Another Phone Call with Beautiful Keri

Here's a short video I took of Keri giving me a hug, toward the later part of my trip to Haiti!

Keri is a beautiful child, and I promised I'd give you an update about him too.

I spoke to him on the phone last week, and told him that I knew he took my Irish pennywhistle (we call it a "flute" in Creole) from me. I told him I understood why he would want to have one. And I told him that I love him anyway, and I want him to have a "flute" for himself. He doesn't know how to play, but who knows, maybe some day he'll be a famous professional musician!

Pictures and Video!

--This is the riverbed alongside Fayet, Haiti. You can see the beauty of the country and the devastation that deforestation, and the erosion that follows, have caused.--

I've added a lot of pictures and video to older posts in this blog. So I hope you'll take the time to look at the links under "archives" on the right. There are also lots of pictures and videos I took in Haiti, over at http://media-haiti-hope.blogspot.com . On that blog, it's less "here's what we're working on in Haiti" and more of the "here is what life looks like in Haiti".

Lookin' Like Tourists

I think the purpose of this blog post is pure levity.

Jeannot, in the center of this photo, is wearing my blue camping backpack which has just been washed carefully and looks brand new, loaded with clothes and gifts for folks back home. With those two snazzy American-style bags, he looks like a tourist to me.

It was me (tourist extraordinaire) behind the camera; Jeannot is Haitian born and bred.

I told Jeannot and Gerald (the other guy in the picture) that I wanted to swim in the ocean in Haiti before I left, so they helped me get the chance as we traveled to Port-au-Prince for my flight back to the USA. Here's me, refreshed from a short swim and (sort of) ready to go home. Check out that goofy looking tan I've got!

Energy Efficiency in Humans

Strikes me that we humans have an instinct to be active, to let our energy out, no matter what. The trick, I think, is to let it out in ways that are constructive.

I've been thinking about the similarities in society in the areas of rural Alaska where I grew up, and in Dabon, Haiti.

In many parts of rural Alaska, there's very little happening in terms of jobs and an economy. Most of the people do not spend their lives in subsistence hunting/fishing/gathering activities. They have a lot of time and a lot of uncertainty about what to do with their time. Symptoms of this problem include very high rates of alcoholism and suicide - certainly among the least-constructive outlets for people's energy.

Certain parts of Haitian society are seeing a similar problem - jobs are very hard to find, and not everyone has the resources to participate in subsistence farming.

One of the not-so-constructive ways some people let out their energy while I was in Haiti was by having yelling matches in the street. Some kind of boyfriend-girlfriend situation gone awry resulted in up to 10 or so people standing around in the evening, with at least one person at a time yelling, for a couple of hours. The thing that caught my attention was that this outdoor yelling match went on for a number of nights, and didn't end until about a week after it started!

These unlucky neighbors were very much a contrast to some of the other folks who I spent time with in Haiti - people who don't have time to spend a week arguing because they're teaching in low-income communities, organizing teacher-education programs, searching for partners in their community work, etc. Seems these folks are too busy bringing joy into the world to have a miserable week-long yelling match.

Learning through Participation, Cabois

I'd like to share a few impressions of the school known as Ecole Communautaire Jean-Jacques Dessalines de Cabois, or ECJJDC.

The cost of teacher salaries in order to run this school is about $500 US per month.

This school, in a poor area of rural Haiti, helps create peace and stability in the area by teaching students to participate in their education and in the life of their community, and to learn the skills required to create joyful, vibrant communities - even in a country with little economic means and an unsteady government.

Here's a snapshot of a day of classes which I observed during the first week of June, 2009. The first year students (roughly equivalent to first grade in the USA) were learning to write letters. Each of them had a notebook with letters repeated many times on one page. I went to the second year students' class, and watched them multiplying two digit numbers by four digit numbers (problems such as 21 * 1748 ). I was surprised to see such difficult work in this class! Some of the students needed help to solve these problems, while others were able to do it right without teacher assistance. Several students were working on problems on the chalkboard at the same time.


The oldest class of students, fifth grade, was working on evaluating "less than" or "greater than" expressions with six digit numbers. For example, the students were given numbers like 369258, 369185, and 359225, and asked to put them in order from largest to smallest. During this exercise, the teacher asked one student to try to provide the correct answer, and then asked the class to decide together whether they thought the answer was correct.

At the same time, the third-and-fourth-grade class was working on reading in French. It's our hope that the school will soon be able to teach reading and writing in the students' native language, Haitian Creole, rather than in French. But for this school year, the school wasn't ready with books and teaching materials for Creole instruction.

