At the end of the day, the work we do doesn’t mean much if our Haitian friends don’t participate with us. We really don’t DO all that much when we go to Haiti. This is because we go to Haiti to BE with people, and attempt to help them help themselves. These are some pictures of the kids at the Cascade Pichon Community School painting their own kindergarten. Because who better to paint these walls than the kids who are going to walk by them every day, right?
Helping Principal Chango Buy A Motorcycle
Poverty is about much more than a lack of material things. Poverty has deep roots within broken economic systems and broken relationships. Thus, providing material things to our friends and partners is not always the best solution for lasting community development.
That being said, in specific contexts providing support directly through an item can be helpful and support ongoing development. For example, last summer, Principal Chango was having difficulty making his commute to the Cascade Pichon Community School. We talked with some of our supporters about Chango's dilemma, and we were able to help Chango purchase a motorcycle suited for the bumpy roads of Southeast Haiti.
Helping Chango purchase a motorcycle doesn't immediately change poverty in Cascade Pichon. But with the help of this motorcycle, he can continue to educate students in Cascade Pichon so that they are better equipped for their future. It's a process, not a product!
Happy National Volunteer Week!
In honor of National Volunteer Week, we wanted to give a huge shoutout to all of the volunteers that have been partnering with us over the years. In the last 6 years, we have taken over 10 volunteer trips to Haiti with more than 80 different volunteers! We simply wouldn’t be LQVE without all of the volunteers who have made our work possible.
We are so lucky to have the Haitian friendships we have. We're also so blessed to have had all the teachers, nurses, coaches, pastors, and students that have volunteered in helping us make those very same friendships. To all of those who have volunteered with us, we want to give you a HUGE thank you!
Mesi anpil!
Thoughts on the Ongoing Unrest in Haiti
We don't spend a lot of time updating you on current Haitian events outside of our communities in the southeast, especially when those events are not particularly positive. First, the political unrest doesn't always affect our friends in the rural southeast. Second, we're committed to telling and sharing the good stories about Haiti that don't typically wind up in Western media. However, as we're committed to transparency with our supporters and solidarity with our Haitian friends, we wanted to offer a quick update.
Haiti has been struggling in recent months with increased violence and kidnappings. The fear stirred up by gang activity in urban areas has disrupted daily (and nightly) routines in Port-au-Prince and other urban areas.
Because of the lack of political action in the face of this violence, there's been an overwhelming demand for the current president to step down. While we hesitate to comment on Haitian politics, we simply can't ignore the cry of the Haitian people. At a certain point, the more unstable life becomes in the city, the more unstable life will become for our friends in rural Haiti.
We ask that you continue to think about and pray for our friends in Haiti during this pivotal time. We won't stop the work we're doing, but these last few months have made everything more complicated than usual. For example, we currently have a new water project ready to start in the southeast, but we are waiting for roads to become safe again to transport materials to the worksite. The roads' lack of safety also affects Nurse Maryse and Principal Chango's commute to the southeast.
Unrest isn't always negative. We realize that there's potential for both good and bad transformation in the middle of all the uneasiness. So, we're praying for the good. Perhaps we are coming to a turning point in Haitian politics that will lead Haiti to a bright future!
Cascade Pichon Community School holding a mini tournament this week on the Quincy Foster soccer field!
Catching up with our Micro-Finance Teams!
This week we are facilitating training sessions with our MUSO micro-finance groups in Pichon! MUSO stands for “Mutual Solidarity” and is a micro-finance initiative that operates in several communities across Haiti. MUSO brings together members of a community and helps them establish a system where they can pool local money to provide small loans to locals, loans that would typically be too small and insignificant to obtain through a bank or lender.
These groups have pooled and loaned out tens of thousands of dollars in their OWN money over the last 5 years; we simply pay for the training sessions! This system works so well because it truly ends up being a community providing for itself and gives more autonomy to the community in the process. Our MUSO groups have given loans to families to help build roofs, pay for kids’ school fees, and even act as a financial safety net during droughts when income is lower than usual.
