Annalise Briggs's blog

A Haitian boy sits with eyes closed during a Comfort for Kids-led meditation, trying to find peace and serenity amidst his country's continuing chaos. Photo: Fabiola Coupet/Mercy Corps

After warming up outside with a name game, the children return to the classroom for their next activity. The mentor asks them to close their eyes and focus on their breathing. They have just had an outdoor activity and it’s time to slow down — it’s time for meditation.

Mercy Corps is training teachers, psychologists and parents in a programme called Comfort for Kids that helps children heal from the trauma they have experienced. More than 61,000 Haitian children have been reached through this network. The goal of meditation: to focus on breathing, take a moment for some quiet time and gain a different perspective. These children are learning how to find peace and serenity in the midst of the chaos that surrounds them.

I wept during the return flight from Port-au-Prince to Miami. It’s painful to see the suffering and poverty in Haiti. It’s difficult to imagine sharing a toilet with 300 strangers every day. Or to envision sleeping on the ground, night after night with no door to lock and no bed to sleep on. Or not having privacy to bathe.

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I met Guivens Cemervil for the first time when he traveled to Mercy Corps headquarters in Portland, Oregon last January on the anniversary of Haiti’s earthquake. His story is remarkable: he was the only survivor in his university’s classroom of 60 to be unharmed. Fifty-five of his classmates were killed and four maimed. Guivens spent 12 hours digging his mother out of the rubble — he pulled her out alive the next day, on January 13th. His view on life is forever changed – and he inspires everyone who has met him. You can read his story, in his own words, here.

After the earthquake struck, Guivens volunteered to help out in any way possible. His task: to write the names of the dead into the city’s computer database. It was there that he met one of our staff and was hired as a programme officer for Mercy Corps’ youth sports programme.

Guivens’ enthusiasm cannot go unnoticed. His smile lights up the room and it’s impossible not to feel his zeal for life. It’s only appropriate that his job is working with children to help them improve life skills.

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Morse Alexis is a shop owner who is able to sell food and accept money via his cell phone through Mercy Corps’ mobile wallet payment system. Photo: Annalise Briggs/Mercy Corps

Morse Alexis welcomes customers into his small shop with a warm smile and asks how he can help. He discusses prices and availability of his products, which vary from rice and beans to sodas to vegetables. Morse is married, 46 years old, with one son and another child on the way.

Mercy Corps is providing 20,000 families with monthly stipends of £24 for nine months to buy staples of rice, beans, corn and oil. The innovative part of this programme is not the programme itself but the delivery method. Instead of distributing cash which can be dangerous and insecure, Mercy Corps has partnered with a mobile operator Viola´ and a Haitian bank Unibank to develop a “mobile wallet” — a cell phone that works like a debit card.

Beneficiaries are credited money on their phone and they go to participating merchants like Morse’s shop to purchase their food via their cell phone. This leap technology has transformed the way Haitians understand financial services. Not long ago, walkie-talkies were the only way to communicate for many Haitians — now they can use their cell phone like a debit card.

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Sunset in Saint-Marc, Haiti Photo: Annalise Briggs/Mercy Corps

When the plane landed in Haiti, the only thing usual was the pilot announcing “Welcome to Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. The temperature is 87 degrees and the local time is 10:48 A.M.” in the same warm and welcoming tone as any other airport. It was a clean start, a way to say arriving in Port-Au-Prince is just like any other trip you may be taking.

I don’t know the stories of those passengers beside me, but I do know that whether they were arriving or returning, Haiti is not like any other place they would travel to. It is not a clean start. It is not like any other place in the world. It is a country whose people have survived one of the most historic and horrifying catastrophes of our time.

The earthquake damage can be seen as soon as you deplane — terminals are boarded up and there are more broken windows than not. The former American Airlines arrival terminal is a makeshift baggage claim with luggage stacked high and deep. It seemed more like a “lost and found” than a baggage claim but, symbolic to Haiti, more felt lost than found. It was as though it was too overwhelming to organise the bags simply by flight or airline or departure city. So, instead, people step over bags and rearrange them in no particular order to try to uncover what belongs to them.

