Jemcy, a medical doctor, works in Cabois, using the community school there as one of his clinic locations. He has plenty of expertise to distribute medications effectively, but has been working for free in Cabois because the need is great and no organization has yet stepped up to pay his salary. He does get the opportunity to help a lot of people because Gerald has obtained medical supplies for Jemcy.

Jemcy and Gerald work with a team that includes elementary school teachers Job, Mirak, and Ormelien. They are motivated to continue their work at the elementary school because it is in their own community. They worked without pay in this community for four years, giving up the chance to spend their teaching-time doing paid work instead. School hours are only 9AM to noon, but even so I saw the third grade students successfully multiplying two digit numbers by four digit numbers. And, significantly, I saw a whole school full of students who were focused and interested in learning, and spoke of their gratefulness for the opportunity to go to school.

They want to see a generation of children in their area who have the opportunity to work for a living, and education (which includes math and financial literacy) is critical to prevent the children from being dependent on aid handouts in the future. It’s hard to quantify how aid work might create a situation where aid is no longer needed versus when aid will create dependence on more aid. But I hope you’ll learn as much as you can (and share, of course) about how that distinction works.

I was in Haiti when the earthquake struck and would like to share something that I’ve observed.

There are a lot of Haitian community organizations and individuals who do highly effective community work, but have very little connection to big foreign non-profits.

The major non-profits often, like you say, have a lot of cash but lack capacity to turn extra cash into useful results on the ground. This is not because there is a shortage of need. It ALSO doesn’t come from a shortage of trustworthy people capable of effectively distributing food aid and medical aid. But too often, the connection isn’t being made between local community workers and foreign aid organizations. Local community workers know their communities and can give you a very accurate assessment of whether bed-nets are going to be used over beds, or thrown in trash piles, or used for something else. They know about common diseases and they know how to make sure malaria medications are being given for malaria and not for diarrhea.

Often foreign organizations think that their “experts” who have never lived among poor people know better, but barriers of language and social class often keep information from being shared effectively. You can’t trust all locals in a poor country and that is one of the major difficulties in aid. But organizations that are effective are the ones who create networks of people who are deeply connected to each other that span the distance from aid recipients, to aid organization employees, to donors. My first-hand experience with this is with several interconnected groups, all connected to Haiti Partners in the USA. Haiti Partners supports the Darbonne community school, the Cabois community school, and other organizations in Haiti. All of those organizations have people on the ground in Haiti who could keep their education work going even if all foreign funding dried up.