Kathy Gross Real Time in Haiti Blog!

Kathy is presently in Haiti, until November 2.  She is keeping a daily log. Learn something about everyday life in Cerca Carvajal.  She has spent time here before and as she says "gives me time to get to know people and this community a little better."

Part of sustainability is working/partnering with the people of your Twin as well as the community they live in.  When your Twin visits your Haiti Twin, do you go out into the community, talk to the people in that community?  If you have gone to Haiti on a Twin trip, how many people can you say you met who live in that community after you get back home?  Food for thought for your next visit to your Twin?

Follow Kathy's blog daily:  kathygross.blogspot.com  Bookmark this link in your browser!

Church in the Modern World

Education for Justice
A project of Center of Concern

Our Mission

The mission of the Education for Justice Web site is rooted in the biblical call of justice. As disciples, we are called to see, hear, understand, and respond to the message of the gospel and the manifestations of injustice that demand the engagement of our heads, hearts and hands.

Reading and responding to the signs of the times is an urgent call of living our faith today. Love of God and love of neighbor are one.

All Education for Justice resources are designed to promote greater knowledge of Catholic Social Teaching and highlight the connection between current world events and our faith. Living as a disciple in a globalized world requires both greater awareness of local and global justice issues and ongoing faith formation.

View Presentation:  Pastoral Circle

Haitians determine root causes of problems

by Jean Denton
of The Catholic Virginian
October 14, 2013 | Volume 88, Number 25

After more than 15 years in a twinning relationship, the parishes of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Salem and Sacre Coeur in Cabestor, Haiti, wanted to take steps to make their joint projects sustainable.

At the same time, they realized a need for a new program concentrating on public health in the Cabestor region.

To that end, Dr. Tom Fame, coordinator of OLPH’s twinning project, introduced a process for organizing the local community so the people themselves could begin working together to identify their most pressing needs and plan how to address them.

Sacre Coeur pastor Father Rene Blot and Dr. Fame developed a survey to help create a profile of the population’s general lifestyles to determine factors contributing to the public health in the region’s various locales.

It asked about the number of adults and children in the household and included questions regarding infant and child deaths and causes.

Also: Where do you get your water? Do you eat a meal each day? Where do you go to the bathroom? Do you have a big garden?

A few months later, when Dr. Fame and a small group of OLPH parishioners visited Cabestor, Father Blot handed them a sheaf of hundreds of completed surveys. The group spent a day tabulating the information from which a clear picture of the community’s life emerged.

At a meeting soon afterward, local representatives told Dr. Fame they believed their greatest need was a medical clinic because of widespread sickness.

“But I was able to show them the information their people had given in the surveys,” Dr. Fame said. “I could say ‘look at what is causing all the health problems. Let’s think of what you can do yourselves, besides some big expensive project, to improve the situation.’”

“The thing is,” Fame explained later, “the process is more important than the task.

“The people could see that through the process, they can determine root causes for their problems and make decisions, develop work plans, assign tasks and evaluate their effectiveness by working together.

“It’s a long process and we’re just beginning,” he said, noting that plans for local economic development also has grown out of the effort. He’s optimistic as community leaders are stepping up to educate the people and encourage their participation.

“It’s alive,” he said. “It’s not just making them a school. It’s a living process involving people making things happen.”

Meanwhile, the process has brought much more to the community, Father Blot said. For one thing, the local church is growing as people have recognized its role in lifting them up and showing them the way to build up their community.

In coming together, he added, the people learn to rise above self-interest and find the value in serving each other.

Father Blot said he takes advantage of the times people gather at church—especially for Mass—to educate them on the community development process. But he presents it in the context of faith.

He explained he continually emphasizes his “message” to live as people created in God’s image and respond to God’s call to be responsible for one another.

“I use Genesis to talk about God creating people with a free will as well as with energy and knowledge,” he said. “I remind them that God gives people the capacity to solve their problems and address their hardships.”

