Transcription of Beyond Maine Borders: Haiti & Africa #255
Announcer: You are listening to Love Maine radio hosted by Dr. Lisa Belisle and recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a writer and physician who practices family medicine and acupuncture in Brunswick, Maine. Show summaries are available at LoveMaineRadio.com. Here are some highlights from this week’s program.
Pamela White: Started my career as a Peace Corps volunteer and I ended my career as a US Ambassador, which is very unusual to go from one end to the other. I had made my mind up when I was very young.
Nicole Wolf: I was worried I wouldn’t emotionally be able to handle what I was going to see and experience. I had traveled a lot, but not in that capacity, not to a developing country before and as on the ground as it would be.
Lisa Belisle: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you’re listening to Love Maine Radio show number 255, “Beyond Maine Borders: Haiti and Africa”, airing for the first time on Sunday, August 7th, 2016.
Many talented Mainers are working on projects that benefit people around the globe. Today we speak with two people who have used their skills to help out after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Pamela White spent several decades with the United States Agency for International Development and served as the ambassador to Gambia and then Haiti. Nicole Wolf founded the organization Up from Under, raising money to build houses in Haiti. Thank you for joining us.
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Lisa Belisle: Today I have in the studio with me Pamela White, who served as the United States Ambassador to Haiti from August 2012 until September 2015. Prior to that, she was the US Ambassador to Gambia. She also was the head of multi-million dollar aid programs in Mali, Tanzania, and Liberia. Originally from Auburn, she now lives in Orrs Island with her husband Steve and I hear that you also have two lovely grown sons who live in the Washington, DC, area. Steve also has two children. You guys have been all over the place and you’ve been raising children in the midst of it all.
Pamela White: That’s right, we have.
Lisa Belisle: So congratulations and thanks for coming back to Maine and also for coming in and talking to me.
Pamela White: It’s a pleasure, great.
Lisa Belisle: I’m interested in hearing more about why a woman from Auburn, born in Lewiston, ended up doing things all over the world. Some people just kind of hang in there and never really leave their place of origin but that wasn’t your path.
Pamela White: Nope. I made up my mind, basically what I was going to do with my life when I was 18. I was a senior at Edward Little High School and my cousin Jim had come home from the Vietnam War almost dead. There was all kinds of things coming out of him and he was my favorite, favorite cousin, and I was just devastated.
As luck would have it, circumstances would have it, that very same week, a team, which I think the first and the last team ever, from Peace Corps, Washington, DC, came to my high school. They had these slides about how you could help people in Africa and how you could make a difference in the world. Back then, there were two ways of getting out in the world. One was the military and one was this thing, Peace Corps, which was pretty new back then. That was 1967. I went home and I said to my dad, who’s a Marine, “Dad, I’m going to join the Peace Corps.” He said, “Absolutely not.” I said, “I’m going to go to Africa.” He said, “Absolutely not.” I said, “I’m going to do it.” Four and a half years later, I was in Africa. I never changed my mind. I knew that was what I wanted to do.
Lisa Belisle: Why? What was that? What was the draw for you?
Pamela White: It just was a different way for engaging in the world and I kind of knew I wanted to engage in the world. I saw these pictures up on this giant screen at my gym. I’ve gone back to that same gym and talked to students about trying to engage in the world also. It was so spooky to be in this place where I had made a life decision. And fun. It was interesting because I started my career as a Peace Corps volunteer and I ended my career as a US Ambassador, which is very unusual, to go from one end to the other. I had made my mind up when I was very young.
Lisa Belisle: I believe that your father was in the audience watching you give your speech at the University of Maine 2016 Commencement in Orono.
Pamela White: He certainly was. He was in the audience. Steve was in the audience. One of my sons from Washington, DC, was in the audience. My best friend, Sydney Watson, was in the audience. My mother, Sandy Peters, was in the audience. My mother and sorority sister from Alpha Phi, University of Maine. Very close, long time friends were there. It was so much fun to have them there because they had not been with me my whole career, but they had followed my whole career. To turn around and be able to wave to my 95-year-old dad was really special. He told me later that he didn’t really know that he was crying but there were tears coming down his cheeks unexplainably through the whole thing . It was a matter of just pride and interest and seeing his daughter up there and giving a speech that got a standing ovation, which was very unusual. They told me it was the first time in 25 years that they had seen a standing ovation. To have him there was very special.
