Konbit Pou Ayiti

KONPAY created a Facebook Cause last year which today boasts an impressive membership: 7,000. Although we post updates and information on the Reforest Haiti Cause bulletin board, we have never engaged our supporters as a group. So, in an attempt to get to know our Cause community, we started an 8 week campaign designed to elicit ideas, stories and pictures from our Cause members.

The initial topic was "Why do you love Haiti", which generated the blog that Melinda and I posted here about how we got involved in advocating for this incredible country.

I was born in Massachusetts in the late 60's, in a suburban white middle class family with a history professor and a math teacher for parents. I was the youngest of six kids and I was doted on. My life in a word: safe.

When I tell people that I live in Haiti I always get a response, and that's because Haiti has a reputation. It evokes a particular seven-word phrase: "the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere." The question most people want to ask is: Why would anyone want to spend their life and raise their children in a place like that?

Haiti has been maligned in the mainstream media and in the United States for decades. Why does the international community focus on the ugly side of things, when Haiti is so much more than its one-dimensional reputation?

Whenever I am given the opportunity to speak about Haiti and the work I do there, I follow a simple formula as I prepare my presentation. First, I share with you what it is that makes me a credible source of information about Haiti. As we launch our first serious online campaign to gain new support for Haiti KONPAY, I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce myself to you. 

Recently I was going through the contents of boxes from storage in the U.S. and I found this account of my trip to Haiti after finishing college in 1998. It had been five years since my first visit, and I had anticipated returning with such passion that it couldn’t have been anything less than extraordinary. Here is what I wrote:

JFK was a madhouse.There were these amazing lines – people with six or more huge suitcases, families of at least seven or ten. Spanish, French, Creole – so many black people. I was completely lost, just sort of following the person closest to me. I was caught up in the noise, the nervous anticipation these people were pouring into the air; the excitement was overwhelming.

After a tropical storm caused unprecedented damage and loss of life in the Haitian city of Gonaives in 2004, it was called the worst environmental disaster in Haiti’s history. That same year the village of Fonds-Verrettes was destroyed a second time and all that was left of the center of town was a glaring field of white rocks washed out from the mountains above.

Last year the storm season was so brutal, lashing Haiti with not one or two, but FOUR powerful storms. More than one million were affected by flooding, mudslides, loss of crops and livestock, loss of loved ones and hope for the future. Gonaives was hit again, the great city of Haiti’s independence was covered in mud and filthy water for months. Hunger became famine and the weak began to die in southeastern Haiti.