A Trip to Haiti: Yard Gardens and CHE in Bayonnais

January-July 2018: A roundup review of the CHE work in southwestern Dominican Republic: Blog #8

As many of you know, Jenny and I are mission workers with the Presbyterian Church (USA), working for their international mission outreach agency, World Mission (PC(USA) World Mission). We have been stationed in the Dominican Republic since 2012, helping promote, support and develop the Community Health Evangelism outreach program of our partner here, the Dominican Evangelical Church (IED--Iglesia Evangélica Dominicana).

2018 has been an an exciting year, with three of the four communities where we work taking on a number of new challenges. This blog is part of a series of eleven short presentations of the work that has been developing. I am posting them in reverse order so that the images from January will be at the "beginning." This also represents a commitment on my part to fully complete my blog ambitions.

A Trip to Haiti: Yard Gardens and CHE

As many of you know, I worked in Haiti for many years focusing on agriculture and specifically on producing large amounts of foods, with minimal resources, on the land rural families have right around their homes. From 2004 until 2011, I worked in Papaye, in the Central Plateau, with the farmer organization, MPP (Peasant Movement of Papaye). From 2012 through 2015, I worked with three farmer organizations in the mountains of Léogâne (west of Port au Prince), Verettes (the central part of the Artibonite valley) and Bayonnais (25-35 kilometers east of Gonaïve). Here is a link to some blogs about that work: (MPP-FONDAMA Yard Garden Project: 2012)

This past July, I took advantage of a trip I needed to make to Papaye in the Central Plateau, where Jenny and I lived and worked for several years, to slip over to Bayonnais and check on how families there are doing with their yard gardens. Together with three friends who worked closely with me in the yard garden project, Herve, Givenson and Mathurin, we visited yard gardens in two of the five communities on Monday and Tuesday (July 2nd and 3rd) and we gathered with the whole yard garden team of the Bayonnais farmer movement (MPB--Mouvman Peyizan Bayone) for a CHE workshop on Wednesday, July 4th. I celebrated Independence in a CHE kind of way.

Although he does not appear in any of the pictures, our team included Anncito, a friend from Papaye who is studying in the State University of the Dominican Republic (UASD--Autonomous University of Santo Domingo), working on acquiring his degree in Veterinarian Science.

Technically this wasn't work in southwestern Dominican Republic, but the CHE workshop we did in with the members of MPB was in fact a repeat of the workshop you can read about in Blog #6 that we did with the community members of Batey 7.

Here are the images:

The first family we visited was Rosemarie (right with yellow bandanna on her head) and her husband Elidieu (middle, green shirt) in the community of Jan Chal. We ate lunch, did an evaluation on their yard--they got 48 out of 100--and we just visited for a while. Eventually we started walking back to the truck and on the way, Rosemarie and Elidieu took us to the homes of two families that Rosemarie and Elidieu have been encouraging in their own yard gardens. This photo is with Edner (left, blue pants) in his yard. Altius (far left, black pants) is Rosemarie's cousin and part of the second family that Rosemarie and Elidieu are disciplining.  Herve, to the far right, is one of the team members who helped lead the yard garden work from 2013-2016. July 2018. Photo by Mark Hare.

Edner showing his amaranth plot (bottom left corner of the photo)
that provided him and his family a significant income for several
months. Edner learned how to create raised beds and generally
improve his soil with manure and mulch from Rosemarie.
July 2018. Photo by Mark Hare.

Altius with his wife and one of their daughters. They are in the middle of one of several patches of moringa (Moringa oleifera) they have established in their yard. Altius and his family have done a wonderful job of landscaping their yard with simple rock walls that hold the soil in place and allow the rainwater to seep into the soil rather than run off. Altius learned the importance of soil conservation from Elidieu, who has protected most of his own land with rock walls built along the contours of his sloping land. Elidieu uses those spaces to plant beans, sorghum and corn, but this year has been a bad year for rain and Elidieu has not gotten his normal harvests. Altius and his family, on the other hand, have used the small protected spaces in their yard to establish multiple plantings of moringa, which they consume on a regular basis and also use to make moringa leaf powder which they sell. It was very exciting to be there.

Tuesday, July 3rd, Herve, Mathurin and I walked up into the community called Boukantoman. I had tried to upgrade my exercise regime before leaving Barahona for Haiti, but it is never enough. The mountains in Haiti are more gorgeous the
closer you get to them, but the beauty can be painful. Givenson did not climb the mountains with us, because he went to Gonaïves with a friend from there to get the brakes of the Landcruiser worked on, and to buy a new battery. Transportation in Haiti is always full of adventures. July 2018. Photo by Mark Hare.

