Dreaming Together on the Border

by Aly Lewis

"When we are dreaming alone it is only a dream. When we are dreaming with others, it is the beginning of reality." ~Dom Helder Camara

Last week, Annie Fikes, our PR and Marketing Intern, blogged about the renewed hope and reconciliation that is taking place between Haitians and Dominicans as a result of Plant With Purpose's program on the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. This week I'd like to share a story about a Dominican farmer from the border region who is working--and dreaming--with Plant With Purpose to overcome poverty and build a better future for his family.

Antonio Guarionex Soto, a farmer from the village of Angel Feliz, is quite the innovator. With Plant With Purpose's encouragement, he continues to add new components to his agroforestry farm. He currently grows bananas, two types of avocados, zapote, oranges and beans. As a result of his agroforestry efforts, he has seen his soil quality and his crop yields improve. Avocado is by far his most successful crop because of the high demand for avocados in the region, and his farm is lush with the valuable fruit.

Antonio and his son, Jendis, show off one of their avocado trees.

Building on his success, Antonio would like to acquire more land in order to plant more fruit trees and see his business grow and thrive. His greatest dream is to provide better opportunities for his son so that he will not have to migrate to another region. As Antonio continues to improve and invest in his land, enabling him to enhance the quality of life of his entire family, we believe that he is well on his way to turning his dream into a reality.

Our innovative Trans Border Project has given hundreds of dedicated, hardworking farmers like Antonio the skills and resources needed to improve their farms, provide for their families, and realize their dreams for themselves and their children. Through Plant With Purpose's Sponsor A Village program, you too can dream together with rural farmers from around the globe and partner with them as they work to turn their dreams into a reality. To learn more, Click Here.

Above: a truck full of avocados makes its way to the local market. An abundant crop means farmers like Antonio can feed their families, improve their living conditions, and send their children to school.

Trees of Life

Plant With Purpose and Floresta have been featured in Christianity Today for the second time this month! For those of you who haven't been able to pick up a print version of the magazine, the article highlighting our transformational work in the Dominican Republic is now online. Check it out below.

Trees of Life

by Deann Alford, Christianity Today

The rain started to hit Jimaní, a town along the heavily deforested border of the Dominican Republic and Haiti, in late May 2004. After three days and 20 inches of torrential rainfall, the surrounding water-saturated mountains suddenly released tons of debris. Flash floods swept up boulders, some weighing eight tons, and sent a 15-foot wall of water and mud down onto sleeping villagers on the night of May 24.

Within minutes, about 2,000 lives were wiped out. The dead were found lodged in trees and entombed in debris fields and sandbars throughout the impoverished border region in south-central Hispaniola, the island comprising Haiti and the Dominican Republic. On the Haitian side, the entire village of Mapou was submerged, becoming a shallow lake. On the Dominican side, the waters destroyed about half of Jimaní.

Since 1986, 12 flash floods have hit Hispaniola, and each has created similar havoc. Flash floods are problem enough, but starting about 25 years ago, peasants began using intensive slash-and-burn agricultural methods to cut down forests for fuel and charcoal. Slashing and burning significantly increases the chance of landslides, and Dominican officials began instating stringent regulations in the 1960s to limit deforestation. But on the Haitian side, 90 percent of trees have vanished across the landscape, creating a brown-green line visible in satellite photos of the island, and leaving border towns especially vulnerable during flash floods.

Click here to read how Plant With Purpose has joined with farmers in the DR and Haiti to restore their land, strengthen their communities, and plant trees to make the next hurricane less devastating.