Lisa Belisle: Why did he doubt that you would make it in the Peace Corps? Or why would he say to you, “Don’t do it”?
Pamela White: Oh, my God, back then, going to Africa was like going to Mars or something. Anything anybody knew about Africa was what they read in the National Geographic, which was not exactly comforting. Kind of wild-looking people or barely dressed. Animals roaming around. Africa was not the Africa that I’ve grown to know and love. It was some kind of freaky, exotic, strange, scary place. So when I went home and said, “I want to go to Africa,” it was like, “Absolutely not. You go to the University of Maine, you have babies. That’s what women do around here.” Like I said, no one that I knew in University of Maine had ever even heard really of Peace Corps and certainly no one was joining Peace Corps. They’d call me the Ape Lady and went “whoo whoo whoo whoo” and strange sounds all the time. I was just convinced I was going to do it.
I ended up in this village. It was so idealistic of me. I was going to save the world. Then it came down to where “maybe I could just save Africa” and then “maybe I could just save the region” and then “qell, maybe just Cameroon,” which is a country I went to, and then “well, maybe I could just save my village.” Interestingly enough, really, my village saved me in many ways. They taught me lifelong lessons as I mentioned in my speech at the University of Maine. They taught me this lesson that poverty is not about money. Poverty is much more something of the soul or lack of friends and lack of family and lack of culture and lack of history. When you’re rich in those things, and you are in fact rich, so you don’t have to worry about the fact that person sitting across from you is not a multi-millionaire, is not making tons of money. That person, especially the elders in my village, they were so rich in so many important ways. It’s a lesson I’ve carried with me forever.
It was a village. No running water, no electricity, very few vegetables, no red meat, no white people, no one speaking English. I looked around when I first got there, scared to death, like, “Ahhh, what am I going to do here?” I mean, there were no white people and I grew up in Maine. There were no black people in Maine. Yet, these people took me in and loved me and taught me, as I said, life lessons. It just changed my life.
Lisa Belisle: It’s interesting to me that you are a young, white woman from Maine chose to go to Africa, was chosen to become the ambassador to Gambia. You were also Mission Director of US AIB in Liberia. You were also the Mission Director of US AIB in Tanzania. This must have taken some like- Well, I can’t use an impolite term.
Pamela White: Yes! (laughs)
Lisa Belisle: It must have taken some guts.
Pamela White: It did take some blank.
Lisa Belisle: Let’s say guts- To be willing to go into those situations.
Pamela White: Yeah, it did, actually. At the time of it, I didn’t think about it so much. I just did it. Liberia: tough, tough place, just coming out of a violent 14-year civil war where people did horrible things to each other. It was a country led by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who was a Nobel Peace Prize winner, a fabulous woman. As fabulous as she was, it was a country still in turmoil. Very difficult to make progress in a country where at least 70 percent of the population hadn’t recovered from the war. They had blanks on their faces. In many ways, Liberia was my toughest country and a real challenge.
One of my favorite stories about Liberia was I had gone from Liberia, much to the disappointment of President Sirleaf, to be ambassador in Gambia. When I was in Gambia, I got a phone call from Secretary Clinton asking me to be ambassador to Haiti. Just after that, Secretary Clinton was in Liberia with President Sirleaf again. President Sirleaf said, “Bring Pam back here, please bring her back here as ambassador.” They call me in Gambia and say, “Okay, you’ve got a choice. You can go to Haiti or you can come back to Liberia because President Sirleaf so wants you to come back.” I so loved her and I really thought about it, but I said, “No, I’m so sorry.” I’ve seen her since and she said, “You turned me down.”
I decided to go to Haiti for a couple of reasons, but the major reason was that I had been there before. I’d started my foreign service career in many ways in Haiti. I had joined the foreign service in Haiti in the 80s. To have that as my first foreign service post and have it my last. As a junior, junior nothing officer in the 80s ambassador, I used to take my kids to the ambassador’s residence – in the 80s when they were babies, little tiny thing – and say, “You keep your little jackets on and you make sure that you don’t go in any room you’re not supposed to go in and you make sure this and you make sure that. You behave.” Then to bring them back for cocktails on the terrace 30 years later. It was a great experience.