What I saw was a demonstration of the teaching philosophy of the ECJJDC school - students sit in a circle rather than in rows, and participate together in learning rather than rote memorization and repetition of what's told to them by a teacher (which is the norm in Haitian schools). Students helped each other understand their work, doing a little bit of "learning by teaching", and took a role of active participation in learning rather than a role of "we do what we are told". When asked, this was essentially how the students described the way the school works, too - that by sitting in a circle they are "able to hear each other", and feel like they are "really learning".

Here are photos and videos of the school.

Generosity, Love and Need

While in Haiti, I was given one of the Reflection Circles books in Creole. My favorite story in it is a story about Generosity, Love, and Need, taken from Plato's "Symposium".

In short, what happens is this: A god named Generosity is at a party, and eats his fill, and drinks 'til he falls into a drunken sleep.

Along comes the goddess Need, who figures what she really needs is to have a child with Generosity. So while Generosity is sleeping, she makes love with him, and conceives a child, who is named Love.

Love takes after his father and his mother - he always needs something; he has no shoes, no house. He always feels poor, like his mother. But at the same time, like his father, he's brave, strong, fearless. He's full of wisdom.

It sounds kind of ridiculous, but consider: what would love be like without generosity? What would love be like without need?

Maybe I'm just over-sensitive. But here in the USA, surrounded by friends and family who, you know, are pretty far removed from anything resembling "need", it has felt pretty hard to connect with people. (That exciting book or movie that just came out on Amazon does not count as a "need".) Maybe there are worse things in life than not having anything that other people need, but it looks to me like this is one of the keys to having a "cushy, alienated life". In a privileged culture where, when one of your friends or family members wants something, they just go buy it... it can be hard to feel like they need anything from you.

By contrast, I saw a lot of inter-dependence in Haiti. Maybe it was more pronounced for me than for your average Haitian - I wasn't really halfway competent in washing my own clothes, buying food to cook, cooking food, or any number of other things. But to a certain degree, that's how Haitians live - they depend on each other, and they're really quite unprepared to live all alone and only accept goods and services they're paying for!

Of course, here in the USA, the idea of not depending on other people is something of an illusion, but it really is possible to cut yourself off from depending on people close to you, and have all of your needs met through money transactions rather than interdependent relationships based on the kind of love that exists within a family.

What would happen if we allowed ourselves to be more dependent on the people we care about the most, and allowed them to be more dependent on us in their day to day activities? Is there a way to create more love within friendships and families by doing so?

Following a Hero?

I want to talk about the concepts of heroes, saints, and prophets. You know, folks like Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jesus Christ.

It seems people find figures such as these kind of intimidating - they've taken such powerful or extreme measures in following what I'd describe as the "spirit of love" - that the rest of us have a hard time seeing even a possibility of really imitating them.

Last night I had a conversation about having a vision for one's life - it can be difficult to decide what to do when you don't know what you really want with your life. Let me suggest that the following is possible for you, and invite you to try it out:

Think about someone who strikes you as a hero - it could be Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Paul Farmer, etc. Pick something about them that you like, something that they did, and don't be afraid to be a total copycat. I don't mean that you should take something out of context and copy that, but, for example, there are still plenty of orphans in India and yes, it's possible to just pick yourself up and go help out there!

For myself, I haven't really structured my life around just one admirable person, it's more that I've heard stories of a lot of different people doing amazing work, and tried to imitate it. But let me take the example of Paul Farmer - what inspired me is that he seems to have decided that pretty nearly 100% of his time is going to be devoted to helping poor people in countries like Haiti to be healthy. He found it upsetting that their lives were being devastated by illnesses that are completely treatable - and rather than worrying that the problem was too big or that he wasn't a big enough person to make a difference, he just decided to get to work on the problem. Although I don't wan't to work in the medical field, maybe you can see how I don't entirely need a vision for my life that comes from myself - I can just plagiarize Paul Farmer's vision!

Don't wait for a guarantee that you'll succeed as much as Gandhi did, before you start trying. Gandhi, Mother Teresa, etc, were just regular folks who didn't worry too much about what might not be possible, rather, they figured now is as good a time as any time, to, um, start a journey of a thousand miles with a single step.

Can you live up to the example of Mother Teresa? Let me invite you to leave that question for later, and to start with a small step in that direction. Just see where it leads you.

