After The Quake, Rebuilding Haiti From Brooklyn

This week is a special one for Haitians: Today, May 18, is Haitian Flag Day, commemorating the day in 1803 when Haitian revolutionaries chose the blue-and-red banner to represent their country; on Thursday, Haitians worldwide mark the 267th birthday of Toussaint L'Ouverture, the former slave who helped lead the nation to independence.

This year's celebrations are simultaneously more subdued and more focused, as the international Haitian community works to rebuild from the devastating earthquake that struck near the capital of Port-au-Prince on January 12, killing an estimated 230,000 people and leaving one million homeless. Some of that rebuilding work is going in and around Brooklyn's large Haitian community, where efforts to direct aid to the ravaged country run parallel to attempts to serve Haitians displaced by the quake who've joined their community in New York. On Sunday, several dozen New Yorkers of Haitian descent marched from Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn to Foley Square, where they held a moment of silence to honor the earthquake dead—plus a "moment of appreciation" to give thanks for the international response to the quake, and call for continued attention to Haiti.

Right now, said Delarquy Fleuriot of march organizers KOREH (Kombit Rekonstriction Haiti), conditions in Port-au-Prince are little improved from the immediate aftermath of the quake—while food, water, and medical supplies have arrived, housing reconstruction hasn't yet begun. "We still have people living in tents," he said. "It's going to rain very soon, and we want to make sure that we put these people someplace that we know they are safe."

Fleuriot ran down the list of immediate needs of the millions of people displaced by the quake: "You're talking about food, medical supplies, a nice place to live, and a good job." This last is key, he says, "because the real problem with Port-au-Prince is we had too many people in one place. So now since some of them went to the provinces, we want to keep them there. The best way to keep them there is to put jobs for them to do. As long as they have things to do, trust me, they don't want to go back to Port-au-Prince." One Haitian group working to do just that is Fonkoze, a nonprofit founded in 1994 that is today the nation's largest microfinance agency, providing loans and banking services for those running or launching small businesses. Fonkoze's latest project is Zafèn, a new fundraising mechanism by which donors can give money to specific projects in Haiti—buying a freezer for a local lemonade merchant, say, or paying for in-home teachers for disabled children—and see immediately how far there is to go to meet the fundraising goal. Already in the works before the quake, Zafèn had its official launch at a conference at St. John's University in Queens last month.

Tatiana Benjamin, a Haitian-American Brooklyn College student who helped organize a Zafèn fundraiser last month, says the school's student government "kind of just fell in love" with the organization after a fellow student tipped her off to it earlier this year. "What we liked about Zafen is that it wasn't just an organization that was claiming to give all of its funds to Haiti," she says. "They were directly helping businesses and projects going on in Haiti, so there's actually a way to monitor where your money's going." The group eventually decided on funding a sugar cane farm equipment project, whose profits will be used to help fund school tuition and illiteracy programs for adults.