Another Anniversary

January 12th is a date which will forever stick in my mind, much like 9/11, December 7th or January 6th.  

On January 12th, I celebrated my 32nd anniversary working for Plant With Purpose. Coincidentally, it is also the anniversary of the day we officially changed our name from Floresta to Plant WIth Purpose. 

However, there is another anniversary which looms much larger and is far more significant for many of our colleagues and friends. Fifteen years ago, on January 12th, a 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti, causing unimaginable chaos and destruction. 

I don’t really think it is possible for us to get a clear picture of the magnitude of what happened. The official death toll has never been established, and ranges from 200,000 to 300,000 people. Proportionally, that would be the equivalent of a disaster that killed 9 million Americans. We can’t even begin to wrap our heads around that.  

It rendered 1.6 million people homeless - almost 15% of the population. Again, to put that in perspective, it would be proportionally equivalent to the US having to deal with nearly 50 million people without shelter. 

At the same time, it destroyed almost the entire government infrastructure, which was weak to begin with. Finally, the capital, which would usually be the source of most services, was literally buried in its own rubble. Just figuring out where and how to move the debris was a monumental task. 

National Palace in ruins. It has still not been rebuilt.

What happened over the weeks and months that followed has received a lot of criticism and second guessing. For some reason, people love to find blame. Some may be deserved, but I don’t think many people grasp the sheer scope of the disaster. Although the amount of money donated to earthquake relief was huge - lots of big numbers were flashed around - there was still a fundamental mismatch between the resources available and the problem itself. Furthermore, a large part of that money went to simply keeping people alive, as opposed to “building back better.”

When we got the news at Plant With Purpose on that Tuesday afternoon, we had no idea how much it would change the rest of the year. As an organization that focuses on long-term development, and works far from Port au Prince, I initially thought there wouldn’t be much for Plant With Purpose to do. To the chagrin of our fundraising team, I publicly suggested that our donors support organizations that were experienced in disaster relief, such as World Vision and World Relief.

Three things changed that. 

First, the region where most of our work was located, south of Leogane, was not spared. Many people lost homes and businesses. 

Homes in the mountains were not spared.

Second, hundreds of thousands of people, who were suddenly without shelter, began the long walk back to their families’ homes in the countryside. Nearly 600,000 people flooded into the rural towns and villages. The farmers we served suddenly had two to three times as many people living under their roofs, all of them hungry, all of them putting more stress on fragile household economies. (“Under their roofs” might be a bit of a misnomer. Too many roofs were made of concrete, and the combination of cracks and frequent aftershocks had most people living outside for months.)

The third surprise for me was how important our local relationships and connections were to any ongoing relief and recovery effort. Everything from orderly food and seed distribution, to Cash for Work programs, where we ultimately spent most of our energy, required collaboration and participation from local authorities and leaders. Thankfully, we had a strong network, built over many years. Our relationships were indispensable and made us a valuable partner. 

As a result, we quickly found ourselves involved in relief and recovery efforts. Within a day, our staff and participants were heading up an effort to clear the road into Leogane, which had been blocked by a landslide. 

In subsequent days, we assisted in food distribution, then seed distribution, before settling on a Cash for Work program, which paid the thousands of internally displaced people to plant trees and implement soil conservation techniques. 

Guy, our local director, and his team ran a million dollar program, funded partly by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) with additional funding from our friends at World Relief. In the scope of the overall effort, it was a tiny program, but was nearly 50% of our global budget at the time. Furthermore, one of the criticisms of the relief effort was that very few Haitian organizations were funded or even involved. For that reason, I have always been proud of the role played by Floresta Haiti. 

As in many disasters, one of the barriers to an effective response was the over abundance of gawkers, disaster tourists, VIP delegations and well-meaning but unskilled volunteers, clogging up access and interfering with local planning. As a result, I held off on a visit until March. Milmer and Bob, who worked more directly with our programming, had already spent quite a bit of time there by the time I arrived. 

We camped out in tents in the front of Guy’s driveway and did our best to attend the UN Cluster meetings so that our efforts would be collaborative. We bought and distributed bean seed, so that farmers that were otherwise using their planting stock to feed their extended families could plant on schedule. And we traveled to Grand Coline and Fonds Verrettes to talk to some of the thousands of participants in the Cash for Work program. 

There is so much I could write about, but a couple of scenes stick in with me:

• A conversation I had with a young woman one foggy afternoon in Fonds Verrettes, as she was working with a team to build soil erosion barriers on a steep hillside. She turned out to be a nurse from Port au Prince. A city girl, she had never lived in the countryside or spent time on a farm, but when everything she knew was destroyed, she was taken in by the family of one of her friends from nursing school. 

• Pitching my tent alongside those of our Haitian staff, in the front yard of the office. They connected their tents together, draping a donated tarp over them, which made ordinary REI tents into sort of a communal shelter. This somehow seemed representative of the way they supported each other through the disorientation and uncertainty of those days. (Some of the women joked that my smaller tent looked far too much like a coffin for their taste.)

Tents at the Floresta office.

• The utter devastation of seeing Cherident’s beloved white stone church reduced to a pile of rocks. In my mind, the church, presided over by Pere Wilfrid Albert for many years, had been the center of so much hope in the community and the site of some profound spiritual encounters of my own. Later we sat with the church choir as they rehearsed for the upcoming Easter service, and their ethereal voices rising above the devastation that surrounded them, reminded me that God was not done and hope was not dead. 

Obviously today, fifteen years later, Haiti remains in a difficult place, but that is such a small part of the story. God is not done and hope is not dead. Gangs control large parts of Port au Prince. If we know anything about Haiti, that tends to be the story we know. But there are so many better stories to tell.

I hope to share more of the ones I know.