12 Big Ideas for 2012 from Shift & Reset
My friend and fellow disruptor, Brian Reich, has written a very important book, Shift and Reset, which is a MUST READ for anyone who wants to lead an organization in this hyper-connected age. You can get a flavor for what his book has to offer by viewing these slides he put together outlining 12 Big Ideas for 2012. And be sure to buy the book – it makes a great holiday gift to yourself or someone you know.
Can you help #OpenHaiti on Monday?
#1 Thing You Need to Learn from This Post:
Leaders in Port-au-Prince are hosting the #OpenHaiti Camp on Monday and welcome your online attendance to help them define a Project Worth Doing using open technology.
A More Detailed Exploration:
During my recent trip to Haiti, our group had the opportunity to meet with the organizers of this coming Monday’s #OpenHaiti Camp. This ideas came out of the recent TEDxPortauPrince event and will be hosted at the same venue, EPIH.
Do you have an interest in open technology and open systems? Can you spare 15-30 minutes or more to join in via Twitter and their wiki? Be sure to RSVP on their Eventbrite page.
Here’s the full event description from the organizers:
Rebuilding Haiti with Open Source tools makes sense.What does Open Source mean in Haiti?Join the discussion to define ”Things Worth Doing”!
Open Sparkers: Traci Fenton (@worldblu), Stephane Bruno (@sbruno74), Jaakko Helleranta (@jaakkoh).
Let’s get the OpenHaiti Movement started at:Twitter: http://twitter.com/openhaiti & Hashtag: #openhaitiFacebook: http://j.mp/openhaiti-facebookThe TEDX@Port-au-Prince event inspired people and helped us connect with others doing interesting work.
The OpenHaitiCamp’s purpose is to build on that. More specifically, we want to nurture community and synergy among people committed to Haiti and who are actively working on projects that depend on collaboration. Technology is an important component in all this but so is the culture in which things are done.
We want to emphasize the possible significance of the Open Source Paradigm that has emerged through Open Source software and various other Open movements.
We believe we have a lot to learn together and that we’ll draw inspiration and make important connections if we start having regular gatherings. So, what are the ideas, the questions, the challenges and opportunities on your Open mind? Our theme is: Things Worth Doing.
On Monday December 12th, at 4 pm we will begin with three 5-7 minute presentations. We will then use a meeting format called Open Space where everyone present is invited to help create our agenda. Together, we’ll determine the topics and questions that we want to address. Then, you will join the small group discussions that interest you where you’ll explore ideas that lead to mutual learning and connecting. Perhaps (and hopefully) concrete actions and projects will emerge.
We invite those attending to think about the topic or question you’d like to propose as a break-out session. You’ll benefit from other creative minds thinking with you.
The Open Space format will help ensure that we benefit from the collective wisdom and experience of everyone present. It’s a great community building technique that you can use in your organization. You can learn more about it here: http://openspaceworld.org/.
Notes from break-out sessions will be posted on OpenHaiti Wiki.“Twitter Fall” allows all to view on a large screen tweets from people at the event and others following it from a distance.
Further Along the Path
#1 Thing You Need to Learn from This Post:
Path provides the best (not perfect) way for you to nurture the relationships that matter most to you while allowing you to cultivate wider networks of people.
A More Detailed Exploration:
When Path launched last year, I became a passionate user of the social network and let the world know why it was a sustainable social network. It’s built for the innate tendencies of the fickle species we call human beings.
Last week after the release of Path 2.0, my friend, @SchneiderMike, wrote a great post on the dramatic User Experience (UX) and expressed his doubts that Path will grow its user base enough to operate a profitable business. Of course, I left my initial thoughts as a rebuttal in the comment section of his post.
After a great Twitter debate with @SchneiderMike, and his colleague, @ericleist, I accepted their challenge to dust it up in front of a camera as part of their #TECHInterruption video series. Today was the big day – video link to come once post-production is done.
We haven’t been the only people talking about Path 2.0 either.
Path official blog announcement
Techcrunch (trade publication) review
Jason Calacanis praise and review
Aboutfoursquare review
Notably, Dave Morin (CEO of Path), has been busy on answering questions on the Quora website (users pose questions that others can answer) and gave a great in-depth interview this week at the Le Web conference in Paris, France. And for good reason. Path 2.0 is an amazingly beautiful app that has the same level of elegant beauty inside and out.
Dealing with the Deluge
Facebook is the biggest party on the block when it comes to social networks. Heck, my mom and aunts are all on it now. Then there’s Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Instagram, and an ever growing list of niche networks. Each network has a different nature and purpose – you likely have different reasons for being on each and various overlapping circles of people.
The biggest hurdle every one of these social networks has is answering the most common question: Why do I need to use ANOTHER social network?
Let’s face it – it takes effort keeping up with the latest happenings with people we know, especially when the Internet and mobile devices create a deluge of data and information for you to process on a daily basis. When you’re investing this effort into networks with large percentages of weak bonded relationships, the feedback you get from these distant people isn’t anywhere as soul nourishing as the interaction you get from those people you care about most. Haven’t you ever felt a bit burnt out feeding the beast?
