On a Firm Foundation

HILDA DE BOJORQUEZ holds a set of blueprints in one hand. Her other hand is pointing. At a better future, perhaps, if things go well.

De Bojorquez is the chief engineer at this construction site in a neighborhood just outside Port-au-Prince still blemished with rubble from Haiti’s 2010 earthquake. She commands respect from the all-male crew of Haitians working at the site—she tells a group of visiting U.S. reporters that her gender has never been an issue in the male-dominated world of construction, here or in her native El Salvador.

When asked about obstacles on the project, De Bojorquez goes on for 15 minutes—she’s an engineer, after all—but the point is that they’ve tackled them, one by one, and done so the right way. She extols the importance of a solid foundation and robust retaining walls. She points to the cinder blocks and the rebar, and explains how her group had to teach a company how to provide high-quality materials, with the promise that they’d buy everything the company made. And she emphasizes that she’s there not just to oversee a number of construction projects, but to train Haitians to do it themselves the next time—and to do it right.

The steel-reinforced blocks are rising into walls that will surround a new six-room school for perhaps 200 children in this neighborhood four miles east of Port-au-Prince. The narrow site is wedged between two crumbling buildings, both showing earthquake damage. Even to an untrained eye, the differences are obvious between the fragile, deteriorating blocks next door and the solid retaining walls rising at our feet.

Perhaps the damaged buildings tell us something about Haiti itself. Maybe it’s about the lack of building codes or a government strong enough to enforce what codes exist. Maybe it’s the very need for this school, being built by an international Christian organization in support of a neighborhood church—because the public schools in the city fall so short of providing a decent education.

Maybe the message is found in how hard people like Hilda de Bojorquez—and the Colorado-based group that brought her to Port-au-Prince, Compassion International—has had to work to “build back better” after the earthquake, as President Clinton put it. In the absence of a viable public sector, the Salvadoran engineer and her crew have had to take a DIY approach to everything from providing their own security to doing their own soil analysis. There are no government safety inspections, as long as the proper “fees” are paid.

But maybe the metaphor is actually seen in the workers themselves. The Haitian workers are not only earning a wage or building a school. They’re learning about international seismic standards, about the importance of firm foundations, careful planning, and reliable leadership. Skills they’ll teach other Haitians. Skills upon which a more solid future can be built.

Or perhaps it’s just a school.

In Case of Emergency

Compassion International didn’t intend to get into the construction business. But the devastating earthquake in Haiti five years ago left the group’s staff little choice. “If we didn’t rebuild schools after the earthquake, 25,000 of our kids wouldn’t have a school,” Matthew Moore told Sojourners last summer.

Moore, coordinator of Compassion’s disaster relief efforts in Haiti, has worked himself out of a job in the five years since the most destructive natural disaster this hemisphere has seen in a century. The organization, which focuses on child development in 26 countries in partnership with 6,500 local churches, has 82,000 children in its 285 projects in Haiti.

When the Jan. 12, 2010, quake damaged or razed many of the children’s schools, Compassion staff responded by rebuilding 30 of them. And all the new schools were constructed in accord with international building standards, which is vital, and sadly all too rare, in this hurricane-prone region.

Other organizations came to similar conclusions after the earthquake. Partners in Health is a group founded in 1987 by Dr. Paul Farmer and current World Bank president Jim Kim. Its mission, in Haiti and around the world, is to “provide a preferential option for the poor in health care.” Through its sister organization Zanmi Lasante (Creole for Partners in Health), it’s the largest health-care provider in central Haiti, with more than 4,000 employees, almost all of them Haitians.

In the wake of the earthquake, which killed hundreds of thousands of people and affected virtually everyone in the impoverished country, Partners in Health did all it could to provide immediate help. “Partners in Health is not a relief organization,” Farmer explained in his book Haiti After the Earthquake, “but we’ll do whatever we can to help.”

Farmer is acutely aware that “disasters are never wholly and purely ‘natural’”: Social conditions play a key role in how an affected area recovers. Before the quake, 70 percent of Haitians lived on $2 a day or less, and the country’s fragile infrastructure—from weak governance and poor construction standards to water insecurity and deforestation—exacerbated the earthquake’s already devastating effects. For Farmer, a central tension in such places is between the essential work of direct, immediate service and efforts at policy change—the tension “between serving those right in front of you and seeking to reduce the longer-term risk of others ending up right in front of you.” In other words, thousands may be served in existing health clinics, but without a functioning public health system, millions more will go without proper care.

A History of Violence

Compassion's mission in its child development work and other programs, isn’t about changing public policy. The group’s emphasis is on providing support for children, and through them their families, their churches, and their neighborhoods. It’s a community-based approach: Every Compassion project is rooted in a congregation. And since many churches in Haiti have responded to the country’s inferior public education system by establishing their own schools, an important part of Compassion’s assistance helps low-income families afford school uniforms, books, and tuition. (Elsewhere around the world, staff members said, children in the program are more likely to attend public schools.)

The organization focuses on directly aiding individuals and local communities, instead of working through the public sector, partly because it has chosen to make that its core competency, and because that approach has brought concrete results. But it’s also due to a basic mistrust of government, which in Haiti has a well-deserved reputation of being weak, incompetent, and corrupt. Ironically, though, the condition of Haiti’s public institutions isn’t unrelated to the way the country has been treated over the years by the outside world.

The nation of Haiti was born out of a rebellion that overthrew one of the most brutal systems of slavery history has seen—creating in 1804 the hemisphere’s second independent republic and the world’s first nation founded by freed slaves. The U.S., wanting to squelch any hopes for freedom among its own enslaved population, saw its Caribbean neighbor as a threat and undercut the fledgling republic at every turn.

