of its rhetoric in dealing with any issue concerning the poor. It should not primarily stress the Christian’s associating himself with the poor or looking like he is poor, as if the poor man wants everyone to be destitute and is delighted to see well-off folks joining them. The religious emphasis needs to be more oriented to teaching how not to be poor. It ought to realize that the first step in this change of emphasis is to rid itself of the idea that redistribution of existing goods is nothing but a revolutionary method that would really make everyone poor. Again, the purpose of Christianity is not to make everyone poor. It must learn to understand profit, markets, and innovation as the primary way to enable the poor, by their own efforts, to become not poor. The poor are not really helped by well-meaning souls who identify with them but who have only confused or detrimental ideas about wealth production.

One final thought seems worth making. The only real resource in the world is the human brain. It is not oil, or material goods, or location. It is true that human intelligence is itself designed to know and deal with what exists in the world. The world is intended to be a place for man wherein he can become through his own enterprise more fully what he ought to be. The virtue of charity, the need to give of one’s abundance, includes the learning how to think and learn what works and what does not. Aristotle had long ago remarked that men need a certain amount of wealth and goods to be virtuous. That is the kind of being we are. They also, having the goods, need a similar amount of virtue. They need to reject vice and corruption.

The worst thing that can happen to Christianity (itself responsible for much of the grounding of science in its teaching about the existence of a real world with secondary causality in it) is to associate itself or be associated with the love of poverty in such a way that Christians seem to want everyone to be poor and thus take no workable steps to make it otherwise. Many seem to think that, by claiming to be on the side of the poor, the poor will be grateful and will reconnect with Christianity. I for one doubt this result. How one is perceived does make a difference, no doubt. The poor, however, usually see where such sympathies lead, to political and ideological control in the name of poverty alleviation. In this area, we have little room for deluding ourselves. Much of world poverty has in fact been reduced or alleviated, as a recent essay in The Economist has shown. Christians often seem not to know that this change has happened or why it happened.

One last point is worth making. The “urgency” of poverty alleviation often makes it seem that the main purpose of the Church in this world is horizontal—that by attending to this issue, it will at the same time fulfill its main purpose. But the Church exists to lead us to a transcendent end, poor and rich alike. Modern thought has often been an effort to substitute this transcendent end for an inner-worldly one as if making a better world here and now were what it was all about. Salvation comes into the world whether the world is perfect or not. Christianity holds that the poor qua poor have as good a chance of reaching beatitude as the rich qua rich, probably a better one. Unless this end is understood, no amount of discussion of wealth and poverty in this world will make much difference. But when the question of the poor does arise, as it should, the main question should not be identification with it, but what really alleviates their condition.

Is It Nuts to Give to the Poor Without Strings Attached?

By JACOB GOLDSTEIN

Published: August 13, 2013 

Bernard Omondi lives in a small Kenyan village in a rural district called Siaya that sits right on the Equator and is almost impossible to get to. He has spent years working on and off as a day laborer, moving stones on construction sites, and commuting long distances over rough dirt roads. When he could find work, he made about $2 a day. When he couldn’t, his two sons sometimes went hungry. Then one morning last year, Omondi woke up to an unusual text message. “When I saw the message, I jumped up,” he recalled. “My wife said, ‘Bernard, what is it?’ ” He told her he had just been given $500 with no strings attached. “ It’s here! ” he said.

A month earlier, Omondi told me, a couple of strangers showed up in his village, and explained that they worked for a charity, GiveDirectly, that gave money to poor people without any preconditions. They had chosen this area, they said, because it was among the most impoverished they could find — most people grew vegetables on small plots, lived in dirt-floored houses and worked sporadically at informal jobs. The poorest people in the village, the strangers explained, would be eligible to receive $1,000, about a year’s income for a family, spread over two payments. Not surprisingly, many villagers were incredulous. Some thought a politician was trying to buy their votes; others presumed it was some sort of trick. “My friends didn’t believe it at all,” Omondi said. “They told me, ‘They will come for it one day.’ ”

A charity that gives away money, as opposed to, say, offering agricultural training or medicine, does seem a bit unusual. That’s partly because governments and philanthropists have emphasized solving long-term economic problems rather than urgent needs. But in the past decade it has become increasingly common to give money right to the very poor. After Mexico’s economic crisis in the mid-1990s, Santiago Levy, a government economist, proposed getting rid of subsidies for milk, tortillas and other staples, and replacing them with a program that just gave money to the very poor, as long as they sent their children to school and took them for regular health checkups.