Why Path 2.0 is the Best (not perfect) Hub
Still in its early days, Path has begun to attract enough users for it to show why it’s going to be my central hub for me to nurture my most important relatonships while reaching out to wider networks. Here’s why you should consider it:
Focused on the individual, not the masses.
At its core, Path is your modern day journal, helping you track of moments in your day with record of places, thoughts, photos, videos, songs, people, and even sleep. You are the primary focus of Path, not your various social networks. You could just to keep everything you do thru Path completely private.
Smart Sharing.
Just like the thoughts in your head, Path allows you to decide to keep them in your private journal, share them with the up to 150 friends you have on Path, and when to push them to the other “parties” you like to attend (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Foursquare currently). While Facebook wants to be the massive party everyone is at, Path is the dinner party you host for people that matter to you with the option to go out to the bigger parties when you feel like it.
Honors Dunbar and Pareto.
The famous Dunbar 150 is the purported limit of relationships a human can keep in his/her mind. Pareto’s Principle is that 20% of something creates 80% of the output. Meaning in this case, 20% of the relationships you keep online occupy 80% of your attention/energy. Path honors both these principles by letting you focus on up to 150 people who hold 80% of your attention.
Visually Dominant.
We know from neuroscience and neuormarketing research, humans rely primarily on visual stimulation. The eye is directly wired to the oldest parts of the brain responsible for fight/flight decisions. No reason or neurocortex activity is involved. Path is dominated by visual information and supplemented with text.
Built for the Post-PC Reality.
It is one of the first social networks built for the post PC era. You can only access it via an iPhone or Android smartphone. This little device in your pockets has become a symbiotic organism – something you need as much as it needs you. Having been in Haiti recently, I can attest to the global reality that mobile is the primary heartbeat of communication, not online. The online version will come but be derived from the mobile DNA.
But, Wait…
Yes, I realize all the people who you consider “my most important relationships” aren’t using Path. Three years ago, they weren’t using Facebook or Twitter either. But that didn’t stop you from using them. Nor should it stop you with Path either.
Now that Path can push content to the four networks I mentioned, more people will be able to see you’re pushing things from Path. Just like Instagram and all the other apps that feed the incumbent social networks, Path will gain greater visibility and traction.
As my friend, Brian Reich, likes to point out – you don’t need millions and millions of people to support a media technology. You just need a critical mass of people highly committed to it and a way to monetize from it. Foursquare is a good example, especially as its American Express integration heats up.
To me, Path is to Apple as Facebook is to the PC. No, I’m not saying Path is going to be the next Apple. What I’m saying is that Path stands at the intersection of art and technology. Path/Apple are beautiful in design and function in line with existing human tendencies. They are intuitive and self-evident.
Just like Apple, Path’s growth strategy is to feed passionate users with a great experience they want to share with whoever is willing to listen (thanks for listening – my wife appreciates not having to endure this conversation over and over). I’m not guessing on this either. This comes straight from Dave Morin himself on Quora.
Parting Thought
A famous New England poet captured what I’m trying to say through the closing line of his famous poem:
I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. – Robert Frost
I don’t need you to use Path. Path meets my needs as my main mobile hub for tending to my most important relationships while still feeding more distant relationships when I feel like it. You can use whatever you want, since I can still share with you thru Path and come visit you where you hang out.
Letters from Haiti: Thank You
Having traveled to Haiti once before, I decided to invite a limited number of people to join me this time around in the experience through their financial support of the trip. By making a $50 gift to Haiti Partners, these individuals became “Series A Investors” in what I plan as a long-term project to bring education and entrepreneurs together in Haiti.
As a special thank you, I produced a custom thank you video for each Series A Investor, which led into this video I produced using the longer videos from the trip. Here’s the message I shared with this select group of supporters:
Thank you for investing in my trip to Haiti. I have put together this special thank you message to show my gratitude and give you glimpses into what we experienced there.
Featured in this video is the Haiti Partners Children’s Choir performing their signature song, a tune they wrote and arranged. The song’s main message: many people are talking about change in Haiti but it will be the children who lead the way.
You can learn more by reading detailed posts about each day and viewing extended videos at http://bit.ly/haititrip2011
You can read all the detailed posts from the trip here:
Why are we going to Haiti?
Letters from Haiti: Day 1
Letters from Haiti: Day 2
Letters from Haiti: Day 3
Letters from Haiti: Day 4
Letters from Haiti: Day 5
If you’d like to join our efforts, you can make your $50 donation here:
Letters from Haiti: Day Five
#1 Thing to Learn from This Post:
Community schools can serve as the launch pad for social businesses that meet basic community needs and produce sustainable income streams to fund the schools long-term.
A More Detailed Exploration:
Waking up to the last day of a such mind-opening, transformational trip was a mixture of emotions. Over the previous four days, Bellevue had become our oasis of calm and connectedness to the outside world.
Bellevue - Central House
Coming to Haiti can be a jarring experience shaking you out of your comfort zone. This is a country where the vast majority of the people work tremendously hard every day to feed themselves and their families, large numbers live in tent cities and squalid shantytowns, and the basic functions of government are sporadic at times.
