Investing in Haitian churches and communities
How Haitian leaders are working together to counter a broken legacy of relief aid to the battered country.
By Hanno van der Bijl, Managing Editor, Applied Research & Consulting
Four earthquakes. Four hurricanes. A cholera outbreak. Political and social upheaval. The COVID-19 pandemic.
These are just some of the crises to hit Haiti since 2010.
Billions of dollars in foreign aid remain unaccounted for, with little of it going into the hands of Haitians.
This is part of the reason the Emmanuel Gospel Center is partnering with the Fellowship of Haitian Evangelical Pastors of New England (FHEPNE) on “Pwojè Rebati” — “Project Rebuild” in Haitian Creole — to raise funds for restoration efforts in Southern Haiti. The fellowship’s partner on the ground, Ligue des pasteurs du Sud D’Haiti (LIPASH), is a group of pastors in Les Cayes, representing 3,000 churches in about 20 municipalities.
Haitian leaders identified several important needs: rebuilding churches, providing housing for families, and distributing food.
“We would like to impact the lives of people in the area spiritually, socially, and mentally, because at the end of the day, people will gather together, they will feel gratified to have a place of worship where they can express their spiritual gratitude to God,” said Pastor Varnel Antoine of FHEPNE. “From a Haitian cultural perspective, they are very religious, and they believe in worshiping God regardless of their situation. You cannot take that away from them.”
People are walking or driving for miles to go to church. More than just a place to meet on Sunday mornings, the church serves as one of the primary forms of social infrastructure for Haitians. It provides a place to worship, safety and shelter, social support and community, a second family.
“Churches are such a pillar of community in Haitian culture,” said Marjory Neret, a member of the Pwojè Rebati fundraising team. “The churches are providing far more than just the place of worship — they’re really connecting people to a lifeline. So this is actually a far more significant project than it might seem on the surface.”
In addition to rebuilding church buildings, Pastor Antoine said the team hopes to get families off the street and into two-bedroom homes to live in.
“We hope that this project, Pwojè Rebati, will be a catalyst that will motivate other organizations to help in their rebuilding efforts so that people can go back and focus on God in adoration and exaltation for who he is,” he said. “That’s what we can tackle right now.”
‘You have a big faith’
Raising money is not easy. It takes time and effort. Often the Haitian leaders who are in the best position to effectively allocate and use the funds are tied up with important and urgent demands on their time. A chasm lies between those with financial resources in countries like the United States and those experienced Haitian leaders in the middle of the action. EGC works to bridge that divide.
After an earthquake and tropical depression hit Haiti last August, FHEPNE and EGC began raising funds.
They had collected about $112,000 when EGC’s executive director, Jeff Bass, was approached by an old friend, a Boston pastor he has known for several decades. The pastor serves on the board of an organization that wanted to donate $250,000 toward Haiti relief. “That’s awesome,” Bass said. And they wanted it to be a matching gift. “That’s challenging,” Bass said with a nervous chuckle.
After some further conversation, the organization agreed to count the $112,000 that had already been raised toward the matching amount, making the challenge considerably more manageable.
Bass presented the proposal to FHEPNE. Pastor Antoine said the group had never raised that much money before.
“It’s going to be a drop in the bucket for all that has to be done,’” he told his colleagues.
Many churches in the Les Cayes area — not to mention other regions of Haiti — had been impacted. So he decided to set a goal of not just making the $250,000 matching challenge but to prayerfully push for $1 million.
Pastor Antoine’s colleagues hesitated. “‘Hmm, I don’t know, you have a big faith,’” he said they told him. But given the high construction costs, they decided to take the plunge.
FHEPNE launched the fundraiser, and EGC signed on as a fiscal sponsor as well as fundraising consultant free of charge.
EGC hired Neret, a Haitian-American leader who graduated from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. With her extensive connections in the Haitian community, Neret brings a critically important perspective to the project.
Neret has broadened the team’s outlook and experience and helped strengthen how it describes the project in addition to reaching out to hundreds of people as part of the fundraising effort.
“A lot of people, especially those who are Haitian, are pretty receptive,” she said. “They’ve been more than willing to help — most of them right away.”
