Supporter: Linda Mason

Linda Mason and Philippe Dodard. Photo: Joy Portella/Mercy Corps

Philippe Dodard is one of Haiti’s treasures, one of its most beloved artists. His paintings hang in some of the most prestigious galleries throughout the world. But fine art is only one of his callings; he has long been committed to public art as well. “The Haitian people are a deeply religious and aesthetic people," he says. "Art is an important expression of their character.” 

On January 12, Philippe was at the Presidential Palace in Port-au-Prince meeting with the First Lady, Elisabeth Preval. Philippe served as her cultural advisor. They were making plans for the annual Carnival in Haiti, a joyous celebration of culture, music and art in the streets. They spent hours with musicians and artists, planning a celebration where millions could participate.

Later that afternoon, Philippe left the palace and got in his car with his 18-year-old son, who was with him that day. The car started to shake violently. Philippe glanced over his shoulder and he saw the great dome of the Presidential Palace shake and then crumble before his eyes, just minutes after he had left.  The whole city tilted and shook and crashed. There was one long wail as millions of Haitians joined together in fear as their world violently fell apart.
 
“The shock was beyond belief. I was quiet for two weeks; I didn’t shed a tear," Philippe remembers. "I just focused on finding members of my family, friends and neighbors. I couldn’t think beyond that as we dug ourselves out. I didn’t touch a paintbrush for two weeks. One night I sat down at my easel and started to paint. That is when the tears started to flow and didn’t seem to stop.”

Philippe painted and painted, expressing the experience of an earthquake. Those “earthquake” paintings have been shown in exhibits in the U.S. and elsewhere.

It was at that point that Philippe decided to dedicate himself to the recovery of his people. He would use his art as a vehicle. This is also when I first met Philippe. I arrived in Port-au-Prince a few weeks after the earthquake. I and other members of Mercy Corps staff met with the First Lady and Philippe Dodard to discuss bringing our Comfort for Kids programme to the vast tent camps.

Mercy Corps Youth Programme Manager Kyle Dietrich with Philippe Dodard. Photo: Fabiola Coupet/Mercy Corps

Comfort for Kids is a counselling programme developed by Bright Horizons Family Solutions and Mercy Corps after 9/11 where we counseled and trained teachers, caregivers and parents how to help their children cope with the World Trade Centre tragedy. We developed a counselling and training programme, and Bright Horizons had also written a book, “What Happened to My World”, to help parents and caregivers understand — by age group — how children were processing the crisis and what they could do to help. Together, these two agencies also mounted a Comfort for Kids programme in the Gulf States after Hurricane Katrina. Mercy Corps has since used this programme following earthquakes in China, Peru, Chile and now Haiti.
 
Philippe Dodard and First Lady Preval were extremely enthusiastic about the programme and we immediately decided to combine it with a space for children where they could play and make art and music. As Philippe says, “The smiles came back to the children’s faces. They were able to become children again.”  The Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. now has an exhibit of the children’s art that has come out of this programme.
 
Philippe Dodard continues to dedicate himself to the recovery of his people. Under the leadership of Mercy Corps youth director, Kyle Dietrich, and with the help of Philippe Dodard, the Comfort for Kids programme has reached some 53,000 children in Port-au-Prince, many who are living in tent camps across the city.

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I arrived in Port-au-Prince on Wednesday of this week, just ahead of Tomas, the tropical storm that just passed through Haiti today.

Yesterday, we headed up to the rural Central Plateau — about 25 miles outside of the capital city — where Mercy Corps is focusing its longer-term recovery efforts. Mercy Corps decided within weeks after the earthquake to focus its efforts in these rural provinces. Port-au-Prince simply cannot support its population of three million. Some one million people are still living in tents after the earthquake. There are insufficient schools and jobs.

In the provinces, Mercy Corps is mounting programmes that support people who have decided to leave Port-au-Prince and returned to their native villages. Mercy Corps' programmes provide temporary jobs through cash-for-work building roads, digging sanitation trenches and rehabilitating agricultural land. They also offer support to host families that have taken in returning relatives from Port-au-Prince. In months to come, Mercy Corps will begin a significant agricultural development programme, helping to develop and support small agri-businesses.

Outside of the provincial town of Mirebalais, I spent time in the home of Rosanne Marcellin. She and her husband, Renal Josef, have six children who range from ages 6 to 18. They are barely subsistence farmers and are part of the 80 percent of the population who live on less than $2 a day.

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On my recent trip to Haiti, I was filled first with despair and then hope. Despair for the overwhelming human and physical destruction. Hope because of the quiet strength, resilience, and determination of the Haitian people.

