The Trees at La Souce

I returned to Haiti in August 2010, six months after I’d first arrived. This time I didn’t go back to Port-au-Prince. I took the ferry across the bay to La Gonâve — an island that had appeared, late in my first trip, as somewhere a single person might actually matter. The capital was inundated with help. La Gonâve was rural, quiet, and largely forgotten. Which is exactly what had drawn me to it.

I went with a question I hadn’t yet figured out how to answer. I’d come to Haiti to help with humanitarian relief after the earthquake, and I had — clinics, food runs, English classes at the church in Delmas. But the longer I’d stayed, the more I’d begun to suspect that the most useful thing I could do wasn’t going to look like emergency aid. It would have to look like something slower, and quieter, and rooted in a place. La Gonâve felt like the place. I just didn’t yet know what that something was.

I lived simply. A rented room in a seaside compound. A bed, a mosquito net, a bucket shower in an open enclosure under the sky. A man named Max, whose family was from the island, became my guide. He walked me through Anse-à-Galets and out to the surrounding villages, introducing me to the mayor, school directors, neighbors, shopkeepers. He told me, without spelling it out, that trust here wasn’t granted because of your intentions. It was granted over time, through showing up, through coming back.

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I noticed the water situation almost immediately. Anse-à-Galets had a small reservoir and a system of eleven or twelve public fountains served by pipes running down from a spring in the hills above town. The locals called the spring La souce — “the source” — and when I asked Max to take me there, we hiked up one morning to see where our water was coming from.

The water itself was striking. It flowed clear and cold from a crack in the rock and ran off down a creek that fed the reservoir below. But standing in that spot and looking up the hillside, what struck me just as forcefully was what wasn’t there. Trees. The slope above the aquifer was almost entirely bare — a patchwork of scrub and bare earth, with only a few scattered trees where a proper forest canopy should have been. Whatever rain fell on that hill ran straight off it; nothing was holding the water back, nothing was slowing it down, nothing was letting it soak into the ground to recharge the spring.

Haiti’s deforestation problem is a story I’d read about before I came. It traces back two centuries, to French colonial clear-cutting of hardwoods, and it has accelerated in the modern era as Haitians have cut what remains for charcoal — the fuel most households still use to cook. By 2010, some estimates put the country’s remaining forest cover at about three percent. You can see it from the air. The border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic is legible from a satellite photograph: one side green, the other a yellowy brown.

What I hadn’t understood, until I stood at La souce and looked up, was that the deforestation wasn’t just a climate problem or an aesthetic one. It was a water problem. No trees, no recharge. No recharge, eventually, no spring. The community I was coming to live in was slowly losing the thing that kept it alive. I couldn’t fix that. But I could plant trees. So that’s what I decided to do.

I found a small nursery in a neighboring village called Palma, where a man grew saplings for sale. I bought a few, then a few more, then many more. Over the course of eight Saturdays that fall, I organized tree-planting days on the hillsides above La souce. The mayor’s office sent people, a local school director brought his older students, and neighbors came by to help as well. Max came, and a rotating cast of his cousins and friends. Between us we planted several hundred trees — mangos, citrus, some hardwoods — and I taught the water cycle as we worked.

I also spent two afternoons at two of the local high schools, drawing on a chalkboard, explaining what evaporation was, what transpiration was, how rain became groundwater and how groundwater became the spring at La souce. None of this was new information to anyone with a high-school science education. But for these students, it was. Nobody had taught it to them before.

I’d be lying if I said every tree survived. Some didn’t, and some were taken down later by people who needed charcoal more than they needed the abstract promise of water thirty years from now. That was a hard thing to watch the first time, and a harder thing to accept as a pattern. But the trees were never really the point.

The point was that people on La Gonâve saw an American woman showing up on Saturday mornings with saplings and a shovel. They saw me sweating alongside them, eating the lunches they brought, taking my cues from the mayor’s office rather than barging in with an agenda. They saw me come back the next Saturday, and the Saturday after that, and by the end of those eight weeks, I wasn’t a stranger in Anse-à-Galets anymore. I was the American woman who planted trees.

That turned out to be the foundation of everything else I would do there.

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It would be a couple of months yet before I started a class. It would be longer before that class grew into a school with its own classrooms and its own teachers, and longer still before the school had a name — Pi Gwo Byen — that its children now wear on their uniforms.

But I’m not sure any of it would have happened without those eight Saturdays. Not because the trees solved Haiti’s deforestation crisis — they didn’t, and they couldn’t — but because they were the way I learned the first lesson La Gonâve had to teach me. You don’t earn a place in a community you weren’t born into by announcing your intentions. You earn it by doing the work that’s in front of you, alongside the people doing it with you, and then coming back the next week.

The rest, when it came, came because of that.

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This blog is extracted from “Why Haiti,” the first in a series of six narrative essays charting the story of Greater Good Haiti — from first arrival to founding, to today. The full essay will be part of a forthcoming collection.

If this story moved you, please consider supporting our work at greatergoodhaiti.org/donate. Every gift goes toward the school, the daily meals, and the children whose lives we have the privilege of being part of.