A big break came when the Imago Dei Fund in Boston donated $85,000. As of early May, the team has raised $213,000. It is now pushing to get to the full $250,000 matching amount by the end of June, and hopefully further toward Pastor Antoine’s bigger vision.
“It’s a blessing. It’s the work of the Lord,” Pastor Antoine said. “I believe that he’s got his hand on it, so we need to do our due diligence, waiting for him to use us as instruments in his hand.”
Half of the challenge is raising the funds. The other half is making sure it’s spent well in Haiti.
Half of the challenge is raising the funds. The other half is making sure it’s spent well in Haiti.
The Pwojè Rebati team is discerning how it can have a distributed impact in several communities.
Part of the process is securing accurate quotes from architects and contractors for building temporary church structures. That has not come without its own heartache. The chauffeur of the architectural firm working on the project was taken hostage, and an architect’s son took his own life in despair over the situation in the country.
Pastor Antoine said the team will be accountable to small and large donors alike. The Haitian pastors in Boston and Southern Haiti are working together to create mechanisms of accountability and for wiring the money safely, which will not all go out at once.
The first phase of the project includes a church building, housing, and food distribution in one community.
“We will start with one project, one region, and see the outcome of that first project,” Pastor Antoine said. “From that point on, we will decide on the next step.”
0.6%
While billions of dollars in relief aid has been promised to help communities like Les Cayes in Haiti, success has been elusive.
The damage inflicted by the 2010 earthquake was assessed at $7.9 billion. The government of Haiti requested $11.5 billion in aid for a 10-year plan that would have helped the country not only recover but also redevelop. International donors pledged a total of $10.76 billion toward that end.
From 2010 to 2012, several countries gave $6.43 billion in humanitarian and recovery aid for Haiti. Non-governmental organizations raised an additional $3.06 billion from private donors.
Of the $6.43 billion, less than 10% went to the government of Haiti and less than 0.6% of it went to Haitian organizations and businesses in the form of grants, according to data collected by Dr. Paul Farmer’s U.N. office.
Dr. Farmer, who passed away this year, had served as a special adviser on community-based health and aid delivery to the Secretary-General of the United Nations from 2009 to 2019. His U.N. office tried to track down how much aid money was pledged, committed and disbursed to Haiti. Billions of dollars remain unaccounted for.
Without greater transparency, Dr. Farmer’s office was left to theorize that not enough aid was requested and pledged and that, of what was given, the majority of aid did not remain in Haiti. Instead, it went to contractors and non-governmental organizations based in other countries.
Haiti is not the only nation to receive such a small share of incoming aid in a time of crisis. Between 2007 and 2011, 5% of humanitarian aid went toward the public sectors of recipient countries, and of the $4.27 billion that was raised through U.N. humanitarian flash appeals in 2012, only 0.6% went directly to local organizations in various countries. Liberia suffered a similar fate in 2012 when it was struggling with Ebola.
Giving only a tiny fraction of official development assistance, or ODA, directly to a country’s political and business leaders undermines its ability to recover from disasters and thrive.
“An estimated 75% of all ODA to the poorest countries never reaches the recipient country,” Dr. Farmer’s U.N. office’s report stated. “In addition, UN flash appeals almost always do not allow for the recipient government to receive funding. Bypassing of the public sector has a significant impact on development outcomes as there is a correlation between investment in the public sector and a decrease in poverty and disease.”
Countries such as Rwanda, which receive more than half of their ODA through their own national systems, make some of the best development progress in overall wellbeing.
The world’s first independent Black republic
This is not the first time Haiti’s future has been compromised by more powerful institutions and countries.
Originally known as Saint-Domingue, Haiti was France’s most lucrative colony in the late 18th century. The flag of liberty that was raised in the American colonies in 1776 and France in 1789 was also planted in Haiti when the enslaved people revolted against their colonial slave masters in 1791.
At first, President Thomas Jefferson saw Black Haitians’ struggle for self-determination in line with his own idealism and the revolutionary fervor of the day.