Father Blot noted, “The history of the Haitian people is very delicate. They’ve become accustomed to believing that if you are poor you can’t do anything.”

In the past, he said, people would spend hours standing in line to receive food donations rather than use that time to work their own fields.

“My work is to clean their brains, and we are changing the attitude,” he said.

The pastor himself, rather than accepting produce from parishioners, has planted and harvested his own garden as an example. “I want to show them if I can do it, you can do it,” he said.

Dr. Fame shook his head in admiration.

“You know sometimes we try to do things here (in Haiti) that I think are going nowhere and then they surprise me,” he said. “You plant these seeds of ideas and then the people do it and often surpass your expectations.”

Little League Baseball in Haiti

By Dan Robson in Port-au-Prince (SportsNet)

White light invades the dark of Wilson Izidor’s one room home – the morning sun reflecting off the tin siding of a neighbour’s house a metre away. A rooster crows. The slum is busy with life. Wilson is late. He climbs out of the bed he shares with his mother and three-year-old brother and dresses quickly, pulling on his favourite aqua-coloured pants, blue basketball jersey and green plaid button-up. He grabs a grey Tabarre Tigers T-shirt and pushes through the swinging doors. Dirt crunches beneath his black-and-white high-tops as he turns a narrow corner in this winding shantytown in northwest Port-au-Prince. “Are you ready yet for baseball?” the 15-year-old shouts in English through a half-opened wooden door, walled in by grey USAID tarps hung upside down. “Jayson, let’s go.”

Sleepy-eyed Jayson Fortine ties his green Converse sneakers and neatly cuffs his skinny jeans. He takes two chomps of a hotdog bun and swigs water from a large metal mug.

“Fast, fast, fast, man,” Wilson says. “Jayson, let’s go. Let’s go-oh.”

The truck is a 20-minute hike away. Wilson still has another dozen friends to collect in this labyrinth of tin, tarp and cinder block. Jayson clanks the mug down, stretches his arms wide, yawns and rubs his hands together.

He pulls his Tigers T-shirt over his white one.One by one, the boys of Tabarre 41 come together, forming a pack of adolescent clichés. Jayson wears a scowl but sings Justin Bieber songs. (“I have the CD,” he shrugs.) Jackson is the best rapper in the group, but also the most bashful (he fell into a four-foot hole playing catch the previous evening, biting his tongue as his friends took joy in the tumble). Jackie is the talker, an unyielding source of commentary and instruction. (“That’s cow s–t man,” he informs a guest about a pile on the ground. “That’s not donkey s–t. I know cow s–t.”) Wilson is a man of style. He’s the kind of kid who changes into his baseball gear at the diamond and wears big black shades when he bats. He strums a guitar coolly in his Facebook profile picture; a disproportionate number of his Facebook friends are girls. Wilson is smooth.

The boys joke with each other in a mix of Creole and broken English, shoving and kicking and laughing as they hike past the barbed-wire walls of a UN camp and take a shortcut around the U.S. Embassy. Wilson prods them on: “Marche, Marche!”

They arrive at the Operation Blessing head office, where another group of kids is waiting. They all hop on the back of the NGO’s blue flatbed truck and cling to it as it sways and dips along the broken streets of Port-au-Prince like a dinghy in the ocean. They arrive at a white gate with big blue writing: “Byen Vini Nan Teren Jen Baseball Ayiti.” “Welcome to Haiti’s youth baseball field”—the only known diamond on this side of Hispaniola.

Despite sharing an island and a 200-km border with the Dominican Republic, the largest producer of major league players outside the U.S., baseball is a foreign sport in Haiti. Drive through the mountainous interior of the country, and you’ll find Haitians crowding around red-clay soccer pitches, rooting wildly. But you won’t find kids running bases. This truckload of boys, aged seven to 18, are the only regular players among the 10 million people who live here. Few of them could name a major league player; they might be able to name a team. Until three years ago, they’d never swung a bat or caught a ball with a glove. But Haiti does have a history with the game. For two decades, this country was the world’s largest manufacturer of baseballs. Every memorable major-league moment in the ’70s and ’80s started with the cotton and yarn wound around a small rubber core in Port-au-Prince factories. Catch a Reggie Jackson foul ball? Get Nolan Ryan’s autograph? That ball on your mantle was born here.

