Haiti Education Foundation

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A LITERATE LEGACY Arkansan builds schools in Haiti 91-year-old El Dorado woman revisits nation where she gives children hope
STORY BY HEATHER HAHN PHOTOS BY CHRIS DEAN ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

14 May 2008
The Arkansas Democrat Gazette, Copyright (c) 2008 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc. All rights reserved.
CHERIDENT, HAITI - Frances Landers climbed into the front passenger seat and braced for another bone-rattling journey.
To get from Cherident to the village of Hess, the white Isuzu truck wended up a steep, rocky track hardly wider than a hiking trail. The 20-minute ride took Landers past women with baskets balanced on their heads, wooden shacks with tin roofs, the occasional goat with its nose in the vegetation, and rows of corn and other crops terraced into the mountainside.
Finally, the truck reached its destination - a half-finished concrete building that will soon be a primary school named for her late husband, Dr. Gardner Landers, who died in 2006. The school is being built with private donations given in his memory.
For the past two days, the 91-year-old widow from El Dorado had braved three airplane flights and the harrowing drive into Haiti's remote southern mountains just for this moment.
"He would be so pleased," she said. "And then to think, there's going to be a school that's near enough for the children to belong to." This was Landers' 43rd trip to Haiti.
More than 25 years ago, while working as a medical volunteer, Landers discovered a village that had no school and vowed to change that. She launched one school, then another, then dozens more.
Today, in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, where nearly half the population is illiterate, thousands of young people are getting an education and at least one meal a day because of Landers' vision.
"It just gives the children purpose to be able to go to school," Landers said. "The kids have hope for the future. They realize that without an education, they don't have a chance to have any kind of life. They'll have an existence but not a life." Many of the children in Cherident said the rice, beans and meat they get at school are typically the only food they get each weekday. Still in a country that recently saw riots over the rising cost of rice and other staples, few students at the Haiti Education Foundation schools bear the tell-tale signs of malnourishment - discolored hair, bleached skin and swollen bellies.
Anci Fils-Aime, 31, is a graduate of the schools that Landers helped start in Cherident. With a degree in accounting from the Episcopal university in Port-au-Prince, Fils-Aime serves as the schools' treasurer.
Without Landers, he said, many of the children in rural west Haiti would be tending their family's gardens with picks and machetes or helping to sell produce in a street-side market. Like their parents, most of them would have never learned to read.
Landers is the chairman and founder of the El Dorado-based Haiti Education Foundation that provides the schools' funding. Much of the financial support comes from donations from churches across the United States, including First Presbyterian Church in El Dorado, where Landers is a longtime member.
The day-to-day operations of the schools are managed by two parishes in the Episcopal Church of Haiti.
"This is a God thing," said Susan Turbeville, the foundation's sole employee and the trip's main organizer. "A lot of people have stepped out in faith to make this happen." The new Gardner Landers School is roughly 50 miles southwest of Port-au-Prince, the nation's capital. It is the most recent addition to the 40 primary schools and 10 secondary schools financially supported by the foundation.
Altogether, the schools had an enrollment of 11,474 students last year - more than all but five school districts in Arkansas.
HELLO AND GOODBYE
Landers traveled to Haiti in late April for the first time since 2004. At 91, she knew it would likely be her last visit.
Landers wanted to see the progress made since her last trip. She also wanted to say goodbye to a land she has grown to love.
Before she departed for Haiti, the U.S. State Department was advising Americans to defer all unnecessary travel to that country because of recent civil unrest. But for Landers, such warnings were nothing new. In her 30 years of traveling to Haiti, the unstable country has always been under some kind of travel warning for political upheaval or violence, she said.
But on this journey, Landers was not alone. She made the trip with seven other foundation supporters, including Turbeville and a son, Arkansas Circuit Judge Mike Landers. Her traveling companions came from around the United States - Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas and West Virginia.
They stayed in a guesthouse built for American visitors near the schools in Cherident. By the standards of the Haitian mountains, the house offered luxurious accommodations. It had an electrical generator that powered a single fluorescent bulb in each room, indoor plumbing and toilets that worked most of the time, and, best of all, a kitchen with purified water.
As with all of her earlier trips to Haiti, Landers and her traveling companions paid for their travel out of their own pockets. She is determined that all donations, unless specifically allocated otherwise, go toward supporting the schools.
In the tiny village of Hess, dotted with mango and palm trees, about 80 children in kindergarten through second grade attend class in a one-room tin building that doubles as an Episcopal church.
Parents in the community organized the makeshift school because the nearest primary school was too far away for the youngest pupils to reach on foot. The Gardner Landers Memorial School will replace the flimsy, cramped, windowless quarters with spacious and solid classrooms.
On Landers' arrival, the teacher and the children, all dressed in neat yellow uniforms, filed out of the tin building to greet their elegant and spry Arkansas benefactor.
Landers sat nearby on a concrete ledge that's part of the new school's construction site. The children clustered around her. After the group posed for photos, the youngsters serenaded Landers in French.
"Come to school," they sang. "Don't stay in your house. Come to learn." Cerisier Bernadette, 32, the school's teacher, is a graduate of the secondary school in Cherident, named the Frances Landers Technical School.
"I loved the education I received there," she said through a translator. "That's why I am a teacher today."
BRINGING SIGHT TO THE BLIND
What first drew the Landerses to Haiti wasn't an interest in its people's education but their eyesight.