The groups are always excited to participate in more training sessions to help them run their MUSO more efficiently, so we hired the MUSO training team this week to do just that! The training this week is focused on accountability principles and conflict resolution.
Pictured here is the MUSO training team meeting with MUSO Group Chanje Lavi (Life Changers) in Pichon
How We Take Pictures Matter
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again - How we take pictures matter! We always strive to be conscientious of the way we take photos when we’re in Haiti. One great way we encourage our team members to do this is by using Polaroid cameras. These are some pictures of some friends with their photos taken from Annie’s camera on our trip to Haiti in December. By taking a photo and then giving it to the subject in the photo, we accomplish 2 things:
- we allow the subject of the photo to do as they please with the picture of themselves, because it’s THEIR picture!
- we humble ourselves through giving the photo away, because now it’s not ours to control.
We’re not perfect. But at LQVE we always strive to show dignity, agency, and respect through the way that we take photos. Thanks for coming to our TED talk!
Making Headway on the Water Project in Cascade Pichon
We’ve already made some headway on the water project for CPCS! Our Logistics guy Frantz is no joke people. Here are some photos from today and yesterday of some workers in Cascade Pichon installing some piping to the sink attached to the kindergarten where the water will come out from.
You know what’s cool about this kind of work? We (Americans) don’t HAVE to be there physically for this to be done. We’ve helped the community with some of the financing piece, and THEY are able to build it themselves because of the Haitian leadership around them. Check out the school kids pitching in too! Frantz told us the kids wanted to do the whole thing themselves.
Nou te komanse pwojè pou lekol Kaskad deja! Zanmi nou Frantz travay di anpil. Gen foto yo travayè yap enstale evye la. Nou panse se yon bon bagay Ayisyen moun ka fè travay sa san moun Amerikan. Nou te ede yon ti kras avek kòb la, men yo konstwi sistèm dlo pou yo mem paske yo lidè Ayisyen. Gade elèv yo ede tou, Frantz di nou elèv yo tap vle konstwi tout bagay yo mem.
Not Commodifying the Poor
This Black Friday, a couple of days before Giving Tuesday, we wanted to mention something.
While Giving Tuesday is a great part of our culture and shows that we as a country care about helping others, we also want to be mindful that we don’t end up commodifying the poor that we are trying to help in the process. We encourage you to be a part of Giving Tuesday this year, not out of guilt for justifying Holiday purchases and not with a mindset that we are “saving” anyone with our donations. Instead, we think Giving Tuesday is a great opportunity to connect on a deeper level with the ethos and story of non-profit organizations and the relationships they’re a part of. Absolutely, we’d love for you to financially support us and our goal of raising $2,500 this Tuesday, but we dare you not to let that be the end of it! Check out our website, watch some of our videos, scroll through our social media, look up some pictures of Cascade Pichon on google. Anything we can do to remind ourselves that the people on the other end of our work are people and not merely objects for receiving our humanitarian aid is good community development practice, in our opinion.
Pictures from the Kindergarten!
In 2017, MidAmerica Nazarene University helped us raise money to help the community of Cascade Pichon build a kindergarten-wing onto their community school.
Principal Chango sent us some pictures today of the kindergarten class this last week, we think they’re pretty cool.
The Haitian Revolution
Did you know that Haiti is the first (and only) country in the world to be founded by a successful slave revolt? On January 1st, 1804, Commander Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared victory over the French, renaming the colony of Saint-Domingue to "Haiti" in honor of the land's original Taino name. Haiti thus became the first country in modern history to abolish slavery.
In a sense, the rest of the world has never forgiven Haiti for winning her independence. Whether it was the forced $20 billion "freedom debt" paid over the course of 100 years to France, or the US occupation of Haiti in the early 20th century where the Marines seized 40% of Haiti's wealth, the outside world has rarely been helpful to Haiti. We choose to remember the great origin story of this country, as it shapes and inspires much of Haitian culture to this day. We seriously think this country is so cool.