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The True Food Prize Goes to the Haitians

Published on Monday, October 14, 2013 by Common Dreams

by Salena Tramel

The Iowa state capitol is vibrating with activity this week in preparation for the World Food Prize Laureate Award Ceremony that is set to take place on Thursday. The 2013 World Food Prize credits Monsanto in the fight against hunger through sustainable agriculture—yet there is a disconnect between the spirit of the prize and the U.S. agrochemical giant’s actual practices. Organizers of the Food Sovereignty Prize aim to bridge this gap by honoring grassroots social movements in their own ceremony that will take place on Tuesday in New York City.

Corporate Interventions in the Global South

Companies like Monsanto consistently expand into Global South countries where more than a billion people each year contend with hunger daily. Those most affected are rural farmers, with the majority being women. Monsanto itself promotes chemically enhanced seeds that perpetuate a cycle of dependency and have devastated parts of the world most affected by hunger, environmental degradation, and extreme poverty.

One of the most palpable cases is Haiti.

The tiny Caribbean nation was once almost entirely self-sufficient, built by generations of highly organized peasants working together in community groups. In the ‘80s, that all changed—owing to neoliberal agricultural policies that included stabilization to curb inflation, structural adjustment, and export-led growth. The rice and pork industries in the U.S., among others, saw Haiti as a means to quickly expand their market share. But for Haitian farmers forced to learn the hard way, the loss of their heirloom crops and Creole pigs meant a downward spiral into dependence and hunger.

In 2008, when the global food price crisis bore down on Haiti’s staple crops, many rural Haitians curbed their hunger pangs with patties made from mud, oil, and sugar. And the 2010 earthquake took the lives and shelters of many rural farmers who had fled the countryside for Port-au-Prince and surrounding urban areas searching for work.

It was within the context of this catastrophe (couched in decades of foreign agricultural intervention) that Monsanto parachuted into Haiti, offering a gift of seeds in excess of $4 million.

The catch was that the seeds were a synthetic variety, some so toxic that they had been banned in the U.S. Many Haitians knew better that to plant them. Haiti’s social movements took the matter seriously—to the point of burning Monsanto seeds at a protest that brought four peasant movements together, making headlines around the world.

Grassroots Movements Reclaim Food Sovereignty

Haiti’s Group of 4 (G4) came together as a coalition in 2007, representing over a quarter million rural farming members of Heads Together Small Farmers of Haiti (Tet Kole), the Peasant Movement of Papaye, the National Congress of Peasant Movement of Papaye, and the Regional Coordination of Organizations of the South East Department. Its strategy is to provide a unified platform for peasants to voice their concerns as well as make space for mass mobilization and advocacy.

The G4 recognized control of seeds as a priority from its inception. Making sure that Monsanto’s alleged charity hybrids would go up in flames reiterated their reach and recognition as a movement.

Haiti’s G4 plays an essential role in Via Campesina, the international peasant movement that has more than 200 million rural and peasant members in 79 countries. Via Campesina is dedicated to seed sovereignty as part of the overarching term “food sovereignty” that it coined in 1996 to take the idea of food security the extra mile: instead of just access to and availability of food, proponents of food sovereignty stress that people have the right to define their own food systems.

In one of the vibrant peasant-to-peasant learning exchanges encouraged by Via Campesina, G4 members invited South American activists and agroecology experts to the Haitian countryside in 2007 to work together with priorities of saving native seeds and supporting peasant agriculture. The group adopted the name Dessalines Brigade after the 19^th-century Haitian independence leader Jean Jacques Dessalines. Immediately following the 2010 earthquake, the G4/Dessalines Brigade redoubled their efforts—providing communities with doctors, seasoned organizers, teachers, and agronomists.