I realize I don’t truly know what it’s like to live and grow up in Haiti. We came to appreciate the realities and challenges here, but we stayed mostly in our bubble. It was kinda like walking thru a glass observation tunnel in a large aquarium at times. You can see what’s going on and interact with the people, but you knew you were just getting a glimpse.
Realistically, that’s the most you can expect in a five-day visit. And, I am very grateful for having this opportunity for a second time in a year’s time. Going from the wealthiest country in the Western Hemisphere to the poorest is a significant jump. You don’t want to fall into the traps of superiority, saviour-syndrome, and cynicism.
Coming to Haiti with the assumption you’ll be transforming Haiti is the common path. Coming to be transformed by Haiti is the more difficult path that will have a much longer-term impact here.
Bellevue - New Group Wing
Having a place like Bellevue, nestled up in the relative security of the mountainside, gives you the space to process the emotions and thoughts you’ll have in Haiti. John and Merline Engle keep a great house to host those of us who travel here to experience this transformation of the heart and find ways to keep connected to the important work Haiti Partners is doing here.
With the main structure completed just prior to the 2010 earthquake, Bellevue offers modern amenities such as electricity and internet access. With the growth of their operations, Haiti Partners is expanding the facilities to provide a permanent structure capable of housing large groups of visitors. The new wing will have two large sleeping rooms and two separate bathrooms, one each for male and female visitors.
Bellevue - Outdoor Kitchen
Connecting the wing to the existing structure will be a communal dining area with access to the outdoor balcony to the sleeping rooms and immediate access to the outside kitchen and indoor kitchens. To allow for a future addition to the main structure, a large chunk of rock and dirt has been cut from the hillside running alongside it. This will allow for an additional two-story expansion providing more individual bedrooms, bathrooms, and living areas for the extended family members who help Merline run the daily operations of Bellevue.
Bellevue - Future Addition (carved by hand labor)
In just the past year since my last visit, they’ve their own transformer (much more reliable electricity now), added a large gate and wall along the mountain road entrance, which will also include a small reservoir for rain water collection. Plus, they were able to complete cutting into the hillside and begin work on the new wing. I can’t wait to see how it comes along in the coming months and year.
School Entrance
Since we had a schedule to keep on our final day, the morning calm turned quickly into a frenzy of packing and loading the truck. We said our goodbyes to Merline, Nestle, Alex, and Felix. Then we drove the Engle’s two children, Daniel and Leila, into Petionville for their day of school.
Having made good time, John took us on an impromptu tour up another hillside, which is home to some of the wealthiest families in Haiti. Even in the poorest of countries, you can find people from the highest strata of international wealth.
As scheduled, we arrived for our final meeting of the trip with the Grameen Creative Lab‘s Haiti team, which is working with Haiti Partners to helps its seven schools establish social businesses. A joint initiative anchored by the Yunus Centre (led by Nobel Peace Prize recipient Muhammad Yunus of microfinancing renown), Grameen Creative Lab is part of the Clinton Global Initiative and has assembled $4 million of capital from a handful of socially-minded investors to provide microfinancing to Haitian to help them fuel their own prosperity.
You might be wondering what a social business is and how it is different from a traditional business. As the Grameen Creative Lab’s website explains:
Until now, running a business has always been self-focused, founded for the purpose of making money. Unlike traditional business, social business operates for the benefit of addressing social needs that enable societies to function more efficiently. Social business provides a necessary framework for tackling social issues by combining business know-how with the desire to improve quality of life. Therefore instead of being self-focused, social business is all about others.
The 7 Principles of Social Business
- Business objective will be to overcome poverty, or one or more problems (such as education, health, technology access, and environment) which threaten people and society; not profit maximization.
- Financial and economic sustainability.
- Investors get back their investment amount only. No dividend is given beyond investment money.
- When investment amount is paid back, company profit stays with the company for expansion and improvement.
- Environmentally conscious.
- Workforce gets market wage with better working conditions.
- …do it with joy.
Both use the market as its mechanism for value creation. The main difference is that a social business leverages the market to improve the community’s wealth by paying fair wages and reinvesting the profits into further community development. While some, including Yusuf, want to claim this is a new invention, the fact is the social business model is a an improvement over previous models. Newman’s Own and farming cooperatives come to mind. But that’s just a quibble.
The main reason I am a big proponent of the concept is because it’s far more sustainable and empowering than simple aid and charity. When you give people a vehicle such as a business, you give them the opportunity to improve themselves, their community and their shared well-being. The old maxim about giving fish versus teaching how to fish comes to mind.
Rather than a single person or family owning them, an association with a board of directors elected every two years will have ownership over each business. This will allow for a rotation of new leaders, as some parents’ children graduate and new parents join the school. The association will hire a full-time manager to run the daily operations and hire necessary staff members. While some staff might be associated with the school, they don’t have to be. Instead, the focus will be to find people with the requisite talents and skills.
As each social business grows and invests in assets like power generators, water pumps, and other critical capital, they can begin to diversify their operations. While you and I might expect this to be function of federal or local government, these communities in Haiti would be waiting for a long, long time in Haiti given the enormity of need there.
