Jatrofa Projenou

Things are at full throttle as Jatrofa Projenou helps rural communities meet the twin challenges of COVID-19 and a collapsing currency that is breeding hunger. To give you a sense of what we’re doing, here is a photo spread. All were taken in the past two weeks and sent to me in my weekly WhatsApp brief from the JP staff.

To remedy the lack of water to wash hands frequently at home, JP developed a hand-washing station to go along with its soap products. A trainer teaches a group of farmers about COVID19 and gives them masks, liquid soap, and handwashing stations for their households.

These Yellow Yam tubers are bound for planting. A true tropical yam (different from what we call a yam in the US), it produces harvests year after year without replanting. A harvested yam is nutritious, weighs 5-8 pounds, and can be stored for 3-4 months, making it an excellent and reliable food staple.

A single yam is planted in a deep pit, where it will develop into a large mass that can be harvested twice a year. It is back-breaking work, but farmers willingly do it to keep their families from hunger. It is also a good cash crop that grows family income.

A hillside is being planted with Yellow Yam where it will grow among trees, which are also being planted. Farmers use their own labor, but JP supplies the tubers, which are expensive (planting 1 hectare of tubers cost $750). Once established though, planting stock can be harvested for other farmers to plant.

(Right)A currency exchange graph shows a massive drop in the purchasing power of Haitian money against the US dollar since March. Inflation is increasing hunger, as the cost of imported rice outstrips what families can afford, underlining the importance of the effort to increase local food production.

(Left) New York Times, June 12, 2020

Taken together, all of these snapshots represent a work in progress that is improving the lives of people in need by helping them develop the resilience to withstand health and hunger challenges. The global pandemic is painfully teaching us an important lesson, that no matter where we live, we’re all in this together. Stay well.

Rob Fisher

Director, Partner for People and Place

God Is Good All The Time

Dear Friends,

A retired assistant bishop of my diocese always begins his sermons with the words, “God is good all the time” to which the congregation responds, “All the time God is good.”

Those are not just words for us here at Espérance et Vie in Terrier Rouge, but our creed, an experience that we live every single day of our life. The goodness of God is manifested by the fact that we can survive one crisis after another and can still be alive. God, in His goodness, uses the channels of faithful, dynamic, heartfelt men and women to reach out to us. We are blessed, chosen people called to be witnesses of God’s love.

As we were struggling to find food, gas, to educate our children, to take care of the sick, to alleviate the sufferings of our elderly and the poor, COVID-19 exploded to complicate our life more. But, sustained by the faith that God is good all the time, we are facing our new situation with hope and determination to resist and survive.

Following the Government’s prevention measures, St Barthélémy School closed on March 19th, as we were about to complete our second trimester and with exams starting the following week. After meetings with the staff and teachers and later with the parents of our seniors, we decided to utilize technology to work with our senior class, preparing them for their national exams. Since only a handful of our seniors have access to technology, we created study groups of 4-5 to meet with their teachers via Zoom. We encouraged all other parents to help their students remain focused on their studies at home. We have continued to pay the teachers, however. It is our hope that we will be able to finish the school year in late Summer and begin the 2020-21 school year in late Fall.

In the meantime, Clinique Espérance et Vie has stayed open, offering continued services to the community in general medicine, pediatrics, ophthalmology, and dentistry. Due to the pandemic, we have noted a small decrease in attendance as people stay away out of fear of exposure to COVID-19. Prescription drug prices have skyrocketed, but fortunately, we are not lacking supplies to respond to the needs of the community.

Currently, the main focus of the NGO, Espérance et Vie, is humanitarian aid and COVID-19 prevention. As soon as the Haitian government declared that COVID-19 had reached our soil, we began our prevention campaign by spreading the word, informing the community about the danger we were facing. Our next step was to make masks and buy soap. In a record period of time, we made the first 5,000 masks which were distributed to the population along with 5,000 bars of soap. As the needs were increasing, we made and distributed 2,000 more. But our task was not limited to just that. The NGO reached out to the most vulnerable people giving them kits of food. In the last three months, we reached out to more than 2,500 families in despair because of the confinement. As the toll of confirmed cases is growing, we are getting prepared for the worst.

We give thanks to the Lord for using us to serve His people. We are obliged to you, our faithful benefactors for providing the means for the work. Please receive our heartfelt thanks and be sure that we lift up our voices to Heaven for you.

In His Name,

JMB+

A Humble Servant

For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.

Ephesians 2:10

There once was a Haitian boy who began his life in the humblest of beginnings but led by the Lord would grow up to do great things and change many people’s lives. That boy was Jean Monique Bruno. Jean Monique was born in the small rural town of Croix-des-Bouquets, not far from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, in July 1945. The fourth of 7 children born to a shoemaker and a dressmaker, there wasn’t much fanfare to his arrival but God had a plan. Jean Monique was blessed to attend school in a country with a literacy rate hovering around 60%. Despite losing his father at the age of 9, he managed to stay in school. With hard work and good fortune, he graduated and continued on to seminary with a dream of becoming an Episcopal priest and educator.