Cabinet ministers worried that parents might use the money to buy alcohol and cigarettes rather than milk and tortillas, and that sending cash might lead to a rise in domestic violence as families fought over what to do with the money. So Levy commissioned studies that compared spending habits between the towns that received money and similar villages that didn’t. The results were promising; researchers found that children in the cash program were more likely to stay in school, families were less likely to get sick and people ate a more healthful diet. Recipients also didn’t tend to blow the money on booze or cigarettes, and many even invested a chunk of what they received. 

Today, more than six million Mexican families get cash transfers.Dozens of countries imitated Mexico’s example and their results inspired the founders of GiveDirectly, a handful of graduate students at Harvard and M.I.T., who were studying the economics of various developing countries. They chose to situate the charity in Kenya because it was a poor country with a well-developed system for sending money to anyone with a cheap cellphone. But they also planned to differentiate their charity; whereas most of the government programs give people money for as long as they qualify, GiveDirectly offers people a one-time grant, spread over the course of several months, and without any requirements.

“I’m hopeful about GiveDirectly’s model, but what they’re doing is very different from what some of the research has suggested is really working,” Chris Blattman, an economist who teaches at Columbia and who studies cash transfers, told me. “They’re just giving away money with no strings. It’s just manna falling onto your mobile phone.” An outside group is studying GiveDirectly’s impact; final results are expected later this year.

A few months after the group sent out its second round of payments to Omondi’s village, I spent two days walking around the area in Siaya where GiveDirectly is working. I didn’t find anyone who drank their money away or started sitting around waiting for the next handout. Although people did like to gossip about what their neighbors did with the money. One man actually pointed to a nearby house, and told me that the owner had nothing to show for his windfall. I later learned that the man, whose first wife had died, used the money to pay a dowry so he could remarry.

Lots of people, in fact, used the money in productive ways. An inordinate number, it seemed, used it to replace their thatched roofs, which are not only lousy but also weirdly expensive, as they need to be patched every few months with a special kind of grass. A metal roof costs several hundred dollars, but lasts for 10 years, making it a much better investment. Omondi was among those who bought metal roofs. He also purchased a used Bajaj Boxer, an Indian-made motorcycle that he uses to ferry people around, for a small fee; he is also currently paying off a second motorcycle, which he rents out. Now Omondi makes about $6 to $9 a day in his taxi operation, several times his previous income, and he works almost every day. Several of his neighbors also used the money to start businesses­. One man bought a mill and charges villagers to grind their corn. Others became microretailers, buying goods like soap and oil at wholesale and reselling them at a markup.

But while Omondi and his neighbors have metal roofs, their houses still have dirt floors and no running water or electricity. And their prospects for making it to the middle class are pretty bleak. “You give people cash to start a business or expand their business, and in a lot of cases, they shoot forward,” Blattman says. “Then they start screeching to a halt when they hit the next constraint.” If Omondi wanted to further expand, he’d probably find it hard to get a small-business loan from a bank. The problems holding Omondi and his neighbors back — underdeveloped financial systems, bad infrastructure — are the generic but defining problems of the developing world, and they won’t be fixed by a one-time windfall.

Even if they can’t necessarily build thriving businesses, or pave their floors, the poorest Kenyans can, even for a time, enjoy the tangible relief of being a little less poor. At its most basic level, after all, GiveDirectly’s work is an attempt to test one of the simplest ideas in economics — that people know what they need, and if they have money, they can buy it. Taken to its logical conclusion, this suggests that giving away money may often be more helpful to people than giving them cows, or medicine, or training or whatever. “This puts the choice in the hands of the poor, and not me,” Michael Faye, one of GiveDirectly’s co-founders told me. “And the truth is, I don’t think I have a very good sense of what the poor need.”

Diocese making progress in helping Haitian farmers

The Catholic Virginian
by Jean Denton
Volume 88, Number 20
August 5, 2013

After five years and an earthquake, a sustainability success story is beginning to unfold at the Small Farm Resource Center just outside of Hinche, Haiti.

Indeed, if the 75-acre farm project continues to progress as it has for the last couple of seasons, it will be a success as a model of collaboration as well as a sustainable agriculture center in Haiti’s central plateau.

The Small Farm Resource Center at Maissade, Haiti, is a joint project of the Catholic Dioceses of Hinche and Richmond, along with Caritas Hinche and the Virginia Tech Department of Crop and Soil Environmental Sciences with a grant from USAID.

