Guest post by Cameron Strang, Founder and CEO of Relevant Media Group
It was April when, in passing, I asked the head of a nonprofit that’s doing a lot of work in Haiti how things were going there. The look on his face said everything. Three weeks later, Roxanne Wieman and I boarded a plane for the short two-hour trip. We had to see this for ourselves.
What we encountered was, in a word, unbelievable. The devastation was mind-numbing, the poverty more severe than anything we could’ve anticipated. The loss was palpable.
Haiti, right now, is in a holding pattern. As bad as it looks, all of the relief agencies say the crisis of the earthquake is largely under control. People are fed, sheltered (though, many, crudely) and getting back to life as normal.
Find out about how you can help rebuild three specific schools.
We landed in Port-au-Prince and spent most of a week canvassing as much of Haiti as we could. It was like drinking water from a firehose. Roxanne went into Port-au-Prince and met with NGO’s and government agencies about the work happening, asking hard questions and seeing up-close what’s going on.
I spent more time in the rural areas. The devastation there is completely different than the city. It is strikingly desolate. The country is left with little farmable land, no exports to speak of, and an economy where people can only grow enough to feed their families, and maybe eke out a few dollars a week.
Compounding this is the lack of an education system to break the cycle. Since most families can’t regularly afford tuition, attendance is sporadic at best for the ones fortunate enough to go at all.
When asked what needs to be done to rebuild Haiti, virtually every leader we talked to echoed the same three things: Infrastructure (sanitation, water, food, power), jobs and education. Education seems to be the least urgent in a time of crisis, but if Haiti is ever going to rebuild itself, educating the next generation is vital.
Many of the schools in Port-au-Prince crumbled, putting strain on the rural ones (many have seen their attendance double as families relocate from the city to rural villages). And many of these rural school structures are damaged as well. The cinder block walls may be still standing but look as though they could easily collapse. The thing is, children are meeting inside these schools every day.
We’re partnering with Convoy of Hope to make three schools a better place to learn.
Everyone wants to help Haiti. But the proud, resilient Haitian people don’t want handouts. They just need an opportunity. One way we can help Haiti stand on its own is to ensure more kids are able to get an education by making sure they have buildings to meet in.
We want to help rebuild some of the damaged and collapsed schools we saw, and we need your help. We want to fund the rebuilding of three schools in particular, partnering with those churches to hire local workers who need jobs to do the labor.
The churches we’ve chosen to partner with have strong leadership and have been influential in their communities for quite some time. We know this because our friends at Convoy of Hope have been partnering with these schools for years, providing nutritious meals and clean water to the schoolchildren and their families.
Our goal is to raise the money to erect new, safe structures (roughly, $15,000 per school). It’s very basic—block walls and a roof—but will provide a place for hundreds of kids to get an education. With your help, we know we can do this.
Will you consider helping? All you have to do is visit RELEVANTmagazine.com/HaitiSchools