A River of Trash

These are canals in the Port-au-Prince area. I know in much of Haiti the canals serve the dual purpose of supplying water for bathing/washing clothes and to allow water and wastewater (ew) to flow to lower ground; I'm not sure anybody uses these canals for bathing/washing though. Only the richest parts of Haiti can afford door to door trash removal services like we have most places in the USA.

Haiti serves as a great example of the problems with single use drinking containers and other disposable plastic items - once you've got 'em, they just accumulate. As some folks say about the concept of throwing things "away" - "there's no such place as away". However, Haitians do know how to get plastic junk out of their immediate surroundings - by burning it. Sorry, don't have any pictures of that. But it's pretty common to see a pile of trash burning, possibly giving off dioxins.

Countries like Haiti, where money is scarce and almost everything is inexpensive, I think there's a huge potential to change the way we deal with environmental issues in a way that's really positive... without needing to spend a lot of money. What do we do with situations like these?

Are Haitians Generous?

This is a photo of teachers at the Jean-Jacques Dessalines school in Cabois. From left: Ormilyen, Rozlèn, Job, Junyo, Mirak, Jeral. They're celebrating Flag Day in Haiti.

Wanted to write very briefly to share what I have learned about the way that elementary schools are typically funded in rural Haiti (from what I saw).

I visited a number of elementary schools in rural Haiti. One was in Sitwonye, one in JanJan, one in Fayet, and one in Kabwa (Cabois). One of the things I was interested in was the way that the schools are able to function currently. The rural students' families have difficulty paying for a minimal number of school books and writing instruments, and are able to contribute almost nothing toward the cost of teachers' salaries. For the most part, the teachers work for no pay whatsoever. This, of course, is a hugely valuable donation to their communities. It's one that costs them the opportunity to work for pay in another place, at the same time that they are using the resources they do have for transportation, food, housing, and other basics.

How do they do it? They, or their family members, are able to cover their living expenses using money earned at jobs in cities like Port-au-Prince, for the most part. Generally, I would guess, office jobs that aren't too different from the kinds of jobs that'll earn you a comfortable living in almost any country of the world.

Why do they do it? The teachers are generally deeply connected with these communities through their immediate and extended families, as well as having friends pretty much everywhere you look in their community.
People generally don't talk in explicit terms about how these things work, so I've had to make educated guesses about how this works. But in any case, I think it shows a side to the generosity of Haitian people that's really wonderful to see.

So, I invite you to consider the following questions:
Where would you like to see yourself being more generous?
In what situations have you seen generosity have unwanted consequences? In what situations is generosity the "wrong tool for the job"; where are completely different solutions are more appropriate?

Computing in Haiti

If you think Windows is a headache in first world countries, try it on slow computers with slow internet connections and people that don't really speak the language their software was written for. Welcome to Haitian computing, where if you kept your Windows and your Virus-checker up to date, that would be the only thing you did with your computer!!!

Oh, wait. I meant to talk about "what's possible" rather than, um, being really whiny.

Here's what's already happened: By installing Google Chrome in French for quite a few people in Haiti, I've helped make internet browsing quicker and made it more difficult for malicious web sites to automatically add a virus to their computers. By installing AVG Free Anti-Virus in French on a number of computers, I've helped protect them from viruses, reduced some of the $cost$, inconvenience and slowness associated with competing software products, and helped people be more capable of managing their own computers (without as much language difficulty).

What's possible for the future? Doing away with virus checkers. Helping computers that have very limited Random Access Memory (a.k.a. "memory") run quickly. Doing away with a significant part of the economic barrier to computing.

How? By using a virus-free, free and open source alternative to Windows, possibly Ubuntu Linux (in an appropriate language). And by looking at the newer computers becoming available which are inexpensive and particularly suited to the kind of use (mainly internet/email and simple word processing) that computers see in Haiti. Let's make it happen, folks!

Here's a video of me helping two Haitian teachers open Facebook accounts. They aren't online often. But if you're interested in the participation-based learning that the Heads Together organization does, you can actually contact them directly! Let me know if you're interested - julianbrelsford -AtSymbol- gmail.com

Who's Hurt More?

There's a dear young boy, wearing the yellow shirt in the photo here, one of my favorite people I met in Haiti. He was quite taken with the pennywhistle I brought there. He couldn't really figure out how to play more than one note, but that was enough. I loved him, so I left the instrument in his hands more than once as I left the house to go do the things that we adults do during the day.

About the second time this happened, he said he lost it. One of his relatives found him with it a few days later and gave it back to me, and it was fairly clear that he had in fact taken it because he wanted to keep it.

