CLICK HERE To see my Photo Journal from my trip to Haiti in May 2010.

This visit was somewhat different than my other visits.  I was with the group, Hope to Haiti, Directed by Scott Bonnell.  This was my 1st trip after the horrific earthquake in January. Seeing all the destruction in Port-Au-Prince was surreal.   However, with outside help and financial support, hopefully Haiti can once again become the “Pearl of the Caribbean” as it once used to be.

Photo taken June 2009 – My 3rd Visit to Haiti, pre earthquake

Photo taken May 2010 – My 4th Visit to Haiti, after earthquake

BRIEF FACTS ABOUT HAITI:

• Haiti is the oldest black republic in the world.
• Population: approximately 8.3 million, almost entirely of African origin
• Employment rate: 30%
• Illiteracy rate: 48%
• Religion: Catholic 85%, Voodoo 90%
• Languages: French (official), Creole or Kreyol (most widely spoken)
• Current government: Elected president
• Haiti is the poorest and most densely populated country in the Western Hemisphere.
• Average life expectancy is only 52 years

On December 6, 1492 Christopher Columbus first laid eyes on the pristine shores of the island of Hispanola. Lush with fruits and towering mahogany trees, Haiti became known as “La Perle des Antilles” or “the Pearl of the Caribbean”. What was once France’s richest colony today has become one of the world’s poorest nations, hindered by dictatorships, depleted natural resources, major natural disasters and overwhelming spiritual darkness.

To see my Photo Journal from my trip to Haiti in May 2010,

CLICK HERE.

Yes, there is Hope for Haiti

Feb 10, 2010 – By Mac Margolis and Lucy Conger | Newsweek Web Exclusive

Hollywood couldn’t have done it better. Late in the afternoon on Jan. 22, an armored car packed with $2 million in cash rolled out of J.P. Morgan Chase headquarters in downtown Miami, headed to the Homestead Air Force Base. Thirty-four bricks of bank notes packed into ordinary office supply boxes were loaded onto a C-17 transport plane redeployed from Langley, Va., and dispatched to Haiti, lighting up switchboards at the United Nations, the U.S. State Department, the Federal Reserve, and military rescue bases in Port-au-Prince.

Before dawn the next day, the stash was on a helicopter bound for 34 branches of microlender Fonkoze. While Port-au-Prince’s nine commercial banks were in a shambles and Western Union was paralyzed, half of Fonkoze’s 42 agencies were up and running in four days, and all but two of the rest within a week. The amounts were trifling: no more than a few dollars per client. But for tens of thousands of desperate Haitians, the nimble infusion of cash amid the chaos and ruin literally meant survival. For the legions of aid bureaucrats, charities, civic groups, and emergency organizations struggling to get a grip on the Western hemisphere’s worst natural disaster in memory, Fonkoze’s nationwide client base of 200,000 depositors (50,000 of whom are also borrowers) was a ready-made lifeline. Could microcredit be the new Red Cross?

This is not exactly what the loan angels had in mind. Since at least 2006, when Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize for his pioneering work in extending credit to the poor, microfinance has been in the spotlight. The founder of the Grameen Bank, a Bangladesh-based credit outfit, Yunus believed in the transformative power of advancing as little as $10, $20, $30 at a time to people that commercial banks wouldn’t allow through the door. Now, experts reckon there are 75 million microborrowers worldwide who hold $39 billion in loans, and enthusiasts speak of billions of the poor waiting to parlay pennies into enterprises and kickstart development in the most blighted countries.

Such ambitions have drawn flak: “I am unaware of any historical examples of nations that climbed out of poverty on the backs of small entrepreneurs financed by credit,” U.S. circuit court justice and economic historian Richard A. Posner once commented. But microcredit initiatives have since bloomed in a thousand boardrooms, winning converts in the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and even luring major commercial banks, many of which now see the future of their industry in courting the “unbanked” multitudes.