Now, when you tie a social business to a community school, like Haiti Partners and Grameen Creative Lab are doing, you knock the biggest barrier to children getting access to eduction: being able to afford it. And you do it in a way that provides the entire community with vital services and products that will help them rise above sustenance living to a degree of prosperity.
John Engle, Ipena Lucien, Phillipe Legrenade, & Jesse Engle
In the short time we had to visit, our team met with Philippe Lagrenade, the social business consultant assigned to the Haiti Partners initiative. Philippe is an accomplished management consultant and left his higher paying job to provide his expertise in a more meaningful manner. He is especially interested in helping Haitian communities provide what is still not available to the majority of people: access to water and access to energy.
Working with the seven Haiti Partners schools, he has identified two immediate opportunities for launching social businesses. The first will bring the four Haiti Partners schools in Leogane together to launch a poultry operation that will sell broiler chickens to the surrounding community and distribute product to other markets, including Port au Prince and the other Haiti Partners schools.
Phillipe is able to leverage the Grameen Creative Lab’s network of partners and has brought Haiti Broilers, a subsidiary of Jamaica Broilers, to the initiative. Haiti Broiler is contracted to sell chicks, provide veterinarian services, feed supplies, and other related services at fair market rates.
The second social business in development is a bakery for Haiti Partners community school in Belle Platon on the Ile de la Gonave (Gonave Island). One of the most isolated places in Haiti, the community has serious needs. With none nearby, the community members are determined to establish the bakery to provide those living in the area with access to fresh baked good.
Near the end of our meeting, we met Ipena Lucien, senior business consultant of the Grameen Creative Lab in Haiti. She helped us understand better the broader operations, which are supported thanks to grants from SAP and Accenture.
With flights to catch, John Engle drove Luke Renner, Jesse Engle, his son Jonathan, and me to Port au Prince international airport. Luke was taking a different flight than rest of us, as he was headed home to his home in Anderson, Indiana, where he runs Fireside International Media. We continued to discuss the promotional video’s script up until the last minute, in addition to discussing our plans for reaching and inviting more people to join us in supporting Haiti Partners. More to come on that in the following weeks.
After proceeding thru security and catching our final lunch in Haiti courtesy of the airport cafe, we took off into the blue skies on our way to JFK. There, Jesse and Jonathan went into Manhattan, since their connecting flight wasn’t until the next morning. Walking around NYC, they found themselves in the practicing bands of this week’s Macy Day’s Parade. I stayed at JFK to eat dinner and catch my flight home to Boston, where I took my first hot shower in five days and collapsed into a deep sleep.
Spicy Peanut Butter - My New Haitian Obsession
Letters from Haiti: Day Four
#1 Thing to Learn from This Post:
Teaching community members consensus-building and collaboration skills is the best way to give schools in Haiti a sturdy, durable foundation for success.
A More Detailed Exploration:
Note: After realizing these “postcards” I’ve been writing were really letters, novellas, or tomes, I’ve renamed the series “Letters from Haiti” to avoid false advertising litigation.
Sunday was a welcome day of rest and reflection for us after three days of covering a lot of ground. The night before, we all turned in at a decent hour for bed and each took our sweet time waking up in the morning. My body, mind, and soul appreciated the respite.
The Central Porch at Bellevue
With morning coffee and breakfast complete, our team went back to work on finishing up the script for the promotional video we’re producing. The previous day in Leogane and time with Phillipe Armand gave us new insights we wanted to leverage. As with many creative brainstorms involving five highly talented people, our morning sped by quickly and soon it was time for Jonathan Chan, partnership coordinator for Haiti Partners, to end his time with us so he could meet another visiting group arriving at the airport.
Between continuing to work on the video script, eating lunch, and then breaking off to weave the Day Three post about our Saturday adventure, the early afternoon soon passed by, too. After Luke Renner finished filming interviews with Jesse Engle, his son Jonathan, and me for the promotional video, we loaded into the truck for a drive up the mountain to visit the site of Haiti Partners Children’s Academy.
Just so you don’t have a false mental image in your head, let me clarify something. When I talk about driving up or down the mountainside, you need to realize how rough of a road it is. Driving from Bellevue to the Haiti Partners Children’s Academy or down into Port au Prince requires a sturdy four-wheel drive vehicle. The two-mile road coming up from Port au Prince is paved only for so far and rises 2,000 feet by the time you reach Bellevue.
A view from the daily commute
Less than a mile up from the city, the pavement (some stretches of asphalt, other of paver stone) gives ways to large crushed rock. The road switches back and forth tracing its way up the mountainside with the grade increasing the further you venture up. About 2/3 of the way to Bellevue, four-wheel drive becomes a necessity if you want to continue with any success. Walking up it is like climbing stairs.
While some, like us, are fortunate to have a four wheel drive or motorcycle taxi to climb and descend the road, most everyone has to walk it – rain or shine – for miles every day with or without carrying things with them. School children walk to and from school. Men, women and children carry containers of water for their daily usage. Men and women making their way to places of labor. Sprinkled here and there are minimal vendor stalls with food, beverages, and other necessities of daily life.