Lisa Belisle: Is it unusual to be raising children as you’re working with the foreign service or being an ambassador?
Pamela White: No, my husband Steve was raised as a foreign service brat, as we sometimes call them, child. Lived all over Africa when he was growing up also. The foreign service set’s very, very common. My children, by the time I had gotten into very difficult roles that were extraordinary time-consuming, were already in college. I don’t think you could be really an effective either Mission Director or certainly ambassador- Because as ambassador, I was not in Gambia, which was a much less taxing job. In Haiti, I was working 16, 17, 18 hours a day, for sure, seven days a week. It was never off, I had 1,400 people in the embassy. I had well over a billion dollars I was responsible for, I had 13 agencies – CIA, the FBI, the DEA – trying to bring them all together to form one team for the United States of America. It was very taxing.
One of your questions was, “What would you have done differently ten years ago?” I thought about it for a long time because I’m so lucky how my career has turned out. I think I would have tried to balance work/life maybe a little tiny bit better, which I was not good at at all.
Lisa Belisle: How would you have done that? If you’re in a situation where people are looking to you for coordination and leadership and sometimes answers, how do you easily create that balance?
Pamela White: I don’t think it’s easy. I don’t know, I couldn’t do it. I didn’t do it. I’ve seen other people, when it’s six o’clock, they walk. They go home and they say, “I’ve put in my long day.” They get to the office. One of my – if I’m honest a few – criticism as a ambassador, someone came down and said, “Pam, please stop sending texts to your staff at two o’clock in the morning.” I said, “Well, I don’t expect them to answer at two o’clock in the morning, but I’m up and I’m thinking and something’s going through my mind.” They’re like, “Well, they think that they should be sort of up 24/7 like you are so just wait. Fine, that that’s when you’re thinking, but put it on save and send it when you get up and you’re on your way in the morning.” I said, “Okay, okay.” It was a lesson well-learned because not everyone an insomniac like I am and working.
I didn’t want them to, I said to them, “I want you to have a family life. I want you to go home at 5:30, six o’clock at night. I can’t do that.” Especially when you go home, either you’re entertaining or you’re being entertained. It’s not like you go home and the day’s over. Ever. It’s fun. Last night- President Martelly was a somewhat controversial president, but I believe with my heart and soul, a guy that truly had the best interest of Haiti and loved the Haitian people. He called me last night and said, “I’m coming to Manhattan, I’m going to a concert in Manhattan. Then maybe I’ll come up to Maine and visit with you.” You build these relationships, these lifelong relationships with people who are in the same circle as you are. They’re trying so hard to make that country a better place. President Sirleaf was the same. President Kikwete of Tanzania did it. Over and over and over you see people who are so dedicated to try to move the needle a little bit on the quality of life of people who are less fortunate.
Lisa Belisle: You referenced the questionnaire that we have all of our guests fill out when you said, “If you could go back in time ten years, what advice would you give yourself?” You said, “Find a better work/life balance.” It’s interesting to me that another question we asked, “What’s the most rewarding part of your job,” and you answered, “Making the world a better place for the disadvantaged, especially women and the poor, and influencing policy.” It really doesn’t sound like you’ve changed your views on what you want to do in the world since you began this journey when you were in high school.
Pamela White: That’s right. That’s very true (laughs). I’ve kept my eye on that goal for decades. I thought it was a worthy goal back then and I still think it’s a worthy goal. It was a whole lot harder to move the needle than I thought it was going to be. There is no doubt that I have done that. There are absolute successes that I could look at and think, “Wow, you really hit the mark then.” Then there are years and years that I was working so hard to move countries forward like Mali, which I adored and spent four years there right on the Sahara Desert. I certainly, at the time I was there, increased the number of young girls in school tremendously, by thousands and thousands, got women involved in politics. I think we started with women’s groups that maybe had five thousand and when I left there were maybe 50, 60 thousand. It was a real difference in the ability for women to participate in civil society and it was wonderful.