By the 1980’s the young priest was in charge of the Church of the Holy Spirit in Cap-Haitien, Haiti’s second largest city. Led by his conviction that education is key to helping his country change its social and economic situation, he had by that time built a primary school, an elementary school, a vocational school for young men and women, and an agricultural school! Some people might have slowed down, resting on the laurels of all they had accomplished, but Father Bruno is cut from a different cloth. His lifelong dream was to return to his father’s beloved rural home of Terrier Rouge in northern Haiti and build an elementary and secondary school there. He held that prayer in his heart having faith that God would provide a way.

In 1985, a recent college graduate, Clai Rice, was introduced to Father Bruno through his local Episcopal church in Athens, Georgia. Feeling called to serve in some capacity, he asked Father Bruno if he could come to Haiti and teach in one of his schools there. Father Bruno was happy to accept. Once there, Clai realized he was serving not only God but a great servant of God and that Father Bruno’s mission to educate Haitians was in fact an answered calling. Clai encouraged his family to join him in Haiti to meet Father Bruno and hear of his mission to improve the lives of Haitians through education. This mission became the inspiration for Bethlehem Ministry, Inc., the U.S.-based nonprofit started by the Rice’s and created to support Bruno’s vision. The name Bethlehem Ministry was chosen by Father Bruno because, “Bethlehem means House of Bread and we are going to be about feeding the poor and hungry. We want to offer the Spiritual Bread to everyone who crosses our path.”

For over 30 years, Bethlehem Ministry has worked hard to do just that, raising funds to support Father Bruno’s mission of feeding, educating, and sharing the Gospel of Christ in service to the poor of northern Haiti. In 2002, Father Bruno’s prayer to build a school in Terrier Rouge

was answered. St. Barthélémy School

welcomed its first class of preschoolers that year and it grew alongside those children, expanding over the years, eventually reaching completion with the building of the high school in 2012. Today over 1,000 students are educated, fed, and nurtured at St. Bart’s each school year. The education they receive includes music, sports, language, philosophy, and regular church services led by Father Bruno. He is a beloved figure on campus and in the community.

Since the opening of St. Barthelemy’s in 2002, Bethlehem Ministry has expanded the scope of its fundraising support to include the broader vision of the Haitian NGO, Espérance et Vie (Hope and Life), overseen by Father Bruno. One such vision was a clinic built in 2009 to bring services such as eye and dental care, prenatal care, and emergency services to northeast Haiti. Today that clinic, Clinique Espérance et Vie, sees 12,000 patients a year. Babies have been born there, surgeries performed, cavities filled, vaccinations administered, and visiting U.S. doctors welcomed. It is truly a clinic of hope and life.

In addition to supporting education and health care initiatives, Bethlehem Ministry raises funds to support the efforts of Father Bruno and the NGO as they work tirelessly to provide food and humanitarian aid to the communities of northeast Haiti. Life in Haiti is challenging on a normal day, and unexpected crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, natural disasters, and civil unrest are devastating. To stem the spread of COVID-19, the NGO has organized efforts to bring soap, face masks, and food to families sheltering-in-place; when disasters such as floods and earthquakes occur, they provide shelter and food and help to rebuild the community; during times of civil unrest (not uncommon in Haiti), Espérance et Vie is there bringing food and supplies to people afraid to leave their homes. Bringing food to the poor is the common thread running through the work of Espérance et Vie. Even in the best of times in Haiti, there are people who are hungry, children who are malnourished. Father Bruno knows firsthand what it is like to be desperately hungry. He has said of his humble origins, “It is a blessing for me because it has helped me to understand the problem of hunger and poverty in general for I have lived them in my own body."

Over the years, many people have traveled to Terrier Rouge to visit Father Bruno and see for themselves the good works happening there. Some travelers are so inspired by Father Bruno and the Haitian people that they begin their own projects. One such traveler was Rob Fisher, an award-winning landscape architect from Athens, GA. He and his wife Barbara started Jatrofa Projenou in 2008. Jatrofa Projenou (JP) works to reduce rural poverty in Haiti through sustainable economic development, forestry, and farming. Bethlehem Ministry supports the work of Jatrofa Projenou because it is in keeping with their mission that the empowerment of the Haitian people is the key to Haitian sustainability. As good stewards of God’s creation, JP’s work is healing Haiti’s fragile environment.

Father Bruno will turn 75 this year. He retired from active Parish work in 2010 after a career that blessed him with serving in Haiti as well as the Episcopal Diocese of the Dominican Republic (yes, Father Bruno is trilingual!). Today, he continues to serve, educate, feed, and care for communities in northern Haiti, as he has done for over 50 years. He is still a humble servant of God answering the call every single day. Bethlehem Ministry is blessed to support him in these good works.

To learn more about the work of Father Bruno, Espérance et Vie, and Bethlehem Ministry, please visit www.BethlehemMinistry.org.