Supporter: Annalise Briggs

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.

Read more ▸

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.

Read more ▸

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.

Read more ▸

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.

Read more ▸

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.

Read more ▸