Archive: Around Town

Robert Burns famously said, 'The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft a-gley.'  But while much has gone awry at the  mission in Benique, Haiti, Reenie Baker Sansted was at the Ithaca Cayuga Rotary Club Tuesday to report on ways the project has taken a turn for the better, largely because of a new contact at the Haiti Methodist Church.  "It was breath of fresh air," Sandsted reported.  "He is Haitian.  He was educated in the U.S., but thankfully made the decision to go back to Haiti and give back to Haiti, which doesn't usually happen."

Despite its name, the Ithaca-Cayuga Rotary is the Lansing branch of the world-wide service club.  The local chapter has donated to the Haiti mission for as long as any of the attending Rotarians can remember, since at least 2003.  The mission started in  started in Benique, Haiti in 1998 with some building projects, including a a four hole toilet for the village, several other buildings, and repairs to the village church and school.  Volunteers have built a kitchen at the school, a bathroom, two classrooms, and are currently putting a second story onto the school.

But with a dry winter and a fiercely wet rainy season, the village is subject to erosion that has literally washed away buildings as water cascades down mountains and hillsides that surround the village.  While mission volunteers have tried to address that problem with plantings, extreme poverty and cultural differences have thwarted the project as villagers dig up plantings to sell for charcoal or firewood,

"We talked to some experts there," Sandsted said.  "We traveled around Haiti to see what other people were doing.  Terracing seemed to be the way to go.  We terraced the hillside, put a lot of work into it.  We took five strands of barbed wire and went around our entire hillside.  We put candelabra, a type of cactus, all around this acre of property.  We really thought we were doing a good job."

But a year or two later every tree was gone.  Villagers proudly told the volunteers that they had cleared the hillsides to give them a nice garden space to grow plants.  "It was devastating to us," Sandsted related.  "We explained again why it is important to have plants on the hillside to hold the dirt, because all that soil is washing down into the valley."

Sandsted, who participates in the mission through the Lansing United Methodist Church, says that in the past it has been very difficult working through the Haitian Methodist Church, which is based in Port-au-Prince.  She says past contacts there were arrogant, and appeared to be flaunting their wealth by driving a Mercedes to the village where nobody has a car.  She said she was to the point of abandoning the building projects, focusing on a school administrative program that benefits 150 children instead.  And village resistance to the planting project made it seem as if the erosion problem would never be solved.

"I had finally reached a point where I said, 'They just don't get it,'" Sandsted told the Rotarians.  "We said we would go ahead and replant the hillside with trees if they promised us to keep the fence line repaired, and they said no.  I had decided to try to take my team to other parts of Haiti.  But I will tell you that we had grown to love this community, and it seemed as though it would be hard for us to go anywhere else."

But a new contact at the Haitian church turned it all around.  In January she began communicating with Jean Michelle Basquin, who told her, 'You brought people from Cornell to help us and this is what happened to you?  I will go with you out to the village and do an analysis of what is going on out there, and see what I can do to help you.'

"This man was not arrogant," Sandsted says.  "He was easy to talk to.  He said, 'Can I ride out with you in the van, because I'd like to spend as much time talking with you as possible.'  He wanted to stay with us for two days.  The first thing he said was, 'I want to walk around the village with you.'   I was greeted by a lot of the villagers.  I think that really impressed him that this was an American that keeps coming back to this same village.  So I now have relationships with these people."

Basquin, who has a PhD from the University of Kansas, brought an agriculturalist to examine the village and the two set about finding ways to bridge the communication gap, and refoliate the hills.  He noted that with an average lifespan of 49 years, the Haitian villagers had never seen foliage on their mountains, because it had been cut down for firewood in the 1960s.  He and the agriculturalist quickly came up with ideas to involve the villagers in positive ways that would not only get the hills planted, but keep them that way.
 
The new plan involves educating village children in the benefits of agriculture, having them plant trees on the hills, and also on their homes and being held accountable for their well-being.  A 15 seminar program is planned to train their teachers.  New rules were put in place to keep animals off the school property where they eat the plantings.

Additionally Benique wants to establish fenced roosting areas for chickens.  Currently chickens in the village are not fed, so they wander freely fending for themselves.  But that means villagers  can't collect their eggs, because they  have no idea where they are laying them.  By creating roosting areas where the chickens are fed, Benique hopes to produce eggs locally.  Currently Haiti imports over 2 million eggs a day from the Dominican Republic.


"Of course this tugged at my heartstrings," Sandsted says.  Her father, Bob Baker is famous in Lansing for his chicken barbecue sauce, as well as a career spent at Cornell University coming up with innovative ways, including chicken nuggets, to serve chicken.  "My Dad had some memorial money that we hadn't known what to do with.  Once chickens were mentioned I knew this would be the place to use it."

Sandsted agreed to raise $6,000 for the program.  She reported that she used the memorial money along with that donated by the Rotarians to send $3,000, and hopes to raise the other half by the end of  May.  Meanwhile she will meet with Benique  in Washington, D.C. where he will be lobbying for more funding for the project later this year.  Sandsted says he hopes to make Benique a pilot project for 140 schools across Haiti.

She also reported that he has agreed to become a Rotarian.  "We need a Rotary Club there that we can partner project with," says Rotarian AnnMarie  Hautaniemi.  "Then we can raise some money.  They just have to raise a little bit and we can get matching grants through Rotary International.  Whatever we can raise here doubles and triples."

Sandsted said she is now optimistic that the project will succeed, and is looking forward to her next visit.  With a local church official villagers understand and respect, she says she is finally confident that they will embrace the project and eventually control erosion that devastates their village.  With the right people, sometimes the best laid schemes work out better than expected.

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