At this point, who was hurt more? Keri looked really uncomfortable around me. But as far as I was concerned, there was nothing wrong with this child; children make mistakes. And I still loved him. I continued to treat him as the dear little boy he is, and our relationship was better.

But, honestly, here's the part where I didn't live quite as the person I'd like to be. There were plenty of easy excuses to avoid talking to him about the situation, so I made them. But instead, I'd like to have told him that I understood how much he would want a pennywhistle, and that he took it away from me. And that, knowing that, I forgive him and I love him anyway.

So here's the deal. I'm going to call Haiti, ask to talk to him, and explain just that.

I'll let you know how it goes.

The Girl with the Smile

It's hard to explain how just looking at a smiling face can be one of the most touching experiences of a lifetime. While I was in Haiti I was lucky enough to see, on a fairly regular basis, a girl who I think is about 6 years old. She's almost always got a huge smile on her face, and her face seems to be made of pure joy. For no reason, really! (Please click the picture at the left so you can see a better version.)

To the best of my knowlege, she lives with a family that can barely afford to eat. I'm told this family is part of the 50% of Haiti's population that lives on less than $1 US per day. They were next-door to us in the small city of Dabonn, a few hours' drive west of Port-au-Prince.

A friend of mine says that having the kind of life you want is a matter of "who you be", rather than what you have or what you do, and that with practice, you can just choose to be joyful and to look at life from that perspective, regardless of circumstances. It sounds kind of ridiculous, but I invite you to try it out a few times whenever the idea occurs to you (especially in difficult circumstances). See if it works for you!

A Personal Mission Around Food

A Haitian Feast. Fried Plantains and breadfruit in the foreground. Next, imported sausage, potato chips, and fries from locally grown potatoes. Further back, the food includes bean soup, lettuce, and local organic goat.

I've been encouraged not to push American culture too much on people here in Haiti, and for good reasons I think. I've found myself often encouraging people to think about food the way I do, though. Haiti produces a huge amount of wonderful chemical free food, but Haitians eat a combination of Haitian food and imported food, much of which is the lowest quality, chemical laden, food produced by the USA.

I would have been inclined to discuss this very little with people in Haiti, on the grounds that anything I say wouldn't make much difference anyway. But I ended up getting pretty sick for a little while, and as best I can tell the overabundance of white rice, white flour products (spaghetti, bread, wheat) was the sole cause of the sickness, or a big part of it. I've gotten used to eating a good mix of different food groups and mostly avoiding white rice and white flour products, and a quick transition towards a very starch-heavy, low protein diet didn't do good things for my stomach.

So, despite my misgivings, I started refusing food that, by memory, taste and smell, made me expect an upset stomach. And instead I'd tell people what food I'd eat given the opportunity, and what I think about the food available here. I've suggested that people make sure their protein intake is high enough and their use of chemical-laden foods is minimized.

I'm basing what I consider to be good diet choices on the US government's food guide pyramid, the book "in defense of food" by Michael Pollan, and an article in Consumer Reports describing tests for pesticides/herbicides in USA supermarket food. Pollan claims that anything you'd describe as "the latest science about food" is suspect whenever it goes against the grain of thousands of years of human food history and culture. (Essentially, he believes that whenever evolution and culture around food can last for an extremely long time, we can consider it to be better than most alternatives that have not gone through such a rigorous test of time.) Consumer Reports says that tests show elevated levels of pesticides in a great many non-organically-grown products available on supermarket shelves in the US, of which the worst offenders tend to be meat/dairy/eggs, and products where the part people eat is exposed to air, pests, and possibly pesticides (which is not true for oranges, but is true for strawberries).

Despite the poverty in this country, it appears to me that Haitians really do have the possibility of eating a lot more Haitian-made food and thereby reducing their dependence on imports and helping their economy. Local foods include a wonderful variety of different nutrition. Beans, cashews, almonds, peanuts, meat, and fish fill out the food group that seems to need the most attention here. For starchy foods to fill the stomach, plantains, rice, breadfruit, and corn are available. Important foods that are not high in starch nor protein include avocados, coconuts, edible leaves, and various fruits.

It'd be easy to say that poverty is too great a force in this country and it's no use asking people to eat healthy. But I don't really believe that at all. I think that many Haitians may be able to increase what they accomplish based on the changes in the body that eating good food can cause. I suspect the savings in terms of disease prevention and increased productivity due to good nutrition will entirely pay for the increased cost of good food.

Anyone wanna take a trip to Haiti to learn and share knowlege about local food and healthy eating?