Beauty on the Border

by Scott Sabin As our two pickups struggle through the grass and mud, it is clear that we are the first to pass this way in at least a few days. In the pouring rain the entire road, what Carlos, Plant With Purpose’s Dominican director, calls the international highway, seems like it could wash down the side of the mountain. Rising thirty or forty feet to our right is a tangle of green. Old tree trunks are visible through the undergrowth, and branches with reddish bromeliads overhang our path. Patches of heavy mist drift through the trees and obscure the tops of the mountain. To our left is a vertigo-inducing drop-off into thin air, the valleys of Haiti visible far in the distance. We are driving between impoverished border communities through Sierra de Neiba National Park in the Dominican Republic, near the Haitian border. It is a place of breathtaking beauty. After crossing the pass, we begin the winding descent down the other side of the mountain range. The forest changes from broadleaf to tall pines. After three days of visiting our work in the struggling hillside communities to the south, the park is a reminder of how magnificent this island once was. I begin to feel as though I’ve caught a glimpse of how things were meant to be in the Garden. One can only speculate about what creation in a pre-Fall world must have been like, yet for all that the curse has tainted and all that human sin has done to damage our earth, the beauty of what God has made still shines through everywhere. God’s ability to work things together for good is obvious in the intricate ways that ecosystems like this fit together so perfectly. Nothing is wasted, and everything has its niche. Everywhere life springs forth from death, and resurrection is foreshadowed. Soon we drop out of the trees and leave the park. As we wind our way down muddy switchbacks, the forest gives way to newly planted bean fields blanketing all but the steepest slopes. The view is still spectacular, but now there is much that is clearly broken. Here the curse is obvious. Huge rills caused by erosion are a testimony to the unsustainable nature of the agriculture. On the far side of the gorge, above the flood-scarred dry wash that marks the border, dozens of Haitian homesteads dot the hillsides. There, years of intense cultivation have given erosion a head start, and the exposed bedrock that fills the fields is a portent for the Dominican side as well. This is new territory for me; Plant With Purpose only recently completed initial surveys on this side of the park. The first village we come to, a collection of wooden shacks, a one-room school, and a military border checkpoint, has been appropriately nicknamed “The Armpit.” The conventional wisdom, that you can tell the location of the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti by where the trees stop, isn’t entirely true, but it is close—the greater population density on the Haitian side makes the border obvious. But on both sides, circumstances have made it challenging for people to live without destroying their environment. And the environment returns the favor, its degradation making life tenuous for these forgotten people. It is a broken relationship in a fallen world. Poverty limits the options of farmers who have no resources other than the hillsides. When times get especially hard, they cut the trees to sell as firewood. The Dominicans can clear more of the forest to plant their beans, moving into the edges of the national park, but the Haitians must cross the border daily to sharecrop the Dominican bean fields. They trade half their crops for the right to farm Dominican hills, taking their unsustainable farming practices deeper into the Dominican Republic. As the trees fall, the soil continues to erode and the watershed continues to degrade, robbing the farmers of their two most important assets—soil and water. Thus, poverty spreads and is clearly visible in the eyes and on the faces of the shoeless workers that walk back and forth across this border. But even here, there is hope. There is good news and there are options. The people may be disempowered, they may need to be reminded of their own God-given talents, but they are not stupid or helpless. Like all of us, they need to be reminded of their own importance in the eyes of God and of the love he has for them. The good news of the kingdom is that they can begin to live as if the curse were lifted. Relationships with God, creation, and neighbor can begin to heal. Creation need not be an enemy. Farmers can learn other ways to farm that work with the steep hillsides, instead of against them. Trees can be planted that thrive in this environment and provide income to poor families while slowing soil erosion and restoring the watershed. Waste can be used as fertilizer rather than river pollutant. By mimicking the diversity of creation and its cycles, a new, healthier relationship can be created. New life can come from decay. Like all of our relationships, these new relationships are still tainted by the fall, but they can be improved and health can be restored. Finally, as Dominicans and Haitians, people with a long history of mistrust and even violence, work together for a common purpose as brothers and sisters in the Lord, relationships between troubled neighbors can be healed. In the few years that Plant With Purpose has been working on the other side of the park, we have begun to see the changes that occur when individuals and communities rediscover their God-given potential and heal their land. Tiny trees cover the hillsides. Beans are being replaced with a diversity of crops that make the best use of the steep hillsides and scarce water. There is reconciliation between Haitian and Dominican. It still doesn’t look like the park and never will, but there is perhaps even greater beauty in the redemption that is taking place as life springs forth from death. Here in the Armpit, that redemption is still only a prayer, but we look forward with great anticipation to the healing that is to come. This article was recently published in The Other Journal. Scott Sabin is the Executive Director of Plant With Purpose. To read other recent articles by and about Scott, click here to read "Celebrating Freedom" and click here to read "The Accidental Environmentalist".

Reforesting the border

The border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic crosses some of the poorest and most environmentally sensitive areas of both countries. Despite rampant prejudice, Haitian and Dominican communities have interdependent economies, common environmental problems, and share elements of a growing border culture. Millions of Haitians cross illegally to seek opportunity in the more prosperous Dominican Republic, and relationships on both sides of the border are characterized by misunderstanding and often violence. One of Plant With Purpose's most exciting initiatives to date is its Trans Border Project on the Haitian/Dominican border. Through an integrated program of community development, innovative agriculture, reforestation, microcredit, and long-term discipleship, Plant With Purpose is holistically addressing the root causes of poverty and empowering these rural farmers to transform their lives and lands through viable, long-term solutions.

Check out this article recently reported by the Latin American Herald Tribune about the Dominican government’s plan to reforest along the border, and see why the work Plant With Purpose is already doing in the border region is so important.

Dominican Republic to Plant 5 Million Trees Along Border with Haiti

SANTO DOMINGO – The Dominican Republic plans to plant 5 million trees along the border with Haiti as part of a project to fight deforestation, environmental officials said.

The project, which will cost about 35 million pesos (some $972,200), will be carried out under an agreement signed by the Environment Ministry and the General Border Development Administration, or DGDF.

Pine, mahogany, mango, oak, tamarind and guayacan trees will be planted in the border region, the Environment Ministry said.

The agreement will be implemented via the Quisqueya Verde reforestation program in Montecristi, Dajabon and Santiago Rodriguez provinces in the northwestern part of the country, as well as in the southwestern provinces of Elias Piña, Bahoruco, Independencia and Pedernales.

Natural resources “are a national security” issue because “not just forests but also transborder waters” are at stake, Environment Minister Jaime David Fernandez Mirabal said.

“The production of charcoal is a threat to all of us, but when families join reforestation brigades you create green jobs, on the one hand, and reduce the pressure on resources, on the other,” Fernandez Mirabal said.

The Dominican Republic and Haiti share the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, with Haiti in the western portion.

Heavy rains from tropical storms and hurricanes have caused mudslides, killing thousands of people in Haiti in recent years.

Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country, is prone to devastating mudslides and flooding because of man-made deforestation that has reduced the amount of the nation covered by forest from 25 percent some 50 years ago to just 2 percent today, while the neighboring Dominican Republic retains a lush tree canopy. EFE