return to Haiti and the DR

Hi Friends,

We just returned from a whirlwind tour of current and prospective Seeds of Self Reliance projects in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. This was supposed to be a longer trip but was cut short by Tropical Storm/Hurricane Tomas, hence the whirlwind. Accompanying us was our friend and colleague, the SoSR director, John Hayden.

We arrived in Santiago, D.R. last Thursday afternoon and spent the night at our usual, el Hotel Colonial. Friday morning we were off to Batay Libertad, a mostly Haitian community in the agricultural Cibao Valley, where we spent two weeks last October. Batay Libertad was the original SoSR community garden in the D.R. It was great to see our friends and many more familiar faces, especially our young friend Cok, who during our stay in the Batay last year left to live with his Grandmother in Port au Prince, and we had heard no news of him since the earthquake. The garden here, which is 4 years old and made up of 14 family plots, looks more productive every time we visit it. The gardeners here grow staple crops: sweet potatoes, congo bean, corn, and cassava to supplement their families’ diets. Papito, a community leader, oversees an area of plantains which is irrigated from the creek which used to be choked with garbage but is now lush with rice almost ready to be harvested.

In the Batay we met up with two new friends who we would be traveling with for the next couple days ... Mercedes is a Dominican American from Mass. who runs the non-profit Emancipation Project in Santo Domingo, which works with poor schools to help lift Dominican children out of poverty, and Kenyatta is an entrepreneur from New York who has adapted a pre-colombian Dominican rum drink made with the bark and roots of native forest plants to make a vitality tea, “Palo Mama Juana”, which he is now selling in NY. Kenyatta is looking to collaborate with SoSR on a project to give back to the country where he developed the recipe and buys his ingredients, and our imported local guide Mercedes had an idea of a place to start. We headed north and up into the mountains above Joba Ariba, which overlook the Atlantic ocean, where Mercedes’ Tio (uncle) Antonio and countless cousins live. Tio Tony is an artist and restores art for a living, and so he is looking for something to do with two beautiful tracts of edible diverse forest, because he is not interested in farming it and his niece, Mercedes, has persuaded him not to cut it down to graze cattle. We met with a group of local campesinos who are interested in farming his land. We talked with them about forming a cooperative and farming the forest without cutting it down. We are now in the process of brainstorming markets for tropical fruits and vegetables, cacao, and coffee. In the mountains here we were really treated to true Dominican hospitality - our first real immersion in the culture of the Dominican countryside. We felt engulfed in this huge family as we went on caravan trips to the river, a pig roast, and late night dancing at the local pool hall.

We came down from the mountains on Sunday and said goodbye to our new friends as they dropped us off in Montellano. Here Dominicans and Haitians alike struggle in the shadow of a sugar cane factory which has been shut down for years. Much of the work here now is in the nearby tourist towns of Sosua and Cabarete: working in (or building) hotels, restaurants, and gated ex-pat communities, braiding hair and selling trinkets on the beaches, or at worse, prostitution. Saman is a Haitian neighborhood in Montellano of about 100 families. Peraulta is a middle aged Haitian Dominican man who learned community organizing working with Papito in Batay Libertad. He saw the community garden in Libertad a few years ago and approached John about starting a garden in Saman. This smaller seven family garden is really starting to produce now, and the harvest from the plantain trees is spread around to the whole community. We were also happy to meet Joe, a volunteer from Virginia who has been living in the Saman community center for the past 3 months. He has done some excellent work installing rainwater collection systems to provide a cleaner back-up to city water. Joe also built a small chicken coop and has been keeping chickens and ducks and selling the eggs locally to raise money for a fund to helping families with medical bills or other crisis. The birds have become the coolest thing around as Joe has a flock of children to help him collect eggs everyday. After spending a night in Saman we helped Joe with his English class, and met with Caitlin who is the director of Project Esperanza. Project Esperanza works with Haitian street kids in Puerta Plata by providing them housing, school, and other support such as a soccer team. We discussed helping the boys in their residential program with urban gardening.

