The Atis Fanm - Haitian Resources

Dear Friends,

I've had the sudden opportunity to go to Port au Prince with Seth Rolbein and a small group from Boston University two days after our terrifically successful fundraiser.

Here we have been able to move through the astonishing, permanently life changing devastation and witness first hand some of the plans the government is scrambling to implement at a time when speed, human awareness and thinking outside the box is crucial to Haiti's regeneration.

I had the opportunity to give President Préval and is wife Elizabeth one of our scarves from the Artists of Matènwa (which she loved and immediately put on!) as a reminder that Haiti is large.

Right now all of the focus is on Port au Prince and its surrounds which redoubles my conviction that our own focus must be Lagonav which I already see can easily remain left out of the aid loop.

More about what we've witnessed here and the results of our own fundraiser when I get back next week.

So grateful for your concern,
EL

To read the CNN article about Lagonav,
"The forgotten Island" click here

EARTHQUAKE IN HAITI: Matènwa needs us now more than ever!

Thank you for your concern. We are shattered by the disaster and the future chronic hardships this is bound to create, just when Haiti was feeling the first tastes of a possible comeback.

We still do not know who we have lost in Port au Prince or what yet happened in Matènwa, but because Lagonav is so dependent on supplies coming from the city we anticipate - if nothing else - a severe lack of food and supplies for a long time to come. There are villages like ours all over Haiti whose losses will not benefit from the aid that necessarily concentrates on the city.

We are committed more than ever to any local relief we can offer our Matenwa community AND to keeping our programs there intact so people can continue their education and means to make a living--- they cannot lose that too.

By donating through us you can be sure that the money will be going to where it is most needed. While our focus is on Matènwa, we will be dedicating a portion of all donations specifically to earthquake relief and rehabilitation.Thank you for helping us to rebuild the lives of our friends on Lagonav and ensure Matènwa's future survival.

For updated information straight from Matènwa visit the blog of the Matenwa Community Learning Center

Read the January 15 Cape Cod Today online article about local relief efforts to Matenwa.

Remarks by Ellen LeBow on the Night of the
8th Annual Merci D’Avance Dance Fundraiser for Matènwa, Haiti

We are overwhelmed by the sheer generosity of spirit that brought so many of you out to be part of this most crucial of fundraisers. It had been planned as a joyful event, a thank you, a newsletter of sorts, celebrating a dozen years of progressive growth and creative opportunity in the small, feisty village of Matènwa.

One of our longstanding goals has been to generate enough educational, environmental and economic security to keep people from migrating to the hellish dead end of a Port au Prince slum. There are many small groups all over Haiti with that same goal in mind. We on Cape Cod know better than most that strong community feeds and sustains life.

President Bill Clinton, now the new special envoy to Haiti, had drawn together investors, politicians, and philanthropists from all over with the idea of turning Haiti around. They were poised to finally give the Haitian people the un-exploitive hand they deserve after centuries of use and neglect.

The irony of tonight is, had the world all along recognized Haiti’s worth, had poured peace money into Haiti’s infrastructure, Cité Soleil, Cité Karton and the crowded slums that rise up the hillsides above Port au Prince would not have existed and would not have buried tens of thousands under its physical, and spiritual, rubble.

We still do not know whom we have lost in Port au Prince, or the extent of what happened in Matènwa. Homes have cracked and fallen; they are still feeling aftershocks. Everyone there has people dear to them who have perished in the city.

But there is something else: because the island of Lagonav is completely dependent on supplies they can’t make themselves coming out of Port au Prince we anticipate severe repercussions for a long time to come.

From Matènwa we hear: “The biggest issue will be one of finding food and other resources. People here are already hungry. It is very difficult to find cooking oil and other necessities as the merchants who travel back and forth have stopped. The already poor infrastructure leading to the island was shattered, and people are afraid to leave. It is unclear when or how it will be resolved.”