“St. Domingo has expelled all its whites, has given freedom to all its blacks, has established a regular government of the blacks and colored people, and seems now to have taken its ultimate form, and that to which all of the West India islands must come,” he wrote to his daughter Martha in 1793.
A depiction of the Battle of Ravine-à-Couleuvres in 1802.
Haiti was the world’s first independent Black republic. The first nation to permanently ban slavery. However, a successful country led by free, former enslaved Africans was too much of a threat to slave owners in the United States. Jefferson tried to isolate the island nation and blunt its economic prospects. The U.S. wouldn’t recognize Haiti as a country until 1862.
But as scholar Annette Gordon-Reed wrote, the U.S. owes Haiti a “debt we can’t repay.” Were it not for Haiti’s successful repulse of Napoléon’s invasion, the French emperor may not have sold the Louisiana territory to the United States for $15 million, or about $18 per square mile.
In 1814, when French King Louis XVIII tried to force Haiti to surrender, Alexandre Pétion, the ruler in southern Haiti, offered to pay France $15 million in exchange for the country’s independence, using the Louisiana Purchase as a benchmark. The king refused.
In what scholar Marlene Daut calls the “greatest heist in history,” French King Charles X sent a flotilla of warships with more than 500 cannons to force Haiti to pay 150 million francs — about 10 times the amount the U.S. had paid for the Louisiana territory. In 1825, Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer committed the country to pay the reparations in five equal installments, taking out loans from French banks. The agreement was revised in 1838 after Haiti defaulted on the enormous debt.
The money went to more than 7,900 former slave owners and their decendants in France, but by the time Haiti fully paid off the debt in 1947, none of the originally enslaved people or slave owners were alive. The total amount was more than twice the value of France’s claims, negatively impacting Haiti’s national education, health care and public infrastructure for centuries. In 2020, French economist Thomas Piketty said France should repay Haiti at least $28 billion in restitution.
For its recent project, “The Ransom,” The New York Times spent months studying old documents and consulting with more than a dozen leading economists and financial historians to calculate how much Haiti paid in reparations as well as the larger economic impact on the country over the centuries.
It found that Haiti paid about $560 million in today’s dollars. Had that money remained in the country, it would have added at least $21 billion to the Haitian economy. But experts told the Times the impact of the reparations and the initial loan go far beyond that. Taking into consideration that the country might have grown at a similar rate as its neighbors, Haiti lost about $115 billion.
“Put another way, if Haiti had not been forced to pay its former slaves masters, one team of international scholars recently estimated, the country per capita income in 2018 could have been almost six times as large — about the same as in its next-door neighbor, the Dominican Republic,” according to the Times.
“Overall, Haiti is just being punished for being the first republic of slaves to overthrow slave masters.”
In addition to not recognizing Haitian independence for decades and trying at times to annex its territory, the United States has repeatedly exploited the country.
From 1915 to 1934, the U.S. installed its own regime, rewrote the constitution, and took control of the country’s finances. During a demonstration in Les Cayes in 1929, U.S. Marines fired on 1,500 people, killing 12 and wounding 23. About 15,000 Haitians were killed during the 19-year occupation. U.S. soldiers pulled out in 1934, but the U.S. maintained control of Haiti’s finances until 1947, diverting about 40% of Haiti’s national income to service debt repayments to France and the U.S.
Since then the U.S. continues to back authoritarian Haitian leaders who appear to be allied with its interests. To reverse this trend, Haitian scholars and others advocate for the U.S. to support a group of Haitian civil organizations called the Commission to Search for a Haitian Solution to the Crisis.
“Overall, Haiti is just being punished for being the first republic of slaves to overthrow slave masters,” Neret told EGC. “They’ve made sure to put lots of political things in place to make them pay for that and to be an example to all of the other places.”
Getting behind leaders God is using
Bass, EGC’s executive director, recalls attending a conference in New York City that included a panel discussion on addressing the problems facing Haiti.
“There wasn’t a Haitian on it,” he said. “I walked out — this can’t work.”
Given the broken legacy of foreign relief aid and exploitation of Haiti, the church must adopt a new model if it wants to help.