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Gunanto is a vendor who sells healthy snacks for children in one of Jakarta's poorest neighborhoods. Mercy Corps staff visit vendors of their healthy street food project, KeBal, several times each week to monitor them and ensure proper hygiene and nutrition standards are met. Photo: Greg Briggs for Mercy Corps

Behaviour is hard to change. I know. I’ve tried. Even with support, it’s still extraordinarily difficult to change. To learn new skills. To give up character flaws. To be a better person.

The last programme I visited in Jakarta is a Healthy Street Foods Project called KeBal, translated: My Child’s Café. (Coincidently, this programme is one of two selected just weeks ago as the 2009 winner of Mercy Corps’ most innovative projects worldwide.)

Children in Jakarta’s slums are extremely malnourished. Oftentimes, the easiest option for a mother is give her child small change (usually about, 2,000 Indonesian rupiah, which is only 20¢) to buy something from a food cart. Most of these options are fried or sugary foods that are really unhealthy and make children sick.

KeBal takes an innovative approach to address this problem: developing a food cart that is child-friendly (colourful, plays music and food is eye-level) and choosing a menu that provides vitamins and nutrients to children. Part of this project is teaching the cooks and food cart vendors about good hygiene and healthy food preparation. (Not wanting to risk getting sick because I was in Jakarta for such a short time, the only food cart I ate from was ours — and it was delicious!).

This pilot project has been so successful that it is being expanded to other neighborhoods in Jakarta.

Mercy Corps field staff talk about “continuous engagement” with the people we serve. I love that term. It’s encouraging, loving, unfailing. It means: we’re here to support you. Whatever it takes. We’re here today and if you need us, we’ll be here tomorrow.

I saw examples of continuous engagement in all the programmes I visited in Jakarta. The problems are complex and the solutions are multifaceted. Even if you provide access to clean water, you still need to teach people the importance of washing their hands. Even if you provide a system to turn a community’s waste into compost, people still have to learn how to maintain it. Even if you provide access to a mother’s support group, you still have to have trained facilitators there to dispel myths and answer questions. And, even if you provide a food cart with healthy ingredients, you still have to show someone how to cook the food safely so children don’t get sick.

Mercy Corps’ programmes work because there is continuous engagement. We don’t put the well in and walk away. Lasting change — the important kind — comes from teaching people how to do things differently and supporting them along the way.

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Farahdiba Tenrilemba Jafar (nicknamed Diba) is a communications officer for Healthy Start, a breastfeeding programme in Jakarta. Her enthusiasm is contagious as she tells me about the programme and benefits to babies when mothers breastfeed. Photo: Greg Briggs for Mercy Corps

I have always believed there are significant drawbacks to women’s equality. There is an unrelenting pressure to be perfect and to do everything: women are now expected to be amazing and attentive mothers, have multiple degrees, maintain successful careers and manage the household by cleaning and cooking. It just means more is expected in the same amount of time. I don’t think equality is about women having EQUAL rights and being treated the same as men. I think progress comes from recognizing women have DIFFERENT needs that need to be met and only by understanding those differences can true equality and empowerment come.

Diba, a communications officer for Healthy Start — Mercy Corps’ breastfeeding programme in Jakarta — is one of these powerhouse women. (I am convinced women like this have more chemicals in their brain which I lack and have always envied.) She’s a single mother, works full time and is going to school for her Master's degree. Diba’s eyes light up when she talks about her job.

“I never thought I would find an NGO with a breastfeeding programme!” she exclaims to me as we drive to the health clinic. I have never met someone so enthusiastic and heartfelt about their job. This is her passion, and you can see it in the way she describes the programme details, talks with field staff, volunteers, midwives and mothers.

Breastfeeding — or lack their of — is a huge challenge in Jakarta. Breastfeeding has numerous health benefits and can prevent malnutrition and child mortality. Drug companies push formulas on doctors, health clinics and midwives — many mothers aren’t even aware of their basic right to breastfeed. In the hospitals after delivery, the babies are taken from their mothers and bottle fed without the mother’s permission. Baby formula is expensive and mothers often times dilute it with dirty water —the only thing available — which can cause diarrhoea and illness.

