Big tree by the river
Driving out to IDDH Farm
IDDH natural farm-made insecticide experiment
Friday, February 25, 2011
Thursday, February 24, 2011
SoSR retreat in Terye Wouj
We have had another busy past few weeks. Our most exicting news is that we just had a great visit from John Hayden and an awesome group of Vermonters! Maggie Donin & John Smith came over from the DR with John Hayden as well as two teachers from Cambridge Elementary School Mary Fiedler and Michel Piché. We spent the past 4 days with them showing them the various agriculture projects here in Terrier Rouge. We spent two awesome days in the school doing some hands on science learning with the group of students who are also involved with the pen pal program that was set up last year. It was very cool to be apart of the kids getting their hands dirty with art projects and a plant experiment. These kids are used to sitting and repeating as a form of learning so the goal was to expose them to a more hands on and critical thinking approach. All parties seemed to enjoy the experience, espsicially Mary, it was her first time in Haiti and she is so exicted to bring back photos and stories to her students in Cambridge.
We also spent a couple afternoons working along side the kids at Jardin Florans- which is always a fun time. In Haiti there always seems to be some set backs, a few chickens died and some gas was stolen, but these kids and especially the director of the program, Onel, truly never get discouraged. We had a nice visit with the GAFAT group who makes the jams and jellies, everyone got to bring some home... hopefully they will remain intact for the plane ride. Having everyone here was a real boost for Pete and I, it was so nice getting to talk and reflect on our time here with our fellow Seeds of Self Reliance Volunteers across the border, we are missing them all already!
Other happy news- my friend here in Haiti (also named Maggie) who was on bed rest ( she was having some higg blood pressures with really bad swelling) delivered a healthy boy at home Sunday at 4am. I was so happy to hear that all went well and I got to check up on mom and baby at their home on Monday morning. It was such a relief that they all are well after having my friend Clesia loose her baby last year. Also on the health care front we have started to do pap smears at the clinic and launched the program last week, we are the only clinic other than in the city of Cap Haitian, in Northern Haiti that is doing this.
We leave for Port Au Prince on Friday- we are both looking forward to seeing our Vermont Haiti Project family and to have a little break from our routine here in TR and to see a different part of Haiti for a while. We will be spending a few nights up in Kazal with Fenel and Kimball and then Donna will be joining us in Port au Prince. Then we are off to the mountains of Douchity to work on collaborating with a VHP project and hopefully working on getting a garden going and composting toilet, Kathryn (Meredith’s) sister will be joining us for that adventure! We will write again when we are back home in Terrier Rouge.
Fun things to note we went to a Baptism last Saturday and Meredith had a spaghetti and carrot homemade popsicle at the clinic today, only in Haiti!
We also spent a couple afternoons working along side the kids at Jardin Florans- which is always a fun time. In Haiti there always seems to be some set backs, a few chickens died and some gas was stolen, but these kids and especially the director of the program, Onel, truly never get discouraged. We had a nice visit with the GAFAT group who makes the jams and jellies, everyone got to bring some home... hopefully they will remain intact for the plane ride. Having everyone here was a real boost for Pete and I, it was so nice getting to talk and reflect on our time here with our fellow Seeds of Self Reliance Volunteers across the border, we are missing them all already!
Other happy news- my friend here in Haiti (also named Maggie) who was on bed rest ( she was having some higg blood pressures with really bad swelling) delivered a healthy boy at home Sunday at 4am. I was so happy to hear that all went well and I got to check up on mom and baby at their home on Monday morning. It was such a relief that they all are well after having my friend Clesia loose her baby last year. Also on the health care front we have started to do pap smears at the clinic and launched the program last week, we are the only clinic other than in the city of Cap Haitian, in Northern Haiti that is doing this.
We leave for Port Au Prince on Friday- we are both looking forward to seeing our Vermont Haiti Project family and to have a little break from our routine here in TR and to see a different part of Haiti for a while. We will be spending a few nights up in Kazal with Fenel and Kimball and then Donna will be joining us in Port au Prince. Then we are off to the mountains of Douchity to work on collaborating with a VHP project and hopefully working on getting a garden going and composting toilet, Kathryn (Meredith’s) sister will be joining us for that adventure! We will write again when we are back home in Terrier Rouge.
Fun things to note we went to a Baptism last Saturday and Meredith had a spaghetti and carrot homemade popsicle at the clinic today, only in Haiti!
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Grapefruit jam, midwives & a funeral
It seems like the weeks have been flying by and it is difficult to get around to posting a blog, but here is my attempt to update you all with what we have been up to.