The Cascade Pichon Community School Water Project
The Cascade Pichon Community School is something that is very close to our hearts at LQVE. When we were in Haiti in August, Principal Chango and our Logistics coordinator Frantz brought up the great idea of trying to get water from the cascades over to the school for the students and teachers to use. We of course loved the idea, which is why we’ve decided our next project is going to be financing the construction of a simple clean water system for the school in Cascade Pichon to have running water. We will be raising money to help us finance this project on Giving Tuesday - with the goal of raising $2,500!
Water is such an important life-giving component of our day to day lives, but we often don’t give a second thought as to where it comes it from. This is a great opportunity for LQVE to help Cascade Pichon provide themselves with an internationally recognized human right - the right to clean water. We invite you to join us this Giving Tuesday as we try and raise $2,500 for this project!
The Way We Take Pictures Matter
We take a lot of pictures when we go to Haiti. We do this to remember this place that we love, and to show all of our friends what it's like in this beautiful country. However, there's much more intentionality and thought that goes into the pictures we show you than what meets the eye.
Too often, foreigners come into Haiti and snap pictures of whatever they like and then parade their photos all over social media without thinking about the implications of doing so. Implicitly, how one takes and uses a photo of someone can identify a superiority complex. We want our friends in Haiti to feel agency and pride when we interact with them, so we try to be very cautious with how we take pictures and how we use them. It can be difficult to be conscientious of this all the time, which is why we try to follow these rules:
1. We always do our best to directly ask for the consent of the individuals we are photographing. This could be as simple as asking, "eske w vle fè yon fotò?" (do you want to take a picture?) If the Haitians are not involved with the picture taking process, we shouldn't be doing it at all. A great way of ensuring of Haitian friends have a voice in this process is by showing them each picture that we take of them.
2. We don't ever take a picture of someone else that we would not want to be taken of ourselves.
3. We never take photos that implicitly objectify our friends. For example, we don't allow our teams to stick their cameras out of a moving car and document nameless faces that we pass by.
4. We always critique our motivations behind why we post what we post. Does this picture convey a sense of dignity to this person and this place? Why am I actually posting this - is there a personal-image motivation behind it? What kind of story am I telling in this picture? Am I the subject, or is someone else the subject?
5. We always try to tell a "good" story of hope with pictures, not a reiteration of hopelessness that the world already sees too often.
No doubt, we will never be perfect. Photography is tricky, especially in cross-cultural situations. We want to connect you to our Haitian family in one of the only ways we know how - sharing photos! But we also do our best to be very mindful of doing so in a way that dignifies our friends.
COVID-19 Cases Reported in Haiti
Last week, Haitian President Jovenel Moïse announced that there had been two reported cases of COVID-19 in Haiti. One of the individuals is an ex-pat, and the other is a Haitian citizen. However, early this morning, we also received word from our friends at Heart to Heart International - Haiti that there have now been two more cases of COVID-19 reported in southeast Haiti alone, where our communities are located.
These are very interesting and unprecedented times. While the developed world stocks up on toilet paper, frozen foods, and hand sanitizer, we cannot forget that this novel virus will have the most significant impact in countries that are the least prepared to handle it. In a country of 11 million people, it is estimated that Haiti has just under 200 total hospital beds to receive patients who fall ill to COVID-19. We are talking with Nurse Maryse and our other healthcare professionals about what the best course of action is to help our vulnerable friends in the southeast.
In this time of insecurity and fear, we cannot forget about those who are most vulnerable in our world, a world that we are all proportionately responsible for creating.
Mountainous Land
The Taíno people, the group of people indigenous to what is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic, came up with the name “Haití” back in the pre-colonial period. The name is translated from their language as “mountainous land.” Haiti is full of beautiful mountaintops - we even drive through the highest elevated peak in Haiti, Pic la Selle, when we visit Cascade Pichon! We can see why the native Haitians gave this name to their homeland.
Big News to Start 2020 for LQVE!
As you may already know, LQVE invests tens of thousands of dollars every year to support nurses, teachers, soccer tournaments, and wealth growing initiatives in the southeast part of Haiti. It's amazing what all of us have been able to pull together and accomplish since 2015, but to continue these projects and to put in the hours it takes to maintain relationships with our Haitian friends, we're excited to announce that we decided to bring Shay Foster on as an official part-time employee!
