HTRIP Graduation Ceremony 2012

Dear Supporters,

The marching band "Fanfa" followed by a long
line of HTRIP project participants marching down
 the National Route 1 towards Le Palace.

May must be the most exciting month of the year for HTRIP. The rains bring a verdant vibrancy to the Artibonite Valley, tree plantings are beginning, and all 1,225 program participants rejoiced in one of two large graduation ceremonies. May 1st is a Haitian national holiday that recognizes agricultural work, so it seems fitting that HTRIP hosts its first celebration this day each year.  We have grown too large for just one ceremony to host all our communities, so the 32 communities closest to the valley were invited to Le Palace in Desarmes to participate in the first ceremony May 1st, while the following Sunday’s ceremony at the HAS dispensary in Bastien hosted the remaining 14 mountain communities.

The festivities continue the following Sunday, May 6th. HTRIP's mountain
communities follow the marching band and parade into the Bastien Dispensary.
Can you spot HTRIP co-founder Starry Sprenkle?

April is the final round of monthly education sessions that started the preceding year in July. If HTRIP participants attend seven or more of the ten education sessions, they will graduate our program.  Although we invite all program participants to the graduation ceremonies, it is only those who will graduate who receive a certificate with their name on it in addition to a germinated coconut tree ready to be planted.  The certificates are prized by many program participants who might not have had the opportunity to receive something similar in school.

Hôpital Albert Schweitzer Managing Director,
Ian Rawson   addresses the crowd to congratulate
them on their dedicated work.

The weather could not have been better and there was no shortage of food or drink at either ceremony. Planning the events poses quite the logistical challenge and was started a month in advance. Luckily for the HTRIP Program Manager, HTRIP technician Marielle Pharelus has several years of experience purchasing food for such events and HTRIP coordinator Antione Frantz handled the transportation superbly. Additionally, the entire HTRIP staff worked together seamlessly to allow the events to run smoothly during each ceremony.

HTRIP graduates make music for the singing
and dancing that marks the end of the ceremony.

As always, the HTRIP staff appreciates and is grateful for the support of our donors, we only wish that next year we will see some of your faces at our graduation ceremonies.

The HTRIP Staff,

including Starry Sprenkle, Ross Bernet, Jack Devine, and Uma Bhandara

April HTRIP Highlights!

Dear Supporters,

April has been an exciting month on many accounts.  We have completed our monthly education cycle for program participants, started planting shade crops that will carry us into the next phase of our program, watched our community nurseries grow up before our very eyes, and seen the start of the rains that mark our busiest and most joyful time of year – the time to start planting trees! But April was not without a touch of sadness as we were forced to say goodbye to the much appreciated and incredibly hardworking intern Ruth Portnoff.

Ruth Portnoff working with Shellon Mondesir
and Marielle Pharelus planting yams in
2008 community Dibit.

Our education cycle runs July through April. At the end of those ten months, program participants who missed no more than three lessons will graduate in our annual graduation ceremony the first week of May and receive a graduation certificate and a germinated coconut tree to take home to plant.  This month’s lesson continued last month’s discussion of agroforestry in addition to a review of the previous nine month’s lessons.

Ruth Portnoff was invited down in large part to help provide the organization and knowledge necessary to start HTRIP’s next phase of introducing shade tolerant crops that will thrive beneath our closing canopies. She worked with each technician to identify 16 demonstration parcels from our early communities with sufficient shade to support a different set of crops beyond the traditional sun-hungry corn and millet.  We worked with the idea to give the technicians as much control over this new experiment as possible, giving them the responsibility to choose and purchase the seeds.  According to the rains and the lunar cycle, yams were the first crop to be planted and five successful konbits have already taken place.

Adieff Jean-Charles, Jack Devine, Uma Bhandaram,
 Marielle Pharelus and the leader of Savonawoch
admire the community tree nursery of over 5,000 trees.

No one was happy to see Ruth depart just as her plans were turning into plantings, but life calls and it called Ruth to Uganada where she will continue working with ECHO on agricultural assessment in rural areas. We wish you luck and that you will return to HTRIP again someday.  Although sad to see Ruth go, Uma Bhandaram and Jack Devine carry on the role of HTRIP interns dutifully.  They both picked up creole with incredible rapidity and have really enjoyed working with the HTRIP technicians in all their tasks.  They have also been essential in helping prepare for the imminent May 1^st graduation ceremony.