The farm project promotes agricultural research, experimentation and production, according to Jay Brown, former director of the Richmond Diocese Office of Justice and Peace, who served as lead staff for diocesan Haiti ministry.

Its purpose, Mr. Brown said, “is to educate small farmers in the region, improve the quality and yield of the land and increase the viability of farming as a way of life.”

He added, “We also see it as a tool for evangelizing about the importance of developing and working the land.”

The idea for the Small Farm Resource Center was first put forward in 2007 by then Hinche Bishop Louis Kebreau as a way to stem the huge out migration of people from the central plateau to larger cities, particularly Port-au-Prince.

“The bishop saw investment in agriculture in Haiti as a great way to provide a livelihood, but he also saw that youth and young adults didn’t see agriculture as a value,” Mr. Brown explained.

“He envisioned something that would be like a place of retreat where people could go to re-connect with the land and re-discover the dignity of working with the land.”

The two dioceses formed a partnership with Caritas Hinche to initiate the farm project and OJP’s Sustainable Development committee approached Virginia Tech about starting a research and development component.

The Blacksburg-based university responded by applying for and receiving a five-year, $1.2 million research grant from USAID under its Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management (SANREM) program.

St. Anne Parish in Maissade provided the land for the farm with a contribution from its twin parish St. Nicholas of Virginia Beach.

But the project had barely kicked off when the devastating 2010 earthquake hit and delayed activities for awhile.

“The large influx of population into the central plateau, the cholera and so forth set us back,” said Dr. Thomas Thompson, who currently heads the Virginia Tech team in Maissade. “Now, we’re catching up but we’ve made a lot of progress in the last year and a half.”

Dr. Thompson’s colleague is Dr. Wade Thomason, the other primary member of the Tech group that includes two more faculty and three graduate students.

Dr. Thompson explained that the SANREM program’s intent is to develop and promote the adoption of appropriate agricultural conservation practices and increase the yields among small farmers in the communities it serves throughout the world.

He said determining such practices for the particular area depends on the soil environment. Early efforts in Maissade included experiments on the soil as well as studying the environment with an aim to “adapt to local cropping systems.”

Dr. Thompson noted that USAID emphasizes the SANREM grants are for cooperative research support projects, so the Tech soil scientists’ work with the Haitian agronomists and technicians is “collaborative as much as possible.”

Through the grant, Tech provides financial resources and expertise in experimentation and evaluation as well as demonstrating how better seed quality and improved crop varieties (primarily maize) will improve farmers’ yields.

In return, the Tech professor said, “We learn from them what will work and what will not work.”

He explained that as the project has progressed, the Tech soil experts have helped the Haitian agronomists “understand the concepts of how to do the science. We design the experiments with them and they conduct them in the field.

“The idea is that this will benefit them down the road and hopefully they will be able to apply these skills in doing their own research and experimentation,” Dr. Thompson said. “We call this capacity building.”

Dr. Thompson said one of his team’s objectives is to introduce and train local farmers in the three basic common practices of soil conservation: crop rotation, reduction or elimination of tillage and maintenance of year-round soil cover (which has the benefit of suppressing weeds, reducing erosion and adding organic matter to the soil).

A veteran researcher in the field, Dr. Thompson said he has traveled quite a bit internationally, but never before to a developing country. Since his first visit to Haiti a year and a half ago, he said the project in Maissade “has been a tremendous experience for me personally and professionally. It’s been enriching and challenging and it has kindled in me a strong desire to do more in this area.”

He has been pleased by the general level of knowledge of the Haitian agronomists and gratified by their commitment to working together for the success of the farm project, he said.

“Once we established a level of trust with the agronomists, they generously allowed us access to their clientele (the local farmers) and the door began to open on the project at Maissade.

“When they invited the small farmers in the area to come meet with us, that was a watershed moment, because those are the people we are trying to reach. It’s all about the small holders (farmers),” he explained.

Now, as local Haitian agronomists and the Virginia Tech soil scientists prepare for an important third full season of crop cultivation and experimentation at the farm, the project also begins the second phase of its overall development, a plan that includes generating income to fund continuing operation of the Small Farm Resource Center.

According to Jay Brown, Phase II, which began July 1, is an animal husbandry project, headed by Caritas Hinche, to develop new, heartier breeds of cows and goats. “This is the first income generating program of the farm. The expectation is that funds from the eventual sale of the livestock will be re-invested in the facility,” he said.