EGC has a track record of partnering with the Haitian Christian community since the 1980s. After the earthquake in 2010, a local foundation provided EGC with about $100,000 in relief aid for Haiti. EGC then worked with the Rev. Dr. Soliny Védrine, senior pastor at Boston Missionary Baptist Church and a former EGC staff member, to partner with a dozen Haitian pastors in Greater Boston to distribute the $100,000 as they saw best.
“They created these feedback mechanisms where people reported how they spent the money,” Bass said. “It was very effective.”
This approach stands in contrast to problematic models of aid and development and outside input that unwittingly reinforce the same corruption, paternalism and racism that have caused many of Haiti’s biggest problems. Most aid and development organizations assume they can import solutions from the outside without long-standing relationships with the humanitarian and development ecosystem in place. The people most impacted are often shut out of the decision-making process.
The reality is that, when disaster strikes, there are already local leaders, organizations and systems in place working to address the needs. Excluding these leaders from the table is counterproductive and colonialistic.
“How can you plan a decent reconstruction if you don’t take into consideration the existing building blocks of local setups?” wrote Marie-Rose Romain Murphy, co-founder of the Haiti Community Foundation, in a CDA Collaborative Learning Projects article. “How can you develop effective and sustainable programs if citizens of the country are not included in those plans’ design?”
These dynamics motivate EGC to prioritize local leaders who have the vantage point and perspective needed to assess and innovate. Not placing relief aid directly in their hands and giving them decision-making power perpetuates Haiti’s struggles.
“EGC’s philosophy, and becoming more so,” Bass said, “is to get behind local, on-the-ground leaders as much as possible.”
TAKE ACTION
Give
You are invited into this effort. We are asking you to prayerfully consider assisting us with this challenge. This is a great opportunity for the church to step up and support our brothers and sisters in Haiti and locally in Greater Boston.
You can make a tax-deductible gift for Pwojè Rebati by clicking here and typing “Haiti Relief” in the “For” box. Thanks to the generous donor who has offered a $250,000 matching gift challenge, your gift will be matched 1:1 until the full amount has been met. EGC is passing through 100% of the donations to support the work in Southern Haiti.
Learn More
To learn more, check out the following organizations and resources. The list is not intended to be exhaustive.
Organizations
Fellowship of Haitian Evangelical Pastors of New England
The fellowship provides Haitian evangelical pastors in New England a “platform whereby its members will be provided ministry support, fellowship, spiritual development, cultural awareness, social services and needed resources, for the advancement and the well-being of each individual.”
The foundation seeks to “foster thriving Haitian communities with justice and opportunities for all, and to nurture and support Haitian leadership focused on national self-determination and collaborative development.”
Resources
“What if?” Questions with answers for a paradigm shift in the Aid System
In this CDA Collaborative Learning Projects article, Marie-Rose Romain Murphy, co-founder of the Haiti Community Foundation, casts a vision for how the aid sector can reflect on past mistakes and change course to empower local leaders so that “Aid … would (finally!) be about ending Aid.”
You call it philanthropy, we call it ‘Devlopman Tèt Ansanm’
In this article published by Alliance Magazine in London, Marie-Rose Romain Murphy lays out four critical changes the philanthropy world must adopt moving forward.
The Haiti Community Foundation: the impossible made possible
In this address given at a gathering organized by the South Africa-based Global Fund for Community Foundations, Marie-Rose Romain Murphy tells the story of the Haiti Community Foundation and its impact on Haiti in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake.
This article by Chris Herlinger in the National Catholic Reporter includes insights and assessments that go beyond just the facts that much aid did not reach people in need and make a lasting difference.
Owning Our Future: Haitian Perspectives in Film
These 10 short films were produced by Haitians in partnership with Haitian community media and development organizations, Community Supported Film, and international non-governmental organizations.
When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty without Hurting the Poor…and Yourself
Although this book by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert is not about Haiti, it does help people with uninformed, good intentions think through their approach to helping to avoid pitfalls, ineffectiveness, counter-productivity, and paternalism.
Research was contributed by Rudy Mitchell.
