| Hope, Commitment, and Love—Three Schools for the Sisters of Saint Ann | ||||||||
| By Yungli Tseng, Colin Legerton, and Peter Chu Translated by Tang Yau-yang | ||||||||
Since the earthquake of 2010, Haiti has been plagued by political instability, an outbreak of cholera, and the onslaught of Hurricane Sandy. All this has slowed the efforts to rebuild the nation. Tzu Chi decided to help rebuild three schools that the earthquake had destroyed. Volunteers flew to Haiti countless times over three years to help with the construction. Now that the work is completed, the schools have been turned over to their operator, the Congregation of the Sisters of Saint Anne. The handover marks an important milestone in Tzu Chi’s post-quake relief work in Haiti.
At 4:53 in the afternoon of January 12, 2010, Gracieuse Willande Mars had just walked out of her school, Christ the King Secretarial School, when it collapsed right before her eyes. That day and that moment will likely stay etched in the collective memory of the Haitian people for the rest of their lives. At that moment, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake rocked Haiti. Over 300,000 people perished in the disaster. A quarter of a million homes and 30,000 commercial buildings were destroyed. Even the National Palace and all central government buildings collapsed in the temblor. Three years later, Gracieuse, now 24, returned to her alma mater. “It’s a miracle!” was all she could say when she saw the beautiful, sturdy school building standing in front of her. After the devastating earthquake, the Tzu Chi Foundation helped the Congregation of the Sisters of Saint Anne rebuild their three schools in Haiti, one of which was Christ the King Secretarial School. The other two were Collège Marie-Anne primary and secondary schools. On May 17, 2013, the foundation turned the three new schools over to Saint Anne in an inauguration ceremony. A huge banner with “Welcome” written in French, English, and Chinese greeted more than 500 guests at the ceremony. The guests included Port-au-Prince Auxiliary Bishop Quesnel Alphonse and Simon Dieuseul Desras, President of the Senate and President of the National Assembly, who attended the inauguration ceremony on behalf of the President of Haiti. More than 300 students watched from the second- and third-floor balconies of the Collège Marie-Anne secondary school. Over a hundred Tzu Chi volunteers from Taiwan, the United States, Canada, and Haiti also joined in the celebration. All told, about a thousand people witnessed this historical event. The three new schools are situated side by side on a hillside on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. The complex of structural steel buildings provides 8,540 square meters (91,920 square feet) of floor area, so far the largest of its type in Haiti. After the 2010 quake, William Keh (葛濟捨), then CEO of Tzu Chi USA, led the first Tzu Chi aid delegation to Haiti. He witnessed the devastation in Port-au-Prince, and he even slept in tents just as Haitians were forced to do. With those grim images still in mind, Keh could really appreciate the nice facilities that were being dedicated in the ceremony. “These buildings are a result of the convergence of love from Tzu Chi volunteers around the world; they are like pagodas rising from the ashes,” Keh said. It is fitting that reconstruction takes the form of new schools. Out of the country’s population of ten million, more than a half of the adults are illiterate. Education is important to the nation.
Rebuilding Tzu Chi volunteers set foot in Haiti on January 21, 2010, just nine days after the quake, to begin to help earthquake victims. In 77 days, 19 delegations of volunteers conducted large-scale distributions and free clinics, and offered work-for-food programs. During that time, volunteers also thought long and hard about how to provide medium- to long-term assistance. One of the prerequisites for rebuilding was indisputable land ownership, which was hard to ascertain in Haiti after the disaster. Things were very chaotic, with government offices virtually shut down. Title verification efforts were almost impossible to carry out. Hard or not, these challenges had to be confronted and overcome. Because practically all schools in Port-au-Prince had been destroyed by the earthquake, new schools needed to be built. Collège Marie-Anne, which is run by the Congregation of the Sisters of Saint Anne, is a highly valued school in Haiti. After the earthquake, the government provided temporary classrooms so that the 1,500 students could continue their schooling. Tzu Chi volunteers in Canada visited the headquarters of the congregation in Montreal, and they learned about its emphasis on education and its schools in Canada, Haiti and Africa. After much evaluation, they decided to help the congregation rebuild the three schools it had lost in Haiti. Sister Rita Larivée, General Superior of the Sisters of Saint Anne, initially requested that the volunteers give them two cargo containers connected by a tent. She only wanted to have enough space for the more than one hundred students at Christ the King Secretarial School to continue with their lessons. She even had a plan drawn up. The volunteers submitted her request to Master Cheng Yen, but the Master rejected it. Instead, she said, Tzu Chi would build permanent, high-quality school buildings for the 1,800 students of the three schools. Haiti imports most of all the materials it uses. Therefore, the three schools required the importation of materials such as steel columns and prefabricated concrete wall units. In all, it would take more than 70 cargo containers to ship. “If taxed, those materials would have incurred more than a million American dollars in import duties,” noted James Chen (٣/٠٧), a U.S. Tzu Chi volunteer. In order to acquire an exemption of import duties, Chen made many trips to the Congregation of the Sisters of Saint Anne, the Ministry of National Education, Youth and Sports, and the Ministry of Finance and Economy.
