Four days of travel and 52 hours on the ground in Haiti. Now, that’s an experience for a chance fall weekend.
I joined a small group of Convoy of Hope staff and businesspeople from around the country Sept. 19–22 on a Hope Experience in Haiti.
The trips are designed to educate and substantiate Convoy’s mission of feeding children worldwide, responding to disasters, connecting communities and partnering for resources. The businesspeople invited are often donors seeing the fruits first-hand, prospects or those interested in learning more for potential partnerships.
It was a whirlwind trip in which we visited three orphanages, a new food distribution center, an agriculture test site and a local village farm.
The orphanages are among the 50 that Convoy feeds in Haiti, along with the 280 schools that receive daily nourishment through Springfield-based Convoy and partner agencies Mission of Hope and Feed My Starving Children. All told, Convoy is responsible for feeding 70,000 Haitian children each day. But even more staggering, there are another 47,000 children on a waiting list to start receiving the rice and soy fortified “manna packs.”
We heard those numbers first-hand while touring the 36,000-square-foot warehouse built last year on property owned by Mission of Hope. Together, the agencies are meeting daily needs but also teaching Haitians to fish for themselves.
It’s great that bags of rice or beans are shipped from Missouri or Michigan to feed kids around the world. But considering global food economics, doesn’t it make much more sense for those countries to grow crops and feed their own?
That wheel is beginning to turn in Haiti.
On our warehouse tour, we walked right into a historic event. The first shipment of locally grown rice had arrived and was ready to be packed for storage and distribution. Two years in the making, it’s enough crops to pack 400,000 meals, grown by a cooperative of some 3,000 Haitian rice farmers.
Mixing business and compassion, that’s the big idea. My heart breaks for these kids left alone with hardly a role model, but there is a path for change.
Convoy of Hope is influencing the people of Haiti, literally from the ground up. In its agriculture program, farmers agree to give 10 percent of their harvest back to feed children, save 10 percent for seed next season and they’re free to use the remaining 80 percent however they choose, usually selling at market or feeding their families.
We can only hope it will change the next generation.
I’m told visitors to Haiti are often left asking, “Is there any hope in Haiti?”
Yes. I saw it.
Certainly, the doubt-filled pursuit of hope is with reason. On the surface, Haitian road and sewer infrastructure is inept, post-earthquake tent cities still exist and there’s a history of deep government distrust.
On the flight down, I saw a commercial on American Airlines TV of Convoy co-founder Hal Donaldson talking about the mission. He said, “Dropping food off the back of a truck, anyone can do that. But are we making lasting change?”
Maybe it’s just a glimmer right now. Maybe it’s just beginning more than three years after the devastating earthquake.
But it’s there. It just needs tilled, watered and fertilized.
Springfield Business Journal Editor Eric Olson can be reached at eolson@sbj.net.[[In-content Ad]]
