Palo Altan Helps Haiti

Past an old sugar factory and a market, back and forth across a river and up a mountain for three hours—or two hours at Haitian speed—and you have arrived.

Those were the directions un-expecting Randy Mont-Reynaud received on her first trip to Haiti at four o’clock in the morning.

Ten years ago, Mont-Reynaud woke up in Haiti to the smell of coffee and followed her nose downstairs to where she met a man who would forever change her life: Friar Tuck. “Well, he looked like Friar Tuck,” Mont-Reynaud said. “That was Philippe.”

That morning, Philippe laughed at Mont-Reynaud’s plans to visit “the real Haiti” in Fondwa, which he compared to the Taj Mahal of Haiti. “‘You want to see the real Haiti,’ ” she recalls Philippe saying. “ ‘You come to my mountain.’ … And so it was.”

“We went up to [that mountain],” Mont-Reynaud recalls. “We stayed a couple of days; I fell in love with it.”

Ever since, Mont-Reynaud has been returning about once a year for a month long period to “Philippe’s Mountain”—Mon Bouton—doing humanitarian work with her organization, If Pigs Could Fly: Helping Hillside Haiti.

A decade after If Pigs Could Fly was founded and a few days after Mont-Reynaud’s return from a month in Haiti, Mont-Reynaud reflects on her experiences there.

She speaks of Haitians’ peanut earrings, their lack of electricity and toilets, and their rubble-filled streets. She mentions their dirt floors, their Catholic devotion, and their deceptively large meals.

“It’s medieval,” Mont-Reynaud explains. “There are these candlesticks in the corners... and no shoes are comfortable. You’ve got to put on tennis shoes or you can’t walk through the rubble.”

She explains how the rubble, contrary to common belief, is not a result of the recent earthquake; even ten years ago the streets were piled high with it to keep the roads from washing out. In fact, she says there was not a large change in Haiti before and after the earthquake. Same rubble, same hardships, just different publicity.

Mont-Reynaud even considers Vietnam in 1967, where she did humanitarian work, was better off than Haiti in 2001. Vietnam at that time had a police force, telephones, markets, and roads; much more advanced than Haiti, she says.

But in recent years, Mont-Reynaud has stopped bringing her students from Stanford to Haiti and has begun bringing other Haitians to Mon Bouton to experience what their own people are going through.

When she did bring Stanford students, though, she brought them for an unconventional reason. “I brought teams of Stanford students to learn from Haitians, not to teach,” Mont-Reynaud said. “I sort of flipped that whole development upside down.”

And learn they did. The students learned how to pound coffee by hand, how to start a wood fire without a match and how to make rope out of a rice sack.

Many of these items were brought back to America to be kept and sold.

Unfortunately, in Haiti, getting money is not so simple.

How do Haitians make money? “They don’t,” Mont-Reynaud said. “They sell themselves. They sell their children.”

Children do not go to school to learn, but instead to eat. They are sent into Port au Prince, the capital, as child-slaves because there they will have a place to sleep and food to eat. Money is the main concentration in Haiti, because money is how Haitians get food.

Mont-Reynaud also explains an economic process of Haitians with family in America: “People send remission money there [to Haiti]. Haitians [in America] send their families [in Haiti] huge storage containers of soap, old clothes, tin cans, food, toothpaste, toilet paper, medicine, aspirin, antibiotics, anything you can fit in the container, it goes there [to Haiti] and people [the Haitians] sell it. How do they [the other Haitians] buy it? With the money that the people are sending in. And the money goes round and round… Haiti is not unique in this.”

“You cannot believe it until you’re there and seeing what people do,” Mont-Reynaud said.

Even after “seeing it” on so many occasions, Mont-Reynaud has never gotten used to the poverty of Haiti. She also feels a distinct distance from the native Haitians.

“Years ago, Toma [a Haitian she works closely with] told me, ‘You’re not a visitor anymore, Madame Randy. You’re one of us.’ But I’m not. And I never will be. I always have my parachute. I can always leave. Even if I go there and intend to stay, I can always leave. And they can’t. So I’m always on the outside.”

This is why she disapproves so wildly of sending Haitians from the mountain into the city. They cannot all leave; most of them are stuck on the mountain. Instead of bringing the Haitians to amenities, she tries to bring amenities to Haitians.

“As an anthropologist, you go there, you don’t wanna change anything.” Mont-Reynaud said. “And yet you go to Haiti and you can’t let this continue; you’ve got to change something. I mean, you got to put shoes on the feet or food in the belly.”

But Mont-Reynaud is always questioning her philosophies. “Right?” she wonders aloud about her prior statement. “I don’t know. Is it the right thing to do? You can’t do it all. So you take one girl from one family and give her a chance? What about everybody else? And what kind of an example is this?”

Mont-Reynaud gained more confidence regarding her program as she thought it out in her head. “Our project is trying to make a viable life in the mountains. You can’t send another two-thousand people to Port au Prince,” she seems to convince herself. “No, you have to decentralize.”

If Pigs Could Fly: Helping Hillside Haiti is doing just that. So far, they have installed a light post for Mon Bouton and are currently working on bringing water up to the mountain.

Eric Sabelman, an If Pigs Could Fly volunteer, explains the water system generally. “We are providing custom-made parts for a tower to hold the solar panel, since there is no structure to put it on,” he said. 

“These parts are made in TechShop in Menlo Park by another volunteer and me. The components will be shipped to Haiti as a kit with tools and an instruction book (translated into Kreyol [the Haitian language] if needed). Some parts will be bought and cut locally (metal and plastic pipe).  We are discussing a partnership with Enersa, a Haitian-owned company, to provide skilled labor at the installation site in the mountains; Enersa may later want to replicate the kits we have designed.”

Sabelman also speaks of the difference between their system and others that are similar. “Other such water systems that I know of are either urban or agricultural; other solar pumps for domestic water exist but their specifications are different.”

He involved himself in If Pigs Could Fly through the Quakers. “Quakers have a history of providing humanitarian relief where no other agency will do so,” Sabelman said. “Randy's project certainly qualifies.  In addition, her focus on a very small region, requiring her to know by name and form mutual relationships with the people being helped, is very different from a typical aid organization.”

Helping Haitians certainty does not come without its hardships, though. The trek to the mountain is the least of Mont-Reynaud’s concerns. The installation of the projects is just another task. The real hardship she faces is the money problem.

Because Haitians hardly make money, they always need money.

This means that Mont-Reynaud is in a hard spot—anything she does, anything the Haitians do, Mont-Reynaud finds herself handing out money. It’s difficult, she says, because she’s giving them water, light, but they want money because they need food.

This also adds to her conflicting anthropological feeling about rural Haiti.

No matter how she feels, she feels more and more that there must be a power, a god. “There is power. There is. Because otherwise I can’t explain this,” Mont-Reynaud says while watching an If Pigs Could Fly video of Haitians singing praise to the Lord.

Perhaps that is why, despite any doubts, she continues helping Haiti year after year. And her duties don’t go unnoticed.

“It is an education,” Sabelman said. “A form of service and a source of inner growth to work with such a person.”