All of us here in Deschappelles are ever thankful to the support of our donors that make this work possible. We are also ever grateful for this year’s good fortune. We look forward to the coming months of tree planting with much excitement.

The HTRIP Staff,
including Starry Sprenkle, Ross Bernet, Jack Devine, and Uma Bhandaram

March Highlights!

Dear Supporters,

        March could not have been any fuller. More than anything else, March has been a month of many visitors.  This was all on top of the normal and increasingly busy HTRIP activities of continued soil conservation, food distribution, taking on new communities, and planning demonstration plot konbits in new communities.  The month concluded on wet but happy note of more than a few light sprinkles – an appreciated reminder that the annual rainy season will soon arrive and put an end to this dusty dry spell. 

Four Yale Forestry students taking a break from field
work to enjoy a much-needed (and pleasantly surprising!)
popsicle in the community of Kounwa.

        The first visitor of the month, Uma Bhandaram, is a fellow UCLA environmental science graduate and will be with HTRIP for two months.  Her boss at an environmental consulting firm in southern California allowed this Haitian hiatus because he is a firm believer in gaining international experience, the benefits of travel and different world outlooks, and we could not be any happier for it!The next group of visitors involved a little more planning, but 20+ Yale school of Forestry masters students provided a wonderful chance to show the program to a group of intelligent and motivated students eager to help in any way possible.  The class was divided into two groups; one focusing on public health questions of the hospital and one focusing on HTRIP. 

Pittsburghers Barbara Granito and Rob Long and
HTRIP intern Uma Bhandaram near Barbes
Dispensary with their gigapan camera.

Within the forestry group, Professor Gordon Geballe and I worked out three projects that could be of benefit to both students and HTRIP. One group looked into possibilities for the development of coffee production in the furthest reaching sixth section communities of Barbes and Labon. The next group interviewed the HTRIP staff, interns, myself, and anyone else they could get their hands onto to get an understanding of how HTRIP works and provide feedback from a new perspective.  The final group probably received more than they bargained for when they offered to continue my UCLA undergraduate honors thesis work.  This involved comparing Spanish Cedar tree growth from four 2006 communities and trying to understand what local environmental factors might be causing the widely differing growth rates between plots. This translated into four full days of field word which they handled with impressive enthusiasm.

Allegheny College Professors Rich Bowden and
Eric Pallant pose in front of the French Red Cross pick-up,
as technician Frantz Antoine straps it down to
prepare for the long and bumpy drive to Barbes.

To fill the gap left by the Yale Students departure, Lucy Rawson accompanied by some Pittsburgh and New York friends came down to spend time learning about the program and creating a rich portfolio of videos and photographs.  They brought with them a Gigapan – a device developed for the NASA Mars rover that takes a series of hundreds of photographs and stitches them together to form one super high resolution image.  We started with the Gigapan in Barbes, where at 3000 feet the highly detailed panoramic is sure to inspire wonder.  We decided to take full advantage of the trip and used this day to transport two 1000 gallon cisterns up to the water short communities of Barbes and Labon.  At the top of the water shed, these localities are particularly hard hit during the dry season and getting enough drinking water is a problem, much less trying to support a tree nursery.  The cisterns might not be enough water to support the 7000 trees we hope for from other communities, but it will be a start.  The cisterns were too bulky to be transported by HTRIP’s land cruisers, but the French Red Cross lent us their pickup truck which made easy work of the task.  The driver deserves considerable appreciation for making the four hour round trip twice in one day.

During this time, two professors from Allegeny University also came to learn about the program and make plans to send students down for a summer internship.

March’s education session focused on agroforestry. We have been fortunate to have Ruth Portnoff’s excellent advice and organizational skills to help implement the first full round of shade tolerant crop trials in demonstration plots that have become sufficiently shaded out.  Planting these crops will start when the rains start.

(Clockwise starting at left) Mathurin Dorcius, Ironce Pharelus,
Ruth Portnoff, Uyless Misteus, Jack Devine,
Adieff Jean-Charles, and Marielle Pharelus spend an
afternoon in the office developing computer skills.

Jack, Ruth, and Uma all continue to work with the staff on their computer skills. HTRIP is incredibly appreciative of their combined work and enthusiasm.