For the journey from Bellevue to the Haiti Partners Children’s Academy, the road rises with periodic declines tracing further into the mountainside. Shortly after crossing a recently improved crossing of a major gulley funded by USAID, we came to the clearing for what will be the site of the Haiti Partners Children’s Academy.
The Haiti Partners Children’s Academy is the culmination of twenty years of working to understand Haitian culture, the people’s needs, and effective ways of fostering the culture change that will help Haitians build their own bridge to a brighter future.
Designed in partnership with Architecture for Humanity (see architectural plans here), the Children’s Academy will serve as the central hub of Haiti Partners’ operations here. When fully built, the campus will house classrooms, teacher training facilities, and housing for visiting educators. Children will be able to complete their entire primary and secondary education in classrooms using Haitian Creole. This is significant since Haitian Creole is the primary language of the country, but has traditionally been supplanted by French in schools. While every Haitian speaks Creole, it is estimated only about 5% are fluent in French.
Currently, the property’s only structure is a makeshift community shelter built from tin roofing sheets and tent canvas found on the southern edge. Next to it is a makeshift soccer (foutbol) field with wooden goals, which is quite the spot for the weekly Sunday night pickup game. On the other side of this is a giant tree shading a circle of stone for sitting that overlook an amazing vista of the Gulf of Gonave, Port au Prince, the mountain range north of the city, the plains to the east and the shore of Lake Azuel, which abuts the border with the Dominican Republic.
Like with every major building project, Haiti Partners Children’s Academy community is busy laying a solid foundation for the future school. Except in this instance, the foundation is not made of concrete, stone, or other building materials. Instead, something more stable and enduring is being put into place – the civic skills of collaboration and consensus decision-making.
Every Sunday afternoon, community members of all ages gather to participate in the facilitated Circle of Change program. Circle of Change is a cornerstone of the Haiti Partners success, shaped by their team’s experiences (read: successes and failures) in helping Haitians raise themselves up. Its main objective is to train community members in the art of consensus decision-making.
While you and I might take this shared skill for granted, this basic civic/community capability is not common here in Haiti. Instead, it is more common for individuals to make decisions on their own without communicating their intentions or seeking the buy-in for others. This strong-arm approach creates resentment, rumor, false conclusions, sabotage and missed opportunities for collaboration.
If this seems perplexing, you need to remember three important facts:
1. Only 50% of Haitian children attend school, with only 1% completing secondary education.
2. The average Haitian lives on $1.50 per – that’s $.50 below the world’s poverty line
3. Therefore, the vast majority of Haitians exert all of their daily activity to subsisting thru tremendous effort.
These three economic facts are the daily reality here in Haiti. Living with them doesn’t provide people with many opportunities to learn the skills to overcome them. Therefore, making sure these Haitian communities have the fundamental ability to discuss shared issues and needs in a way that builds consensus and identifies ways to improve community efforts is necessary if you want to help Haitians in the long-term. Once learned and reinforced, these skills can be passed down to future generations until it is a given.
Knowing why the objective of teaching consensus decision making is critical, let’s explore how Haiti Partners achieves it. In the community we were visiting, there were enough participants to fill two Circles of Change, each with its own trained facilitator. We arrived toward the end of the week’s 3pm-5pm Sunday gathering and spent time observing both groups. The main focus of each session is to discuss the week’s selected passage from the Circle of Change guidebook, which is written in Haitian Creole.
While these passages includes works from venerable writers like Aristotle and Shakespeare, they are primarily used to provoke discussions and provide the participants with a forum to learn, practice, and reflect on the skills needed to effectively run meetings, debate ideas, and come to shared conclusions and decisions. As you can imagine, it’s quite the empowering experience since men, women, and children of all ages are encouraged to participate actively.
The job of the trained facilitators is to help the participants learn from the discussions and integrate these learned skills into community matters. When the Circle of Change participants reach a certain level of competency, the Haiti Partners team helps them organize an Open Space event. Those who are familiar with the “unconferences” now quite fashionable in the technology and innovation sectors will immediately understand the Open Space. Interestingly, Open Space has been used effectively for many years prior to the rise of unconferences.
Like the name implies, an Open Space event is designed to create a forum for the community to identify a specific issue or need and work collaboratively to build consensus around the specific solutions they will employ. It uses a real world problem to allow the community members to utilize the civic skills they’ve developed and produce a tangible symbol of their shared achievement.
John Engle and Messr. Montclair
Prior to the Open Space, the community members develop a consensus for the theme of the gathering. With the theme set, participants develop the agenda and organize working groups at the beginning of the Open Space. Like the Circle of Change, the Open Space is as inclusive as possible.
At the conclusion of Sunday’s Circle of Change session, our team had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Montclair, an 82 year old pillar of the community who attends every Circle of Change gathering and is the first to arrive to make sure the circle of sitting stones is in place. Most of the community members are related to him in some fashion, giving him clout as an important proponent for the culture change underway.
