What You Might Not Know About Haiti

Photos from Time Magazine


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The lines on her face and hands defied the way she walked toward me, eager and snappy, happy to take my hands in hers, thanking me for coming. She wanted to know if I could help her market her idea in America. We sat in a back booth at the S & S Deli in Porter Square and this is the the story I heard from her:
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I was 65 years old, a retired Nurse when I first came to Haiti. I’m older now than you would think. I’ll be 72 next month. I intended to stay one year working in a health clinic. I did not expect the level of poverty to be so massive, so commonplace. Unemployment is almost 80%. It cost $ 40 to send a child to school for a year and most families could not conceive of ever having that much. The poverty is so deep you almost cannot believe it.

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First I started a library, thinking that this could encourage reading skills. Then an education initiative to send children to school, then a family-planning clinic, and then a very successful micro-lending program to help local farmers buy tools and supplies.

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But one of the best things is the Cooperative d'Artisanat--the Sewing Cooperative. I went to Haiti to do my nursing thing for a year, and then I was supposed to come home and sit in a rocking chair and say that I'd done my bit for the Third World. That's not what happened.

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"I met these women who just wanted to send their children to school. They had so little but boy could they sew. So we started a cooperative, sewing and embroidering linens, napkins, tablecloths. Some knitting too: the most beautiful baby hats and sweaters and socks. I started looking for places in the States that would buy what our cooperative made. Pretty soon we had twenty women, most would walk ten or more miles at a time to drop off what they had done and pick up new materials. There's no stopping them now. "

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Sarah Hackett is no stranger to adversity: widowed in her 30s with four children to raise, she learned to pull herself up by her own bootstraps.

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How many years has it been since I sat with her that day at the S & S and her eyes glistened and her hands danced in midair when she talked about these wonderful Haitian women? I remember her so clearly: her face and smile so passionate, kind, determined. I wonder how she is today, how the now fifty-strongwomen of the Cooperative d'Artisianat are today, they in their country that has blown apart.
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