Nothing is hard

Billy, Britani and I in Carribean Lodge restaurant

After working all day at the RG Shop

We ended up staying at the Caribbean Lodge, where Julie's accommodations are provided for due to the great relationship she has formed with Worldwide Modular Construction & Caribbean Lodge. Julie is right, the partnerships she has made out here are keeping RG alive and Julie. Luxury living in Haiti is not defined by plush pillows and steaming hot showers, but it is defined by having the luxuries of having a safe place to sleep that is monitored by an armed guard, a semi warm shower and an air conditioned container. We felt pampered by Julie letting us sleep in till 8am, most Haitians normally rise around 6am. This morning we went to the RG shop and there was a free training for 10 women in a woman’s group that functions to empower women in the community. The women who came today desperately want jobs and want to learn the skill of making sandals. RG hopes that one day they will be able to expand and increase the number of artisans. Julie briefed us on today’s plans and while she was explaining the women’s group and their desire to work with RG she broke down in tears. Because the bottom line for Julie is not about making money it’s about being a catalyst so that people can have the opportunity to take a care of themselves and their families.

Grassroots United Land

We spent most of the day coming up how much with how much it costs to make a pair of sandals. It sounds simple but the prices change due to riots, the color of the skin of the person buying the materials and local conflict, there is no stagnant price. It’s important that the sandals are sold at a rate that is beneficial for RG and the vendor because the sandal component differentiates RG from other nonprofits in the sense that it not sustained solely through individual donations or grants, but by the revenue generated from the sandals as well.

Next we went to European Disaster Volunteer’s (EDV) Compound. EDV’s goal is to provide meaningful relief and reconstruction assistance to disaster affected communities. They aim to understand and address the factors that make a community vulnerable to the disaster in the first place. They empower volunteers to affect positive, long-term change in their day to day lives as well as while volunteering. EDV has partnership that has been very supportive of RG since the beginning. The current project that we spoke about today was to organize EDV volunteers to help clear and build on RG’s newly acquired land. Not mention, they made great suggestions for fundraising initiatives to raise money for construction on the new land. We had an incredibly productive business conversation sitting on the couch, with a cat in heat in the background, that provided some comic relief!

After the meeting we were eager to get back to the lodge and get started on helping Julie implement some of the new ideas that were generated today. Tomorrow we are taking the kids from the orphanage we visited yesterday swimming. Although it isn’t exactly swimming, because none of them can swim and we were told we will be there flotation device with 5 kids hanging on each person. I’ll let you know how that goes!

After spending one day in ‘the life of Julie’ I know that it is her passion that keeps her here. It is not easy. Speaking with a local today, he was telling us that ‘nothing is hard-if you love it’.