With dusk enveloping our team because we lingered longer than planned, we piled back into the truck and drove back to Bellevue for our final dinner of the trip. Merlene Engle, John’s wife, and other members of the household spent the afternoon preparing dinner. In fact, every day requires a steady volume of work to prepare the meals and keep the household moving. The outdoor kitchen is almost always in use.
Our final supper featured Soup Joumou, which as Wikipedia explains, is:
“traditionally consumed on New Year’s Day (January 1), as a historical tribute to Haitian independence in 1804 where newly freed slaves consumed the soup, a meal forbidden them by their French masters.”
With a full belly, which is something most in Haiti do not have, I turned in for the night to rest up for the final morning to come and journey back to Boston coming the next day.
Letters from Haiti: Day Three
#1 Thing to Learn from This Post:
The community school is the foundation for educating children, parents, and community members, giving the people of Haiti the bridge to a better life.
A More Detailed Exploration:
Waking up at 6:00am, our team hit the road shortly after 7:00am to make the drive to Leogane, the epicenter of the 2010 7.0 magnitude earthquake and where the Haiti Partners team first began its work here twenty years ago. On a typical weekday, this twenty-five mile journey from Bellevue can take anywhere from 2-1/2 to 4 hours depending on flooding, traffic, and other factors.
Thankfully, traveling on a Saturday meant considerable less traffic and we made it there in 1-1/2 hours. It also helped that most of the highway is a paved, divided four-lane road. Last year, it was still under construction and considerably more arduous. Having a functional system of roads and highways is vital.
Before I go further, let me give you some perspective and scale of the geography and population here. Haiti is slightly smaller than the state of Maryland and has twice its population, coming in with slightly more people than New Jersey. Of the roughly 10.2 million people living here, most of them are concentrated in urban centers, coastal plains, and valleys. Port au Prince is the capital and largest city with over 2.5 million people living in the greater metropolitan area.
Garden and Guest House at Henri Christophe Community School
Situated west of Port au Prince, Leogane is a port town also along the Gulf of Genove and is considered the 5th or 6th largest city having roughly about 50,000 people living in its metropolitan area. Situated in fertile soils, it’s an agricultural-centered community with the sugar cane processing plant a main focal point of commerce. Driving thru it reminded me of towns in the heartland of America that have grain elevators clustered together.
As you can deduce from the opening paragraph, Leogane and its people straddle a major fault line and was also destroyed in a 1770 earthquake. The 2010 earthquake was catastrophic, damaging 80-90% of buildings and leaving no government infrastructure. Like other urban centers hit by disaster — think New Orelans, LA and Joplin, MO — every person in Leogane has been directly affected.
John Engle, co-founder of Haiti Partners, began his work in Haiti here twenty years ago, learning to speak Haitian creole and forging relationships that endure today. Prior to the 2010 earthquake, Haiti Partners supported two community schools in Leogane. Now, they support four community schools here, all of which have had to build new structures in the past two years.
Community Gathering Shelter
Turning this disaster into an opportunity to rebuild with longer-term thinking and leveraging new partnership opportunity, Haiti Partners has helped these four community schools become the central platform for creating the change and advancement Haiti needs for its future.
Think back to your childhood years and consider the central role school played in your community. Much more than children learning in the classroom, schools are a major hub of social interaction, civic engagement and cultural activity. Parents, children, and other community members coming together for everything from community discussions, civic planning, and celebrating shared holidays.
What was true for you and your children is true for the parents and children of Haiti.
We arrived at the Henri Christophe Community School at about 9:40am and were greeted by the school’s principal, director, and students. Thanks to the generosity of a local family, the school relocated a few hundred years from its former location to a plot of land with room for the main school building, a community center structure, and a guest house for Haiti Partners to house visiting groups and other partner organizations.
Having visited the school last year when just the main school structure was about 70% complete, I was excited to see it completely finished, the community gathering shelter completely finished, a new latrine system installed, a community garden thriving, and the guest house in the final stages.
The property is lined with a tall, sturdy chain link fence. All three structures built with the inevitability of future earthquakes. The main school building has a solid foundation with a cistern underneath storing rainwater captured from the tin roof. Steel beams serve as the main vertical load-bearing support and lightweight divider materials separate the footprint into functional spaces. Ample windows allow for air circulation and natural lighting. In the back of the main school building, three rooms with doors house a storage closet, administrative office, and a computer lab.
The computer lab is the gateway to the world, previously unthinkable of providing. Thanks to a partnership with Inveneo, Henri Christophe Community School has six HP computer terminals running off one server to conserve energy, powered by solar energy, and connected to the Internet. What a catalyst this computer lab will be for the children, their parents, and community members.
How do I know this? Just consider how powerful the simple community gathering structure has been. You and I might mistake it for a picnic shelter and wonder what the big deal is about it. Remember the devastation from the 2010 earthquake, consider the deterrent heat/rain can be, and you’ll quickly realize this shelter empowers community members to gather in one spot to discuss shared community issues and come up with solutions. Simple, yet profound.
