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?
1h40 ~ General Audience
CROIX-DES-BOUQUETS, Haiti -- Teenagers in blue-and-white uniforms pour out of classrooms of this boarding school at the edge of Haiti's capital, chattering in their native language of Creole about the science test they have just taken.
"Eske ou te byen konpoze?" asks one boy in the campus courtyard. In English, it translates as "How do you think you did?" "I'm not so sure," a girl answers back in Creole with a shrug of her shoulders. "The exam was really difficult."
The students don't speak much French at the school, although it remains the primary language of instruction in most Haitian classrooms. In fact, less than 10 percent of the country's 10 million people speak French fluently, and in most schools, even the teachers don't understand it very well although they're asked to teach in it.
The private Louverture Cleary School has already broken from that linguistic tradition and is instead emphasizing the Haitian Creole children speak at home. The school is also introducing students to Spanish from other parts of the Caribbean and the English they will likely need in the future.
"It is a practical issue," said Deacon Patrick Moynihan about the Creole language-based curriculum at the boarding school. "It really is about being part of this region."
Elsewhere, students struggle using French text books and coping with what largely remains a foreign language in a country once colonized by France, but more and more under the sway of the powerful economies of the United States and Latin America.
In many schools, children copy French lessons by rote from the chalkboard, understanding little.
"I really have to work hard, because I don't speak French at home. My parents don't speak French at home," said 14-year-old Alexandra Julien, who attends another school, as she walked to class one recent morning. "They speak Creole."
Haiti's 1805 Constitution declared that tuition would be free and attendance compulsory for primary students. But the quality of education lagged through the years, and plunged during the 29-year-long dynasty of Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude, or "Baby Doc," which ended in 1986. Haiti's professionals fled into exile to escape political repression, spawning a major brain drain the country has never bounced back from.
About 30 percent of the country's youth are now illiterate, according to the U.N.'s children agency, UNICEF, and only half of all children can afford to attend primary school. Less than a quarter attend secondary school.
In a 2011 report published in the journal "The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs," author Brendan McNulty wrote that 80 percent of Haiti's 16,500 or so primary schools are private, and they adhere to no academic standards. The article focused on rebuilding Haiti's education system after the quake.
Like the Louverture Cleary School, more organizations inside and outside the country are saying Haiti's educational crisis can be eased by educating the nation's children primarily in Creole, which all students and teachers truly understand, and bid adieu to French as Haiti's primary teaching language.
"We have lost, we have wasted, so many Einsteins because of the language barrier," said Michel DeGraff, a leading Creole scholar and Haiti-born linguistics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. DeGraff led a four-day workshop in January to help Haitian teachers incorporate Creole into math and science curricula, challenging the notion that the language is not sophisticated enough for the hard sciences.
In a sign of growing interest in Creole's educational potential, the U.S. Agency for International Development last fall awarded a $12.9 million contract to the North Carolina nonprofit group, RTI International, to create a basic reading curriculum that includes the language.
The humanitarian group Concern Worldwide is also developing Creole course materials and training teachers in the language. Duke University recently held a Creole linguistics workshop for U.S. and Haitian scholars in Durham, North Carolina, that treats Haiti's native tongue as a subject worth serious academic study.
Haitian Creole, which grew out of a mix of 18th-century French and West African languages, is the nation's lingua franca, but it wasn't until 1961 that it joined French as one of the country's two official tongues.
President Michel Martelly and other government officials switch between Creole and French in public settings, depending on whether the audience is Haitian or foreign, and many speak English and Spanish fluently from years of living abroad. More English than French can be heard on the streets of the capital as Haitian teens increasingly listen to artists popular in the U.S. such as Rihanna, Justin Bieber and Lil Wayne.
But French remains the language of affluence and privilege, employed in polite society and government communiques and openly spoken in the upscale supermarkets selling brie and baguettes in the mountains high above the capital's shanties. Although used by Haitians of all social strata, Creole is seen by some as the language of the impoverished masses.
As a result, Haitian parents are often all too willing to let their children stumble in their coursework to "learn" a language that even their teachers barely speak. Children whose parents can afford tuition typically spend the first three years of primary school being taught in Creole, then move to French for the remaining years. Students often learn little, and few pass their national exams.
President Michel Martelly campaigned on promises to improve Haiti's school system, and the government says it has paid tuition at private and public schools for more than a million students though some believe the number may be lower.
Some education officials, however, are reluctant to let go of French-centered instruction.
The government has run workshops helping teachers better understand French, with some officials saying French instruction is necessary because few Creole textbooks exist.
"French remains a language that is very symbolic for Haitians," said Pierre Michel Laguerre, an Education Ministry consultant who oversees the school system's curriculum. "There is a history with that language. We have many of our authors who have won prestigious literary prizes in the Francophone world. We cannot leave French behind."
Creole advocates say that there's no shortage of Creole-language books and point to publishing houses such as Educa Vision, Inc. in Florida, which produce such materials. But they acknowledge that shipping the materials to Haiti is expensive and goods are often held up in customs.
The Louverture Cleary school, which was founded by St. Joseph Parish in Providence, Rhode Island, has a history of success in the classroom.
It serves smart children from families with modest means and says it has notched a 98 percent rate of students passing the national high school exam, compared to the countrywide average of 30 percent.
A challenge painted on a wall at the school appears not in the customary French but in Creole: "Nou pare poun rebate ayiti, e ou?" – "We're ready to rebuild Haiti, are you?"
Jeff Thomas says he is. The 18-year-old sees his new linguistic skills as more than a path to a career as a computer programmer.
"If we meet a foreigner ... in order to help him we should speak English to understand what he's saying," Thomas said in English, with a heavy accent.
Moynihan emphasizes that Louverture Cleary is only one possible model for the rest of Haiti's schools and that it follows Ministry of Education guidelines. Unlike most secondary schools, the children have already mastered written and spoken Creole, some of them in the school's morning day care program.
"What is beautiful about language at Louverture Cleary is that we know it's a bridge," Moynihan said. "It's a bridge for communicating."
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Associated Press reporter Evens Sanon and videographer Pierre-Richard Luxama contributed to this report.
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