Phase II is funded by OJP’s Sustainability Committee with nearly $20,000 raised from donors here.

The third phase will begin soon afterward, supported by $25,000 from the Richmond Diocese Annual Appeal, Mr. Brown said, explaining that the funds will help purchase fertilizer for crops and feed for raising the livestock and will support training farmers across the central plateau.

He said the plan is for the “production element” of the farm eventually to be able to fund and sustain its operation into the foreseeable future.

Impossible Dream Comes True at Haiti’s College Pierre Toussaint

Catholic New York

by RON LAJOIE

7/10/2013

At age 27, Willio Methelus is finally getting his high school diploma. He has never been held back and has maintained outstanding grades since he started school, he proudly declares. But like most children in rural Haiti, he didn’t have much chance to get an education.

His father is disabled and so for most of his childhood he worked the family’s subsistence farm with his sisters and brothers tending to the goats and dreaming of the day he could go to school.

That chance finally came when he was 15. Was he embarrassed to be sitting in a classroom with kids half his size and half his age?

“I never worried about it,” the willowy young man, who doesn’t look much older than his graduating classmates, told Catholic New York in Creole through an interpreter at St. Jean Baptiste parish rectory in the tiny mountain village of Sassier in rural southwest Haiti.

“I just focused on my academics,” he said. “It wasn’t really my fault.”

It has been said that in Haiti dreams seldom come true. But on June 23 dreams did come true for Willio and 10 other members of the first graduating Grade 13 class of College Pierre Toussaint, the first complete secondary school in the rural areas of Haiti’s Grand Anse Province.

On graduation day St. Jean Baptiste was packed to overflowing for the Mass and graduation ceremony. At the open end of the little cinderblock church, villagers stood four deep in 95-degree heat to witness history being made. The eleven 13th grade and fifty 12th grade students that comprised the Class of 2013 walked behind the cross as they entered the brightly decorated church.

“We are very proud,” said Father Edner Mars, pastor of St. Jean Baptiste parish, who had just seen his dream of many years come true. They now have a secondary school here so that the children of his community would not have to leave to get an education elsewhere. “I’m very happy that we have gotten to this point. There is so much potential in these kids. Usually when you think of the countryside, you don’t think of anything worthwhile in Haiti. Now there is dignity here. The school has changed the community in so many ways.”

It had been called impossible. How unlikely was it that a tiny impoverished village without electricity, where most people could not read or write and connected to the outside world by one torturous gravel road, could have a secondary school? This is a school of their own where their precious children would not have to be sent away to complete their education in overcrowded classrooms with strangers in an indifferent, possibly dangerous, far-off city?

“When Brother Tyrone first came here at the end of 2006, he went to visit one of the first classes of seventh-graders and he asked them, ‘who wants to be a doctor?’ Blank stares. ‘Who want to be lawyers?’ More blank stares. He repeated a couple of other things and he began to realize these kids don’t have any dreams. They didn’t have any basis upon which to have dreams,” said Deacon Gerry Keenan, president of Zanmi Sassier (Partners with Sassier), a nonprofit organization that works with groups in Sassier to bring hope, create opportunity and improve the lives of the 10,000 inhabitants of the region. He serves at Sacred Heart parish in Winnetka, Ill., which is twinned with St. Jean Baptiste parish.

“Because all they knew was the existence they had here, which is this really hardscrabble life where none of their parents, if their parents are alive, have any education. Many, probably as many as half can’t even write their name,” he continued.

“Fast forward from fall 2006 to June 2013 and what you see now is the transformational value of education. And it’s not just transformational for these students, it transformational for their families and the entire community. They can hope. Adults in Haiti have a hard time hoping, because they’ve seen too much, but for these kids, they don’t know Haiti’s a place where things are supposed to be impossible. So it allows them to have the kind of hope and the kind of enthusiasm that says things here can be different.”

In late 2006, Deacon Keenan and Father Mars were looking for partners to help sustain the little school which at that time went only as far as seventh grade. The idea was to add an additional grade every academic year to Grade 13, the grade in Haiti that permits a student to go on to university. They found one in Brother Tyrone Davis, C.F.C., executive director of the New York Archdiocese’s Office of Black Ministry.

Brother Tyrone had been searching for a way to get the archdiocese involved in Haiti. He had seen a film “Mission to Sassier” that told of a medical mission to the impoverished region and had been deeply moved by what he saw.