Two years ago, the bad guys, the terrorists, come from the north of the Sahara Desert into Mali, a very peaceful country of very moderate Muslims, don’t like to fight, loved people, share everything. These bad, bad guys come down through Mali and disrupt everything that we had done for years and years and years. All these little schools that we had built that all these girls that had never had access to education were in these schools and learning how to be historians and dietitians.
One of my favorite stories, because when I first asked the men of the desert to send their girls to school, they were like, “Why would we do that? Why would they need to go to school?” I said, “Because these girls can write down your history. These girls can be your dietitians. They can write down the recipes that you pass down for years. These girls can be taught health methods that will help your women be healthier across the board.” All of the sudden it was not that they were just sending their girls for no reason. You can’t just have no reason to send young children to school who have never been to school. I had to change the curriculum, I had to get people trained, a whole new thing. We were practically, at the beginning, using little notebooks that people were stick figures in. We got it all organized, but we changed the way people felt about education, for sure.
These were tuaregs, these are these blue men of the desert. When I first met them, they would come across the desert on camels from 50, 60 miles away. They didn’t want me to come to their homes at first because they didn’t want this nutty white woman to be where they were. We would sit in a circle with their camels in the background and me talking about two things. I wanted them to use condoms, which didn’t work very well, and sending their girls to school, which worked very well. Good success on one side and not a success at all on the other.
Lisa Belisle: When you’re talking about the type of work that you were doing, sounds like there’s a significant amount of sales and marketing that takes place.
Pamela White: Oh, yes, absolutely. In fact, at the end of my career, the last five years or so, I became very, very interested in behavior change and what really makes people change behavior. Why would you after centuries of not sending your girls to school, why would you do that? I found out saying it’s a good thing to do is not good enough. You need a better reason. Just like the condom thing did not work because we want you to space your children, that was not a good enough reason. I learned right then and there, if you’re going to do family planning, do not count on the men to do it. Count on the women to do it.
I completely changed my outlook. You give speeches all over the place that this is how you should approach family planning, at least in Africa. Let the women take responsibility for their own bodies and the number of children that they want, which tends to be very different, in rural Africa, than men because having babies is sort of a status symbol and responsibility does not lie with the men. The women have full responsibility for babies until they’re a teenager, so that was an interesting thing. Yeah, how do you get people to use a bed net when bed nets aren’t comfortable. We’ve figured out a way of doing that. How do you get people to not be corrupt? It’s interesting because it’s often not what you think. It’s not an easy answer to say, “Well, if we tell them it’s not good for you, that’s good enough.” That, in and of itself, almost never is.
It is, it’s figuring out how do you make that needle move. It’s so hard and we spend millions on it. I think we are getting better at it, but I’m not so sure that we’re still there. For many decades, we never measured it, either. Did more people actually use bed nets? You can distribute bed nets easily. It’s very easy to distribute a million bed nets. It’s the use of them afterwards that makes a big difference.
On Zanzabar, which is an island right outside of Tanzania, we started with an incidence of about 40 percent of the people on that island every year had at least one incidence of malaria. We had this program that we put in place and after two years, it went down to two percent and it’s still less than two percent. How did we do it? We had a fabulous marketing campaign. We had all the nets that we needed, we sprayed all the houses, we sprayed all the dead areas where the dead water was. We had people trained in doing rapid testing for malaria. We had the clinicians trained so that as soon as a diagnosis was made, they could get treated. It was one of my favorite moments of my career. In fact, I was invited with the Minister of Health there to go to the White House as a reward for this amazing achievement.
Part of it was just using political voices: the president of the country, Minister of Health, Minister of Education, me, running around day after day, the ambassador – I wasn’t the ambassador at the time, I was the head of AID – but the ambassador, also. We were over there saying, “If you’re a good Zanzabarian, you’re going to use a bed net.” We convinced them. Like I said, 20 years later, it’s still going strong.
Lisa Belisle: You strike me as a woman that doesn’t like the word no or maybe doesn’t even hear the word no. I’m not really sure that you even acknowledge that “no” is a possible response to one of your suggestions.