Chris Low, the local school’s director writes: “The world will be contributing to the major rescue organizations and as usual the people here in the bay, on Lagonav, will be forgotten and suffering without the media to send out their call. Our staff on the ground will get your donation to the neediest people here to rebuild and keep them from starvation in the coming weeks and months.”

Most of Haiti is made up of villages like ours whose losses will not benefit from the aid that concentrates on the epicenter alone. We can’t imagine now what it will take to make an immediate dent in this human disaster. But as you see here tonight we have always been and will continue to be in it for the long haul.

We are committed more than ever to any local relief we can offer our Matènwa community AND ALSO to keeping our programs there intact so people can continue their education and means to make a living--- after all this, they CANNOT lose that too. For almost a decade the sole focus of this event has been to create another year of educational and economic security for Matènwa.

All around you see the results of our collaboration in our photos and in the beautiful artisan work for sale made by the mothers of Matènwa.

We bring High School students for a life-changing experience, encourage social change through teacher training, grassroots theater, local entrepreneurship, and support the efforts of local food growing farmers. If we abandon that, we undermine the healthiest part of Matènwa’s will to live. We can’t allow an earthquake to shake the foundation of what keeps a community vital.

There is disaster and there is rebuilding. There is life after earthquake.
Relief means not just saving life but keeping life going.

In the days to come you won’t hear about a place like Matènwa. In the months to come people are going to forget about Haiti, they’ll get sick of hearing the word on the news, or a new disaster will come along in a new place.

Our forgetting doesn’t diminish the need or the suffering. On the other hand I have seen for myself it doesn’t diminish the Haitian people’s capacity to rise from their own ashes.

They have done so for 300 years with no help at all. Try to imagine what they can do WITH real ---sustaining ---global help.

The donations you so freely make tonight makes the connection between the ongoing health of Matènwa and the ongoing health of Haiti itself.

This community IS the hope. If villages like this one, which make up most of Haiti, can stay strong even through this, then the people who survive the next disaster will be those who were able to stay put, root deep into their rural community and hold on.

RaRa: A rousing, month-long, Vodou celebration honoring the gods of life's deepest forces. RaRa is unique to Haiti, with its own fiery music, rhythms and dance.

This summer the artists of Matenwa opened their first storefront, "RaRa" in Wellfleet, Cape Cod Massachusetts showcasing their extraordinary silk, sequin, silkscreened and embroidered artwork.

RaRa is located at 6 Commercial Street next to "The Juice" one of Wellfleet's most popular restaurants. The head chef at "The Juice," Mike Andolina, is an artist who teaches printmaking at the Arts Center in Matenwa.

RaRa is tiny but packed with glittering life!
Come visit, eat great food, learn more about the project and buy gifts for everyone you know. Your support ensures the artists' -- and their families-- future.

On Wednesday, June 10th we celebrated the new season of The Juice restaurant and the opening of RaRa, the Women Artists of Matenwa's first storefront, located right next to The Juice.

Dear Friends,

Our trip to Haiti seemed too brief, yet a lot got condensed into that time.

We hadn't been in Matenwa for two hours before a rowdy, traveling RaRa procession descended on our house, demanding cash for blessings. It was RaRa season, what I consider the seminal heart of the Haitian countryside, when Vodou traditionalists gather into animated rival processions in honor of the gods of sex and death. With thrusting music and percussion, songs, rum, costumes and lascivious dance steps, RaRa is one of many places where Ancestral Africa meets Haitian descendants. The loud, glittering crowd glides through hills and valleys by sun and moonlight, pooling in yards and crossroads for a performance and handout before moving on.

A few days later we discovered a baby hawk ("GriGri" in Creole) "acquired" by some schoolboys and left dangling by a cord in a tree. With rescue in mind, we bought it for a few cents and took it home, hoping Val Bell, our arriving biology teacher, would know what to do with it.

