HOW HAITI OUTREACH BUILDS COMMUNITY WITH WELLS

The Adopt-a-Well Program

Haiti Outreach Community Well at La Fontan

Haiti Outreach operates a new program that should interest many individuals, churches, and schools, along with Rotary Clubs and other civic groups and foundations: The Adopt-a-Well Program!  In its 17 year history of community development, Haiti Outreach has earned a reputation of excellence as an organization that works with Haitian communities to build sustainable facilities for transforming life.  

The Forest Hill Church Haiti Mission has committed to raising funds to sponsor a well for the little village of Gabo in the Central Plateau region of the country.  The community there has asked Haiti Outreach for a well, with the blessings of the municipal mayor and the national clean water authority.  And at the same time, village's leaders have made a commitment to develop their capacity to manage the well permanently with their own personnel and resources.

In this program, the sponsor raises the money for a specific community managed well in rural Haiti. Each community has a name, population, and its own story about where and how far people have to go to get contaminated water that they bring home daily for their families to use.  In order to receive its well, each community must have its own organization responsible for permanently managing its well and the distribution of clean water.  

This newer method of developing a local community well management group to take responsibility, be accountable to the whole community, and do their work in a transparent way is transforming life in rural Haiti.  The success rate for clean water wells in operation steadily over more than five years has dramatically increased from about 50% to more than 90%.  That translates into better health and fewer deaths from contaminated water.  It leads the way to better sanitation and living standards.

Once the funds are raised and donated to Haiti Outreach, their staff begins the process of engaging the people of that community and training a volunteer water management committee. When they have been sufficiently trained, the well will be developed on community owned land and completed with a ceremonial inauguration. While that process is underway, the sponsors can be informed as to the progress of the well management training and drilling.

Haiti Outreach produces 50 community managed wells a year. That impacts 18,000 – 20,000 people every year.   But in order to do this,  need to raise the money to maximize our capacity.  Each well costs $15,000, so that is the sponsor’s goal. Of course, if the sponsoring group could raise funds for more than one well, that would be great! If the sponsor can only raise half that much, another group is recruited to add funds in order to reach the goal.

If some members of the sponsoring group wanted to travel to Haiti during this process to visit the community, or to attend the well inauguration, Haiti Outreach will do its best to facilitate that as part of a trip to see Haiti and other community development projects of Haiti Outreach.

Here is a very specific and concrete way YOU can make the difference in the lives of hundreds of people in one of the poorest countries in the world, not only for today, but for years to come as they maintain their well. Become a sponsor and literally save lives with clean water and sanitation education.

For more news and information about Haiti Outreach click on this link.  For a video telling this story click on this link.

NGO'S AND HAITI'S GOVERNMENT: WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO HELP HAITI'S PEOPLE?

Since the Haiti earthquake of 2010, attention has been focused on the miserable records of both the international community of NGOs and the government of Haiti to effectively deliver relief and reconstruction to the people directly and indirectly hurt by catastrophes.  Actually, that problem preceded the earthquake and has dogged Haiti for most of its history as a nation.

Now comes an article in Foreign Policy by Clare Lockhart and Johanna Mendelson Foreman suggesting an approach to better cooperation between NGOs and the Haitian government.  They prescribe dialogue.  Rick Cohen, an editor for the Nonprofit Quarterly responds with doubt about the possibility of successful dialogue.  Both of these articles are linked here below.

I urge my friends reading this blog to take a look at these two articles.  I have attempted in my blogging to distinguish between help and development that is toxic and hurtful, on the one hand, and the work of building community-based capacity in Haiti that can receive and sustain our well-intended aid to the Haitian people on the other hand.  In doing so, I have observed and pointed to the mission and methods of Haiti Outreach as an example of how to do things better.  

The Haiti Outreach difference is that it finds ways to work with local communities to develop the capacity of the intended beneficiaries of capital resources to maintain clean and life-giving water systems. They partner with local and national officials to establish community-based authority.  They make sure all who have responsibilities carry out those responsibilities with integrity and transparency.  That includes Haiti Outreach, whose financial records, for instance, are published right on their website.  Their program staff is virtually all Haitian.

So with those kinds of principles in mind, take a look at these two articles below.  They aren't that long or difficult.  See what you think about how we in the NGO world might act to be more effective in Haiti.

"Four years after a devastating earthquake, Haiti remains a mess. It's time to bring Haitians from all walks of life into a national conversation about the country's future." 

Why Haiti Needs a National Dialogue

"Given the challenges that Lockhart and Forman detail in the article, a Haitian national discussion seems well intentioned but difficult to imagine getting very far." 

  A Prescription for Haiti’s NGO-Related Problems: Heal Thyself

KREYOL: SPREADING THE WORD

The Forest Hill Church mission team attended a very special church service at the Episcopal Cathedral on our visit in the fall of 2013.  It was the first service in which Kreyol was used as the primary language for the entire service.  Until that Sunday services were in French even though the vast majority of Haitians speak only Kreyol.  French is regarded as a "foreign" language, the language of imperialism and the very elite in Haitian society.

Now the Haitian government is pushing harder to make Kreyol the nations dominant language.  By teaching in the Kreyol language, learning is accessible to more children and underscores the reality that their lives and future in the own country do not depend on learning a foreign language.

