Planting trees

Today's news from Hispaniola is horrifying:

U.S. and Canadian troops on Thursday rushed to a town left completely submerged by flooding, and health officials feared 1,000 people could be dead in that town alone, a figure that would nearly double the toll from storms that hit Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

About 300 bodies have been counted so far in the isolated border town of Mapou, said Dr. Yvon Lavissiere, the health director for the region.

That brought the confirmed death toll from Haiti and the Dominican Republic to nearly 870. ...

In the Haitian border town of Fond Verrettes, meanwhile, more troops handed out food Thursday to hundreds of survivors who lined up seeking help. Troops were also ferrying plastic tarpaulins to families seeking shelter.

Rains over the weekend lashed the island of Hispaniola, which Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic, sweeping away entire neighborhoods early Monday.

Including the 300 known dead so far in Mapou, some 450 bodies have been recovered in Haiti. At least 158 more people in Fond Verrettes were missing and presumed dead.

At least 417 bodies had been recovered in the Dominican Republic, and officials said some 400 were missing.

"The river took everything, there isn't anything left," said Jermanie Vulsont, a mother who said the rushing water swept away her five children in Fond Verrettes, about 35 miles southeast of Port-au-Prince.

Rushing waters and mudslides swept away most homes in Fond Verrettes, leaving it looking like a barren riverbed with stunned residents wondering about and asking troops for help.

For these people, among the poorest in the Western hemisphere, life was already hard and it just got worse.

The town of Mapou shares its name with a kind of Haitian tree. Most of Haiti's third of the island it shares with the Dominican Republic is mountainous. Once covered with trees, this steep, hilly country is now mostly deforested -- thanks in part to the industrious but short-sighted cottage industry of producing charcoal, which has been one of the few ways many Haitians have been able to make a living. Treeless hillsides plus tropical rains equals mudslides and devastation, as the Associated Press reports:

The death tolls have been high because the border area is largely deforested and many of the poor have built poorly constructed homes out of wood and tin. Hundreds of homes were destroyed on both sides of the border.

It's more than just the border area -- as much as 90 percent of Haiti is now this kind of moonscape environment.

At one level, the situation in Haiti -- the ecological devastation, intractable poverty and political turmoil -- seems overwhelming. But from another perspective, it's really very simple.

One of my favorite books is Jean Giono's brief parable The Man Who Planted Trees. The plot, protagonist and theme of the book are all contained in that title.

Haiti needs trees, the old man at the center of that book would recognize. So he would plant some.

Floresta is a group that's doing just that. It's a Christian mission group that plants trees -- or, as they put it, Floresta "reverses deforestation and poverty in the world, by transforming the lives of the rural poor." So far, they've planted more than 2 million trees in Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Mexico.

Haiti needs a lot more than just trees, of course. It's economy is sub-subsistence and it remains in political chaos. But without trees, any other measures are doomed to fail. The planting of trees may not be sufficient to solve all of the island nation's problems, but it is an essential and necessary step.

Floresta recognizes this. Their outlook, and their work, isn't as simple as that of Giono's glorious monomaniac. They do a bit more than just plant trees. But they do plant trees.

And Haiti needs trees.

(Floresta accepts donations here.)

Comments

[Patrick J. Mullins]

It's good to hear anybody say anything hopeful about Haiti, which has never worked. I think Haiti's deforestation goes back well to the French period even. Wade Davis's book THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW from 1989 does make it seem as if voudoun is so entrenched in every aspect of Haitian life that it has to be dealt with in every nuance of politics, but the truest missionaries wouldn't let this get in their way, of course. In the last few months--since Aristide's departure--I've thought Haiti was the purest example of the impoverishment of all geographical space. Can it really be reversed in any serious way at all when only a few countries in the world have a reasonably high standard of living (with two or three having an extremely high one) and the ones that are just getting by have to be so consumed with themselves, that every time there is a beginning with some project for Haiti, it is abandoned.

I've read about other mission groups in Haiti, and they do sound, like Floresta, to be the only sources of relief that Haiti ever gets. They would clearly be dedicating themselves wholly to Haiti, and still there is a country that even its neighbour, the Dominican Republic, sharing the same island, looks down on. Haiti NEVER succeeds. But any relief is meaningful. I've almost gone to Haiti twice, but there's no point unless I was a missionary myself; the tourist isn't really offering them anything

[Patrick J. Mullins]

Thanks, Fred. I am very interested in this organization and have just made a donation, and will continue to do so, hoping that your optimism is truer than my pessimism. I guess I don't think a thing will save Haiti, but it's sure the place to try to support.

[Daniel Heidebrecht]

Another worthwhile charity that is involved in self-sustaining agriculture and the prevention of soil erosion and deforestation in Haiti is World Neighbors. They have been working in Haiti for many years.

Their Haiti program information can be found at: World Neighbors Haiti Program

[Thel]

This is a topic pretty dear to my own heart. I'm interested to learn more about both of these organizations; in honor of our wedding guests this summer, my fiance and I were planning to make a donation to Trees for the Future, which does similar reforestation and community-building work in Haiti and in other countries. I'm glad to see similar organizations receiving well-deserved recognition for their critical work.

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, so I always took trees for granted. Not anymore.

[Phil K]

I was so impressed with the work shown at the Floresta website that I tried to buy a few bags of their coffee and make a donation for the same modest dollar amount as my purchase.

I found their donation webpage to be extremely counter-intuitive and difficult to use. I ended up not using the page because it looks so bozo I wouldn't trust it with my credit card number. I don't want to belabor the details, but you must enter a "donation amount" and credit card number before you can specify products. On the form that enters the credit card number, I couldn't find a "submit" or "continue" button, so it was not clear how their process would send me to the next page. Because it appeared that they were going to use some non-standard event (e.g. the click on the expiration date) to proceed to the next step, I decided to blow off the website and snail-mail them a check.

The site says they're saving money by using a free donation system. I definitely sympathize with their situation, but the particular system they're using ~has to be~ losing them money.

Are there non-profits that provide services like this to other non-profits? If so, can someone with non-profit website experience recommend them a decent donation system?

I have a friend who ran an anti-Iraq-war website, and he set up a donation system with Paypal, and had nothing but good things to say about them. Like Floresta, he wanted a system that could handle donations together with purchases of material to be shipped. He said it was easy to insert their hookup into his site, and their system helped him with shipping labels and the like.

It took me a while to find this -- it may save folks some looking:

Floresta USA
4903 Morena Blvd, Suite 1215
San Diego, California 92117

[patrick]

You must be right, Phil, but I thought it was just like Paypal or any other online credit card payment. They sent me a personal letter in a few hours thanking me, etc. However, I didn't have long, so I just quickly donated and left; I didn't even see the things they had for sale--maybe that's where it's more difficult, so for anyone just donating I recommend they go ahead and do it online if they want to like I did, and it showed up properly on my American Express statement today; I couldn't see or foresee any problems with the way I did it.