Winning the Fight for Access to Food

The G4 and its collaboration with the Dessalines Brigade caught the eye of the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance, a diverse coalition of member organizations working toward food justice in North America and globally. Annually, the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance celebrates the leaders on the frontlines that do the most to advance access to food in their own communities through its Food Sovereignty Prize. The Haitian G4/Dessalines Brigade partnership received top honors this year.

“The Food Sovereignty Prize symbolizes the fight for safe and healthy food for all peoples of the earth,” said Chavannes Jean-Baptiste who sits on the executive committee of the G4. “It’s a fight that must be waged both locally and globally, and requires deep solidarity among all organizations fighting for food sovereignty.”

Flavio Barbosa, a Brazilian organizer from the Dessalines Brigade, elaborated: “Receiving this prize for the partnership between the G4 and the Dessalines Brigade is an incentive for others to participate in long exchanges such as the one we are experiencing in Haiti. And it charges us with even greater responsibility to continue our defense of peasant agriculture and agroecology as a way to produce sustainable, healthy chemical-free foods accessible for all.”

In addition to the G4/Dessalines Brigade’s top honor win, the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance lauded the work of women and peasant groups in Mali, India, and Basque Country.

The Food Sovereignty Prize picks up where the World Food Prize has fallen off—building confidence in the rural movements that are positioned to transfer both power and food back into the hands of deserving communities. 

Our shortcuts help keep Haiti poor

Posted: Sunday, July 14, 2013 12:00 am | Updated: 11:57 pm, Sun Jul 14, 2013.

Zachary Reid

Two centuries of supposed independence, long periods of guidance from more sophisticated allies, billions of dollars in foreign aid and the world’s second-oldest democracy comes down to this: a cute kid smiling and asking that her photograph be taken as a pretext for demanding payment.

Haiti, a nation that in forcefully declaring itself free in 1804 put its slave masters to rest long before the United States ever did, has been reduced to a place where children play the role of convincing victim in tourist snapshots.

And why not? The little girl who materialized in front of my camera, smiling brightly on the trash-strewn Atlantic shore of Cap-Haïtien, might be onto the best-paying job she’ll ever get. The dollar I handed over for her hundredth of a second of cuteness is about half of what most Haitians earn in a day.

Her country is a confusing, complicated place, and it doesn’t get any easier with familiarity or much better for the presence of an endless parade of do-gooders, myself included.

I’ve been there six times since the summer of 2010, three on work projects to the town of Gonaives. On those trips, I’ve played a small role in helping a team from Richmond’s St. James’s Episcopal Church build a school.

Every step of the way, we were convinced we were doing something good. For us, to be sure, it feeling quite good to build a thing we could actually see. But more important, we thought, for Haiti: creating a place where Haitians could learn.

That’s no small accomplishment in a country with a 53 percent literacy rate, a showing more in line with the miseries of Africa than the relative affluence in which Haiti is nestled. Its neighbors east (Dominican Republic, 87 percent), west (Cuba, 99.8 percent) and north (the United States, 99 percent) far outpace it in educational attainment.

Even Honduras (80 percent) and Nicaragua (68 percent), the other usual contenders for the infamy of being the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, do better by their people.

Each year, we’d troop down there and roll up our sleeves and haul cinderblocks and buckets of cement, roll gasoline-laced paint on walls and do our best to not to greatly interfere with the construction of what would become a two-story, six-room schoolhouse.

We finished in March and waited eagerly for the bishop suffragan of Haiti to come to town to dedicate the school.

With incense-waving pomp and circumstance, Bishop Oge Beauvoir did the honors in style.

An hour later, our group, basking in the glow of our collective success, met with him.

I’m not sure if we had expectations, our private meeting being a last-minute addition to our itinerary, but I can say with some certainty that what we heard wasn’t what any of us would have imagined coming our way.