Monday afternoon came the activity we’d all been secretly waiting for: jumping in the warm Atlantic surf of Cabarete to bodysurf and wash the travel grime off us. We used our little repose in this tourist town to replan our trip around Tropical Storm Tomas, which was strengthening and aimed to directly hit Port au Prince the day we were supposed to arrive there. We decided we would have to leave for Haiti the next day to have time to get back to the DR and fly out ahead of Tomas. The next morning we met with Tricia, the director of the Mariposa DR Foundation, who partners with public and private schools in Caberete to improve education for local kids, but mostly is focusing on supporting girls and young women to finish school and become strong community leaders, and maybe even professional kite borders. Tricia is a powerhouse of ideas and energy and since we first met last October has gone from compost ignorant to the compost queen of Cabarete. We are so excited to work with her schools and young women to help nurture a new generation of environmentally literate leaders. Squashed under our bags and wedged between fellow bus riders we slowly then made our way to Dajabon, the border town, where we would spend the night before crossing into Haiti the next morning.

The border of the DR and Haiti is the Massacre River which flows between the towns of Dajabon and Ouanaminthe. This border has been a place of conflict at least since 1937, when the Dominican dictator Trujillo ordered the killing of 20,000 - 30,000 Haitians and and Dominicans of Haitian descent. Recently their have been riots at the border because it has been closed to trade due to the recent cholera outbreak, causing prices of food such as eggs and meat to rise in Haiti. We crossed the border Wednesday morning and took a bus to Terrier Rouge, where we lived last year. We had a very warm welcome from all of our friends and co-workers there, even though they were shocked to hear we were there for only two days. We visited the clinic where Meredith worked last year and saw it was doing well with two new employees. We also visited Jaden Florence, the youth gardening program that SoSR helped to re-start this year after it lost funding. They had just had the garden plowed and were about to start the program with 15 teenagers who would be growing vegetables to sell to local schools and markets while learning about agriculture.

We were also very happy to see lots of progress at the IDDH experimental farm. IDDH is the group of local agronomists and agriculture technicians who volunteer to run a school garden program in 5 schools. The objective of the farm is to try out new techniques and crops and to raise money for the school garden program. Since we had been they had planted a reforestation demonstration and citrus orchard using the compost Peter had made. They also continued to make compost the same way, by paying local kids to collect cow manure. They also built a small house for a guardian and his family to live in so he could provide security and weed the trees. We next visited The Nativity Village where we started the Rabbit Project. We were really encourage to see the members (Andre, Willa, and Christian) were taking really good care of the rabbits and they had no food shortages during the dry seasons. They had had some trouble breeding the rabbits so far with only one successful litter of 3, but they did not seem discouraged. We had an idea to try to raise laying hens underneath the rabbits to get twice the use from our rabbit structure, we think we may be able to feed chickens from the Black Soldier Fly larvae which grow in the rabbit manure. Developing a low grain input layer system is something we want to focus on when we return in January.

After our whirlwind tour we are feeling more excited than ever to return to Haiti and the DR this winter. The focus will be on strengthening our existing rabbit and gardening programs as well as starting to add in the chicken project. There is also a group of midwives coming to TR in January that Meredith will collaborate and work with, the clinic is in the process of planning and developing a new prenatal initiative to get women to seek consistent care during their pregnancy and Meredith hopes to focus on this during her time. We also plan to get to Port Au Prince to meet up with the Vermont Haiti Project since that portion of this trip was cut short, and our goal is to get out to Douchity (in the mountains on the southern peninsula) where there is a plan to start a vocational training school and some agriculture collaboration opportunities.

We hope to arrive in the DR after the holidays and then on to Haiti after that. We want to thank everyone who has contributed to Seeds of Self Reliance, you all are making these projects possible, thank you!! Stay tuned!
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