We really want
to grow.
A question about help led us to listen. The women of Mizak showed us what dignity, opportunity, and a future shaped by community could mean.
What is help?
In 1998, I traveled to Haiti with a group from Aquinas College. The poverty we encountered overwhelmed us. Students began to say, “We have to help.”
They had ideas about what that help should look like, including picking up trash. I found myself asking a harder question: What is help, and who gets to decide? I knew the answer had to be discovered with people living in poverty, through listening to their own hopes, needs, and strengths.
On later visits to grassroots groups in Port-au-Prince, I often heard the question turned back toward me: What did I want them to do? Then someone suggested that I visit Paul Prevost and the rural women with whom he was working in Mizak. I met Paul and the sisal artisans in 2001.
The women knew what mattered.
The income from their work was modest. Yet the women spoke with excitement about something larger than money: they could make purchases, contribute to their children’s needs, and be regarded with greater respect at home and in the community.
The income was a means. What they valued was being seen as people with something to contribute.
That first sisal group later disbanded because its model was not sustainable. What the women had shown me stayed with me.
You know, Valerie, the missionaries really want us to live; we really want to grow.
We had just seen neighbors waiting in line for a free serving of rice and beans. I saw the shame in Paul’s posture. His words became a guiding question for everything HAPI would become: How could we stand alongside a community seeking room to grow?
They built more than an artisan program.
When Paul and I founded Haitian Artisans for Peace International in 2007, I asked the women to care for the small seed we were planting together: nurture it, water it, and one day it might become a tree where we could all gather, rest, and find shade.
They were that seed. The artisans named the community’s needs and assets. Their knowledge and leadership helped shape the work that followed.
HAPI’s artisan program is no longer active. Its influence did not end with it.
Their children had new doors to walk through.
In 2024, the son of a community member was asked what had lasted from the artisan program. He remembered something that had once been unusual in Mizak: women going to work in formal employment outside the home or marketplace. They invested what they earned in their children’s education.
“We never used to have professional people like nurses, doctors, engineers, dentists and now we do.”
A community member’s son, reflecting in 2024 on the artisan program’s lasting impact.
He credited the women’s earnings with opening access to a school that charged higher tuition and offered a scholarship path beyond high school. That opportunity had been out of reach for many of the women: about 40% had received no formal schooling, and the others had not graduated from high school.
In his telling, Mizak’s college graduates are part of the legacy those mothers made possible.
The seed became a tree.
As the artisans listened to their neighbors and shared what they knew, HAPI’s work grew in response: healthcare close to home, maternal care, support for people living with chronic illness or disability, practical education, and opportunities for young people to earn and lead.
Today, Haitian professionals and community leaders guide this work. The artisan program is no longer active, but the women who nurtured that first seed remain at the root of HAPI’s story.
Growth begins with listening.
Meet the people shaping HAPI’s work today and hear what opportunity means in their own words.
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