Surprises every day David Chang (張士錡) was also heavily involved with the reconstruction project. Chang is the deputy general manager of Overseas Engineering and Construction Co. (OECC), which was chosen to build the three schools. That company had built Haiti’s Sylvio Cato stadium, the University City campus, and many other structures. These buildings survived the strong quake of 2010. The reconstruction of the schools entailed a great many steps and even more details. Everything needed planning, and everything seemed to have quirks that threw things off and required alternate planning. “In the aftermath of the earthquake, many things were beyond our control, so everything had to have a plan B,” Chen said. Chang has an MBA and a degree in civil engineering, but no amount of schooling could have completely prepared him for the surprises that popped up seemingly at every turn. He found that the skills he had learned in school were not necessarily applicable for the work in Haiti. “What I do here is crisis management,” he said wryly. “Every day is filled with excitement.” For example, when cargo containers containing building materials for the project arrived at the port, the local freight company trucks hired to deliver the containers to the destination failed to show up. As a result, OECC ended up having to use its own trucks to do the job. Even so, the freight company was still paid for a job it didn’t perform. Sometimes in the process of transporting materials for the project, a driver would call and say his trailer had been detained by the police. Chang had to rush over at such times to straighten things out. According to the project plan, the high-strength nuts and bolts to fasten steel columns to the ground were scheduled for arrival at Port-au-Prince in May 2012. That month came and went, but the nuts and bolts never arrived—they were still sitting at the port in Singapore, waiting for other goods to fill the container before they would be shipped out. There was no telling how long the wait would be. Facing the possibility of a serious delay, OECC airfreighted another set of nuts and bolts from the United States. However, when OECC staffers went to the airport to pick up the goods, a warehouse worker said that they were not there. Two weeks of inquiry and tracking still failed to find the necessary parts. They had mysterously evaporated. The steel columns had arrived, but they would be utterly useless without the nuts and bolts to fix them to the floor and keep them standing. A major project delay seemed imminent. James Chen and others had to request Haitian government officials to help track down the shipment from the States. Those efforts paid off, and the nuts and bolts were found just in the nick of time. In the three years between 2010 and 2013, James Chen made 35 trips between Los Angeles and Port-au-Prince, logging 240,000 miles in the sky. Sometimes he had hardly arrived home in Los Angeles when another urgent matter would force an immediate return to Haiti. To complicate matters further, Haiti was politically unstable from the end of 2010 into 2011. Social unrest often led to the delay or cancellation of flights to Port-au-Prince. Chen spent countless hours waiting in Miami International Airport for a flight. He once waited two whole days and still could not board a plane. To overcome all the surprises and all the unexpected roadblocks, one needs persistence and mindfulness—the two things that Chen was bent on using, in triple strength if necessary, to see the project to successful completion. “Without perseverance and mindfulness, you just couldn’t carry on,” he said.
Completion Despite the roadblocks and frustrations, the new schools were completed in 16 months. They were a labor of love by people like Chen and Chang. At the dedication and inauguration ceremony, Chang said, “I’ve completed more than 50 construction projects in Haiti, and this one was the best of them all. It’ll definitely remain an unforgettable experience for me.” He believed that building schools and teaching students good values and ideals could really help Haitians transform their core. Chen smiled as he said, “I think I can say that I’ve given my all to Master Cheng Yen and Tzu Chi volunteers around the world.” Sister Larivée, who understood the trials and tribulations that had happened during the implementation of the reconstruction project, spoke at the ceremony: “The project, under the guidance of Mr. Chen, was not easy. There were many challenges to solve. But you always found a way to solve the problem. And you did this with great kindness and great patience…. You taught us that hope and compassion can overcome many obstacles. “You cannot see the foundations of these new buildings, but they are not made of cement and steel. The real foundation is much deeper than the cement and steel. The real foundation is the courage you have given us that nothing is impossible. The real foundation is the strength you showed us that when people work together, dreams can come true. The real foundation for these schools is that compassion does work miracles.” Hope Tzu Chi has also done other things to help the multitude of Haitians following the 2010 earthquake. The destitute neighborhoods around Saint Alexandre Church in Port-au-Prince were badly damaged. Schools were completely paralyzed, leaving children to wander amid the exposed, twisted steel bars of fallen buildings and the repulsive odors of rotting corpses. To keep the children out of harm’s way and keep them in a learning environment, Jean Denis Petit Pha, a former high school English teacher, and Marie Ange Colinet, President of the National Association of Girl Guides in Haiti (ANGH), found a run-down house, covered