2019 Year in Review

There have been extraordinary challenges in Haiti in 2019, but together with our partner NGO, Espérance et Vie, and YOU we’ve faced those challenges head on with some beautiful results:

· A maternity wing was developed at the Clinic with the first baby born there in March.

· Over 700 patients seen each month at the Clinic. That’s 8,500 people a year with access

to medical care in northeast Haiti!

· 28 students graduated from Ecole St. Barthélémy in May, 10 boys and 18 girls! This is an incredible accomplishment in Haiti where the average Haitian has an 8th grade education and for women it can be as low as 4th grade.

· The award-winning marching band at St. Barthelemy’s was invited to compete in a competition in Cap Haitien in May and they won 2nd place!

· Over 1,000 children are being educated at St. Bart’s. The school has remained open despite civil unrest and national school closings throughout Haiti.

· Hundreds of people – farmers and families – are breaking out of the cycle of poverty and environmental collapse through the sustainable methods of farming taught by the staff at Jatrofa Projenou.

· Students from St. Bart’s have distributed thousands of pounds of food to people in Terrier Rouge and the surrounding communities. Food was purchased by the NGO with your generous donations. We will continue to do all we can for those struggling to meet even

the most basic needs.

As always, we thank YOU for partnering with us and believing in our mission. Together we have made, and ARE MAKING, a difference in Haiti!

#makingadifferenceinhaiti

#Haiti

Let's Celebrate Life!

Clinique Espérance et Vie: Clinic of Hope and Life. Life is at the core of the Clinic’s mission, life from the womb to old age. From setting a broken arm to prescribing life-saving medicine to bringing new life into the world (and everything in between!), the Clinic is witness to all the joys and challenges of life in northeast Haiti.

Today, we are celebrating some pretty great numbers coming out of Haiti. Over 6,400 patients were cared for in just the first 9 months of this year. That’s over 700 Haitians a month with access to healthcare! We’ve broken down the numbers in the chart below to show you all the services provided by the Clinic, all the LIFE that’s impacted by your support.

Please help the Clinic continue to thrive by donating today to our Annual Campaign, Hope and Life.  We’re all in this life together. And together we’re making a difference.

Jatrofa Projenou Update

I’m writing this update to remind us all of what we do and why we do it. No better way to do that than share with you our current activity in one poor farm community.

It is a little village far off the paved road, landmarked by a bright blue, wood plank two-room schoolhouse, packed with children in plaid shirts. Little mud and block houses with tin and palm thatched roofs dot the roadside nearby. Behind them a steep, treeless hillside runs up to a knife-edged ridge 500 feet above. Spread across it are small fields like puzzle pieces - some green with a new crop, some brown with exposed dirt, some black with char. They are little farms and they are the economic basis of life here. They are also the center of community life. Every day, families hike up to them to plant, hoe, and harvest depending on the season. Here babies are nurtured, meals prepared and eaten together. Children who go to school come at noon to do their part to help.

There is much to be admired in the fabric of this scene - the hum of families working together, the satisfaction of farming, the sheer beauty of the vistas. But it is a thin fabric and it is easily torn. There is a constant worry of not having enough to eat and a fear of what happens when something goes wrong — a crop fails, a child gets sick, a parent dies. Everybody knows these things up close and too often. With incomes of about $150 every six months, when crops are harvested, families have little resiliency to adversity.

This kind of poverty does not exist because of governmental corruption or personal failure. It’s way more structural than that. It evolved over generations with family after family after family simply doing what is necessary to survive and inadvertently destroying the economic foundation of their survival, which is the land. It is a destructive cycle of cause and effect, where poverty leads to environmental collapse, which leads to greater poverty. It’s a disaster happening in the midst of everyday life. Desperate families farm desperately, which degrades the land, which diminishes crop yields, which reduces income, which increases hunger and fear, which leads to desperate farming.

There’s no shortage of intellect in this community and people can understand the ramifications of deforestation and soil loss, but they simply cannot risk failure in an effort to change. They have to stick with the devil they know. When I pointed out to a farmer that his peanut crop was causing massive soil loss on his steep land, he said he had no choice — growing peanuts was how he paid for his kids to go to school and he knows how to grow them. The suggestion of an alternative crop was met with a “yes but” — a good idea but he did not have the money to change and he could not afford the risk that there would be no crop to sell in six months. Bottomline, having no money to shift to a new crop and no time to transition keeps rational people from making the changes they agree would be in their long-term interest. This is where JP has stepped in. It is giving people in this community enough ‘slack in the rope’ for them to change how they farm to improve their income and conserve their land.

JP is currently working with ten farm families (125-150 men, women, children, seniors) planting trees and changing crops and cultivation practices. Our Haitian agronomists work with each family to make a plan specific to their land, needs and preferences. It then helps launch their plan by providing trees, seeds, supplies, and supervision.

Two families are currently planting yams, another two are planting pineapple. JP provides the tubers and the pineapple plugs, which cost more than these families make in a year. In return each family will pass on planting stock to their neighbors in growing seasons to come. Six families are planting woodlots on their land and establishing contour conservation belts to prevent erosion. Several families are hatching a plan to produce guava juice after talking to us about the economic benefit of adding value to their crop before it goes to market.

All together, these activities are helping this very poor community break out of the cycle of poverty and environmental collapse, which has dragged it down for generations. We are convinced of the soundness of this method and the sustainability of its results. While nobody will be getting rich from these little farms that are so ubiquitous in Haiti, they can enable families to step out of poverty to live simply but with health, dignity and a sense of possibility.

While macro-economic factors like governmental corruption and currency exchange rates are beyond JP, it is well within our power to tangibly reduce poverty and improve the lives of real people in the countryside, where more than half of Haiti lives. That is what we are doing.

Thanks for your interest and support.

-Rob Fisher