by Kendall Webb
From her home in Thompson’s Station, Tennessee, Bronwen Pope remained in close contact via cell phone and social media with friends in Cayes-Jacmel on Haiti’s southern coast as the powerful Category 4 hurricane quickly approached the small village.
“And then everything went silent,” Pope says reflecting on those late evening hours of October 3 before Hurricane Matthew blazed a deadly trail across the island nation.
Lubien Fils, who lives in Cayes-Jacmel and serves as the director of the school, had tried to reassure Pope on one of those calls when she asked what they were doing to prepare. “We are praying,” he said.
“I was like ‘you have to do more than pray!” she says recalling her frantic response to Fils. “What are you thinking? You have to do more!”
Pope’s thoughts then drifted from the comforts of her Williamson County home to the remote Caribbean seaside village she first visited in September of 2011 as part of a medical relief team. She helped lead the group with Kay VanFleteren, her friend from nursing school who lives in Franklin, and it was here at the urging of a Haitian friend from the village that the two Williamson County residents agreed to fund – out of their own pockets – a Christian day school that now stands in Cayes-Jacmel.
Photos by Bill Jorgenson
That, in turn, led to the founding of Trezò, a Williamson County-based 501(c)(3) charitable organization with a mission to support the ongoing education of children in Haiti and help their families and communities. Having made the trip from Middle Tennessee many times in the five years since then, Pope reflected on the community’s modest resources and primitive habitations and, for the first time, the reality of the situation hit home.
“When your roof is a tarp or your roof is bamboo, there’s nowhere to go, there’s nothing to do,” Pope says. “You can’t go to the lumber store and start battening down your hatches. You pray, and that’s really all you can do is pray and wait it out.”
Kay koule twonpe solèy, men li pa twonpe lapli. – A Haitian proverb
“A leaky roof can fool the sun but it can’t fool the rain.”
More than 1,500 miles away from Williamson County, Fils and his fellow villagers in Cayes-Jacmel were actually doing a little more than just praying.
“When the community and I heard that the Hurricane Matthew was approaching, we were so scared because the homes are not okay,” Fils says. “Many homes (are) too close to the sea. The roofs are not okay. They leak and some of them just get tarps or palm tree leaves on the top.”
So Fils hid all of his important papers deep in the ground in plastic bags. He stressed to his fellow residents the importance of securing food, charcoal, water and other essential stocks. He continued to monitor radio stations and the internet sharing the latest information on the storm’s progress with the community.
Then, finally, with the first signs of Matthew’s arrival, like everybody else, he returned to the relative safety of his concrete-block home.
Lespwa fè viv. – A Haitian proverb
“Where there’s hope, there’s life.”
Hurricane Matthew crashed into the coastline of Haiti’s southwestern peninsula in the early morning hours of October 4. Cayes-Jacmel was spared a direct hit, but for roughly 24 hours, Pope, who still serves as one of Trezò’s founding board members here in Williamson County along with her husband Bill, sent messages with no response from Fils or anybody else in the village.
VanFleteren, Pope’s friend who also serves on the board with her husband Bob, was monitoring the news for potential updates, too.
“Some of the other people, like in Port-au-Prince, had quicker access to the internet and were posting that they were safe,” Kay VanFleteren says. “So we were getting some reports in but nothing from our area. I just remember calling Fils, calling Fils, calling Fils, and finally, one time he answered and it was like ‘yes!’ and Bob and I started kinda tearing up.
“It was just good to hear that there was no significant damage and nobody injured. It was a huge relief.”
Dèyè mòn gen mòn. – A Haitian proverb
“Beyond the mountains, more mountains.”
There are 29 different types of 501(c) nonprofit organizations defined by the Internal Revenue Code, and the most common type is the 501(c)(3). These organizations are either private charities (like Trezò) or private foundations, and some of the more widely known are household names.
Major national and international organizations like the American Red Cross, Goodwill and The Salvation Army.
Many of them, however, are small organizations of which you’ve never heard. There were more than 1.4 million exempt organizations as recently as 2012 according to the Urban Institute’s National Center for Charitable Statistics, and many of them fill a niche in a specific community that might otherwise be overlooked by those larger organizations.
Like Williamson County’s Trezò.
Pope and her husband Bill first became involved with Haiti back in 2003-04 when they adopted two young boys from the country, one of whom was abandoned due to minor medical issues.