A Low Tech Eco-Village

For a long time I've been a big fan of the various efforts people make to live lightly on the earth. Bicycling instead of driving, eating locally grown organic food, sharing homes and sharing cooking responsibilities to save labor and costs.

It strikes me that around the world, a lot of these ideas are demonstrated best by people who don't have a lot of choice in the matter. People in Haiti carpool with 15-20 people to a single small pickup truck. They seem pretty comfortable with the idea of four people sharing a bedroom. They generally don't use any of the fossil fuel powered appliances that tend to run day and night in the US, because it's just not feasible for them: water heaters, refrigerators, (yes, you can get by without a refrigerator!) etc etc. They eat tons of locally grown chemical free food, food that often has never been transported using fossil fuels.

A lot of what makes this possible is living together and depending on each other, and a lot of what happens when we depend on appliances and so on is that we depend on each other less. We get convenience but sometimes what we lose is a sense of being connected to each other. But let's not only think about the bad sides of this technology. Plentiful treated water, refrigerators, private cars, etc often give us opportunities to accomplish work and keep ourselves safe from disease, in ways that otherwise wouldn't be possible.

Strikes me that Haitians and Americans have a lot to share with each other on how to be deeply connected to other people, live in an environmentally sustainable way, and still get the benefits technology can offer us. Also check out my post about food in Haiti...

If Joy is the Reward for This...

I write this message from Dabonn, Haiti, a market town of maybe 50,000 people where material wealth is scarce, but a wealth of "people sharing with people" can be seen often! I've heard it said that running water, electricity, and so on are not what you need for a good life. I haven't had an experience quite like Haiti before, but it's certainly confirmed for me that creature comforts aren't necessary for me to experience happiness.

A friend here in Haiti shared with me a couple of bible verses that really relate (paraphrased here).

"For every thing that you give up, in order to follow God, God will reward you 100 times as much!" (Mark 10:29-30)

From my perspective, the main reward God will give us is the natural joy we get from sharing with others, but that's not to say rewards of material comfort are out of the question!

The other thing my friend mentioned was the verse, which I'll change slightly in paraphrase, "You can ask for absolutely anything, and if you'll use it for the purposes of Jesus and in the following of Jesus, you'll receive it!" (See Luke 7:7-9).

This reminded me of the importance of not only asking God for help, but asking others in your life to help you. Especially when they see that what you ask for is for them to help you follow where God leads, they'll often be overjoyed to help you!

So I invite you to consider, as a possibility, the joy that you might receive by giving. I'm thinking about giving time, giving things, giving what you have, by considering what you have as belonging to God. Thinking of what you have as being there so you can give it away, especially to people who have almost nothing themselves.

Consider that this way of thinking might present big changes for your life. Consider that there's nothing evil about the way you have been living, and yet there might be a possibility of a much deeper connection to God still!

They say, with love, the more you give away the more you have. I invite you to give away love like there's no tomorrow.

God has given me many gifts, and the best part about it is that the gifts enable me to give to others. Everything I have is thanks to Bondye (that's the Creole word for god) and these gifts I've been given, give me so many opportunities to share with others. I've been making an effort to consider everything that I have (my self and my possessions) as belonging to god, and relating that to Jesus' request that we take everything we have and give it to folks who have very
little themselves.

A friend here in Haiti shared with me a couple of bible verses that really relate. I don't know exactly where they are in the Bible, but here are the paraphrases:

"For every thing that you give up, in order to follow God, God will reward you 100 times as much!" (Mark 10:29-30)

From my perspective, the main reward God will give us is the natural joy we get from sharing with others, but that's not to say rewards of material comfort are out of the question!

The other thing my friend mentioned was the verse, which i'll change slightly in paraphrase, "You can ask for absolutely anything, and if you'll use it for the purposes of Jesus and in the following of Jesus, you'll receive it!" (See Luke 7:7-9).

This reminded me of the importance of not only asking God for help, but asking others in your life to help you. Especially when they see that what you ask for is for them to help you follow where God leads, they'll often be overjoyed to help you!

So I invite you to consider, as a possibility, the joy that you might receive by giving. I'm thinking about giving time, giving things, giving what you have, by considering what you have as belonging to God. Thinking of what you have as being there so you can give it away, especially to people who have almost nothing themselves.

Consider that this way of thinking might present big changes for your life. Consider that there's nothing evil about the way you have been living, and yet there might be a possibility of a much deeper connection to God still!

They say, with love, the more you give away the more you have. I invite you to give away love like there's no tomorrow.