The GriGri, with enormous, gold-rimmed eyes and elegant markings, became our tame mascot and beloved obsession. We paid the same boys who once tormented her to bring lizards and cockroaches that she swallowed with the ease of an Anaconda. How often, we marveled, does one get a chance to pet a hawk? Day after day she would sit on our hands, shoulders, heads, content to watch it all. Then, one morning right before we were to return to the States, while our backs were turned, she disappeared.

Meanwhile our goals were pressing. Mike Andolina and I were teaching three students the art of silk screening. Our hope was that, as they learn the process, they will seek out printing jobs from schools and other local organizations as well as make work we can sell here. Our first project was printing a logo on 60 t-shirts, one for each artist at the Sant Atizana.

Down the road at the Matenwa Community Learning Center, Lisa and Val were organizing teacher trainings, Lisa concentrating on how the learning mind works, Val evaluating their knowledge of basic science.

The Nauset High School students grappled with the language, hanging with their host families, taking part in cultural eye-openers like pounding coffee and lugging water, helping out at the school's new computer room.

As usual, we attended many meetings assessing the artists' new work and grappling with the fact that the worth of Haitian money is falling as the cost of food rises.

A local activist, Wol Kalixte, asked us to help 37 neighbors build a cistern so they could keep their community food garden alive. We looked out over the hills, desert-dry though it was "rainy season," and tried to figure out how to help.

Jet, a hard working entrepreneur, asked us to help her restart her little outdoor roadside restaurant to which we used to make pilgrimages, sitting within woven palm frond walls to eat rice and stewed goat from mismatched bowls. This year Jet had been robbed of everything - money, food, pots and pans, even chairs and table - but was ready to resurrect her business with more security in place if we could lend support.

Each visit includes magical moments outside of economic worry:

• The sight of our little goddaughters in a wedding procession, dressed like mini-virgin brides in white tulle trains and seed pearls.
• The dancing King of RaRa swirling with satin scarves and sweat.
• Teaching the artists to sing a rousing group version of "Stand By Me" in Creole and English.

We came home with many plans. The well-being of the artists' families depends more than ever on increased sales of their work. Our hope is to find an affordable storefront in Wellfleet to sell to the summer crowd.

Our ideas for this year's fundraising dance bash are underway, as well as a progress report/video presentation at the Wellfleet Public Library this September. Mike, head chef at Wellfleet's popular restaurant "The Juice," is planning to open with a Haiti Night dinner event to help raise money for, among other things, Jet's new restaurant.

We'll get back to you soon with dates, and thank you for standing by us.

With love and respect,
Ellen LeBow, Lisa Brown, Valerie Bell, and Mike Andolina

WE ARE waiting to hear from four young students who have taken themselves to Matenwa.

Now freshmen in college, Peter and Maria first went to Matenwa last year when they were Lisa’s students at Nauset High School. Arielle, also one of Lisa’s former students, will make this her third visit, Mike his fourth.

Their past experience in Matenwa was so personal and transforming that they vowed to return on their own if necessary, confident in their ability to do it without Lisa or me.

With a mix of longing (to accompany them) and pride in their desire and independence, we are waiting for their stories of reunion and what the community is up to in our absence.

Because of some family “issues” in both of our lives that absorbed some of our winter focus Lisa and I made the decision to move our traditional February stay in Matenwa to April. This will leave us more time to “prep” the two new Nauset students coming with us and make clearer plans for new projects at the school and art center.

We also decided for the first time to move our crucial fundraiser bash, the famous “Merci D”Avance Dance” (“Thanks in Advance Dance”) to the spring. This way we will be back fresh with new stories about the progress of music and art in the community as well as all the new work from the artists.

Nonetheless, be on the lookout for our 2008 progress report arriving soon.

When the economy seizes up all over the world Haiti gets hit with a 7 on the seismic charts.

But the small, focused, good things that are happening in Haiti, things that depend on steady community drive, patience, imagination and good will as much as they do on money, do not crumble in the quake.
That’s us.

Thanks,
Lisa and Ellen