With nary a thanks for the effort, the bishop launched into a talk about the dire state of the church in Haiti. The church, he said repeatedly, was land rich and cash poor. It had acre after acre of land, particularly in the lush plateau and north regions, but neither the means nor the expertise to use it. The foreign aid on which the church has long depended, he said, was drying up fast while demand for services was as high as ever.

Our school was an example of those ills. We’d given the church a gift it apparently couldn’t afford to keep.

Open an hour, and it was seemingly on the chopping block already.

In the weeks that followed, in a flurry of email between our team and the bishop, we were told the intent was never to close the school. (The bishop himself proved the point, with much grace, months later when I and two other St. James’s members returned to Haiti to scout new projects.)

But still, at the time, it was a bittersweet day.

We’d never planned to finance or otherwise run the school.

We set out to build something with the hopes of creating a place for Haitians, not us.

That it didn’t work out came as a surprise.

But you don’t have to look far in Haiti to find a road paved with good intentions, and it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out where it leads.

Cheap American rice has been shipped in by the boatload, a great humanitarian gesture to feed a hungry nation. But with every sack, the market for more expensive local rice dies a little more.

Every T-shirt a well-meaning missionary leaves behind is one less T-shirt a local merchant will sell.

Every dollar handed over to a practitioner of the Haitian handshake — one hand rubbing the belly, the other stretched out for your dollar — is one more step backward for a nation that has struggled mightily to recover from its fight for independence.

Everywhere you go in Haiti, you see something you think you can fix, with money or goods or just by doing what you’d do at home.

But trailing after all of those good intentions are consequences.

Some are good: Our school is a tangible thing, a structure that, hopefully, will stand for years to come, doors open to generations of future leaders.

And some bad: Who trains the teachers and pays them to work is still up in the air, and whose children get to attend is yet another layer of nuance to explore in a country whose government makes no promise of education.

Three months after the dedication, St. James’s sent three of us back to Haiti to scout out new projects. We like doing, after all, and we aren’t easily deterred.

The bishop himself, who’d left so many of us disillusioned in March, offered to be our tour guide, driver and compatriot.

He managed the difficult task of pulling off a good second impression. He was open and honest, defining challenges as quickly as opportunities. What lingering ill-will existed dissipated quickly.

The goal, the bishop kept saying in June, wasn’t getting American do-gooders to foot the bill for every step of every project. It was helping the Haitians find ways to sustain themselves.

How that’s going to happen isn’t an easy thing to figure out.

Beauvoir, born and raised in Haiti but a naturalized citizen of Canada, admitted the depth of the challenge and the need for many voices in helping craft solutions.

In Cap-Haïtien, where he has been based since winning his seat last year — after seven years in charge of the seminary in Port-au-Prince — the Episcopal church has a school filled to capacity and demand for space it can’t provide.

On the road out of town, the church has an agricultural school and acres and acres of land. It’s the perfect environment in which to grow crops that could be sold to support schools and other church projects. But on our visit, the school was locked tight, the fields were overgrown and rusting farm equipment was covered in weeds.

On the highway in front, trucks from the Dominican Republic rolled by, heading home with empty trailers.

There’s potential, for sure.

But while we do-gooders debate ways to tap in and help out, there’s a country full of kids who know that the best immediate chance of survival is finding a white guy toting a camera so they can smile wide and demand their dollar.

I paid mine reluctantly.

It seemed a small price to pay, but it made me complicit in a centuries-old shortcut that never seems to lead anywhere.

Napoleon couldn’t conquer the Cap-Haïtien shore two centuries ago. You have to wonder if he’d bother trying these days.

Zachary Reid writes about education for the Times-Dispatch. In the past year, he has accompanied St. James’s on mission trips to Haiti, New Orleans, Cuba and Honduras. 

Sounds Familiar, Doesn't It?

