While on a beach one day, a woman approached Hanna and asked him to take her baby, because she had no money for food and feared the infant would starve. Stunned, Hanna came back to the United States, docked the boat, and joined First Church of New Bern, N.C., which already was involved in hospital work in Haiti. From there, Hanna helped expand the congregation’s involvement to include what’s now a major reforestation project in a watershed in the mountains southwest of Port-au-Prince.
Sometimes ministry emerges full-flung – a big, ambitious plan all at once. And sometimes it starts small – the determination of one person, inspired by a need in the world – and grows into something bigger than anyone ever imagined.
That second way is how what’s now known as CODEP (haitifundinc.org) (for the Comprehensive Development Project), an agricultural and reforestation project in Haiti that’s now a validated ministry of New Hope Presbytery in North Carolina, got started more than 20 years ago.
Years later, having survived political strife and national disasters, the project focuses on sustainable agriculture. It is an example of collaboration that pulls together Christians from a variety of backgrounds, with a nonprofit organization called the Haiti Fund Inc., which raises money for CODEP and is supported by more than 65 churches, including Presbyterian, Episcopal, Methodist, and non-denominational congregations, as well as individuals, according to the fund’s executive director, John Winings.
Presbyterians are involved, parishioners and congregations, also with assistance from the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). The Haiti Fund works in partnership with the Episcopal Diocese of Haiti and has sent Nicole and Michael Carlin, formerly of Pittsburgh, to be directors of the CODEP project in Haiti. Local congregations often send short-term mission groups; a large component of their efforts is relationship building.
And the CODEP project is just one of many mission projects in Haiti in which Presbyterians are involved. Others range from medical clinics to recovery programs in areas devastated by hurricanes.
For example, Mark Hare, (pcusa.org/missionconnections), a PC(USA) mission co-worker, assists a group of farming cooperatives in a project called the Road to Life Yard. It emphasizes sustainable techniques for growing crops and raising animals, including goats and chickens, with support from the Presbyterian Hunger Program. Hare is a former long-term international volunteer at the Ebenezer Center in Nicaragua, where he learned techniques of sustainable agriculture on eroded soil – such as using leguminous trees, shrubs, and vines to help stabilize and put nitrogen back into the soil.
Among the initiatives Hare is now pursuing in Haiti: the promotion of moringa trees as a low-cost source of protein, and the use of animal manure to aid the production of California red worms, which are then used to help put nutrients back into the soil.
All of this — a matrix of interwoven ministry projects that have evolved from the grassroots over the years — is an example of the kinds of challenges the PC(USA) faces in trying to support international mission work. The needs and political realities in the country keep changing; mainline denominations in the U.S. also are seeing massive shifts. So the configurations of how Presbyterians do ministry keep changing.
But at the center, the binding element is still the desire to act in faith to make a difference in the world.
In Haiti, CODEP works in a part of the country in which nearly all of the land has been denuded of trees. A key goal of the project is to reclaim the environment and reforest the hilltops by planting 750,000 trees a year in an area roughly 15 miles by 12 miles.
The history of deforestation in Haiti is tied to the nation’s political history.
Haiti achieved independence in 1804 in a slave rebellion against French landowners — an independence the United States for years refused to recognize. In time political control shifted to an elite group of families. And throughout the 1900s the country suffered massive deforestation. Some trees were cut and sold to logging interests; some forests were damaged by hurricanes. Wood’s value increased because charcoal became an increasingly important source of revenue. By this decade, only about 2 percent of Haiti’s land was forested. The lack of trees results in erosion and soil depletion.
So the focus of CODEP’s work is land reclamation. The organization has 31 nurseries growing a variety of trees, including shade trees that can grow to almost 20 feet tall in three years. Initially, the workers go to a part of the mountain with little subsoil left, where they will cut a canal two feet wide and 1.5 feet deep, and then plant vetiver grass — a grass with deep roots that grows naturally in the area, and helps to anchor the lower end of the canal. Above the canal, the workers plant shade trees — deciduous trees that, once they take hold, shed their leaves into the canal. That organic matter begins to form compost, and after about three years the workers can come back to plant mangos, bananas, vegetables and coffee – crops that can be a source both of nutrition and marketable goods for the people.
To become members of CODEP — to participate in the work — people can’t sign up as individuals, but must join as part of a community, usually consisting of anywhere from four to a dozen homes and up to 50 people, John Winings said, from which a core group is directly involved in growing the trees in the nurseries, digging the canals, and planting new trees.
This is a give-and-take kind of a program with built-in incentives for continuing participation. CODEP also builds fish ponds and systems for capturing water. When a community plants enough trees and shepherds them to maturity, people in the community become eligible for new homes, built with concrete footers to resist hurricane-force winds, for example, or a water catchment system and cisterns built so the families won’t have to haul water back up the hills.
Currently, about 650 Haitians are involved with CODEP, organized into 32 working units led by 15 “animators,” local agricultural specialists who guide others in the best techniques for planting, harvesting, and digging the canals.
Short-term mission groups that come from the U.S. to help with the project stay at a facility owned by the Episcopal Diocese of Haiti, where the Carlins also live. They worship at a nearby church, and during the week do whatever work is needed — helping to teach at the school, painting, maintenance, installing cisterns. Mostly, Winings said, they begin to understand “the vast differences between what life is like in a place like Haiti versus what life is like in our comfortable, suburban kind of environment.”
Many of the Haitians involved in the program have been subsistence farmers for all of their lives, he said. Most live in poverty; about half are illiterate. In the area where CODEP works, the hillsides are covered with trees. “The rest of the area is just barren hillside. There’s a significant improvement environmentally, and it’s sustainable.”
And “we have people in our project who now talk about the area where CODEP is as a place where their children will be able to grow up and stay in that area, rather than having to leave. … For subsistence farmers to no longer think just in terms of days ahead but generations ahead is a huge step forward.”
CODEP also is dealing with its own questions of sustainability — of how it will relate to the PC(USA) and how it can try to build a project that would continue even if U.S. dollars were not forthcoming. It has started a micro-lending program to lend money to local people who want to rent plots of ground to plant their own trees, or to women who want to sell goods at a local market.
One of the animators sold a few trees from her plot — keeping many of the trees but selectively harvesting a few — and made enough money from the lumber to pay school tuition for two children and to buy their school uniforms for a year. “They’re starting to think like entrepreneurs,” Winings said. People are learning they can selectively harvest the forest, “and the forest will maintain its integrity.”
