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Osemene Jeune was another one of the desperately poor. She lives in the village of Larakwent in the same Central Plateau region as Beatrice. She has three kids, but because she could not afford to take care of them, two of them lived with other people as resteveks. (For more on the plight of the restaveks, keep reading). She had a man living with her as a way of her surviving. She used to spend her days without eating. She had no assets. On a few lucky days, she would get to work all day picking corn or millet for somebody else. At the end of a long day, she would be given a small portion to take home. She was considered a “nobody” in her community. Her house was only good enough for shade.
Until now, there has been no system or vision for getting people like Beatrice and Osemene out of poverty. For those a short step up the ladder, there is the growing micro-credit industry pioneered by the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, whose work to eradicate poverty won the bank and its founder, Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel Prize. In Haiti, Fonkoze (Fondasyon Kole Zepòl – Foundation of Shoulders Together) has taken on the mantle of micro-credit, becoming one of the leading providers of economic empowerment in the Western Hemisphere. Fonkoze has 45,000 active borrowers in Haiti who are using micro-credit and training to undertake some enterprise that lifts themselves out of poverty, provides education and nutrition for their children, and most importantly makes them players in an economic system. They have parlayed an initial loan of $60 into creating an alternative future of hope and dignity for themselves and their children.
But that whole population of “invisible” Haitians a step down the ladder – like Beatrice and Osemene – find even micro-credit beyond their capacity. They are in such extreme poverty that daily survival consumes all that they do. They are the invisible people because their plight is not heard, they have no voice, and they are not even counted as members of their communities. They are so impoverished and their living conditions so unthinkable that they are seen as less than human.
Poverty so profound has a deeper impact than shorter life expectancy, chronic hunger, infant mortality, constant disease, and hopelessness. It places the families at extreme risk. They will be torn apart because, out of desperation, the children will be given over to be restaveks, a form of child slavery. Human trafficking in Haiti is a shameful part of the economy. According to UNICEF, there are 300,000 retaveks in Haiti. Children are not only given into slavery in Haiti either as household servants or sex slaves, but more than 2,000 children are also trafficked annually into the Dominican Republic to work as slaves in the sugar industry.
Ben Skinner, in his 2008 release, A Crime so Monstrous, writes that the daily humiliation, long hours, living conditions and beatings of resteveks work to essentially zombify them within two years.
People of Abiding Hope, God is calling us to stand up and do something tangible and proven to be successful to lift these poorest of the poor out of abject poverty. Again, following a model of a pilot program in Bangladesh, the Chemen Lavi Miyo project of Fonkoze offers participants a path to a better life. Costing about $1,000 a family, the program helps motivated families, almost always a single mother and a cadre of children, lift themselves up to the point where they can become players in the micro-credit economy. The project begins with the family getting their shelter weather-proofed, getting a water filtration system, and getting a sanitized latrine. The families learn the essentials of daily nutrition and basic hygiene. The kids are placed in school, which is not free in Haiti. The families receive health care. And, they get training and supervision on how to take an enterprise of their choosing, like raising goats or chickens, and develop it into a self-sustaining and growing source of income.
On a May trip to Haiti, we visited with participants who were a year into the pilot project in Haiti. The results are astonishing. It is the best underdog-to-victory story on the planet! It is a tribute that with God all things are indeed possible. On our trip we visited Beatrice, who is one of the CLM clients in the pilot project. She stood proud, wearing clean clothes, and looked us in the eye as she talked. Because she no longer has to go to man to man to survive and feed her children, she is no longer ashamed. She has a small commerce and even has some savings now! All of her children are going to school, and she says, “I am not getting respect in my village.”
And then there is the transformation in Osemene’s situation. She says that he life has “completely changed!” She eats at least two meals a day. She and her children no longer drink water from the river. She no longer walks around dirty. She can write her name, and all of her kids are now going to school.
This year at Christmas, under the theme, “It’s Not YOUR Birthday,” Abiding Hope will be joining other congregations that are partners with the Haitian Timoun Foundation in working to raise $1,000,000 to lift 1,000 families out of poverty through the CLM. In the United States, the average family spends $996 on Christmas. I suspect that in Littleton, Colo., that is probably just the sales tax!
Are we willing to be so moved by the call of our Lord, to stand with the least of these, and reorient our Christmas so that others might live? After all, it’s not your birthday. It’s His. And He has said, “Inasmuch as you did it to the least of these, you did it to me.”
- Dr. Rick Barger,
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