Written by Sarah Kyle
In response to the Jan. 12 earthquake that devastated Haiti, the Harding University student body enacted a relief effort to provide immediate shelter to the Haitian people.
THE SURVEY TRIP
The project, known as Tents and Tarps, was born out of a survey trip conducted by freelance journalist Phil Holsinger and Dr. Mark Elrod, a professor of political science at Harding, last week.
Holsinger, who has lived in Haiti periodically during the last four years, was brought into the project to help provide a professional recommendation as to how the Harding community could provide aid.
“I told them that I wasn’t really sure, I’m not an aid expert,” Holsinger said. “But I do have a lot of contacts.”
Holsinger recommended that the university holds true to a core value of avoiding the traditional “blanket aid” contribution and instead find a way for the Harding community to directly connect to the Haitian people. A group began discussing this and decided that Holsinger should go to Haiti to assess the situation.
“But it wasn’t enough for me to go. I needed another pair of eyes with real training to see material and human resources and make real sound assessments in a real short period of time,” Holsinger said. “Not a real easy thing to do, to avoid all the trauma and drama and really assess the situation and form contacts.”
It was with those criteria in mind that Holsinger asked Elrod to join him and help the university understand the situation in Haiti.
“[I was] basically a second set of eyes to look at the things that Philip was looking at in terms of both the short-term and long-term things that the university could do for Haiti,” Elrod said.
Once in Haiti, Elrod and Holsinger said things began to line up in a near-surreal way.
“We had a specific mission we were approaching,” Holsinger said. “We had these contact names of different Christians who were in Port-au-Prince … and we were trying to figure out how we were going to contact these people and put them together with some resources I have on the ground and some other people on the ground.”
But God provided, Holsinger said, adding that the primary contacts for the trip ended up picking the team up at the airport.
Upon arrival, Holsinger and Elrod were thrust into something unexpected: a real and unedited picture of Haiti’s controlled chaos.
“Just an average Haitian day is everybody fighting,” Holsinger said. “But when we landed it was like there had been a calm over the city. It’s not calm, but compared to what it usually is.”
Elrod agreed, adding that he was impressed by the Haitian people’s efforts to preserve order in Port-au-Prince.
“That calm was being preserved not by the presence of the police and the military, but by the people themselves,” Elrod said. “It’s not the same kind of out-of-control situation that you see reported in Western media.”
Holsinger and Elrod began working with Holsinger’s old friend Bertrand Vieux, a native Haitian with novel ties to the country’s history.
“Most people don’t know this, but Haiti is the home to the true pirates of the Caribbean,” Holsinger said. “That’s why the country exists today.”
Vieux is a direct descendant of Toussaint Louverture, a pirate’s slave that Holsinger described as a “gentleman of sorts and a brilliant man” trained by his owner. Louverture eventually led the slaves to revolution.
“Their training was in imperialism, and they made themselves emperors,” Holsinger said. “One killed the other, and so forth and so on. So Haiti has this history of terror.”
A history, Holsinger said, that still affects the country’s people today.
“If I had to sum up my friend Haiti, I would say Haiti is terrorized by physical troubles and political troubles,” Holsinger said. “They know they’re poor, and they’re losing hope after generations of terror. The average person in Haiti has a hard time believing that things are ever going to change.”
But Elrod and Holsinger agree that Vieux is not the average Haitian.
“He’s extremely hopeful and keeps trying in the face of failure and loss,” Holsinger said.
Vieux and his son distribute water and aid to Port-au-Prince using Haiti’s cultural system of formed communities and community leads to help bring order to the potential chaos of aid distribution, a process that Elrod said would prove useful later.
“This is what clinched it for me that Bertrand’s family is who we need to work with,” Elrod said.
It was not until the day before their departure from Haiti that Elrod realized that providing shelter for the people of Port-au-Prince was the painfully obvious solution to Harding’s desire to help.
“When Mark had this idea, it was like it was perfectly suited and the need was there,” Holsinger said. “And now all the news agencies are talking about it. It’s just so obvious. Encampments of 100,000 people with just sheets over them.”