For recent news about this issue look at these articles:

Help for Haiti must include embracing Creole

By Jacques Pierre

February 20, 2014 

A Creole Solution for Haiti’s Woes

By MICHEL DeGRAFF and MOLLY RUGGLES

AUG. 1, 2014

--kjl

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/02/20/3640172/help-for-haiti-must-include-embracing.html#storylink=cpy

FUNDRAISING EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT

Here is the announcement and invitation you have been waiting for!!  Make your reservation now!

The sponsors know that everyone who would like to come to this event will not be able to fit it into their social calendar or travel the distance to get here.  If you want to participate in this project and cannot attend on September 14, your donation will be most welcome.  Thank you.

IT'S ABOUT LATRINES

Haiti Outreach published a report this week on a community development project for better health. The report is not about clean, community managed wells this time.  It's about latrines.  It is also about the process of changing personal habits for better health and life in rural Haiti.   Read the article here.

Postscript:   I am tempted to draw comparisons between the latrine development project of Haiti Outreach to transform unhealthy waste management in poor villages with our struggle to get global financial corporations and their various servicers to adopt good habits about handling the solid waste they excrete and abandon in Cleveland's residential neighborhoods hardest hit by the mortgage crisis. I won't.  I've already tried to make that point elsewhere.

--kjl

BREAKING NEWS FROM HAITI OUTREACH

Haiti Outreach just posted big news on its website. It announces that "... the division of the national government of Haiti responsible for potable water and sanitation throughout the country, DINEPA, agreed to join Haiti Outreach in a breakthrough 100 Community Well Project in the Northeast Department. This is a $2.3 million project that will take 2 – 3 years to accomplish. It is the first time that the government has agreed to have Haiti Outreach train their staff in how we do our community development work."

Here is a statement from Dale Snyder, Executive Director of Haiti Outreach

I have two comments:

1.  This is an example of how effective collaboration between the government of Haiti and NGOs  should work as partners to develop lasting improvement for community health, safety and welfare.

2.  The most important investment being made is in the development of capacity by people to plan and manage a vital resource independent of long-term financial aid from outside.  It is community development as liberation, not domination.

What do you think about this development?

--kjl

LIFE SPRING CLINIC IS BORN

Life Spring, Inc.        

Ten months ago I met Dr. Roberta S. Van Dine when she and her husband, Neil, passed through Cleveland on their way back home to Haiti.  Roberta's husband is Founder and Director of Haiti Outreach, a construction and community development organization in Pignon, Haiti, a city in the Central Plateau on the road between Hinche and San Raphael.  I visited the Van Dines last fall in Pignon.  

In our initial conversation, Roberta outlined a vision she had for a medical practice that would treat people with respect, that would be sustained primarily by patients' fees, and that would be accessible to people in rural villages needing both preventive care and medical treatment.  Now, ten months later, a nonprofit corporation named Life Spring is in formation.  It has a website to show and tell the progress being made to realize Dr. Roberta's vision for how health and medical services should be provided by Haitian medical practitioners in response to the health needs in rural communities. 

Here is a link to Life Spring's new website.  Check it out.

The Challenge          

In a conference call conversation just a few days ago, Dr. Roberta repeated something she said nearly a year ago that challenges me.  Here it is:  There are trained doctors in Haiti just like her who want to practice medicine but whose efforts to set up a practice and make a living at it are undermined by the competition from providers of free medical services who drop in for short visits. Haitian doctors cannot compete with free services, so stabile clinics operated by Haitians to provide continuous, community-based, preventive care and basic medical treatment cannot grow and survive.   We heard another version of this about mid-wives when we were in Hinche in 2013.  Desperately needed midwife nurses were unemployed because local clinics could not afford to give them jobs.

Described this way, the development of health care in Haiti suffers from the same problem as food development.  Large donations of free and government subsidized rice from the US puts Haitian rice farmers and marketing systems at a great disadvantage.   When Haitian farmers, wholesalers and retailers have to compete on unfair terms, they can't develop their own country.  In colonial times, European slave-masters in Haiti produced and exported to Europe and the US huge quantities of coffee, sugar, fruit and other products that resulted in very little benefit to Haitian people.  Now that Haiti is an independent nation, Europeans and the US are "helping" Haiti meet urgent needs but doing so in a way that frequently leaves Haitians out of the process and subservient to the vision and will of those with resources to give.

In a blog posting last year I mentioned two challenging books -- When Helping Hurts by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert, and Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (And How to Reverse It) by Robert Lupton.  These books echoed the criticism of  my dear friend, Ralph Jean-mary, who lamented how often relief and development aid to Haiti ignored the Haitians who were supposed to benefit from it and its harmful impact on others.  

But this challenge is not easy to resolve.  When confronted by desperate poverty and curable disease, how can one say "No, first we must develop a Haitian means of relieving poverty and preventing disease."  Aren't we supposed to help the poor and heal the sick?  How can one justify charging poor people for food, clean water and health care needed so desperately by persons right in front of us?  

I would suggest, as we proceed in building relationships in Haiti, that we keep the discussion of this question open along with our eyes and our minds.  We would do well, I think, to make sure our discussion includes those in Haiti permanently engaged in the liberation of people there from the confinement of poverty and disease.  We need the guidance and awareness of Haitians who are helping other Haitians to build community infrastructures locally in Haiti.  We need to consider ourselves as their partners first and providers only as necessary.

What do you think?