“It was such a powerful display of Church in action,” said Brother Tyrone of the documentary. “We thought this would be a great way for us to be supportive of Haiti and to collaborate with a congregation from the Archdiocese of Chicago that was already involved in that community. It then became a dilemma for us as to how we could be involved. It was really a about a yearlong conversation and I also recognized that my personal interest was more in education than in medicine. In the course of this conversation I became aware that this community had an elementary school and that the parents were interested in forming a secondary school. We thought this would be a great way for our ministry and the archdiocese to become involved, where we didn’t necessarily have to be crafting our involvement from the ground up. Rather we could come in and be supportive with others.”

Cardinal Egan, then Archbishop of New York and now Archbishop Emeritus, was supportive of the idea. It also didn’t hurt that the school was to be named College Pierre Toussaint, in honor of the prospective Haitian saint who performed myriad works of charity in 18th- and 19th-century New York City. He is interred in the crypt under the altar at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

The archdiocese has since been involved in a number of ways. Brother Tyrone estimates the archdiocese has contributed $127,000 in direct financial aid to the school. It has also provided indirect financial aid, such as school supplies and gym uniforms. It also had t-shirts made up with the College Pierre Toussaint logo on the front to fashion a sense of school community. A team from the Office of Black Ministry was in Sassier for the graduation ceremony and placed a commemorative medal around each graduate’s neck.

One problem, Brother Tyrone said, has been keeping up with the spectacular growth of the college, which has since become a magnet school for nearby communities. Enrollment last academic year was 880 from pre-school to 13th grade and next fall 900 students are expected. College Pierre Toussaint now has 53 teachers, some part time, and nine administrators.

“As the school grew, unfortunately our ability to contribute at the level we would have wanted began to diminish,” Brother Tyrone said. “When you start out and the budget for 56 seventh-graders, teachers and all, was somewhere in the range of $30,000 it is easy to contribute a significant part of that picture. But when you start moving up to 70 students and more teachers, and then 80 students and more ‘whatevers,’ we lost our ability to keep up with that. But we’ve certainly maintained our ability to contribute something every year, never as much as we wanted to. But then our support has been in other kinds of ways.”

Keeping the school solvent is a continuing challenge.

But at the graduation ceremony Deacon Keenan told the graduates and their parents they were witnessing a miracle. Something everyone said was impossible had come to pass. Sassier had its own secondary school. This miracle didn’t happen without faith and perseverance. Brother Tyrone made sure the people responsible for the human element of the miracle were given due credit.

“Many doubted this day could happen here in Sassier,” said Brother Tyrone looking to the proud parents. “But when I looked into your eyes seven years ago I knew it could happen right here.

Turning to the students, he said, “We celebrate your academic achievement today. But I’m going to tell you there are no smarter people in this church today than your parents. Never forget who brought you to this point...I want you to remember that probably in your whole life you will not meet any people smarter than your parents.”

College Pierre Toussaint is not an imposing building. It is a simple turquoise-painted, low-slung, two-floor cinderblock structure hand-built around an open-ended courtyard among palm and mango trees. There is no ivy, no million-dollar synthetic athletic field and certainly no student parking. Almost all students here walk to school, some for miles. The small classrooms are spartan by U.S. standards.

But it is here where Sassier’s children are permitted to build their dreams. Yameson and Bonel Nazaire, two brothers graduating from 13th grade, are teaching their parents how to read and write and thinking about college. Willio Methelus would like to become a civil engineer.

“It is a really good school and it has afforded me the opportunity to get an education,” said Methelus, who has attended College Pierre Toussaint since 2007.

“I saw the catastrophe in housing after the earthquake (in January 2010),” he said of his career choice. “A lot of houses didn’t have strong foundations and sometimes people add on three and four stories but the foundation is not made for that. As a result a lot of people lost their homes. I want to be a civil engineer to build.”

Lizana Sanon would like to become a nurse and to help her widowed mom who has sacrificed so much for her education. She has taught her mom the alphabet.

“I’m the first one to graduate high school from my family,” she told CNY.

“I’m grateful to God my daughter is where she is,” said her proud mother after the ceremony. “Since she was young I’ve been working very hard, sacrificing to send her to school. I’m happy I’ve given her something, something that she can live.”

While Lizana plans to go to nursing school, it is not at all certain given the financial sacrifice it would require for her family and indeed for all the families of new graduates. (Students were busily filling out applications for scholarships or sponsorships when CNY visited.) She intends to return to Sassier. “I would like to come back here and provide medical attention to those in the community, so we don’t have to go to Jeremie (the nearby city) in the middle of the night for medical attention,” Liziana said.

