Haiti Days 5 & 6: Haitians Helping Haitians
Friends,If you’ve been following along, you’ll have read of our plans to expand our One Hen, “Yon Poul” social entrepreneurship program to an additional 90 students in the Institution Mixte Martin Luther school in Marmalade. In order to accomplish this, however, we first have to equip the Marmalade teachers with the skills needed to lead the program.That said, we dedicated a significant portion of Friday and Saturday to initiating the healthy expansion of the One Hen program. On Friday, the Bethlehem teachers debriefed us on their successes and struggles of all eight modules of the 2016 pilot program. Truly, we could see- in their expressions and candor- that the teachers share our belief in the potential of the program. They loved leading the pilot and, as we’ve already established in Tuesday's post, the students performed above and beyond expectations!One Hen is well on its way to becoming a self-sustaining program in the Bethlehem school. After much preparation and strategic planning on Friday, we were able to step back on Saturday and watch the Bethlehem teachers train the new Marmalade teachers in the One Hen curriculum! There are a number of benefits to this that we would never achieve if we continued to lead the training ourselves: development of community, continuity in communication (i.e., no translating needed), celebration of culture, collaboration across geographic regions, decreased dependency on outside aid (Help for Haiti), the list goes on and on.Soon, instead of our bringing help to Haiti, we could start to witness Haiti change from the inside out. Already, we have local teachers training other teachers, who are training students, who are helping each other to build businesses and donating a percentage of profits to charitable causes.
Friends, this is the start of something big. Please join us in praying for the future of One Hen: that its teachers and students will invest themselves in the program, that our project managers will communicate effectively with us as we monitor progress, and that we will start to see Haitians work with fellow Haitians to communicate, collaborate and create change in Haiti from the inside, out.Blessings,The Help for Haiti Team