I spent my time in the sprawling tent camps in Port-au-Prince. It's estimated that 1 million people now live in these camps — with no water or sanitation and where people sleep under bed sheets tied to sticks in the ground. The city is now populated with amputees, orphans and the homeless. This was a desperately poor population before the earthquake. What little they had is now gone.

Let us not forget that this is a disaster of extreme poverty. This earthquake did not need to result in such devastation. The Northridge earthquake that took place in southern California in 1994 similarly struck a dense urban area and was nearly as strong as Haiti's quake (a 6.7), yet its toll of human misery wasn't nearly as high. Sixty people died in California; as many as 230,000 people have died in Haiti. People died because they lived in shanties perched on hillsides, because they were in buildings that were poorly built in a crowded city of three million on a fault line with no building codes.

As I spent time in the tent camps, I thought, 'How are Haitians going to survive, let alone rebuild?' The answer became clear to me as I watched how Haitians live their daily lives. Everywhere I went, they were making the most of meagre resources — washing a shirt in a plastic bottle of water, taking scraps of food and stretching them into a meal, scavenging through rubble to find material to rebuild a hut. Their enterprising spirit and drive for survival sprung quickly to life after the earthquake.

In one small tent, I met Charlene Malebranche. There she lived with her husband and two little girls, Dahlia and Sahina, and a 16-year-old friend who had lost her entire family. They had retrieved cinder blocks from the rubble to make an uncomfortable floor that would keep them off the mud when the rainy season begins. Charlene invited me to sit in her tent. She talked about how they all sleep holding each other since they are afraid of another earthquake. Her two girls never leave her side. She takes some of the rice she has received in distributions and makes a traditional dish, akasan, to sell for a bit of cash on the street. She smiled warmly throughout our conversation and showed a quiet but fierce determination to ensure her family's survival.

Charlene Malebranche and her daughters. Photo: Linda Mason/Mercy Corps

I witnessed this same strength and resolve when I met another mother, Haiti's First Lady, Elisabeth Delatour Preval. The earthquake was a great equalizer. Like so many others, her home and place of work were destroyed along with most government buildings. I met with the First Lady in the government's makeshift headquarters in a small police station near the airport.

First Lady Preval is passionate about the needs of Haiti's children and parents. Half of Haiti's people are under 18. Madame Preval echoed the sentiments of Charlene. The half-million children living in the tent camps are frightened and clutching their parents, who are equally as afraid. I went to Haiti on behalf of Mercy Corps and Bright Horizons. They have created a Comfort for Kids programme, implemented after 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the Sichuan earthquake in China to help parents and caregivers effectively respond to children's emotional needs and symptoms of trauma. Collaborating with First Lady Preval, Mercy Corps is now conducting this training programme throughout the day in some of the city's massive tent camps.

Prior to the earthquake, 70 percent of the population survived on less than $2 a day. This extreme poverty existed despite, or perhaps because of, the massive amounts of aid that have been pumped into the country for decades. Yet I marveled as I saw street vendors and markets spring back into life within days of the earthquake. There is a deeply embedded positive, entrepreneurial spirit in the Haitian culture.

There is hope that now Haiti can be rebuilt stronger and better. Aid agencies should build on this enterprising spirit and give people the tools to help themselves. One effective approach is the cash-for-work programmes that are being introduced by forward-thinking relief agencies. Residents can decide what is most needed for their community, and workers are paid a daily wage to clear rubble, dig drainage ditches or build latrines. With their daily wages, families can buy the things they need most with money they have earned — restoring dignity — while also pumping money into the Haitian economy at a time when it is most needed.

Aid agencies should creatively support and encourage local initiative and enterprise. Cash grants or loans should be made to small and medium size entrepreneurs and business people. A street vendor can use a small grant to purchase a push-cart for her wares; a small business person can use a loan to refurbish an apparel production facility. Technology can be used to provide banking through cell phones, which nearly every poor family owns.

As international donors prepare to gather this month in New York City, they must remember that Haitians, both poor like Charlene Malebranche and powerful like First Lady Preval, will ensure the country's recovery. There is hope that Haiti can be rebuilt out of its ruins, but it will take both a long-term commitment from the donor community and a resolve to build on Haitians' own initiative, rather than imposing our own.

(Editor's note: this story originally appeared on The Huffington Post.)

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(From left) Liliane Hollant and Griff Samples, Mercy Corps Comfort for Kids programme; Haiti's First Lady Elisabeth Préval; Linda Mason, Mercy Corps Chair; Haitian Cultural Advisor Philippe Dodart. Photo: Mercy Corps

During the last part of my visit to Haiti I was fortunate to meet with Madame Elisabeth Delatour Préval, Haiti's First Lady. She and her husband, Haitian President René Préval, were just entering the Presidential Palace when the earthquake struck. They jumped back as a large part of the palace crumbled before their eyes. Their private home also collapsed.