Healthy Start is working with health care providers, midwives, community leaders and government workers to educate and support women and their right to breastfeed. I sat in on a mothers’ support group where women asked questions — and not just about breastfeeding.

“When can I introduce solid foods?"

"When I have leg cramps [from pregnancy] what is the least painful way to get up?"

"When will my baby’s teeth come in?”

The irony is that breastfeeding is not just a women’s issue in Jakarta. It takes the entire community to mobilize to learn about the benefits of breastfeeding and support these mothers. Many of the Healthy Start facilitators are men and most of the government leaders that Mercy Corps works with are men.

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn talk about this exact issue in their book, "Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide." He said, just as civil rights wasn’t a black issue and the Holocaust wasn’t a Jewish issue, women’s equality isn’t just a women’s issue. I have seen this firsthand in Jakarta where men are involved in learning and encouraging their wives, sisters, daughters and friends about the importance of breastfeeding, and bringing us one step closer to equality.

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These blue bins underneath the freeway in North Jakarta contain organic material for compost to sell as part of Mercy Corps' Community Based Solid Waste Management programme. Photo: Greg Briggs for Mercy Corps

I didn’t expect my first blog post from the field to be about sanitation. I thought maybe microfinance or agriculture programmes or mobile commerce. Something unique, innovative, life changing. But sanitation? Toilets? Hand washing? What could be less cutting edge?

Actually, I was surprised to find out just how innovative Mercy Corps’ approach to water and sanitation is.

In Jakarta, the bustling capital of Indonesia that is home to almost 10 million people, waste and sanitation is a major obstacle. Not washing hands can spread disease and cause life-threatening illnesses. Not only are there not clean toilets with running water or soap but even when you find a clean toilet (like in a hotel or nice restaurant), there’s no infrastructure to properly process the waste. In other words, human waste is seeping into the ground and rivers all over Jakarta. Innovation is not limited to coming up with a completely new concept, but developing a new approach to something totally ubiquitous in our daily lives.

The project I visited today is a pilot project working on a multi-level approach to waste management. There is empty space underneath the freeway, which has been used by make-shift houses that easily catch on fire. Mercy Corps has developed a programme to use this space to process waste from the communities and make compost to sell.

Yatini, a mother of 8 children and 14 grandchildren, who lives next to the freeway overpass makes hand bags with her daughters out of recycled rubbish. Photo: Greg Briggs for Mercy Corps

Waste is collected in the neighborhood, separated and the organic material is made into compost. This solves numerous problems: a positive use for the vulnerable and challenging space underneath the freeway; economic opportunities for people to find work; environmentally safe waste management and communities working together.

There’s more. Some of the women in this neighborhood are recycling plastic coffee, detergent and soap wrappers to make into reusable shopping bags and purses. (I was able to put a considerable dent in their inventory — a woman can never have too many handbags).

Together, Mercy Corps staff is working with these community members to solve daily problems in a completely new way. Now’s that’s innovative.

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I work as a fundraiser for Mercy Corps. When I tell people I meet that I’m in fundraising, they usually respond with “ugh, I would hate to ask people for money.” The funny thing is that I love it.

People want to help. I believe it is in our nature. Often times they don’t know how to. My mother always complains of “donor fatigue.” It’s so easy to feel overwhelmed by the millions of people in the world that desperately need help. Part of my job is to take those millions and highlight the individuals — to bring donors the personal connection through intimate stories and photographs. It’s a daunting task and I feel lucky to work with the colleagues that I do. Because, there’s simply no way to sugar coat it — there are millions who need our help.

Months ago I heard a news clip that changed my life. A nun said there are three things that we all hunger for:

1. To know that we are loved.
2. To make a difference.
3. To know that our lives have meaning.

I believe these three things to be true. And I feel it every day. We can each be of service in different ways; it is up to us to figure out what that way is. I love connecting people who want to help – with the people who need our help. I ask for their hard-earned money – even during a recession – and promise to make sure it gets to those in need.

Thank you for the opportunity to be of service.

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