But the Haitian earthquake illustrates a more pressing role for microfinance institutions: helping societies respond to shattering tragedies. Ironically, not so long ago many development experts assumed it was the microfinance institutions (MFIs) that would need saving in times of crisis. National calamity, they noted, falls hardest on the weak, depriving the poor of jobs and capital and so, they reasoned, automatically driving them into massive default. “If people could get no money, they couldn’t repay. The whole sector was threatened,” says Don Terry, a former IDB microfinance and remittances specialist.

In fact, the opposite has been the case. “Devastation typically paralyzes the big banks,” says Terry. “Microfinance institutions are used to dealing at grassroots levels in a way that large commercial lenders cannot.” In 1998, when Hurricane Mitch ravaged Nicaragua and Honduras, shuttering banks and destroying roads and bridges, microlender Fundación León 2000 stepped into the breach, putting its experience and vast rural customer network at the service of relief agencies. “Microfinance institutions were the only ones able to communicate,” says Alberto Solano, the Grameen Foundation’s regional CEO for the Americas.

MFIs swung into action again after the Asian tsunami in late 2004. Even as they buried the 200,000 dead and cared for the injured, rescue crews were faced with tens of thousands left homeless and desolate across Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. For that, they needed not just cash but an organization structured to parse the needs at ground level and get money to scattered clients. Enter microcredit experts like Grameen, which helped raise disaster loans and channel the credit to stricken families through local microlenders.

Haiti has been the acid test. When serial hurricanes battered the country in 2008, drowning whole towns, killing nearly 800, and wiping out jobs and savings across the island, credit services were threatened with extinction. Instead of buckling, Fonkoze expanded. The bank managed cash-for-work payments during the clean-up, rescheduled outstanding loans, waived interest payments, and reached out to new clients. A year later, more than eight out of 10 of the bank’s clients had repaid their loans. This experience proved critical when the earthquake struck. With Port-au-Prince in ruins, Haiti’s banking sector went dark for nine days, choking off the vital flow of remittances ($1.87 billion a year) that Haitians receive from relatives abroad. Though badly shaken itself, Fonkoze, the island’s largest microfinancier, kept working (from a borrowed van, in one instance), giving families access to cash for immediate needs as they waited for emergency rations of food, water, clothes, and medicine.

Microfinance is not likely to replace emergency rescue efforts, where immediate humanitarian assistance is crucial. “Giving grants might send the wrong message about microfinance, encouraging people not to pay back their loans,” says Grameen’s Solano. Others argue that microfinance could play a much wider role in first response to disasters. Because they tend to the poor, microlenders move in and out of dangerous areas, such as crime-ridden slums, where button-down lenders do not or will not go. Their vast client base also “creates a network that can locate people as the population migrates out of the destroyed capital and help distribute food, water, and tents,” says Fonkoze’s director, Anne Hastings. “If the technology were in place, [we] could transmit SMS messages and locate displaced people or evacuees and reunite families.”

To the founders, microfinance means much more than donning rescue gear and mopping up after tragedies, manmade or not. But when calamity strikes, and the world’s poorest people are in the way, no mission would seem more appropriate.

© 2010   http://www.newsweek.com/id/233334

I urge you to spend “A Day In Haiti” so that you to can see, hear, smell, touch and taste what true poverty is. You will find yourself in a place of Subliminal Euphoria as your senses take over and cause your inner core to do something to help those in need.

It is so hard to believe that this is only 2 hours (by plane) from Miami Beach, Florida. Every time I return back from Haiti, makes me ever more grateful for what I have and thankful for what I can do to help other people.

Please watch the video from my 3rd trip that I put together for you.

To see my Photo Journal from my 3rd trip – Click Here

]]> http://www.adayinhaiti.com/2009/06/17/hope-for-haiti-2009/feed/ 0 http://www.adayinhaiti.com/2008/06/24/hope-for-haiti-my-2008-visit/ http://www.adayinhaiti.com/2008/06/24/hope-for-haiti-my-2008-visit/#comments Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:06:24 +0000 admin http://adayinhaiti.com/?p=61 This is my picture essay of my 2nd trip to Haiti with Frank McKinney and The Caring House Project Foundation.