the broken roof with plastic tarps that Tzu Chi had distributed, and borrowed benches and an old blackboard to set up a makeshift classroom. They recruited volunteer teachers to teach 120 community students, ranging from four to fifteen years old. They taught them math, reading, writing, personal hygiene, environmental protection, and character building. They also fed them two hot meals a day—the only food for the day for many of the children. They did this with the financial support of Tzu Chi. Six months later, with most schools reopened, Tzu Chi terminated that program and started a tuition aid program for local poor school children. After one semester, volunteers discovered that most of the students on the Tzu Chi aid program had done poorly at school, and some of them even had to repeat a grade. Volunteers visited their homes and found out that their parents were either too busy working or too busy looking for work to check their children’s schoolwork. They typically lived in tight quarters—hot, humid, and without electricity or light. The children could not have studied at home if they had wanted to. It was no surprise they were not doing well in their subjects. Father Columbano Arellano, OFM, of Saint Alexandre Church in Port-au-Prince, had seen a few children studying under the light of the basketball court across the street from the church at one or two o’clock in the morning. The children wanted to learn, but they needed a place to study. Haitian Tzu Chi volunteers decided to give them after-school tutoring, which started in spring 2011. More than 150 children started going to Saint Alexandre Church after school, and received extra instruction there. After a few months of tutoring, 85 percent of the students passed their subjects. One year later, virtually all the children passed. Even so, some children did not go to school, much less go to the church for after-school tutoring. Volunteers visited their homes and discovered that they were simply too poor. Some of them managed to have only one meal a day, sometimes not even that often. How could a hungry, malnourished child have the energy to study? Tzu Chi volunteers decided to provide hot food at Saint Alexandre Church for local children so they could get some nourishment. Fr. Arellano, who has always been supportive of Tzu Chi, allowed them to set up a small kitchen in front of the church. Volunteer Immacula Cadet led a group of mothers to cook for the children. As a result, fewer children were absent from the after-school program, and they were able to concentrate better in class. Tzu Chi also provides tuition aid to students in Route Neuve, a community in Cité Soleil (Sun City), one of the largest slums in the Northern Hemisphere. Ecole Mixte Des Humanistes is the only school in Route Neuve. Some children start school late, so they can often be seen in classrooms with much younger classmates. It is not uncommon for a fifth-grade class to have students who are 15 or even 20 years old. Because of their poverty, many children would not be attending the school, or any school, without financial aid from Tzu Chi.
François Runer, the school principal, pointed out that many students could have been recruited to deal drugs if the United Nations had not interdicted drugs in Cité Soleil in the previous several years, and if Tzu Chi had not provided tuition aid, which helped keep the students in school and out of trouble. Centre Préscolaire Carmen René Durocher, a three-room preschool, was the only school in Solino, another impoverished community in Port-au-Prince. Several hundred preschoolers were taught by qualified teachers here, so they had better chances for getting admitted to the best elementary schools in Port-au-Prince. Sadly, the school was destroyed by the 2010 quake. The families of the students could not help much in rebuilding the school because they were just too poor. “Our tuition was just 250 gourde [US$5.80], but still we could collect it from only 12 families in a class of 40 students,” said Marie Ange Colinet. The preschool was managed by her organization, ANGH, which could not afford to rebuild the school, either. Because they wanted to keep their students in school, they hung a tarp overhead to provide shade in which classes could resume. The students, the teachers, the sound of learning, the sun, and the shade would have been enough of a sight to move any observer to do something to help them. Tzu Chi volunteers decided to help them rebuild. The new preschool is now under construction. When completed, by the end of 2013, the school will have nine rooms to replace the three rooms that were lost to the quake. There will be space for administrative and other purposes. More students will have an opportunity to attend the school. It has been more than three years since the devastating quake. The streets of Port-au-Prince have been cleared of damaged buildings and houses. But the pace of rebuilding is very slow. It is estimated that about 320,000 people still live in tents. There is no indication of when these people may move out of these filthy, unpleasant sites into new permanent homes. The reconstruction of Haiti would have been quicker had international aid come in as pledged. But data from the United Nations indicated that of the 5.4 billion U.S. dollars that international organizations had promised to donate to help Haiti, 2 billion dollars never materialized. Representatives of both the Sisters of Saint Anne and ANGH pointed out that many aid organizations had promised help but were never heard from again. Sister Rita was therefore particularly grateful to Tzu Chi for having made a promise… and for making good on that promise. |
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