Lucy brought a much anticpated gift for the Staff that comes in time to finish the seasonal filial plot control and in time for the summer wet season. HTRIP owes a huge thanks to Little's Shoes in Pittsburgh and Merrils shoes for providing a new pair of hiking boots to each technician at an incredible price. And we would all like to thank the rest of our generous supporters for making all the work we do down here possible.

The HTRIP Staff,

including Starry Sprenkle, Ross Bernet, Ruth Portnoff, Jack Devine, and Uma Bhandaram

Announcing!

February HTRIP Highlights!

Dear Supporters,

February has come and gone full speed. While continuing the ongoing and demanding work of filial plot control, we have also begun organizing food distribution among our communities for our soil conservation konbits and we have started our annual outreach to new potential HTRIP communities.  Our new nursery is up and fully operational, and the array of daily activity under the oversight of Gerard Alvarez foreshadows just how busy we will be in the coming months as we deliver our expected 60,000 tree seedlings when the rains starts around May. 

Technicians Alexandre Albertini (left)
and Julson Pharélus (right) record GPS
coordinates at one of our filial plots.

Before we can plant the trees however, our communities are to engage in soil conservation konbits. Konbits are already a part of a Haitian tradition of community members coming together to work on a project followed by a shared meal.  We supply the food for the day while the community does the labor installing soil conservation techniques of rock walls and small canals to combat erosion and allow for maximum retention of rainwater when the dry season comes to an end.

With the New Year well underway, we are making good headway in adding new HTRIP communities. Now that the work of HTRIP is common knowledge in the HAS service area, it is not unusual for communities to make contact with us requesting to join the program. Such was the case with our first new community for 2012, Rondo, near the 2007 community of Titon.  We have several meetings already planned for March with other potential new communities.

When it rains it pours, and February has brought not one, but two interns to the HTRIP team. Ruth Portnoff is joining us for two months on her THIRD visit to HTRIP. She recently completed a yearlong internship with Florida’s ECHO learning about tropical ecology and agriculture – she was an asset to HTRIP in the past, and her value is now increased many fold.  The second intern, Jack Devine, is here in Haiti for the first time. He is taking a gap year before university with Carnegie Mellon University awaiting him in the fall. Both Ruth and Jack have been participating in HTRIPs day-to-day operations - working with staff members on filial plot control, research, and daily nursery activities.

Driver Fenel Plaisil, interns Ruth Portnoff
and Jack Devine, and technician Mathurin Dorcéus
after the long hike to and from Barbes.

Ruth is taking on a few side projects, including helping the technicians organize all the necessary information for implementing our second year trial of shade tolerant crops. Jack has been particularly useful in helping the staff improve their skills on the computer.  Having never used a computer in her life, Marielle Pharèlus is already able to create basic spread sheets using Excel and basic contracts using Word. Shellon Mondèsir is using his newly learned skills with Excel to create spreadsheets that are helping him manage all the tools and food in our new depot. Although they are incredibly quick learners, the process has required a lot of patience because repetition is the key to success of this new skill – and Jack has already proven he is up to the task.

All of this, with the help of our excellent staff and always cheerful interns, has made this a very productive February. We would like to express our sincere gratitude for your help in making this excellent work possible.

The HTRIP Staff,

Including Starry Sprenkle, Ross Bernet, Ruth Portnoff, and Jack Devine

Happy New Year HTRIP Highlights!

Dear Supporters,

The end of the year was a little quieter for HTRIP’s Deschapelles activities. Tool distribution was completed, seed collection has begun, and community nursery work is well underway. As we prepare for the next phase of preparing for tree seedlings, the staff and our communities alike are able to take a moment to celebrate the end of year holidays. A hospital wide party for all HAS employees was a joyful occasion for the members of our staff. 

Pruning to allow light into the new nursery

HTRIP could not have asked for a better gift than the near completion of our new central nursery. The 40-foot shipping container arrived this month that will serve as our new and secure tool and storage depot. The recently completed barbed wire fence reinforced with spiked plants help prevent the goats and chickens from nibbling on our tree seedlings that are ready to get going. A 250 gallon water drum hooked up to the main water line will make watering trees much easier than our previous location. And the covered meeting space is just waiting for the final protective paint job. 

Head nursery gardener Gérard Petit Alberez-Noël
watering large compost piles.

We continued our monthly educational program which focused on plant health in preparation for the nursery tree seedlings which will get going in late January and February.

