
Readers interested in knowing more about the Haitian plight and the challenges faced by a U.S. nonprofit organization while attempting to help Haiti will benefit from reading Haiti will break your heart PROMISES MADE PROMISES BROKEN During Wood for Haiti’s (WFH) effort, author Gary Funk kept a journal. His journal contained letters written by Haitians and advice from experts about how to negotiate the challenges faced when dealing with the Haitian and U.S. bureaucracies. While providing a look inside the nonprofit organization, the book shares a great deal about Haiti’s history, culture, and people and presents a no-holds-barred look at the difficulties in dealing with Haitian corruption, the profit motives of U.S. corporate philanthropists, and the political motivations of both the U.S. and Haitian governments. The progress WFH hoped to make was dependent to a great degree upon surmounting the many barriers including the overwhelming role that poverty played in Haitian daily life. WFH worked tirelessly and closely with its Haitian partners to lay the groundwork for a major rebuild of Haiti using beetle-killed wood from the northwest U.S. We faced difficult challenges in working with USAID while attempting to convince U.S. businesses to support our project. The most significant challenge, however, involved dealing with the unstable, ever-changing Government of Haiti and greed and corruption among one of WFH’s Haitian partner organizations. During the first several years of our work, the powerful negative forces did not diminish our efforts. Immense barriers were thrust in our path that thwarted our ability to raise the necessary financial support. As a result, WFH’s Board of Directors finally determined in 2014 that it had exhausted itself and voted to disband the organization. As Mark Johnson, former Ambassador to Kuwait, predicted early in our project’s development, "Haiti will break your heart!" And....it surely did break the a
Page Count:
558
Publication Date:
2022-01-26
ISBN-13:
9798407721185
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