We visited Port-au-Prince  June 2008

Doug Doebler awake and ready to go at 5 am June 21, 2008. Ft.Lauderdale, Florida, Airport – waiting for our flight to Port Au Prince, Haiti.  Our group consisted of donors to the Caring House Project Foundation directed by Frank McKinney.  We were to meet the directors of Food for The Poor in Haiti.

Our comfortable Tour Bus at the Food for the Poor headquarters in Port Au Prince Haiti. Food for the Poor feeds 15,000 people per day from their feeding centers in Port Au Prince Haiti.

At the Food for the Poor Headquarters – Frank and Nilsa McKinney to the left. Angel Aloma, Executive Director of Food for the Poor (based in Florida) and Madame Pun, Director of the Haiti Operation, to the right.  We were treated to a nice breakfast at this location.

Doug’s thumbs up for the start of the Day in Haiti.

The Caring House group walking to the Food for the Poor Feeding Center to assist in the morning rice distribution.

Large bowls of cooked rice waiting to be distributed to the long lines of people waiting with buckets and what ever they could carry their scoops of rice in.  The feeding center was a huge steamy hot room.

Kimberley, Executive Director of The Caring House Project
Foundation, stirring the pots of soup to be distributed.

Patient recipients, waiting for their scoop of rice.  What you cannot see is that the court yard where these people are waiting is surrounded by high walls.  Outside the gate and walls are lines of people in the streets waiting and hoping to get in today for some rice.  We were told some of the women had walked 2 hours to the feeding center and will walk 2 hours back to feed their children. They do this daily.  Each recipient has a ticket book. They handed in a ticket that told the number of people in their family.  They got one scoop of rice and one serving of soup for each member in their family.

Lissy from Chicago talks to a little girl.  Here’s the shocker – Lissy asked the little girl what her name was.  With an interpreter the little girl answered “My name is Sammy”.  Lissy almost fell to the ground and said “my little daughter back home is named Sammy”  WOW!

Photo from the Bus on our ride to Cite Soleil.  Cite Soleil is considered one of the worst ghettos in the world.  In years past the ghetto thugs and gangs made life there very unsafe.  The UN and US guards could not even enter the area due to all the violence.  We drove right into the middle of the slum with our guides. Movies and documentaries have been written about the area.

Kids lining up at the Cite Soleil feeding center operated by Food For The Poor.  As you view these photos note that most of the children have a smile on their face even though they live in extreme poverty.

As we arrived at the Cite Soleil Feeding center we were greeted by a band and a Happy Birthday Banner hung between buildings. People were dancing in the streets for the arrival of the Americans that helped fund some of these operations.

The children we met in the street all had big smiles and moved in close.  Some were a bit shy in front of us strangers from the USA. Most of them would shake hands, receive a “high five” or even accept a hug when offered.  They loved to have their photos taken and then shown the photo on digital cameras.  We suspect some of them have never seen their own face (didn’t see any mirrors). Some kids would tell others as they looked at the photos “that’s you!”

One of our group members wrote “Everywhere there were children – so many of them!   They were wearing old scraps of clothing, some were barefoot.  Their faces were smiling, some looked skeptical, but they didn’t hesitate to come close to us.  They were gently tapping my arms and grasping my hands.  They smiled broadly if I stroked their head or hugged them.  It was a rare experience to receive so much affection from so many little ones”.

Huge bowls of rice for distribution to those in line in Cite Soleil.

Our walking tour of Cite Soleil – never at anytime did we feel unsafe. (click here for Wikipedia description of Cite Soleil) An unsafe feeling would be expected based on what you read there.

A woman doing laundry in front of what would be considered a nicer home in Cite Soleil.

This photo reminds me of a photo that was taken of me in February of 2007 on my 1st visit to Haiti.  Kind of a dazed look during a 100 degree temp walk through the ghetto in Cite Soleil.  Yes – those are homes in the background behind me…

Another picture during our walk through Cite Soleil.

Inside one of the ghetto homes.

We were told 8 people lived in this one room home.
Not sure where they all sleep?

I’m told they are lucky to have a roof over their heads.

Another street scene from our walk.