I (Meredith) recently had the opportunity to visit the organisation Midwives for Haiti in Hinche with a group of midwives that came to work in the clinic from Georgia. This was quite the trip because from TR to get to Hinche you have to fly to Port au Prince then take a 4 hour drive into the mountains arriving in the Central Plateau where Hinche is located. The locals will say Hinche is 2 hours form PAP, but not true at all. It was really interesting visiting this program and seeing the great work they are doing with educating women who are already birth attendants to become certified midwives. They go through a year long program and are then able to work in hospitals. Esperance et Vie is in the process of developing a women’s health center and I have been lucky to be apart of that planning process, visiting MFH gave us an opportunity to see what their program was like. There are two Haitian physicians who are the true motivators behind the development of the women’s health center, they already come out to TR once a week and volunteer their time seeing ob/gyn patients. They feel their is a real need in this area to develop a
“one of a kind” center that offers consistent quality care. They ultimately want to turn it into a birthing center but we are starting with pap smears and family planning. My plan for the next few weeks is to develop a survey with these physician to do in the community to help organize and focus the development of this project. Hopefully by next week I will start going door to door and begin this process!
I really enjoyed having the group of midwives here, it was great collaborating and learning from my future colleagues. We saw lots of ob/gyn issues as well as the regular skin, GI, fevers and all the tropical illness jazz. My favorite part of their trip was the midwifery seminar that we put together. We had a two day seminar with the home birth midwives from the community. Most of these men and women I knew from last year so it was a great way to give back to the community of midwives. These midwives do have some training but it was great to go over things like positioning during labor, shoulder dystocia, breech delivery and review the different reasons to transport to the hospital. They have a lot of experience and knowledge already but it was great to review and strengthen their existing skills.
Last week we had a small group here with a physical therapist and x-ray tech. We got an x-ray machine donated and the tech was so amazing she basically learned how to do the film processing and we went from having this machine in the closet to taking, processing and casting fractures in 2 days! We had an elbow fracture, wrist sprain and pelvic fracture all in 3 days. I worked along side the PT translating so I also got to see some interesting cases, we also had our first case of sickle cell anemia. The clinic seems to be getting busier and busier each day and I am leaning something new all the time! I have also been busy with home visits, following another pregnant woman who is bordering on pre-ecclapsia her BP remains stable on bed rest for now.
Peter, who will from now on be referring to himself in the 1st person, has also been busy. Lately I have been spending ever afternoon at Jaden Florence, our youth community garden. We have started up the program with about 15 middle and high school aged students who will each have their own garden plot to manage. We have all been working together after school to form our nursery beds and seed vegetables that we can transplant into the main garden once we get some rain. We have also finished building our chicken coop and just bought three hens and a rooster. The chickens will provide fertility and also (hopefully) help to support the program financially. We also repaired an old cement water basin that we are going to use to make worm compost. In the Nativity Village the rabbits are starting to take off. We’ve had three does give birth in the last week, with 8,7, and 3 babies respectfully.
One other group I work with here in a women’s group called GAFAT whose main activity is transforming local fruit into jams, jellies, liqours, and were hoping to keep experimenting on solar dehydrating. We’ve been working on a business plan together and we gave them a micro loan so they could produce a few cases of several products, which will allow us to do some local market research. This has been an enjoyable project to work on because of course we need to be taste-testing the product. So far we’ve had grapefruit jam, orange marmalade, candied peanuts, and I know they’ve also made passion fruit and pineapple jam which I’ll try to get my hands on soon.
Other interesting things to note- we had another Cholera campaign up in the mountains this past Sunday. That really is Meredith’s favorite type of nursing here, having the time to sit down with a family and do prevention work is so important and rewarding too. Going up in the mountains is a whole other world compared to TR. There are children everywhere! It is getting us excited for our trip to the southern mountain village of Douchity in March... more on that later.
On a sadder note we attended our first Haitian funeral this past weekend. It was the brother of the pharmacist from the clinic and he was also a member of the group Peter works with IDDH. We had to borrow the appropriate attire from friends since I ( back to Meredith typing now) did not have a black skirt and Peter needed a tie. The affair started at the families house where we paid our respects then everyone walked to the church. This was a very well liked and respected individual and the church was packed, we stood in the back for the 2.5 hour ceremony. The music was incredible and there was incredible tropical plant and flower arrangements everywhere. I know people talk all the time about the resilience of Haitians, their determination to endure and prosper and their incredible ability to be so hopeful and spirited. Being at this funeral just reaffirmed that cliche. Here was this 50 year old man that died on his way being transferred to Port Au Prince because he was having trouble urinating, the first hospital he was seen at was unable to give him any answers so he was being transferred and died in the car. He started feeling sick in December and died January 25th. His family still does not know why he died and his wife is left behind with no children and no parents or siblings, all of who have passed away (including their daughter). The health system has failed this poor man and his family, but he is only one of the many many out there continually enduring this injustice. And here all these Haitians sat and stood singing and crying for this tragic loss of life, enduring the heat and discomfort of the packed church. As people flooded the streets after the funeral to walk to the cemetery for the burial the road was shut down and all you could see was a sea of white and black. The inequality that exists in our world is truly astounding- let us never settle for this inequality.