“During the adoptions, I think I realized that while adoption is something that is needed, even more so, I think is helping to keep families together,” Pope says. With many other Haitian children abandoned over medical issues, she was inspired to return to nursing school where she met VanFleteren.
VanFleteren, meanwhile, had worked with refugees in Middle Tennessee including some of the Lost Boys of Sudan. Her interest in refugee work led to an interest in Haiti as well when the country was left in shambles by the catastrophic earthquake of 2010. Wanting to see the situation up close, she and Pope joined a medical mission together and visited the country to assist with recovery efforts.
“When I went after the earthquake, we were right in Port-au-Prince and there were millions, literally millions of people living in tents,” VanFleteren says. “Everywhere you drove there was a tent city.”
Anpil men chay pa lou. – A Haitian proverb
“Many hands make the load lighter.”
A year later, the two friends returned to Haiti as the leaders of another relief mission in 2011, and that’s where they visited Cayes-Jacmel for the first time. It was there that Trezò was born, and like Pope, VanFleteren and her husband Bob have made the trip from Williamson County to Cayes-Jacmel many times since. That includes a trip following Hurricane Matthew’s visit last October.
“I was a little embarrassed to learn that things were a lot worse than they had conveyed to us,” Bob VanFleteren says, “and that we might have overestimated our sense of relief.”
Virtually all of the crops in the village were lost along with any livestock like goats, cattle and chickens. And while the school building Trezò helped to build over the years held up well, there was widespread damage to homes and the other rudimentary structures that the village depends on.
“What was most apparent was just with all the flying debris and stuff, they had a lot of roofs that were punctured or just shot … they were ruined,” Bob says. “And so with every successive rain then, people were pretty miserable. They couldn’t get dry; they couldn’t get away from it.”
“So on that trip we were able to rebuild a number of homes and hang new roofs on homes and bless people there with something a lot more secure than they had even before the storm.”
The community has avoided the widespread cholera outbreaks that have affected neighboring communities, and Trezò’s early focus on repairing homes and replacing roofs has reduced the likelihood of standing water in homes that might otherwise become breeding grounds for bacteria and the mosquitos that help spread diseases like cholera.
But the community isn’t out of the water yet.
“My guess, having had my eyes on it, was that I think it’s actually going to be worse for those people in January, February,” Bob says, “because it’s going to be then that the markets are completely out of food. And it’s going to be really time to scrounge.”
Timoun fe richès, malere. – A Haitian proverb
“Children are the treasure of the poor.”
Haitian creole is the only language spoken by most Haitians, and it is filled with colorful proverbs and other metaphors that speakers of the language use frequently. The word ‘trezò’ itself is a Haitian creole word that means ‘treasure’ – a nod to one of the popular proverbs that says “children are the treasure (or the wealth) of the poor.”
In a country where 54 percent of the inhabitants live in abject poverty according to the CIA’s World Factbook, possessions of value are few and far between. But in a country where 96 percent of the population identifies as Christian (80 percent Catholic and 16 percent Protestant according to the Factbook), children are seen as gifts from God representing a family’s true wealth and its hope for the future.
Trezò’s primary mission is focused on those children and their communities, but Matthew has presented the organization with its biggest challenge yet.
“We had just built a fifth and sixth grade class,” Pope says. “Things were expanding, we started building a fence, and we’re hoping to put solar power in and be able to have laptops and things like that so the kids can learn computers.
“We were growing and building, and of course, then the hurricane hit so we’ve kinda stopped all that and now our focus has been on recovery in the community.”
While Trezò ultimately remains committed to its original vision, Fils is quick to acknowledge the importance of the current focus on recovery. He and the community in Cayes-Jacmel are grateful for the help that Trezò has provided – much of it through the donations and volunteer efforts of Williamson County residents who support the local organization.
“(Trezò is) paying for carpenters to cover the roofs for the poor families,” Fils says. “They had some tins on their roofs that were there for more than 15 years. You can imagine how leaked are these tins. They couldn’t even sleep well when it was raining, but Trezò help them fixing their roofs. They said that is a blessing from God.
“I would like to explain how precious and wonderful Trezò helps are for the community,” Fils says. “A book of many, many pages wouldn’t be enough.”
Trezò already has two more relief missions planned for March and May of this year. If Haiti’s markets run out of food in the near future as Bob VanFleteren fears, then that help will be more essential than ever.
For more information on Trezò or to donate to relief efforts in Haiti, visit www.Trezo.org.