Heading out of Cite Soleil – open sewer ditches are seen all over. I assume when there are heavy rains, the trash is washed away – to the sea??

Haitian people sell everything along the roadside.

A village outside of Cite Soleil that Food For the Poor
had built years prior.

Seaside Shanty town – you can barely see the ocean in the background.  These are the types of villages that The Caring House Foundation Project and Food For the Poor try to replace one village at a time.

Our next stop was a Retirement Center.  The minute we got out
of the bus we could tell we were standing in an oasis of peace
and well being.  It was like night and day from where we just came from in Cite Soleil.

We were treated to a celebration from the residents.  This is hard to write but we were told:  “if this center didn’t exist, these older residents would someday be found dead on a trash heap or starving and neglected”.  Now they have a place of safety and respect.

I’m hesitant to add this photo and it still chokes me up to tell the story of this experience.  We were told the older boys from the orphanage next to the SR’s residence wanted to give us a gift.  We wondered what it could be.  We were told they had nothing but they asked if they could give us a blessing.  They filed in and stood in front of us, then laid their hands on our heads and softly sang over us.  Wasn’t a dry eye in our group.

My good friend Jim Whelan (with the Cowboy hat), an Advertising Agency Guru, made some new friends with the children who were there to entertain us.

The senior residents having a meal under the shade of the trees.  This was so much better than what we saw just a few miles away in Cite Soleil.

One of the senior resident’s simple homes.

The simple interior of one of the homes.  Just a cot and a chair in most cases.  There was a central bathroom and washing area across the sidewalk for the residences.  You may think it looks like a garden shed but it is paradise compared to where these Seniors had come from.

Orphan boys from the orphanage adjacent to the Senior Center. We had brought 700 beanie baby toys to give to the kids.  These boys were very polite and well behaved.  I suspect via the lessons they learned at the orphanage.

Our next stop was the 1st Village Caring House had built in Haiti. Frank McKinney was thrilled to see the condition of the these homes.  We walked the streets and viewed them all.

The residents had made these homes their own and the little village was maturing.   Most had planted trees and plants.  Some had dog pens and gardens.  Some even had small additions.

Some of the residents had repainted their homes in anticipation of our visit.

We handed out more Beanie Babies. We almost started a small riot with the kids from all the excitement.

This little girl was holding her friends gifts.  They would get a Beanie Baby from us, run to her to hold it, and then run back to us for another Beanie Baby.

On the way to our hotel we drove by the US Embassy
in Port Au Prince.

More street scenes on our bus ride.
This was one of many local markets on a typical Saturday afternoon.

A short video of my bus ride through one of the Haitian neighborhoods.

View from my hotel room of the mountain side filled with housing.  I was told that was the better part of the city.

A shower, fresh clothes and reflecting on our day in Haiti.
A beautiful sunset behind my back over the city of
Port Au Prince.

Presentation of the “Hope For Haiti” T-shirt I had designed for Frank McKinney.  This was my birthday gift to Frank.  The design came from my photo taken of a little boy in Cap Haitian on my 1st trip to Haiti in February 2007.

The day becomes night after a long day in Haiti.

Jim Whelan thanking Doug for inviting him to this memorable experience.

Doug and Frank McKinney preparing to celebrate Frank’s Birthday with our tour group at our hotel in Haiti.

As we were leaving the hotel the next morning, I noticed that the local Rotary Club holds their meetings at the Hotel Montana where we had stayed. (I am a Paul Harris Fellow Rotary Club Member in my hometown of Newark, NY).  Hotel Montana is a beautiful hotel that sits on a mountain top with great views of the distant city and valley.

Beautiful Haitian artwork on sale along side the road.

As I recall from my 1st trip to Haiti,
“There Is Much Hope For Haiti”
I look forward to my next visit.

To see my Photo Journal from my 1st Visit to Haiti
Click Here

For More Information on

The Caring House Project Foundation

Click here to visit Frank McKinney’s CHPF website

On this day in the countryside of Cap Haitian, Haiti the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere life was given to a whole community of people.  Ange Village (Village of Angels) was dedicated.  The generosity of donors to The Caring House Project Foundation brought education, shelter, sanitation, clean water and the possibility of self-sustainability to a large number of children and adults.

