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Recycling for a people simply set it ablaze, further polluting
living is backbreaking the air. With these serious sanitation issues were
work, but it is still an added to malnutrition and poor healthcare,
opportunity to make a outbreaks of disease were inevitable.
living: one which did Hope Rises from the Rubble
not even exist before For many poor people in Haiti, charcoal
2011. is the main source of fuel for the home, and
its use has led to massive amounts of trees
When Tzu Chi being cut down. As the supply of trees steadily
volunteers visited Haiti dwindled, people started cutting down ever-
in 2008, a decade after younger trees to make charcoal, so the pieces
their first relief trip, of charcoal sold on the streets of Port-au-Prince
they described the became thinner and thinner. The support posts
scene in the streets: used to hold up tents after the earthquake were
“The dusty dirt roads also thin logs from young trees, since larger
are now paved in logs were nowhere to be found. These are clear
asphalt, but unchanged indications of the country’s deforestation crisis.
still are the women
balancing things on Ever since the earthquake, Tzu Chi
top of their heads, the volunteers have unceasingly sought sustainable
buses overfilled with self-reliant solutions for people in Haiti. After
passengers, and the extensive searching, Tzu Chi volunteer Patrick
food stands lining the Chou came to the conclusion that moringa—a
streets. But new are tree that thrives in hot tropical climates and
the burnt-out tires possesses an extremely high nutritional
used to fuel the rage content—could be the ideal solution. He has
during riots, the piles actively worked to promote the tree as a solution
of garbage filling the to Haiti’s problems of poverty, malnutrition, and
ditches that attract deforestation by setting up moringa farms in
foraging pigs and goats, Haiti and guiding many people to grow the tree
and the occasional in the hopes of making it an industrial crop. He
stench and thick smoke has also actively promoted moringa leaves as a
from the garbage piles nutritional supplement and taught locals how
that spontaneously combust. All along the to grind the leaves into powder.
streets are makeshift sheet metal dwellings that
only intensify the heat and cold of the seasons.
Smoke from people cooking on the streets
combined with billowing dust and exhaust
fumes from the vehicles is just overwhelming.
Not only that, there are bullet holes on walls
everywhere, left from the violence during civil
unrest. Poverty, filth, and disorder are evident
all over; there seems to be no sign of hope Moringa offers an opportunity to ease
anywhere.” poverty, malnutrition, and deforestation.
Photo: Neuvendal Admettre
After the earthquake in 2010, public
services were completely paralyzed. Lacking In the wake of the cholera outbreak that
basic health education, many families simply began in late 2010, the Haitian government
dumped their trash outside to keep the inside of has turned its eye to environmental issues and
their homes clean. With public trash collection begun to offer free courses to women on turning
halted for many months, the streets and streams used candy wrappers and packing containers
of Port-au-Prince were polluted by mountains of into handicrafts, which has the twofold benefit
garbage. When the trash became too excessive, of reducing garbage and providing a trade to

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