Thanks for listening,
M and P
I (Meredith) recently had the opportunity to visit the organisation Midwives for Haiti in Hinche with a group of midwives that came to work in the clinic from Georgia. This was quite the trip because from TR to get to Hinche you have to fly to Port au Prince then take a 4 hour drive into the mountains arriving in the Central Plateau where Hinche is located. The locals will say Hinche is 2 hours form PAP, but not true at all. It was really interesting visiting this program and seeing the great work they are doing with educating women who are already birth attendants to become certified midwives. They go through a year long program and are then able to work in hospitals. Esperance et Vie is in the process of developing a women’s health center and I have been lucky to be apart of that planning process, visiting MFH gave us an opportunity to see what their program was like. There are two Haitian physicians who are the true motivators behind the development of the women’s health center, they already come out to TR once a week and volunteer their time seeing ob/gyn patients. They feel their is a real need in this area to develop a
“one of a kind” center that offers consistent quality care. They ultimately want to turn it into a birthing center but we are starting with pap smears and family planning. My plan for the next few weeks is to develop a survey with these physician to do in the community to help organize and focus the development of this project. Hopefully by next week I will start going door to door and begin this process!
I really enjoyed having the group of midwives here, it was great collaborating and learning from my future colleagues. We saw lots of ob/gyn issues as well as the regular skin, GI, fevers and all the tropical illness jazz. My favorite part of their trip was the midwifery seminar that we put together. We had a two day seminar with the home birth midwives from the community. Most of these men and women I knew from last year so it was a great way to give back to the community of midwives. These midwives do have some training but it was great to go over things like positioning during labor, shoulder dystocia, breech delivery and review the different reasons to transport to the hospital. They have a lot of experience and knowledge already but it was great to review and strengthen their existing skills.
Last week we had a small group here with a physical therapist and x-ray tech. We got an x-ray machine donated and the tech was so amazing she basically learned how to do the film processing and we went from having this machine in the closet to taking, processing and casting fractures in 2 days! We had an elbow fracture, wrist sprain and pelvic fracture all in 3 days. I worked along side the PT translating so I also got to see some interesting cases, we also had our first case of sickle cell anemia. The clinic seems to be getting busier and busier each day and I am leaning something new all the time! I have also been busy with home visits, following another pregnant woman who is bordering on pre-ecclapsia her BP remains stable on bed rest for now.
Peter, who will from now on be referring to himself in the 1st person, has also been busy. Lately I have been spending ever afternoon at Jaden Florence, our youth community garden. We have started up the program with about 15 middle and high school aged students who will each have their own garden plot to manage. We have all been working together after school to form our nursery beds and seed vegetables that we can transplant into the main garden once we get some rain. We have also finished building our chicken coop and just bought three hens and a rooster. The chickens will provide fertility and also (hopefully) help to support the program financially. We also repaired an old cement water basin that we are going to use to make worm compost. In the Nativity Village the rabbits are starting to take off. We’ve had three does give birth in the last week, with 8,7, and 3 babies respectfully.
One other group I work with here in a women’s group called GAFAT whose main activity is transforming local fruit into jams, jellies, liqours, and were hoping to keep experimenting on solar dehydrating. We’ve been working on a business plan together and we gave them a micro loan so they could produce a few cases of several products, which will allow us to do some local market research. This has been an enjoyable project to work on because of course we need to be taste-testing the product. So far we’ve had grapefruit jam, orange marmalade, candied peanuts, and I know they’ve also made passion fruit and pineapple jam which I’ll try to get my hands on soon.
Other interesting things to note- we had another Cholera campaign up in the mountains this past Sunday. That really is Meredith’s favorite type of nursing here, having the time to sit down with a family and do prevention work is so important and rewarding too. Going up in the mountains is a whole other world compared to TR. There are children everywhere! It is getting us excited for our trip to the southern mountain village of Douchity in March... more on that later.