We split our group into two teams. Herve and Anncito went to visit our friends Notaire and his wife Alidie in the main part of Boukantoman, while Mathurin and I took the higher road up to the home of Celavy (far right). Celavy's daughter, Licine (right, white hat) received us first, then Celavy's wife, Dila (blue shirt, left, white bandanna) came in from working in the gardens and finally Celavy arrived. Their yard only got 38 out of 100 in the evaluation, but they all explained that it is because Celavy has been ill with a back that hurts and he has not been able to help re-build the vegetable benches. But they have been eating from the 8 or 9 moringa trees that are still growing well. July 2018. Photo by Mark Hare.

Mathurin (left, striped shirt) and Celavy (right) and I hiked
down the mountain to catch up with Herve and Anncito at
the house of Silveni and her mother, friends and who
member of the MPB yard garden team. Silveni's sister had
died from fever and complications about one week before.
July 2018. Photo by Mark Hare.

A workshop starts with a program. Herve, Mathurin, Givenson and Anncito listened to
me Tuesday night as I explained what I hoped todo with the group on Wednesday, July
3rd. The goal was to help reinforce the idea that every community has resources that God
has provided. The trick is to move people into a process of  identifying those treassures
and to develop techniques to use them in productive ways. I asked the team to help me
name the workshop based on what we hoped to accomplish, and they chose the name,
"Hidden Treasures."  Below is the translation of the times and the activities.

Translation of Program:
8:30            Breakfast
9:00-9:30    Each community designs a tree that represents their community
9:30-9:45    Each group presents their tree
10:30-11:00 Pair up and do the listening exercise
11:00-11:45 "Crossing the River" exercise
11:45-12:30 Luke 10:25-28, Reflection of text and the exercise, "The cups half full"
12:30-1:00   In community groups (4 or 5 participants each from a 5 communities), re-
                     spond  to two questions, 1) "If the visitors work to return in one year to visit
                      all five communities, what would the participants like us to see there?" and
                      2) What would they like for us to see in terms of their organization, MPB.
1:00-1:15     Evaluation: 1) What did you see in the workshop that interested you? 2) What
                     will you do in your community with what you learned? and 3) Was there any-
                     thing you did not like?
1:15-1:30      Pray, sing and eat

The group from Boukantoman responsd to the questions about what they would
like to happen in their community during the next year. July 2018. Photo by
Mark Hare.

The tree of life for the community of "Deyemòn." The roots are the history of the com-
munity, the trunk represents the things happening now, and the canopy represents the
dreams the community members have for the future. This is one of the techniques that
Jenny and I have learned from the "Training for Transformation" books. There are
multiple web sites from organizations that base their work on the techniques and
principles of the books, which is comprised of five manuals. Here is one website:
Training for Transformation. July 2018. Mark Hare

Herve (behind) helps Mathurin learn how to cross the river in the "Crossing the River" exercise. We used this exercise as
a code, just as I mentioned in the blog about "Domestic Violence." In this dramatization, there are two people who come to
a river that they need to cross, but they don't swim and they don't know where the rocks are under the water that can help
them get to the other side. Initially, a "helper" comes who thinks he can carry them across, but he isn't strong enough and ends up leaving the first person in the middle of the river on a small island. Someone else then comes along and helps the second person across by showing him/her where the safe places are. Once the second person is across and has accomplished his/her task, he/she comes back and re-discovers the friend still stuck in the middle of the river. The second person is able to show the first friend how to cross the river, so that he/she can also get across to do what he/she needs to do.

There are many ways you can work this code. In this case, we made the first "helper" a foreigner who not only dumps the first person on the island, but then quickly walks out of the scene and never re-appears. The second helper we made it clear that they were a local person who lived near the river and had good knowledge about it.

When we began asking the group reflection questions, one of the questions was something like, "Why did the first "helper" just disappear after abandoning the first person in the middle of the river." Our friend Ceniel immediately replied, "Because he didn't have the same interests as the the local people." And when we asked, "Does this happen here?" The immediate answer was, "Yes! It happened after the earthquake with a United Nations project. The managers had rules about the work that would have kept us from working in our gardens. And those who did participate, even though they earned salaries for a year or so, eventually they ended up poorer than before." The power of codes, when they work, is that the participants are the ones who teach themselves and each other.

July 2018. Photo by Mark Hare.

Sitting on the chairs with his broken leg is the director of the Farmer Movenment
of Bayonnais, Viljean Louis. Viljean was in a motorcycle accident about six months
ago and he is still recovering. In addition to a nasty fracture of his femur, he did
serious damage to his knee cap. Even so, Viljean found a way to make it out of
his Gonaïve home to come to this workshop and support us. The members of MPB
have deep respect for Viljean and it made all the difference that he was there. He is
an amazing person. The best reward I could have had for sharing the CHE ideas
we are working with in the DR was Viljean's response when I asked him if he
thought the workshop had been worth doing. He replied in a firm voice, "This is
exactly what we need. I have material from today that I can use for the next six
months."

 July 2018. Photo by Mark Hare. The photo is of very poor quality. Nevertheless,
it was me who took it.