A representative from the Medical Benevolence Foundation, which supports Presbyterian hospitals and clinics around the globe, had spoken at the Landerses' church in the 1970s. He told the congregation that without the help of American doctors, most people with cataracts in Haiti would be blind for life.
That news stunned the Landerses, who knew that cataract surgery was routine throughout the United States. So, the couple volunteered to spend Thanksgiving week of 1977 helping out at Hopital Sainte Croix (Holy Cross Hospital) in the coastal city of Leogane, about 19 miles west of Port-au-Prince.
"Some of the people had walked days to the hospital, some with their blind relatives, to see whether they would be eligible for cataract surgery," Landers recalled.
"We worked a week and really thought that we would only go once, but at the end of the week we found people waiting that had not even been seen." The couple returned the week after Easter, and once again, they found the time too short to serve all those who showed up. For the next 12 years, the Landerses continued to visit Haiti twice a year around Easter and Thanksgiving.
During that time, the hospital - a joint operation of the Episcopal Church of Haiti and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) - hired as chaplain the Rev. Jean Wilfrid Albert, a graduate of the Episcopal seminary in Haiti.
Frances Landers and "Pere" - that is, "Father" - Albert became fast friends. She remembers Albert continually telling her that education was the answer to Haiti's many woes.
One day, he took her to the village of Mercery, a community where, he said, no one could read or write. At the time, most people in Mercery practiced voodoo, and the voodoo priest was the most influential man in town.
But Albert pointed to a small building that he planned to use as a church. The next year, he asked Landers for help in establishing a school inside the church building.
She appealed for assistance from the Presbytery of the Pines, the regional governing body for Presbyterian churches in southern Arkansas and northern Louisiana. A congregation in Monroe, La., learned of her efforts and donated money from its Vacation Bible School to pay a teacher's salary.
When Landers next traveled to Mercery in 1981, she saw a classroom of happy children who sang to her and presented her with flowers. Then she saw a girl ask Albert if she could go to school there too. But Albert had to tell her there was no room.
"I took her picture and took it home to my church and asked them if we could build a school where we would not have to turn one child away," she said. "Gardner said, `You know, that was God's first miracle because they gave you that money, and they didn't even appoint a committee.'" The people of Mercery used the money to build an eight-room school for 400 children in kindergarten through the sixth grade. The school included a much-needed lunchroom that served more than just the students.
"You would see that there would be mothers holding younger children by the wall and watching them eat," Landers said. "If a child saw his or her mother, they left something on their plate and placed it ... in front of their mother and then returned to class." The Episcopal school even caught the attention of Mercery's voodoo priest, who decided to send his children there.
Landers also played a role in Mercery obtaining a clean-water source. She learned that the villagers were washing and bathing in the only water supply available - a muddy, stagnant pond tainted by sewage.
Landers knew that Southern Baptist missionaries were digging wells in Haiti, so she wrote and asked the missionaries to consider drilling a well at Mercery. After visiting the villages, the Baptists told Landers that they would build the well if she could give them $1,000 for pipe. She returned to El Dorado and asked a doctor who attended her church to donate to the cause. The last time Landers checked, the Baptist well was still the village's and school's sole source of clean water.
Today, the Mercery school is self-supporting and independent of the Haiti Education Foundation.
"I do not hear regularly from Mercery," she said, "but I do understand that the school is doing fine, and the economy in the village is higher than most because they have learned how to make items to sell."
"SCHOOLS IN THE MOUNTAINS"
In 1989, Albert told the Landerses that he was leaving Leogane to serve churches in the mountains of western Haiti.
He said God had told him in a dream that a school needed to be built next to each of the seven Episcopal churches in the mountains.
"We were still supporting the school at Mercery, and I said, `Pere Albert, how can we support seven more schools?'" Landers said.
"He said, `I don't know how we'll support seven more schools. But there's one thing I do know: If God wants schools in the mountains, there will be schools in the mountains.'" Landers wasn't sure where to start until her husband suggested that she call Presbyterian women's groups. She got her first speaking engagement at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Hot Springs. Her slide presentation so impressed one of the women that the woman's family donated $10,000 to the schoolbuilding project.
Landers looked down at the check and thought, "God does want schools in the mountains." Cherident became the site of the first primary school. But Albert continued to start churches and request more schools. Landers, paying her own way, traveled from the Shenandoah Valley to the Hollywood hills to raise the money.
But Albert didn't live to see how far the ministry he inspired would expand. He died in July 2005 of pancreatic cancer.
Today, the foundation has donors from a variety of religious groups in 37 of the 50 states. For $91 a year, the foundation can pay for a student's tuition, shoes, a school uniform, textbook, Creole Bible and a daily cup of milk.
In some ways, Landers has acted as a one-woman economic stimulus package in this distant outpost far from Haiti's troubled, trash-strewn capital.
Like the other mountain villages, Cherident has little in the way of creature comforts. The few houses in each village are mostly two-room, wooden huts. The more prosperous dwellings have tin roofs; the more destitute have thatch.
There are no traffic lights, no street signs and no paved roads.
Most people travel by foot along roads where hurricanes have blown away much of the dirt, leaving only rock.
Landers' foundation has paid to erect two-story concrete buildings where once there were only shacks. Each month the foundation provides salaries for 441 teachers, 46 teacher assistants and 44 principals. While the vast majority of Haitians live on less than $2 a day, the foundation pays its staff salaries ranging from $65 to $100 a month year-round.