   The arrival of a GPS unit for each technician meant that we could begin filial plot control to collect data on the past year’s tree plantings. We have already begun with many days of hiking around our newest communities counting trees and collecting site data. 

A new meeting place with a pile of dirt for filling plants
making compost.

   When looking back at the challenges of previous years around this time, I am thankful for how smoothly things have been running here in Deschapelles. We can only hope that the New Year continues down this path as we face the normal struggles of trying to bring trees  to the Artibonite Valley. 

The HTRIP Staff, 

including Starry Sprenkle and Ross Bernet. 

Staff training

A 250-gallon tank in the new nursery

A barbed-wire fence with spikey plants!

New storage depot

October HTRIP Highlights!

Dear Supporters,

This month was an exciting one as we continued our education program, distributed tools to community nurseries, broke ground on our new central nursery project, hosted many guests and visitors, and welcomed back a former intern to Deschapelles. This month’s lesson covered tree nurseries, and HTRIP technicians taught community participants about seed germination and care for tree seedlings. They also covered general nursery management principles, like laying out even rows of seedlings for better accounting, and new communities selected a suitable location for their tree nurseries—as near as possible to a water source (for watering seedlings during the dry season), on a slight slope (so that water drains and seedlings do not drown in the rainy season), and with a mixture of sun and shade (so that trees can be acclimated and avoid sunburn). November’s lesson covers tree seed collection and storage.

HTRIP welcomed many guests and visitors in October. Here, intrepid members of the Canadian Friends of HAS disembark in the remote, misty community of Barbe after the grueling 2 1/2 hour drive from Deschapelles.

The education program always corresponds with our community activities, and we spent much of this month purchasing and distributing tools for community nurseries. Each community that participates in the HTRIP program receives basic support for its own nursery, each of which produces between 4,000 and 7,000 trees each year. HTRIP supports community nurseries by subsidizing the material cost of production of the seedlings (the community members do all the work themselves) and by providing simple equipment like picks, shovels, germinating pans, and water drums.

Above: At Mòn Marassa, the steep road to Barbe becomes treacherous and frequently impassable when wet. With the help of HTRIP and other organizations, the local political leader has organized the building of cement bands (below), which will allow HTRIP to reach this remote sixth-section community even in the rainy season.

 

These are views of the progress on the entire nursery space, including the foundations for the "gazebo" meeting-place structure.

In October, we purchased all of the equipment for the 2011-2012 community nurseries, and we will finish distribution by the second week of November. It is essential to begin community nurseries early in order that trees be ready to plant as soon as the rains begin (the later they are planted, the less they benefit from the rains, and therefore the higher the mortality).

Construction progress on HTRIP nursery water tower foundations.

With this in mind, we also began work on our central HTRIP nursery in Deschapelles this month—and this year, it meant starting construction in a new-to-us space on the Hospital campus which was unused and overgrown until recently (see photo at right). The $13K project will include a small water tower, a “depot” equipment storage space, a wide gate and access road, and a small gazebo like building in which to hold staff meetings. We expect this new nursery space to meet all of HTRIP’s needs for the foreseeable future, and immediately it will allow us to increase our nursery production to more than 80,000 trees this year at the same time that it allows us the space for a larger central composting operation and a grasses program. This month, we finished most of the foundations (see photos). We expect to finish the major construction work by the end of November and have everything else in place and fully operational by the end of the year.

Among the many guests and visitors we welcomed to Deschapelles this month was Ross Bernet, a recent graduate of UCLA in environmental science who completed an internship with HTRIP in the summer of 2010 researching the effects of geospatial human and ecological factors on tree growth in HTRIP filial plots. This year, he will be contributing more to project logistics and long-term management strategy while he continues his research.

Construction progress on the HTRIP nursery. Above, foundations are being built for the forty-foot shipping container that will serve as a "depot" storage space.

Although we suffered from a shortened rainy season this summer, we’ve been benefitting from an unusually wet “second rainy season”, so we hope that tree mortality this year will not be as high as we originally thought. HTRIP staff will soon begin the long process of surveying the over eight hundred new “filial” tree plots this year, and we will know for sure in the early months of 2012.

We look forward to an exciting and productive November and thank you all for your continuing support,

The HTRIP Staff,
including Starry Sprenkle, Dan
Langfitt and Ross Bernet.