After the Batey

There’s something addictive about “the field.” Out in the countryside, among peasants, where the roads transform into rocky, uneven earth. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to completely remove myself from this environment. It’s refreshing, rejuvenating.

Here in Haiti, the countryside is certainly not the idyllic, contented landscape it’s often romanticized to be. Haiti’s countryside is harsh and rugged and unforgiving. It takes lives at the same rapid pace its peasants create new ones.

Maybe the romantic notion of life in the countryside – a quaint home, fair-sized plot of land, good health, and eternal tranquility – was once true in Haiti, but not these days. Food production is too low. People can barely feed themselves on their tiny plots of hillside rock, let alone sell what remains after consumption. And schools are atrocious; hospitals are absent. It’s not a pleasant picture, but I see hope for the countryside, so maybe that’s why I can feel refreshed in an environment that should depress me.

The countryside could be better. With roads to transport harvests to markets, or with inexpensive investments in irrigation, Haiti’s peasants could produce more than just 47% of the nation’s food supply. Peasants who grow mangos could form cooperatives to export Haiti’s little treasures. Instead, poverty and circumstance conspire against them: they sell their mangos to an intermediary who will sell them in Port-au-Prince, and the only thing he leaves behind is a promise to repay the peasant once he’s sold his truck load. Maybe I’m delusional, but I have hope these things will be righted before too long.

And then there’s Fonkoze, the microfinance institution with an unshakeable commitment to Haiti’s poor. Thanks to Fonkoze, my job is to direct a program that provides hope to peasant women; a program that rejuvenates individuals and families and communities alike. Yes, microfinance only treats the symptoms of Haiti’s structural illnesses, it does little to address the root causes, but the results are beautiful and significant to each and every child of a Fonkoze borrower. A borrower who can now enroll her child in school or treat illnesses with more than tea wrung from nearby leaves.

Poverty eliminates hope because, in most cases, poverty represents the absence of opportunity. Even the most optimistic are defeated by enduring poverty. Fonkoze rekindles spirits by offering opportunity. Maybe someday the government will get its act together and inspire some hope as well.

In any event, the countryside continues to beckon me. I recently rented two rooms in a home in the wonderful provincial town of Milot, which sits at the base of Sans Souci Palace and Haiti’s Citadel. I will be there one week each month and I’ve already become known among my neighbors and at the corner where vendors sell Haiti’s famous spicy peanut butter, mamba. I’m the Haitian creole speaking blan who’s always playing with children and snacking on peanut butter sandwiches.