Last year, the foundation gave a total of $616,318 to Haiti. On average, the group wires the Episcopal board that operates the schools about $39,000 monthly.
The foundation now also partners with Living Waters of the World, which recently installed water-purification systems in Cherident and the village of Bainet. It also helped inspire Haiti Health Partnership, a joint ministry of First Presbyterian Church in Fort Smith and congregations in California and Tennessee. The ministry operates a clinic in Cherident.
INSIDE THE SCHOOLS
But the schools are Landers' greatest joy. She said some students begin walking to school as early as 4 a.m. to cross the rocky terrain in time for class. By about 6:45 a.m., the main road leading to Cherident is full of students - all in spotless uniforms kept clean without the aid of washing machines and dryers.

At the Frances Landers Technical School in Cherident, the students begin the day lined up in the front courtyard. They pray and then join in singing the first verse of "How Great Thou Art" in French before they head to class.
Their course work is designed to be rigorous. Only students who plan to go to college attend "Terminal 2," the Haitian equivalent of a senior year. In one Terminal 2 class in Cherident, 16 students are studying calculus.
Asked what careers they hope to pursue, students named a range of professions. Three of the boys wanted to become electrical engineers, one boy wanted to become a civil engineer, boys and girls wanted to go into medicine, a girl and boy each wanted to become Episcopal priests.
All those professions require college degrees, but already students from the schools have gone on to study at universities in Port-au-Prince.
Forty of the schools' graduates enrolled in a university this year. Four received their college diplomas in December, and two will graduate this month.
Former students have become teachers, nurses, priests and agricultural experts helping to fight the rampant erosion that threatens Haiti's sparse farmland.
Still, college is expensive, and the foundation has been unable to provide much help for students after they graduate from secondary school. Foundation leaders hope to build a dormitory for its graduates in Leogane so the students can attend a university without moving to the dangerous slums of Port-au-Prince.Even for college graduates, jobs are scarce.

While this was likely Landers' last trip to Haiti, she plans to continue traveling across the United States, raising awareness and money for the children she loves.
She also has taken steps to ensure that the foundation will continue well into the future. One of her sons, Mike Landers, has replaced her as president. She continues to serve as chairman.
Landers' work with the Haiti schools has strengthened her faith, she said.
"If anyone had told me 12 years ago that this would be here, I would have said `no way,'" Landers said. "But what I've learned is that if God wants it, it's going to happen." More information about the Haiti Education Foundation is available at www.haitifoundation.org.

This article was published 05/14/2008