On a sadder note we attended our first Haitian funeral this past weekend. It was the brother of the pharmacist from the clinic and he was also a member of the group Peter works with IDDH. We had to borrow the appropriate attire from friends since I ( back to Meredith typing now) did not have a black skirt and Peter needed a tie. The affair started at the families house where we paid our respects then everyone walked to the church. This was a very well liked and respected individual and the church was packed, we stood in the back for the 2.5 hour ceremony. The music was incredible and there was incredible tropical plant and flower arrangements everywhere. I know people talk all the time about the resilience of Haitians, their determination to endure and prosper and their incredible ability to be so hopeful and spirited. Being at this funeral just reaffirmed that cliche. Here was this 50 year old man that died on his way being transferred to Port Au Prince because he was having trouble urinating, the first hospital he was seen at was unable to give him any answers so he was being transferred and died in the car. He started feeling sick in December and died January 25th. His family still does not know why he died and his wife is left behind with no children and no parents or siblings, all of who have passed away (including their daughter). The health system has failed this poor man and his family, but he is only one of the many many out there continually enduring this injustice. And here all these Haitians sat and stood singing and crying for this tragic loss of life, enduring the heat and discomfort of the packed church. As people flooded the streets after the funeral to walk to the cemetery for the burial the road was shut down and all you could see was a sea of white and black. The inequality that exists in our world is truly astounding- let us never settle for this inequality.
Thanks for listening,
M and P
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Aba Kolera, Viv Lasante
We have been back on the Island of Hispaniola for the last two and a half weeks and we’ll try to update you on what we have been up to.
We flew down to Santo Domingo, the capital of the DR with our two friends Maggie Donin and John Smith, who are going to be volunteering in the DR through Seeds of Self Reliance. They will be working on different gardening projects all across the North Coast. We spent 10 days there with them to get them set up.
We got to Haiti last Friday. Saturday morning we loaded up with the Cholera campaign group and headed up the mountain to Perche. This small town neighbors an area that has been hit hard by Cholera, a river runs through this area which has been identified to be contaminated, so this area is a target for prevention. We found that most people get their water from the river so educating about treating the water and hand hygiene is critical. Most people in this area are already aware of the Cholera and know what needs to be done but this was an opportunity to reinforce and provide resources by going house to house and sitting and talking with the family members. This campaign was started by Father Bruno who runs the school where we are currently staying, he has put together an amazing campaign to prevent Cholera in this area and because of his efforts we are happy to report few cases of Cholera here.
So about this trip up to Perche... We loaded 56 people in the back of a flat bed truck that has a metal bar on top that everyone holds on to. We lumbered up a bumpy dirt road with everyone hooting and hollering like monkeys the whole time. We normally travel by tap taps here which are trucks with benches in the back, normally 20 people or so ride in the back of these trucks, but 56 people yelling to duck from the trees that brushed our faces and hands was a whole different experience. It was like a horrifying amusement ride, not able to see where we were going and just hanging on for dear life, we have never been so relieved when we finally arrived home at 6pm everyone in the truck chanting in unison “A ba kolera, viv lasante” (down with cholera, live health)!
Since then we have jumped right in to our projects down here. It has been great to hit the ground running, having more creole under our belts and already having meaningful relationships developed it has been so different arriving down here compared to last year. Our first month last year was about figuring out how to live down here, now we can just pick up where we left off.
Peter has already started working with the directors of Jardin Florence, the youth gardening club, on how to start keeping chickens at the garden. He is also working with his friends at the Nativity Village who are still raising rabbits. He is most excited about trying to grow black soldier fly larvae in rabbit manure or other organic matter to supplement chicken feed.
Meredith has been busy as the same clinic she worked at last year, Esperance et Vie. This will be more of her focus this trip. She has been translating and working with an American doctor who is down here for the week so she has been in the clinic each day since we arrived seeing a diverse variety of patients, from lacerations to malaria.
We have also started helping in an english class once a week for some of the teachers at the local Baptist High School. It was a pretty fun experience to see them converse and practice sentencing, so excited and eager to learn, the students have so much passion to learn english!
The return of Baby doc has not brought too much fuss to the north and things remain calm despite the Cholrea and the uncertain future of the government. The feeling of walking down the street and giving hugs and handshakes to friends here has been wonderful, it feels great to be back in our Haiti. We were at a church service last night and the singing and drumming was bursting through the seams of the room- it was a truly moving experience hearing the powerful voices in harmony with the steady drum.
N’ap Kenbe
M ak P
Sunday, November 7, 2010
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!
!
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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