Next consider the difference an ecologically sound latrine system makes. Last year, GiveLove representatives met with us and introduced us to the system they had developed and could deploy here. Now, the school has a latrine system that catches human excrement in buckets with organic biological material to kill heat-resistant organisms that cause cholera, disentary, and other scourge diseases (thus eliminating the smell). These buckets are carried and dumped into a compost bin and mixed in. Like your compost pile home, it provides rich, organic material that can be sold or used in the community garden.
Once our team finished touring the facility, we began filming a video we’re producing to share the Haiti Partners story with business leaders and entrepreneurs. More to come later on that. Finished, we piled into the truck and made the trek back to Port au Prince.
Phillipe Armand
We headed to the offices of Phillipe Armand, owner of Groupe Dynamic. Phillipe had just returned that morning from a trip to Europe as part of a delegation of Haitian private sector, government, media, and NGO leaders to learn from the Catholic-Protestant reconciliation efforts in Northern Ireland.
Phillipe’s father and uncle started their family business in 1946 bringing Canadian herring to the Haitian market. Now, Groupe Dynamic is a conglomerate of businesses with interests in Hertz rental cars, insurance, medical clinics, courier services, and Steelcase Furniture.
Of the many insights he shared with us, what stuck out most is the fundamental role education and literacy plays in defining the future of Haiti. To paraphrase him, every conceivable problem exists here, but the one to focus on first is education. Education and literacy will make their democracy better. Education and literacy will help Haitians create new economic opportunities for themselves and their families.
Coming back home that evening, we were greeted by the Haiti Partners Children’s Choir. They travelled earlier this fall to Michigan for a special concert tour. They performed five songs before closing with their signature song – one they wrote and arranged. Its main message: many people are talking about change in Haiti and it will be the children who lead the way.
Letters from Haiti: Day Two
#1 Thing to Learn from This Post:
Haiti has an amazing amount of potential and innovative people are here committed to help unleash it.
Special Thank You:
I want to thank everyone who has donated to support our trip. To date, 13 people have joined me in giving $50 or more. Want to join us with your investment? Learn more and donate here.
A More Detailed Exploration:
The more time I spend in Haiti, the more I appreciate the nuances of the challenges and opportunities here. Last year’s trip was my first time outside the bubble of the developed world and it opened my eyes to the realities of life without its amenities.
Yesterday morning started with the braying of a donkey a bit further down the mountainside. Perhaps by coincidence or design, Luke Renner from Fireside International arrived from the airport and added his humor and creativity to the group immediately. With coffee, an egg scramble, and fresh fruit in our bellies, our team piled in the truck for the bone jarring ride down the mountain side road on our way into the heart of Port au Prince for the day.
View from ESHI Looking North
Our first stop was at the Ecole Superieure d’Infotronique d’Haiti (ESIH), a burgeoning higher education institution with an impressive story. Patrick Attie, co-founder and vice president, spent with our team sharing his story and the success they’re building. Born in Africa to parents of Lebanese-Haitian and French heritage, Patrick began spending his summers in Haiti at the age of 17 after his folks had moved there from France. In time, he did as well.
Started shortly after the embargo of the 1990s, ESIH has grown in its 15 years to have 900-1000 students, most studying computer science and management. The campus, located in a middle-class area of the downtown, is compact and continuing to grow. The earthquake damaged the original building, causing the deaths of 11 students and a professor.
According to Patrick, the earthquake has been a partner amplifier for them. As companies and organizations come into the country to help with the recovery and rebuilding, they found an able partner in ESIH. Microsoft, Google, Net Hope and more work with them to provide opportunities for the students home and abroad.
Higher education represents one of Haiti’s greatest economic opportunities. Over $80-100 million flows out of Haiti for just the students attending university and technical training schools in Dominican Republic. Just imagine how much money could be invested back into Haiti if those students remained here for school.
Even as it is, ESIH has room to grow, because the Port au Prince area has three times the amount of need for its students than it currently graduates. Employment opportunities abound for these young men and women, 60-70% of whom come from Port au Prince middle-class families. One challenge ESIH faces is that most students who do matriculate into the program need a year of remedial coursework to make up for shortcomings of the primary and secondary schools.
After a short while, three new people joined our conversation. Jaako Helleranta, a Finnish ex-pat formerly with the World Bank, highly active with OpenStreetMaps, and now leading a startup in Haiti focused on GPS tracking devices, Adam Holt from One Laptop One Child, and Nick Doiron, One Laptop One Child volunteer leaving soon to join Code for America. These three men and Patrick are organizing an Open Space event on December 12 with the goal of generating a list of “things worth doing”.
As Jaako explained, open source is a new paradigm in the international development community that requires new policies and a mindset. With that in mind, our group brainstormed meeting best practices for integrating social media into the event to help them reach a wider audience and inform those who join the event. You can follow along from wherever you are on December 12 by tracking #OpenHaiti and @OpenHaiti on Twitter.
"Temporary" Tents in a Park
Ready for lunch, we made our way to the Hotel Oloffson to dine on the veranda while talking with Richard A. Morse, proprietor and leader the band RAM. As a close cousin to President Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly and a man know for his critical voice of prior administrations, we had a mostly off the record conversation about political realties of serving as an advisor to the president. Enjoying the conversation and lunch served, we strolled the hotel grounds admiring the voodoo art, chasing the roosters and chickens, and envying the pool on a 93 degree day.