The U.S. wasn’t alone in its mistreatment of Haiti. France, the former colonial overseer of the now-independent nation, had the audacity to demand reparations from the new country—extorting payments for the value of “lost property” in the colony, including the “property” of former slaves. Not only has France yet to repay the extorted amount—which in today’s dollars, not counting interest, is around $21 billion—the world has been slow to forgive “debts” like these, regardless of the injustice of their origins.

The 20th century was little better. U.S. Marines invaded and occupied the country for 19 years. They left behind a series of military-backed despots, culminating in the three-decade-long dictatorships of Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier, who was finally expelled in 1986. The Duvalier regime bled the country of its professional and business class (one-sixth of Haiti’s population fled during their reign), centralized power while decimating national institutions other than their own presidency, and neglected the agriculture, health care, and education sectors. A fragile democracy—with weak central institutions and vulnerable to military coups, external debt, and an unstable, export-focused economy—has struggled to provide effective leadership in the years since Duvalier’s ouster.

In Baby Doc’s time, 80 percent of Haitians lived in rural parts of the country. By the mid-’90s, according to longtime Associated Press correspondent Jonathan Katz, nearly half the population had moved to cities. And about a third of the nation’s people, almost 3 million people, were crammed into the area in and around the capital, Port-au-Prince. Almost all of them were affected when the earthquake struck five years ago.

A Down Payment on the Future

After the quake, the outside world spent billions of dollars on relief and reconstruction efforts. While the emergency aid was essential, much of it flowed in ways that contributed little to sustainable development. (Katz’ book on earthquake response efforts is subtitled “How the world came to save Haiti and left behind a disaster.”)

Much of the aid money was channeled through the United Nations and other international bodies and through the “republic of NGOs” that serve in Haiti—an estimated 10,000 non-governmental organizations are active in the country, more per capita than anywhere except India. According to the U.N., of the $1.8 billion in relief assistance after the quake, only 0.3 percent went to the public sector. Much of the official U.S. aid went to the U.S. military’s emergency response work.

An influx of money is essential in the wake of a disaster, but it can’t go only “to groups like [Partners in Health]—to NGOs or ‘faith-based organizations,’” wrote Paul Farmer, referencing his own organization. “Only the Haitian government has both national reach and a mandate to serve the Haitian poor.” So while immediate needs were addressed, governance was undercut, not strengthened—and strengthening public institutions will be an essential part of achieving lasting change.

Some, including Farmer, pointed to the sad irony after the earthquake: Billions of aid dollars pouring in, countless people looking for work and enormous amount of work to be done—and yet millions still unemployed. (Estimates of Haiti’s unemployment rate range from 40 to 80 percent, and four-fifths of the population lives below the poverty line.) Very little of the post-quake aid money went to Haitian-run enterprises; an AP study found that only 20 of the 1,583 U.S. contracts for recovery aid—$1.60 out of every $100 spent—went to Haitian organizations.

Given that situation, Compassion International focused its reconstruction efforts after the earthquake not only on rebuilding schools but also lives, through a microlending program aimed at creating “income-generating activities.” The program distributed $1.2 million in loans of $500 to $2,500, money used to start more than 450 small businesses in the hard-hit areas around Port-au-Prince.

The goal, according to Jean Wilson Plymouth, a Haitian credit officer and leader of the Compassion loan program, was to help people create self-sustaining businesses. “In Haiti, it’s very difficult to walk into a bank and get a loan,” Plymouth told Sojourners. Other nonprofits that do microfinance loans charge high interest fees to make enough to run their programs; Compassion was able to charge low fees because it used donated money to support the program.

Matthew Moore, who directed Compassion’s reconstruction efforts, emphasized the merit-based nature of the loans. Before granting a loan, questions included: Is the business viable? Are there other similar businesses in the area? Is this business likely to succeed? Loan recipients—usually family members of children in other Compassion programs, 60 percent of them women—received not only money, but also entrepreneurial training and support in how to run a business.

“Our hope in the [microloan] program was to create real jobs for people,” Moore explained, “to enable people to earn money to live on and build for the future.” Overall, he said, the program was “definitely a success” that impacted hundreds of lives in positive ways.

For Moore and his staff, the main task over the final months of 2014 was closing down the reconstruction office. “We accomplished all the goals we set five years ago” regarding immediate and medium-term responses to the earthquake, Moore said. Now, despite some sadness at seeing the end of successful programs like the microloans, because they “touched a lot of lives,” he said the organization was returning to what it’s done for 45 years: working with vulnerable children. “We’re going back to what we’re good at: child development.”

Moore was asked why he does this work, in some of the poorest places on the planet. “Because Jesus told me to; because of the call God put on my life: What we do to the least of these, we do unto Jesus,” Moore said. “We honor God by how we treat the poor. That’s important not only now, but eternally.” Moore sees hope in the changes he’s seen in Haiti. “Five years ago, Haiti was literally a disaster zone,” he said. “I see progress.”

But Moore is well aware that Haiti has many challenges that will last far beyond disaster response. If there’s a secret to Compassion’s success in Haiti—and it’s clear that Haiti is not an easy place to succeed—the crucial element might be found in the group’s partnership with local churches. Other groups have come into the country, with the best of intentions, and tried to impose what they think Haiti needs. Compassion Haiti is run by Haitians.

That’s no guarantee that everything will run smoothly, or even with perfect integrity. “Some people in the church are corrupt,” Moore said, “but in the church it’s frowned upon.” And the church is an institution that exists, even in the poorest communities. If they can be better equipped to “bring hope to a generation,” Moore said, that’s a foundation upon which a future can be built.