Hope was given to many who may have been at the brink of despair; shelter to many who may have been sleeping under cardboard and plastic; clean water and toilets to many who have lived with the illnesses that come from their absence, dignity to many who have never been able to earn themselves a living; and, most importantly, education to as many as 500 children who would surely have been condemned by ignorance to repeat the horrible cycle of poverty that has ensnared their families for many generations.

On this day we were able to witness the possibility of Hope where so much despair exists.

Frank Mckinney, Caring House Project Foundation – 6 am Flight From Fort Lauderdale

Doug Doebler along with other donors off the plane in Cap Haitian, Haiti

Cap Haitian, Haiti Airport and Customs Check in

Food For The Poor Executive Director – Angel Aloma – our guide for the day

Cap Haitian Street Scene

Cap Haitian Street Scene

Cap Haitian Street Scene – notice the Bank

Cap Haitian Street Scene – open Trash/Sewage Channel – a common site

Cap Haitian Dump/Swamp – People live there

Doug in the Dump – Notice the blank look – overwhelmed and only in the country for about 1 hour

A Morning Church Service in the Dump – notice our armed guards for the day

Raised trail into the Dump/Swamp and the squatter homes in the area

Homes in the Dump/Swamp (we were told these were the nice ones)

Other Homes in the Dump – these people are lucky to have a roof we were told

Typical Home Sitting on Trash & mud pile to stay dry

Mud & Stick House in the Swamp

Is there Hope for Haiti – There is – see more photos below

Girl selling Charcoal to survive – most of Haiti is Deforested due to the production and sale of Charcoal by the homeless

We were treated to a wonderful breakfast with Frank Mckinney and Catholic Arch Bishop Hubert Constant

Ange Village (Village of Angels) built by Donations from the Caring House Project Foundation & Frank Mckinney’s visiting donors. A complete self sustaining village like this for 500 people only costs $400,000 +/- to build & supply.

United Nations armed guards at the village for the day

Franks first look at the Completed Ange Village. 500 Orphans & families from the Swamp/Dump now occupy this self sustaining village

Ange Village Children singing for us

Frank is overwhelmed at the Crowd there to meet us and to formally dedicate the village – over 600 in attendance on this 90+ degree day. The girl in the hat behind Frank is Kelli Kennedy with the Associated Press. She was with us for the day. Her story about our trip is being published in newspapers around the country.

Arch Bishop Hubert Constant leading the dedication service. The church helped choose the children & families to live in the new village and is part of the support system for the village.

The Lady that donated her families land to build the village – she will continue to live at the village and oversee it’s operation

Frank Mckinney and Caring House Project donors receive a gift from the village residents – a beautiful painting of the village

Frank Mckinney and two children cut the ribbon to dedicate Ange Village

Children very happy to greet us. Many are orphans and lived in the dump prior. Now they have homes, education, food & medical care in Ange Village.

Children lined up to shake our hands & say Mese (like Merci) thank you in Creole

Author & Real Estate Investor Mark Evans posing with two village girls. Mark said they reminded him of his nieces back in Columbus Ohio

Egg laying Chickens – Ange Villages goal is to be self sustaining. Eggs from these chickens will be used for food and will be sold.

Chicken area. Eating Chickens are being delivered soon. Goats and other animals as well as a tilapia fish farm are also planned. Food for the village and to be sold to create funds to purchase other needs for the village.

Village meal center to the right & typical home to the left

Ange Village typical home built by Frank McKinney and The Caring House Project Foundation

What Fun – we handed out 800 Beanie Babies – the kids went nuts as you can see

Doug with a big smile after seeing the completed Ange Village

Happy Children – lucky occupants of Ange Village

MY FAVORITE & FINAL PHOTO – THERE IS GREAT HOPE FOR HAITI AND ITS CHILDREN – JUST LOOK AT THIS SMILE

FOR MORE INFORMATION OR TO DONATE TO THIS CAUSE GO TO:

Frank McKinneys’ Caring House Project Foundation