Hotel Oloffson - A Grand Dame
On our way home up the mountainside back to Bellevue, we stopped in the better-off Petionville neighborhood for some grocery shopping at Giant Market, which caters to internationals and upper class Haitians. It could have easily been a grocery store in the US with a wide selection of goods, local and imported.
Back at Bellevue, we enjoyed a delicious dinner and spent the better part of the evening working on the script for the video we’re shooting over the weekend. After 3 1/2 hours of writing and rewriting (3 hours of which were just sheer comedic lunacy), we called it a wrap and headed to bed.
On our third day, we’re getting up quite early to make the journey to the countryside west of Port au Prince to visit one of the seven schools built and managed by Haiti Partners, which are participating in the social business initiatives. You can bet on reading about it all in the next post.
Letters from Haiti: Day One
#1 Thing to Learn from This Post:
Thanks to the generosity of a small number of people, I have arrived in Haiti and have joined up with my fellow travelers for five-days filled with learning and connecting.
A More Detailed Exploration:
Good morning from Bellevue, the growing operational center of Haiti Partners, settled up two miles up the mountain overlooking the sprawling city of Port au Prince. I’ve had my first cup of delicious Haitian coffee, served black with sugar, and am rested up from yesterday’s long day of travels.
The journey began at 3:15am in Boston with the wake-up alarm going off followed by the haze of getting ready and heading to the airport. My flight from Boston Logan to JFK went quickly thanks to my ability to sleep sitting up. At JFK, I joined up with Jesse Engle and his son, Jonathan, who took the red-eye flight from San Francisco.
Jesse has been traveling to Haiti to visit his older brother, John, since 1995 and this trip was the first time Jonathan, who’s 11 years old, was making the journey. As a father of a ten year old son, I know it’s going to be great to watch the son travel outside the comfy confines of the developed world with his father.
Landing in Port au Prince on a sunny day from the west is one of the most beautiful approaches you’ll experience. The deep blues of the Caribbean with the lush green of the Haiti shoreline make for a pastoral contrast to the dense urban expanse of Haiti’s capital and largest city. Disembarking the plane and getting on the bus to the main terminal, we were greeted just like every arriving plane with a band of Haitian musician.
Passing thru customs and entering the baggage claim area, the three of us meet up with another fellow traveler, Jonathan Chan, who serves as the Haiti Partners social media coordinator. He had arrived shortly before us on a flight from Ft. Lauderdale. After a short wait, we made our way outside the terminal to meet up with John Engle, our host, his two young children, and Felix, a local Haiti Partners team member.
Coming out of the terminal, you have to run what I’ll call the “Port au Prince Porter Gauntlet”. It’s a surreal experiences as men in red shirts jockey to help arriving passengers carry their bags to their cars. It’s the first sign that there is a great supply of labor in Haiti and a desire to hustle.
With a change of plans because of our planned fifth traveler, Mark Dowds, having to call off his trip from Argentina due to a labor strike, we load up the truck and head up the mountainside toward Bellevue, Haiti Partner’s operational center and our home for the next five days.
Driving thru the streets of Port au Prince, we came quickly across the ubiquitous tents housing the many thousands of people the earthquake displaced almost two years ago. It was encouraging to see the progress being made to resettle and rebuild, but much work remains.
After a respite over a late lunch at La Reserve, we made our way to Bellevue to settle into our living quarters, recharge our phones and laptops, and enjoy a delicious dinner.
Catching our second wind, we loaded up again in the car to drive down the mountainside to the Hotel Oloffson for the magic and mystique of RAM, a legendary rasin muzik band known for its Thursday night performances. It was a wonderful way to end the long day.
On our second day, we have a full agenda meeting with a number of leaders from different NGOs and companies to learn about the innovative approaches they are taking here in Haiti to help Haitians raise themselves up from the bootstraps. More to come on that.
Here We Go: Hendo Heads to Haiti
#1 Thing You Need to Learn from This Post:
I’ll be in Haiti today to start a five-day trip to help Haiti Partners take their education + entrepreneur initiative to the next level. You can come along for the ride here with daily posts.
A More Detailed Exploration:
As Jesse Engle of ExactTarget and my fellow traveler said yesterday, “Here we go!” This afternoon, we’ll be landing in Port au Prince for a five-day trip hosted by his brother John Engle, co-founder of Haiti Partners.
You can learn more about the exciting partnership between Haiti Partners and Grameen Creative Lab that seeks to empower families to start their own businesses to fund their children’s education. And if you feel so inclined, you can join as a charitable investor in this adventure by making a gift of $50 or more here.
I’ve been looking forward to returning to Haiti since I first visited it last year. We’ll be meeting with numerous Haitian leaders, including Richard A. Morse (aka @RAMHaiti), to discuss ideas for how to forge a stronger link between education and entrepreneurs. Plus, we plan to catch the weekly show of RAM, a mizik rasin band, at the Hotel Oloffson. Great times ahead!
Here’s a great introduction to Haiti Partners:
