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Rebuilding Haiti Long-time business partners join forces to build a secondary school overseas.
Millions of dollars have been poured into Haiti since it was struck by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake nearly two years ago, but ask anyone who’s recently traveled there and they’ll tell you that it’s difficult to see where that money went. Since the earthquake, trash pick-up has been non-existent. Instead of filling landfills, two-story-high trash piles line the roads of urban areas like Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince. Buildings remain unrepaired, with bodies still buried underneath them. Tents, initially set up as temporary housing solutions, have now become permanent homes for thousands of Haitians who have no homes to return to. Part of the problem lies with Haiti’s education system and the fact that Haiti’s poverty is cyclical. With nearly 50 percent of the country illiterate and only 43 in 1,000 students enrolling in secondary schools after they complete 60
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Lewis Communications employees visited an orphanage in Thomazea, Haiti, where the group plans to build a school for orphans. Their most vivid memory, though, is from Port-auPrince, where trash lined streams and roads, the smell of burning garbage filled the air and the streams used for bathing were also used for drinking.
their required six years of schooling, many Haitians have only a fifth-grade education. In rural populations, school enrollment rates are even lower, and only 10 percent of Haitian schools are public. Most are privately run by churches or other countries. This cycle of poverty, which has been exacerbated by the 2010 earthquake, struck former Tennessee senator and 20/20 Research founder Jim Bryson most when he visited the Caribbean island in 2010. It also prompted him to develop the concept of The Joseph School, a secondary school for Haitian orphans that, when established, will give them the opportunity to extend their education and become their country’s leaders.
To help get Haiti back in the spotlight, make the school known to the public and raise the funds needed to establish it, Bryson has teamed up with several Birminghambased individuals including four employees of Lewis Communications, a company Bryson has worked with more than 15 years, as well as Wahoo Films owner and commercial director Stephen Moe, who has worked with Lewis for more than 18 years. All five individuals accompanied Bryson on another trip to Haiti this spring, taking photos, shooting video and compiling footage for the project’s marketing materials. All were dumbfounded by what they saw. “I’m usually a positive person. I feel like I can fix things, but for the first time in my life, I understood the meaning of hopelessness,” Moe says. “So many people live there, and they live piled on top of each other in a city
Photos courtesy of Lewis Communications
By Stephanie Brumfield
August 2011
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Geoff Carlisle, Entertainment Coordinator, JAMM Entertainment Services, Inc.
with no indoor plumbing and rubble everywhere, and it’s street after street after street. I kept thinking, how do you help these people?” Lewis’ Executive Creative Director Spencer Till noticed another problem: Haiti’s chronic orphanage issue. “Something like 90 percent of parents in Haiti cannot take care of their children, so they send them to orphanages,” Till says. “When they reach fifth grade, they start to weigh their options, and the potential of street life is better. Can you imagine?” He also says the only kids who are educated further in Haiti are those whose parents have money, and they’re oftentimes sent to the U.S. or other countries once they are educated, perpetuating the cycle. “Haiti is still getting a lot of attention,” Till says, “but you have to understand the depth of need. Jim just got back from another trip where he went with a church group to build houses. Things like this are happening all the time, but it’s one house in one week, and it’s a small cinderblock home made by someone else. Until you educate Haiti’s people, Haiti has no way to fix itself.” For Bryson, Till and the rest of the group, establishing the school is about helping Haitians help themselves. They want Haitians, not Americans, to be the teachers of the children who, through The Joseph School, will learn about leadership and service in a Haitian cultural context. “We want to equip them to make improvements on their own so they can make a difference in Haiti in the years to come,” Bryson says. Eventually, the group would like to see these orphanage-schools built in towns all over the country, but their current goal is to build one school that will initially educate and house approximately 60 students in the rural town of Thomazeau.
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After having spent the last year building relationships with Haitian partners, getting them excited about the school and making sure everyone shares the vision, Bryson is beginning the fundraising process and hopes to have the first Joseph School up and running within the next two years. And with Moe, Till and the rest of the Lewis staff doing everything pro bono, travelling to Haiti and sifting through photo and video footage to create websites and advertisements in their spare time, the group is well underway to begin soliciting donations. “It’s a beautiful Caribbean island with enormous potential,” says Lewis office manager Sarah Cooper. “And the people there have such faith. The amount of people going to church on Sunday mornings in Haiti is just phenomenal. I have faith, but these people have raw faith. They have such big smiles to have nothing.” For more information about The Joseph School, visit thejosephschool.org or lewis communications.com/headed-to-haiti.
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