Have you ever tried to make things better but found that your efforts only made things worse? Haitians have an expression for this. They call it “washing your hands and drying them off in the dirt.”

Many good people outside Haiti see the country’s critical needs and try to help. They know people are hungry, so they send food—never realizing that donated food often puts local farmers out of business, leaving the country less able to feed itself in the long run. They see people poorly clothed and send used clothing, often never learning that their gifts take work from local seamstresses and tailors and encourage a general sense of helplessness.

The same thing happens with education in Haiti. People hear that many poor Haitian children never have a chance to go to school. So they respond compassionately, perhaps by sponsoring a Haitian child or even traveling to Haiti with a mission group to help build a school. While this may help in some instances, many schools are so bad in Haiti that they do their students more harm than good.

Most Haitian teachers have never graduated from high school and have no training to teach. They teach as they were taught, forcing their students to memorize and recite long texts in French, a language neither the students nor most teachers ever learn to speak. To keep students engaged in such mind-numbing busywork, teachers often resort to violence and humiliation. The whole enterprise teaches students to devalue their native language, abandon their questions, and discredit their own thoughts. Students who succeed in this educational charade often tend to see themselves as above physical labor. They enter adulthood alienated from productive rural life, yet unprepared for any other kind of work. The cities of Haiti are flooded with frustrated unemployed people who are products of this backward kind of schooling. Too many Haitian schools are preparing students to fail rather than succeed.

If giving food, clothing, and schooling can hurt more than help, what are we to do? Is there any hope for helping Haiti? Or is it all just too complicated? Will we always end up drying our washed hands in the dirt?

At Beyond Borders we believe that there are ways of helping that lead to lasting improvements. The key is to look beyond symptoms to root causes. It will do Haiti little good to increase school attendance if the hidden curriculum of these schools is failure, if they teach that the only way to advance socially is through domination and exclusion, and the best way to cope is through passivity and compliance. Certainly, we must work so that more Haitian children are able to attend school. But we must make sure the education being offered is really liberating students and equipping them to be life-long learners and problem-solvers, and preparing them to work constructively and compassionately with others.

We have focused in this newsletter on hope, which is a precondition to progress. But we recognize that not just any kind of hope will do. Just as outside efforts to help Haiti can end up doing more harm than good, it is easy for poor Haitians to place their hope in schemes that end up making them poorer. (See the story Where Hope Hides.)

Beyond Borders works to nourish a different kind of hope, a hope that endures because it is anchored in the quest for God’s kingdom and justice. (Matt. 6:33) Instead of hacking away at the symptoms of poverty, we promote new models of education and leadership that are rooted in kingdom values. We help schools equip students to serve rather than be served. We promote leadership energized by the power of love rather than the love of power.

By supporting Haitians in their struggle for hope, we discover hope for ourselves as well. Like love, hope is something that we can only keep when we give it away. By sharing hope, we find our own hope renewed.

Help make hope shine brighter in Haiti. Please make a special gift or pledge your regular support right now. You can give securely online through our partner, Network for Good. Your help is really needed. Thanks so much!

Thank you for the hope you place in us and for the hope you help nourish in Haiti.