Madame Préval spent the morning before our meeting moving into another house. She is a bright, charismatic, compassionate woman. She has gone on national radio several times since the earthquake to talk directly to the population of Haiti. She speaks of the resilient spirit of the Haitian people and their strong sense of community and helping one another.

The government offices have largely been destroyed, so the government is operating out of a police station near the airport. We met with the Madame Préval and her Cultural Advisor, Philippe Dodart, in the one small conference room in the police station. We talked about the great needs of Haiti's children.

Madame Préval wants to devote her efforts to helping children get through this crisis. We talked about our Comfort for Kids programme and how we could collaborate together on behalf of children and parents in Port-au-Prince. We decided on a major collaboration throughout the tent encampments in Port-au-Prince.

The First Lady's office, Mercy Corps and UNICEF will create child spaces in the tent encampments. UNICEF will provide play, art therapy activities and counselling for the children. While the children are engaged in these activities, Mercy Corps will provide the Comfort for Kids counselling programme for the parents. We will distribute Comfort Kits to the children.

It's a very important programme for both the children and parents, and the collaboration is a wonderful way to work directly with the government of Haiti on its priorities for children and parents. We presented the First Lady with our first copy of "What Happened to Our World", our training manual, translated into Creole. She was very grateful.

I sat through one of our Comfort for Kids trainings, run by Griff Samples. I was able to see first hand how hungry parents were for this counselling and support. Parents are confused by much of the behaviour they see in their children. They are also confused about their own reactions.

One teacher said she is plagued by guilt that she told children to stay in the classroom when the earthquake hit. Although they luckily escaped injury, she is full of self-recrimination that she did the exact wrong thing.

"They could have all been killed, and that would have been my fault. That is on my shoulders," she said.

She visibly relaxed when Griff explained that you can't judge your actions during the earthquake. No one had ever experienced anything like that before.

"You were actually trying to help the children. You did what you thought best. You shouldn't think otherwise," Griff told her.

After the two-hour training, many wanted more, and we found that many adults came back for the next training to hear the messages again.

The Comfort for Kids programme was developed by Bright Horizons and Mercy Corps after the 9/11 attack. It has been effectively used in that crisis, after Hurricane Katrina, after the China earthquake, and now will be a central part of our recovery effort in Haiti. It will make an important difference in countless lives over the next many months.

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Charlene Malebrauche and her three-year-old daughter Sahina, displaced since the earthquake destroyed their house in Port-au-Prince. Photo: Linda Mason/Mercy Corps

One million people are displaced by the earthquake. There are tent encampments throughout the city. In fact, now every open space is now filled with tents — most often just plastic or sheets on poles.

Despite some media reports, there is very little looting and violence. In fact, I am struck by how calm the city is — congested but calm. The city of three million is largely sleeping in the streets. People are too afraid to sleep in their homes, even if they weren’t damaged in the earthquake. They block off streets at night and sleep on mats away from the buildings.

We met Charlene Malebrauche and her two daughters, six-year-old Dahlia and three-year-old Sahina, in one of the tent communities. She and her two daughters were in their small concrete house when the earthquake struck. They rushed out. The whole neighborhood was screaming. Charlene grabbed a few things from her home, including Dahlia’s doll and Sahina’s stuffed bunny.

Their house collapsed and they are now living under a sheet on poles. They gathered cinder blocks from the debris of fallen buildings and lay them down on the ground so, when it rains, they won’t be sleeping in the mud. In their five-by-eight-foot space sleep Charlene and her husband, Dahlia, Sahina and a friend who has no family.

At least 100 families are living side by side in this one community. When I asked her what she had eaten today, she showed me a corn mush called akasan.

It’s hard to imagine how anyone in the camp survives. No one has work. This is one of the many communities where Mercy Corps has started a cash-for-work programme. Every household can designate one member to work, cleaning earthquake debris away from their living space and digging drainage trenches in anticipation of the coming rainy season.

Workers are paid a daily wage. They will use the cash to buy what they need and begin to jump start the local economy. Mercy Corps is following the cash-for-work programme with a loan programme for individuals and small businesses, particularly outside of Port-au-Prince as more and more people leave the unliveable city for the countryside.

As I talked to Charlene, her two little girls clung to her legs. She said since the earthquake, the children never leave her side. Charlene encourages them to play, but they won’t let Charlene out of her sight.

Dahlia, the six-year-old, has trouble sleeping at night. She is sure the earthquake will come again. She incessantly asks her mother why the earthquake came.

And this is where our Comfort for Kids programme is so critical: helping children like Sahina and Dahlia move beyond their fear and uncertainty. Comfort for Kids trains parents, teachers and social workers how to help children process and cope with this tragedy. An entire generation of children has been deeply traumatized by this tragedy.

We are here to help.

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