We've been supporting Haitians for years, but Shay will be the first person on our payroll stateside facilitating everything from finances to social media to leading our trips on the ground in Haiti. LQVE has come to the point where we need someone like Shay to devote more of his time to our Haitian relationships and projects in order for them to continue thriving, volunteering a couple hours a week isn't enough anymore! We're happy to say that due to Shay's own personal fundraising campaign for this job, his salary is already taken care of and won't come out of any of LQVE's existing donations. This way 100% of what everyone gives to LQVE still goes towards our relationships and projects in Haiti!
Shay loves this work and has gained a wealth of experience in facilitating trips, managing donations, editing media content, and interacting with our Haitian friends for the last three years. He's also pursuing a Master's degree in International Community Development from Northwest University. With his education, experience, and personal connection, we feel Shay is the perfect person to help LQVE!
Last week of School before Break!
We got to see some kids during final exams week. See videos at https://www.facebook.com/LQVEhaiti/.
Giving Tuesday 2019
Thanks everyone for helping us surpass our Giving Tuesday, 2019 goal! https://facebook.com/LQVEhaiti/
Classes Continue in Cascade Pichon amidst turmoil in Port-au-Prince
Despite the social unrest that has been happening in the capital of Port au Prince, our friends in Cascade Pichon have continued to go to school this last week while many schools closer to the capital have had to postpone classes. Cascade Pichon is rural enough that the protests have not yet affected them heavily. Nurse Maryse is also still going through her medical rotation in the southeast, however it is becoming increasingly difficult for her to travel and do her work because of fuel shortages throughout the country.
In many ways, being a rural and mountainous village has made life more difficult for those in Cascade Pichon. But we are thankful in this moment for the safety that the distance from Port-au-Prince gives our friends. We pray that our friends remain safe, and that peace would be ushered in by the Haitian protestors and the Haitian government.
Haiti is struggling right now. We're asking for prayer.
A precursor: I hesitate to write this, because I view part of my role as breaking down stereotypes that Westerners have of Haitians. In the wrong light, information like this can perpetuate stereotypes that do more harm to Haitian's pride and independence than any social turmoil or poverty can. But I feel out of transparaceny and care, it is also my job to inform you of recent events in Haiti. I pray that we can all look upon these events as manifestations of broken relationships and evil in our world, and not as the justification some of us want to convince ourselves that "people get what they deserve." There's a word in Haitian Creole called degaje. Degaje means to "make do with what you have." In many ways, this has been the motto of Haitian life since the beginning of their independence. But I've been asking myself recently, how do you make do with what you have, if what you have is practically nothing?
Since this last March, Haiti has been thrust into their newest chapter of political turmoil. And in the last two weeks, the palpable tension has been rising in the capitol of Port au Prince. The country is experiencing a major fuel shortage because the government is behind on paying oil companies back for previously used gasoline. This, along with a 19% inflation rate in the national currency, and in-fighting in the Haitian senate, has sparked widespread protests. Principal Chango told me today that school in Cascade Pichon has not been affected by the protests yet, and we hope that it stays that way. And as far as we know, Nurse Maryse is still doing her medical rotation throughout the southeast, though we are trying to contact her right now.
If the Haitian government can ratify a new prime minister and national budget soon, they will be able to access loans from the International Monetary Fund that they desperately need to resume social normalcy. We pray that Haitian leaders are able to step up and help their citizens. A Haitian friend of mine (one of the best people I know) told me yesterday that he feels "useless," and that he is ashamed of his country right now. One must know the past 200 years of exploitation the world has thrust upon Haiti before they can adequately judge what is happening there now, but we also recognize that sometimes we wish our politicians would be better leaders than they are. If I was Haitian, I would probably be protesting too.
I'm asking you all to pray for Haiti if you can. I'm not sure what else we can do right now, I am just praying that our friends can find a way to degaje in the midst of all of this hurt. Even though they don't have much.
- Shay Foster