The small village of Molas is situated on mountain slopes (above 2,500 feet elevation) several miles from accessible roads. Because it can only be reached on foot, all building materials and supplies arrive on the backs of people or draft animals. Two Mules (De Milèt) works with partner organizations and individuals to purchase, outfit, and provide care for mules used to transport supplies to many villages like Molas. Mules are purchased locally with the help of local community leaders and placed with caretaker families who agree to terms of use and care.
Bon Samaritain Episcopal Parish includes five village churches in the L’Acul-Molas region, four of which have primary schools. None receive support from the Haitian government or the Episcopal Diocese of Haiti, relying on tuition and U.S. based support. Students must achieve a secondary school (grades 7–9) certificate of graduation before going on to high-school (grades 10–13). Recognizing the importance of education in Haiti’s future, Two Mules’ scholarship program is designed to help defray expenses for the parents of exceptional secondary school students. Scholarships are merit- and need-based, considering grades, scores received on annual state-sponsored proficiency exams, and an assessment of family need. Recipients can attend secondary school with tuition, housing, books, food, and uniforms paid.
Families in rural L’Acul and Molas rely on springs and streams for drinking water. Water quality tests conducted by Two Mules indicate high levels of coliform bacteria, confirming that the water is unsafe for consumption. These results are underscored by the common occurrence of enteric diseases and cholera. Our Water and Sanitation Hygiene (WaSH) program provides both WaSH training and water purification resources. Our educational program, Ti Koze sou WaSH (Little Talk about WaSH), designed and written by Charles Provins, in consultation with public health professionals, is being integrated in school curricula and community organizations throughout the Bon Samaritain Parish. Water filtration systems installed in each school are the focus of WaSH training exercises, with the goal of growing awareness and access to residential water filtration systems throughout the region.
The Molas Agroforestry Program (MAP) is designed to address critical food shortages in the endangered agricultural settlements of the western Artibonite where the mountain slopes are largely deforested and eroded. Agroforestry increases biodiversity in and above the soil surface and increases water-retaining and carbon-sequestering capacities at greater depths, improving soil health. This reverses human-caused soil erosion that is threatening local communities and draws down climate-damaging levels of atmospheric CO2.
Working with community organizations, methods are being developed to integrate the cultivation of fuel, shade, and fruit trees in ways that improve conditions for other crops. Forming cooperatives, community participants receive training and access to resources needed to develop and sustain regenerative farming methods.
Two Mules anticipates that community cooperatives will be the cornerstones around which projects will be built and supported. History has shown that charitable donations are limited in their ability to create long-term change without active participation and project ownership by recipient communities. Two Mules will work with family members residing in the local villages to assess the viability of establishing a cooperative to serve as a source of governance with open participation, elected officials and fair rules of order with procedural and financial transparency. The goal is to foster economic development and social transformation through the productive cooperative model. Two Mules expects to provide resources and introduce appropriate technology to communities who desire to advance themselves economically by participating in the cooperative model based on international principles, and looks forward to partnering with organizations such as FIDA-PcH.
The contamination of drinking water in L’Acul is largely due to contamination of open water sources. Rural family homes often do not have latrines and the concept of composting is not widely appreciated. This results in contamination of almost all surface water sources including free-flowing springs and streams in mountain villages such as Molas and Chermaitre. Individual latrines or composting toilet systems for family homes, and larger systems for schools and churches will greatly reduce contamination of drinking water in these villages. Two Mules’ goal is to partner with organizations such as SOIL and US universities to design and conduct educational programs to support the construction and maintenance of waste disposal systems using technology appropriate to meet the needs of Haitian families living in remote locations.
Coffee and cacao grow well in the L’Acul area. The coffee grown by local farmers in Mola and Chermaitre is a variety known as typica Arabica, and is a direct descendant of the plants brought to Haiti by the French in the early 1700s. As coffee has high genetic fidelity, beans from these heirloom plants have great potential to be marketed as historic, single-origin source coffee. This variety grows taller than most coffee plants, more like trees than bushes, and produces fewer berries than hybridized commercial varieties. Unfortunately, the local variety is also susceptible to leaf rust, particularly at altitudes below 3000 feet above sea level. We estimate Molas to be about 2800 feet (0.85 km), and Chermaitre somewhat lower, perhaps 2300 feet (0.7 km); so, this disease may well pose difficulties for local farmers attempting to increase production for commercial marketing. Two Mules’ efforts will focus on listening to the Haitian farmers, documenting their challenges and shaping solutions for those who may be interested in expanding their coffee and cacao yields for commercial sales. Partnering with US university researchers, we hope to find solutions to problems as they emerge.
