After Four Hurricanes Haiti Needs Your Help

Water, water everywhere... Women in Gonaives searching for clean water after Hanna.

Gonaives after Hanna. Hurricane Ike struck after this photo was taken, causing even more severe flooding.

With almost no trees or terracing, the soil on this mountainside has completely eroded away.

Rural couple beginning to employ the terracing technique that will hold soil in place and help prevent flash flooding.

September 9, 2008

Dear friends of Haiti,

You probably know that Haiti has been hit by four hurricanes in less than a month. Many of you have called or written asking us how our people fared and what can be done to help.

The official death count has climbed into the hundreds. But much of the country is cut off from any outside contact because of washed out bridges and roads. So the number of dead may be much higher, perhaps into the thousands.

Winds blew away many of the simple houses of the poorest families. But the rains were far more destructive. Haiti is very mountainous and almost completely deforested. As poor farmers clear land to grow food and cut trees to produce charcoal for sale in the cities, the soil is left exposed and quickly erodes away. Little is left to capture the rain. So it rushes down gullies that grow quickly into raging rivers that wash away homes, livestock, and people. The water quickly rises in low lying towns and cities. Countless thousands only survive by crowding atop rooftops.

We are grateful that all our staff and associates survived without injury. They tell stories of the destruction and desperation. Some have taken in neighbors who have lost their homes. Others have faced loses of their own.

They tell us that many of the communities where we work have been hit hard. Gonaives, where we have a large Living Words network, is under water. Hundreds of homes and the school in Bresilienne were lost. The road to Menaud and the bridge to Mirabalais (and Saut d'Eau) have been washed away, isolating those communities and our program people there. We have not heard anything from many of the more remote communities where we work.

While Beyond Borders is not a relief organization with access to helicopters and stockpiles of food and water, you can help us play a critical role in the coming days and weeks as schools try to get back up and running and communities begin the hard work to recover.

Once this crisis has passed an even more important work will resume, and you can help us expand it. Let me explain:

We cannot prevent hurricanes, but we can help Haitian farmers learn agricultural practices that will both prevent soil erosion and greatly reduce the destructive flooding these hurricanes bring.

Participants in adult education program introducing sustainable agriculture and environmental protection.

Even before this hurricane season started we were working to expand a very successful new adult education program that teaches sustainable agriculture and environmental protection. Farmers learn how to build organic barriers and gully plugs that fill with soil to create fertile terraces where gardens can be planted to produce more food. They learn the consequences of deforestation and how planting trees along contours can increase food production and restore the natural water cycle. This is important in the dry season, too, when droughts can be just as deadly as floods.

This effort along with our other rural development work helps reduce the damage storms and drought can cause and helps people who are struggling sometimes just to survive to have more to eat, get a basic education, and live much better both when it rains and when it doesn't.

Please make a special gift right now. Anything you give will help speed this effort.

Even better, add Beyond Borders to your monthly budget (if you haven't already) to help us continue to expand our work to more communities.

Thank you so much! And please pray for Haiti during this very difficult period.

David Diggs,
Co-director