ALL TOGETHER FOR HILLSIDE HAITI 2024

Who we are:  

We are a small, grassroots 501-c3 (since 2001) that collaborates with a community in the mountains of rural Haiti. Our website: www.ifpigscouldflyhaiti.org

Shipping News, Ports and Roads Blocked We carry on, "nou degaje," Our work in the mountains is ongoing despite the chaos in the Capital, the Republik of Port Au Prince. It's another country here in the mountains, but still.. Imports slowed. Livestock as well as people tighten belts, as always. The population hangs on, though crops diminished. The current home grown meager food supply has increased dependency on imported rice, even beans. World events, climate changes, threaten to bring this mountain community to it's knees...But not quite. Some how, rural Haitians degaje and carry on. Faith helps - theirs, and from you and me.

Solar Power Pumps Water UpHill:  We continue to provide paid work and training. Our team has implemented solar energy to replace human labor, with special pumps and PVC engineered to make the trek up winding hillsides to storage and faucets. This collaborative effort, with our local team of experts who know the territory, and our Stanford-trained engineers (who dream up plans, absent on-the-ground experience), has been in place since 2014. With a firm understanding of gravity and the Pythagorean team, our local experts have refined the Stanford dream and made it manifest and functional in the hills of rural Haiti. This system serves perhaps 80 households. "A dwop nan bokit", but still a drop

Pwojet Pwa: A hill of beans is needed. We provided support for small landholders who must focus on food crops (corn and beans) in lieu of cash crop (manyok has found a market, but our farmers cannot yet take advantage of it.) After recent droughts, food security - there isn't much - is a matter of breaking through demonstrations in the capital and blockades, gangster held roads. Subsistence agriculture barely lives up to its name. We try to fill the gap as best we can, when schools are open, we provide snacks for as many as we reach.

Food vs cash crops, varied diet? In this emergency, we can't afford to worry about vegetables and seedlings; now, attention turns to the lost harvest of amber waves of green: pwa nwa (black beans) that have been the staple of this zone for generations.

Funds from this effort will go to support school feeding programs and provide beans (for consumption) and beans/seedlings for replanting. It won't solve the long-term problem of food self-sufficinecy, but it will provide some hope, and agricultural work people here know well and can do.

Given the emergency, the beans, seeds and plantlings are charitable - and yet, work will be required for the community to bring Pwojet Pwa to fruition.

Gratitude  from the farming community, families and children (yes, they work in the fields too) forthcoming, from the heart. Mesi anpil anpil!