TCN Newsletter Issue 18: October 2015
Village Infrastructure Guild Article:
Haitian Student and American Farmer
Meet Shared Challenges with a Solution
by Taylor Proffitt
Onel is a Haitian Farmer that is currently spending the late summer and early fall growing season between Virginia Beach, VA, and New York City as an employee of a nonprofit called Community Development International. After growing up in the Haitian countryside, Onel moved to Port-au-Prince to attend an agriculture university. He has since built an all natural, chemical free tropical fruit tree nursery and education center. He teaches students, farmers, and community members how to grow low cost, highly productive, perennial food forests. He currently has 5,000 fruit trees in his nursery that he actively gives to his community to help people become more food sovereign. Onel is a grateful, humble, highly educated, quad lingual Haitian who is extremely privileged in relation to the majority of his fellow citizens.
The New Earth Farm, where I work, is one of the farms where Onel is apprenticing in Virginia Beach, VA. I took Onel out to see a bit of what I do for fun this weekend. We went to the food share of the Norfolk, VA Chapter of Food Not Bombs (FNB). At FNB, a large, organic, vegan feast is shared with underserved, undernourished, mentally handicapped, homeless, and otherwise hungry people. Onel had never been to one of these food shares, but was fascinated with the idea. We cooked organic food from the farm for those in need of nutrition in the food desert neighborhood where we serve in Norfolk, VA.
I knew Onel would have fun at Food Not Bombs after explaining to me the details of the wealth gap in Haiti to me at lunch one day. On top of a large juice bottle he demonstrated where the rich people of the capital city, port au prince, live. At the bottom of the bottle, his phone represented the poor, and a small box of nearly the same size represented the middle class, in the rural countryside. “Haiti is the poorest country in the northern hemisphere” and “Two and a half million Haitians live in extreme poverty.”
The recent history of Haiti has been a whirlwind, politically. In 1990, the poor and the middle class came together to elect Jean-Bertrand Aristide, an unpopular figure in the Haitian and United States wealthy class. After Jean Bertrand won the presidency, the wealthy came to a popular young Haitian named Guy Phillipe, who visited and campaigned with all of the universities and promised to bring money and prosperity to young people in exchange for their support. He was convinced by the wealthy to overthrow Jean-Bertrand. Jean-Bertrand was threatened by the “paramilitary leader Guy Philippe, a former Haitian police chief who was trained by US Special Forces in Ecuador in the early 1990s” and exiled to Central African Republic. The poor finally had a voice through Aristride, but then he was gone. When they needed him most, in 2010, a 7.0 magnitude Earthquake shattered any remaining hope for the under-priveleged of Haiti, but Jean Bertrand was powerless. His life was threatened and he could do nothing when disaster struck. Remember the “text to donate” Red Cross PR campaign? That money never made it to Haiti. It didn’t go to the Wealthy, it didn’t go to rebuild Haiti. It stayed in the United States, in the pockets of the Red Cross.
If you go to Haiti today, you see a nice capital city that was rebuilt by the wealthy class and some of the funds from the Red Cross. In the countryside, however, the socioeconomic contrast is like night and day. Poverty and malnutrition are serious epidemics. Dead bodies lie in the street. Deforested land for miles.
With this recent history in mind, Onel could not understand, how people in America could be homeless or hungry. America is a rich country, couldn’t the rich people just take these poor and buy them a home, or some place to live? And what about all the food in the grocery store dumpsters? Aren’t there more than enough wealthy people in the Unites States to take care of everyone?
Onel was right. Why do we have poor people in America? There haven’t been any civil wars, any government coups, or massive natural disasters that crippled our entire country and economy in the last century. If there are more than enough resources to go around, why aren’t they going around? Why is the economic distribution in the United States almost exactly the same as it is in Haiti? While the answers to these questions are obvious and not surprising, these rhetorical questions leave a dark space in the heart.
Onel’s questions were valid. The United States is portrayed as the promised land, even to this day, to the rest of the world. I explained that people here in the land of opportunity are greedy too. I explained that grocery stores would rather throw perfectly edible food in a locked trash can than give it away to hungry people. I explained that rich people are more concerned buying their next mercedes benz or yacht than concerning themselves with the problems of the lower class. I explained that we are still living in a country full of slaves, but we call them something different. We call them “the poor”. We call them “minorities”. We call them victims of trauma, mental illness, and they are the symptoms of the illness of consumer and throw away culture.
When I speak with Onel, we often exclaim our mutual sadness for the challenges we face as humanitarians and community builders. This sadness propels us to make small changes in underserved people’s lives each day. In permaculture, the problem is often reframed as the opportunity for a solution, and both Onel and myself are great friends for this reason. We are actively seeking ways to initiate these solutions in a world where problems are in no shortage and effective solutions are so simple, but so few.
For Onel, the challenges he faces in Haiti are of deforestation (caused from an overactive lumber industry which cut down the biodiverse rainforests of rural haiti in a drastic effort to make money), hunger, economic scarcity, and a corrupt political system. By educating youth about the importance of organic food production, teaching his community how to turn fruit seeds into fruit trees, and donating plants from his home grown nursery, he combats the forces of ecological and economic oppression, one tree at a time. Each time he teaches a child how to grow a fruit trees, he is creating food and livelihood to his students. Each tree his students plant feeds hungry people, reforests the island, contributes to plant and animal biodiversity, sequesters carbon, offers a valuable education, and leaves a legacy.
For myself, the challenges I face in the Unites States are deforestation (caused by phenomena called lawns and overgrazing), hunger, economic scarcity, and a corrupt political system. By working with local organic farms to access fresh, organic food, which I can give to hungry people in the city, I can combat many of these problems with organic, grassroots solutions, just as Onel does. By turning people’s lawns into organic gardens, I can help to reforest one small plot at a time. By hosting a Really, Really Free market at the community peace garden, I can help close the wealth gap, one winter coat and one empowering book at a time.
What’s inspiring about this story is the shared resiliency and solidarity that is happening across borders, climates, language barriers and cultural norms. Our two stories coalesced when we met and the convergence has opened my mind to the possibilities of real, organic solutions that are relevant to each bioregion. Our solutions are very different, but the challenges are identical, and this story is proof that there is no universal “cure” to world hunger or poverty. There are organic solutions that work for a bioregion and the sooner we come together as a glocal community to enact these customized solutions, the closer we are to overgrowing the oppression of a patriarchal world. Our use of permaculture principles (neither of us call it that when talking to each other) gives us hope and inspiration to change the world around us, and to actively empower those who need help in our communities.
To make meaningful change in your community, contact [email protected]
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by Taylor Proffitt
TCN Community Member
Network Ambassador at NuMundo