Bill Lohmann:
Planting seeds to grow a business, future farmers

Posted: Thursday, October 3, 2013; Times-Dispatch, Richmond, VA

The property is not much to look at now. The fields are weedy, the roads are rough and the barn’s roof has seen better days. But Sean Sheppard and his partners have big plans for this place.

Standing at the barn, he points around the property: the vegetables will be grown over there, the orchards across the way, maybe flowers in the back. He talks excitedly about providing food for restaurants, markets and food banks, starting a compost operation and laying out nature trails.

However, the primary mission, Sheppard said, is to “grow more farmers.”

“What we really want to do is showcase … sustainable agriculture techniques for replication,” he said. “We want to turn this place into a school.”

The 30-acre parcel of land in Highland Springs is tucked between Nine Mile and Creighton roads, only a half-dozen miles from downtown. Part of it had been used as a horse pasture, another as a private landfill. Soil and water tests didn’t reveal anything that would prevent it from being used for agricultural purposes, said Sheppard, who acquired the property this year and immediately brought in his colleagues from Backyard Farmer to begin plotting the future.

In an attempt to speed up the process, Backyard Farmer launched a Kickstarter campaign, trying to raise $150,000 by Oct. 12. The money would be used for infrastructure such as constructing wheelchair-accessible pathways, restrooms and raised garden beds, as well as the planting of 250 fruit trees and a 3-acre garden. In return for contributions, donors receive rewards such as heirloom or organic seeds that Backyard Farmer has purchased in large quantities, or, for larger donations, custom-made raised beds.

Kickstarter, an increasingly popular way to finance creative projects, is an all-or-nothing proposition, meaning if the goal isn’t met, donor pledges are voided and Backyard Farmer receives none of the money. Regardless of the outcome, Sheppard characterized the Kickstarter campaign as “a long shot … but worth a shot.” He said their plans will come to fruition eventually, just at a slower pace if the Kickstarter effort is not successful.

The group plans to get started this winter, planting garlic, cover crops and hardy greens, and establishing 100 trees.

Backyard Farmer is a cooperative of four owners who have their own contracting businesses: one is an arborist, another does stone work and site-grading, a third performs carpentry and makes custom furniture, and Sheppard works in landscaping, sustainable agriculture and education. They work together to market and share jobs, each one bringing something different to a project.

“We’re all very independent people,” Sheppard said when I visited the Highland Springs property the other evening. “We don’t want to work for anyone. We don’t want to have employees. We all use each other to get big jobs done.”

Backyard Farmer is a young, for-profit business, though it often is mistaken for a nonprofit because it performs so much of its work for school — installing gardens, for example, and teaching kids about the joy of growing things — and other community organizations, sometimes on a contract basis, others on a volunteer basis. Backyard Farmer maintained the Whole Foods community garden in Short Pump before it was lost to development.

Sheppard, 26, grew up on the Eastern Shore near Kiptopeke State Park. He said it would be nice to say he’s been farming since childhood or always wanted to do this sort of work, but neither would be true. His family didn’t even have a vegetable garden when he was a kid.

But Sheppard’s grandfather was an ornamental bonsai enthusiast, and he taught Sheppard about horticulture and composting and even how to painstakingly repair terracotta pots he had brought over from his native Italy.

Sheppard attended college, thinking he wanted to earn a degree in business. But he lost interest in traveling that career path, dropped out of school and instead set about creating his own future with the skills and knowledge his grandfather had given him. His grandfather died in 2007 without knowing how things would turn out for his grandson.

“He would love it,” said Sheppard, who still takes care of his grandfather’s bonsai and other plants back home.

Sheppard wants to provide that sort of edification at the proposed learning center, not only in the form of school field trips but in the area of professional career development. “Maybe someone looking to start a hobby farm,” he said.

Such a career move can seem daunting to someone without an agricultural background, but Sheppard believes it increasingly is becoming more feasible as farmers markets and community-supported agriculture gain popularity, and interest continues to grow in locally produced food.

“I’m a big believer that … small-scale, non-industrial farming is going to be a big job-maker in the future,” he said.