Looking back at their trip, Elrod and Holsinger realized that all the necessary connections had already been made.
“We had made all these connections that can make this happen without even thinking of that as a solution,” Elrod said. “We got to the end of the road and made a decision that would allow us to take advantage of all those connections we made. It was a really amazing thing to me, almost a spiritual thing.
Holsinger said having tents as temporary shelter could prove to be a matter of life or death for the people of Port-au-Prince.
“This is the next crisis, that people are exposed to the elements,” Holsinger said.
However, time is quickly running out to provide shelter before the rains come. Displaying a weekly weather forecast for Port-au-Prince on his phone, Elrod said the Haitian people have been given a weeklong window to get the necessary protection.
“The Lord has given us a week of clear weather … [but] when it [the rain] comes, all this is going to wash down and the streets are going to turn into rivers,” Elrod said.
He added that another crisis would come with the rains: water-borne diseases.
“You’ve seen these pictures of buildings that Philip photographed,” Elrod said. “Every one of these buildings was full of dead bodies. You could tell from the flies, the smell, from everything that there were dead bodies in these buildings. When the rains come, it’s going to be a city full of disease.”
With an idea in place, the team agreed that in order to give the most effective and timely aid to Port-au-Prince, nontraditional methods must be employed. Holsinger related the idea to his childhood anecdote of wasting food and his mother chastising him because “starving people in Africa” would be grateful for the food. Holsinger said he would usually reply with “well, why don’t you put it in a box and ship it to them.”
“In essence, that’s our theory,” Holsinger said. “We’re going to box up a piece of ‘bread,’ and mail it to a specific address.”
To make their theory a reality, Holsinger and Elrod searched Port-au-Prince for people and places to serve, cutting out the middlemen of larger aid agencies and bulk shipping.
“Most aid dispensing is ‘Get it, warehouse it, ship it in bulk to a central depot, move it through measurable bureaucracy, save money,”’ Holsinger said. “That always leads to corruption.”
By using personal connections, the team would be able to dispense aid directly from the plane to the people.
“It’s more expensive, but we’re asking people to step up and help because this is life and death stuff,” Holsinger said. “There’s no price tag on that.”
Holsinger said the team is enlisting the help of people with airplanes and trucks to ship the tents and tarps, allowing all money raised for tents to be used for the purchasing of tents.
Once the tents are in Haiti, Vieux’s family will distribute them as water and aid are distributed, and the family will help by providing additional connections to expedite the process.
Holsinger and Elrod returned to Harding with a plan and a purpose.
“We came up with one good idea, and almost everybody I shared this idea with in Haiti said that it was a great idea,” Elrod said. “Hopefully this will lift up the name of Jesus to the people in Haiti, and more importantly… these people need to be taken care of. We need to fulfill our mission and provide for the lives of these Haitian people.
TENTS AND TARPS AT HARDING UNIVERSITY
After being informed of the need for shelter, Harding Student Association President Bryan Clifton and others began the Tents and Tarps project.
“Our objective at Harding is to have a tent and tarp sent to Haiti for each member of the Harding undergraduate student body,” Clifton said. That goal is the equivalent of 4,500 tents.
The SA began collecting money and donated tents earlier this week, with today being the last day to donate money in order to get the tents sent to Port-au-Prince by Monday, Feb. 1. As of Tuesday, $10,000 had been raised for the cause through monetary donations and gift card collections
“One tent will provide shelter for one Haitian family,” Clifton said. “Many times, that includes up to 20 people.”
Junior Calea Bakke said she believes that the situation in Haiti is an opportunity for her generation to show their true spirit.
“For so long, the trend [has been] ‘We are socially conscious, we are wanting change, we want to help people,'” Bakke said. “But unless we respond with our actions, it’s hypocritical.”
Bakke added that she hopes the relief effort will help show people the true nature of God.
“He helps the poor, he aids in disaster, he cares,” Bakke said.
For more information, or to donate, visitwww.tentsandtarps.org, or contact Bryan Clifton.
