- courtney3769
- Jul 26
A few weeks ago, we were using a drone to measure our success rescuing Haiti’s mountainside farms. It lets us see what we can’t see on foot, but this time it showed us something more.
As it took off, we looked down on a family working their land, and I caught myself about to shout to Madame Toussaint, who was cooking dinner in the shade of a tree. As it went higher, we saw newly made terraces to control erosion and hundreds of green dots that were trees we recently planted. “That’s Emilien’s farm,” our first-time drone pilot pointed out, and I smiled, thinking how cool it is that we know this land by the people who live on it.
The drone flew higher, now a speck in the sky, and we could see the whole mountain like a sleeping giant garbed in clothes covered with patches - brown patches of fresh-tilled earth, bright green fields of peanuts, random squares of field peas. And down there, too small to see were families working the land, talking, singing, telling stories… unaware their land is hemorrhaging its lifeblood, the soil.
Then… the drone went out of sight.
“It’s gone! I can’t see it,” the pilot yelled in a panic.
“If it’s down, we’ll never find it!” someone else cried.
“Is there anything on the screen?” I asked.
“Yes,” came the reply… “a mountainside but not the one we’re working on.”
We crowded in to look. There were no green fields, no patches of fresh-tilled earth, no farmers, no sign of life, just rock. This sleeping giant was dead, and the families who lived here were gone. Our drone had shown us the future. Rescuing Haiti’s farms is a race against time, and for this place and its people, we were too late.
Haiti’s hillside farms are losing 40 to 60 tons of soil per acre per year. Once gone, it takes 500-1000 years to make 1 inch.
Take care, and thank you for your concern for Haiti.