Returning to Sassier was a common sentiment among all the grads. Many hoped to go to agricultural college and then return to their community to pass along what they’d learned about proper land management to their families and neighbors. Their pride in their school and community was evident.

“There is really no way to describe what this school has meant to me,” said Edline Maxi, who would also like to pursue nursing. “If there was no school here I would have had to go to the city. But because it is here I was able to go to school and stay at home. I feel very blessed. Everyone is different, but for me, I’m choosing to go to university and then to come back to Sassier, to work, sweat and build a community. I want people to know I’m working in the community so they can point to me and say, this is a product of College Pierre Toussaint!”

The Charitable-Industrial Complex

By PETER BUFFETT

Published: July 26, 2013

I HAD spent much of my life writing music for commercials, film and television and knew little about the world of philanthropy as practiced by the very wealthy until what I call the big bang happened in 2006. That year, my father, Warren Buffett, made good on his commitment to give nearly all of his accumulated wealth back to society. In addition to making several large donations, he added generously to the three foundations that my parents had created years earlier, one for each of their children to run.

Early on in our philanthropic journey, my wife and I became aware of something I started to call Philanthropic Colonialism. I noticed that a donor had the urge to “save the day” in some fashion. People (including me) who had very little knowledge of a particular place would think that they could solve a local problem. Whether it involved farming methods, education practices, job training or business development, over and over I would hear people discuss transplanting what worked in one setting directly into another with little regard for culture, geography or societal norms.

Often the results of our decisions had unintended consequences; distributing condoms to stop the spread of AIDS in a brothel area ended up creating a higher price for unprotected sex.

But now I think something even more damaging is going on.

Because of who my father is, I’ve been able to occupy some seats I never expected to sit in. Inside any important philanthropy meeting, you witness heads of state meeting with investment managers and corporate leaders. All are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left. There are plenty of statistics that tell us that inequality is continually rising. At the same time, according to the Urban Institute, the nonprofit sector has been steadily growing. Between 2001 and 2011, the number of nonprofits increased 25 percent. Their growth rate now exceeds that of both the business and government sectors. It’s a massive business, with approximately $316 billion given away in 2012 in the United States alone and more than 9.4 million employed.

Philanthropy has become the “it” vehicle to level the playing field and has generated a growing number of gatherings, workshops and affinity groups.

As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to “give back.” It’s what I would call “conscience laundering” — feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity.

But this just keeps the existing structure of inequality in place. The rich sleep better at night, while others get just enough to keep the pot from boiling over. Nearly every time someone feels better by doing good, on the other side of the world (or street), someone else is further locked into a system that will not allow the true flourishing of his or her nature or the opportunity to live a joyful and fulfilled life.

And with more business-minded folks getting into the act, business principles are trumpeted as an important element to add to the philanthropic sector. I now hear people ask, “what’s the R.O.I.?” when it comes to alleviating human suffering, as if return on investment were the only measure of success. Microlending and financial literacy (now I’m going to upset people who are wonderful folks and a few dear friends) — what is this really about? People will certainly learn how to integrate into our system of debt and repayment with interest. People will rise above making $2 a day to enter our world of goods and services so they can buy more. But doesn’t all this just feed the beast?

I’m really not calling for an end to capitalism; I’m calling for humanism.

Often I hear people say, “if only they had what we have” (clean water, access to health products and free markets, better education, safer living conditions). Yes, these are all important. But no “charitable” (I hate that word) intervention can solve any of these issues. It can only kick the can down the road.

My wife and I know we don’t have the answers, but we do know how to listen. As we learn, we will continue to support conditions for systemic change. 

It’s time for a new operating system. Not a 2.0 or a 3.0, but something built from the ground up. New code.

What we have is a crisis of imagination. Albert Einstein said that you cannot solve a problem with the same mind-set that created it. Foundation dollars should be the best “risk capital” out there.

There are people working hard at showing examples of other ways to live in a functioning society that truly creates greater prosperity for all (and I don’t mean more people getting to have more stuff). 

Money should be spent trying out concepts that shatter current structures and systems that have turned much of the world into one vast market. Is progress really Wi-Fi on every street corner? No. It’s when no 13-year-old girl on the planet gets sold for sex. But as long as most folks are patting themselves on the back for charitable acts, we’ve got a perpetual poverty machine.

It’s an old story; we really need a new one.