A mother in need. Help us build a house in Haiti

I would like to invite you to help us fund raise to build a house for a woman in Haiti who lost her home in the earthquake and is living in a tent city. Below is a brief summary about the woman we met and details about how to get involved:

Our experience in Haiti can’t be summed up in a few quick sentences. Hopefully some of the photos below will illuminate what we experienced. This journey was one of contradictions.  It was difficult yet encouraging, sorrowful yet joyful, hot and steamy and still sticky at night!  We went there with a group of 25 other Americans for one week to listen to Haitian people tell us their stories, pray for those who wanted it, play with children in the largest tent city in Port Au Prince, and do small things like bring gifts to kids in three different orphanages. That is really the Cliff’s Notes of the Cliff’s Notes version of our trip there.

During our visit to the tent city we met 54 year-old Presume Yves Rose who was watching her neighbors baby in her 10×10 dirt floored tent. We learned that Presume’s home crumbled during the devastating earthquake of 2010 and she’s been living in the country’s largest tent city ever since with her 23 year-old daughter, Riche Santhia. After a little asking we learned that she already owns land for a house but lacks the resources to have a new home built. Since our visit there, we have been in contact with one of the translators from our team, Pierre Duclair, (You can friend him on Facebook!) who is a local pastor in the area. We told him about our desire to build Presume a home and he has offered to oversee our project.

We are reaching out to friends and family to help us raise $700 dollars to build Presume’s home. Do you want to help? Before you commit, we want to be completely up-front about the risks that may be involved. There are a lot of ways our fundraising efforts could go wrong (since we’re dependent on our local contact) but in many ways it could be more effective than giving to a larger, vetted organization. On the positive side we know a charity is not taking a large percentage of our donation for their overhead. And we know the money will go directly towards this project.  I’ve tried to ask the right questions as I go about this to make sure our money goes directly towards Presume’s home. However, there is no way to be completely certain and this is the risk we run, myself included as I will be giving towards this as well. I do feel good about having Pierre handle this for us. We trust him. We spent our entire week with him as well as some other Haitians who helped our team as translators and we were impressed with how he treated us, the kids we played with, and his peers. He is a kind man with a big heart to love people like he says God has loved him.

Here’s how you can get involved!

1.  Donate via PayPal. Send to garretthubbard at gmail. (Paypal will a 3% transaction fee)
2. We’ll send you an email to confirm receipt of payment.
3. Stay abreast of donation tallies and the latest developments on this blog.

Next Steps:
1) Raise $700 and wire transfer it to Pierre who will hire locals to build the home in about a month’s time. (He has committed to taking photos of the project so we can see the work being done.)
2) We’ll post all updates here.
3) At the end we’ll share photos and do a final recap here.

My bride and her new pals in Haiti’s largest tent city.

Our team of 25 walking through the streets of Carrefour, about 15 miles from the capital, Port Au Prince.

Final Thoughts.
-Every dollar that comes in will go back out. We will not be taking money out of any of these donations for ourselves.
-We are not a not for profit 501(c)3 entity. Therefore, your donations are not tax deductible.
-Even with as much as we’ve prepared and planned, we all could get scammed on this. If you are uncomfortable with this risk, please don’t give.
-If we raise more than $700 for this project the remaining money will be given to support another project like this in Haiti. If Peirre does not find other people who want help getting out of the tent city then we will be giving the money to David’s Hope which seeks to bring sustainable development and life change to people in Eburru, Kenya. It was started by many of our friends and spearheaded by Jeff Trexel in the basement of our house. Our connections to David’s Hope continues with of our friends, Kevin Wiley, whom many of you know has been involved with David’s Hope for three years now and has gone over there to volunteer and use his gifts of photography to help the people of Eburru, Kenya. More info here. www.davidshope.org.