Pamela White: (laughs) My husband’s laughing over there. No, it’s not a word that I use very often or is used with me in the room. It has been tried, but I can almost always find a solution to almost any problem. If it fails, I’m not afraid of that, either. I always tell young people, “Make a decision, make a decision. Evaluate it as soon as you can.” Often, decisions in the developing world are done- Evaluations are done two years a decision is made or a program is started. I’m like, “Don’t wait two years. Start evaluating within a month. Keep it coming, keep it coming.” With technology today, there is no reason that you don’t have a read on what is being done and how successful it is right away.
I have shut down programs. There was a program in Liberia on literacy. I went and visited some schools that were teaching- It was adult literacy so it was a night. I showed up at five o’clock. I’m looking at the white boards. I’m like, “There’s nothing on the white board.” They’re like, “Oh, well, we haven’t started yet. No, no, we started but we finished it.” I said, “Well, the lesson only started ten minutes.” “Oh, well, tonight we’re going to concentrate more on drinking coffee.” I said, “All right, this does not look it’s working.” It was a 50 million dollar program.
I went to another school and another school. They were so proud because the enrollment numbers were supposed to be five thousand and they were 15 thousand because everyone’s coming and eating the cookies and drinking the coffee and kibitzing. I said, “This doesn’t look too good to me, so let’s do a rapid assessment.” I had a team come out from Washington, a rapid assessment team, and went around to ten or 12 of these schools and we found out that no one really knew how to read. No one. No one knew how to count. They could count if they had their fingers – one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten – but if you said, “What’s six plus six?” Forget it. They could not get that far.
I said, “We’re going to close down this program now.” The contract at the time said, “No, we’re not. No we’re not. Our indicator was how many kids were in the classroom.” I said, “Do you know what? Do you really want me to go to national radio? Do you really want me to go to the Congress? Do you really want me to start talking about how 50 million dollars of the US taxpayers’ money is being spent in Liberia?” They decided to play along with what I wanted.
What we did there was we started tying literacy to skills. If you wanted to rebuild Liberia, if you wanted to be a mechanic or a plumber or a hairdresser or whatever, then we would teach you language skills around that skill area so that meant something to you, you weren’t just sitting in the classroom. Also it meant that you could have a job, which was very, very, very important for the rebuilding. You have to be creative, you can’t say no, and you have to be always one step ahead of failure, which in the third world is very easy to come by.
You can’t get discouraged, either. It’s so easy to say, “Oh, you know, we spent two years building this thing up and now what?” Well, how can we make it better? How can we make it more sustainable? How can we get people more involved, especially politicians. Corruption in the third world is a huge problem. How do you work around that so you can make sure that the people that you are working for and with really benefit from what you’re doing? It’s possible.
Lisa Belisle: Pam, it’s really been a pleasure to have this conversation with you. I appreciate the work that you’ve done, really, all over the world. I love the fact that you are from- Well, born in Lewiston, raised in Auburn, went to Edward Little, went to the University of Maine. I have many family members that have gone, including my son, who watched your commencement speech.
I appreciate the work, also, that your husband Steve did as part of the foreign service. I think this type of work is maybe something that we here, who live in Maine most of our lives, don’t know that much about, but I know that it’s important and I think it’s great that we have someone from our state who was out there really on the ground and doing this. I appreciate you’re being here.
Pamela White: Thank you so much for having me. I loved every minute of it. Congratulations, great studio here. Keep on the great work.
Lisa Belisle: Thank you.
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Lisa Belisle: One of our good friends of the magazine is here with us today. This is Nicole Wolf, who is a Maine-based commercial photographer. After a long term trip to Haiti in 2010, she founded the organization Up from Under. Up from Under aided in building sustainable housing for four Haitian families as well as providing funding for micro-financed job opportunities and education. It’s great to see you here today.
Nicole Wolf: Good to see you, Lisa.
Lisa Belisle: It’s interesting because you’re always responsible for our visual and today you’re responsible for our audio. You’ve been photographing for the magazines for quite a few years now, I think.
Nicole Wolf: I think about seven years, actually. Before I moved up here, I was living in Washington, DC, and had a random trip to Maine on my way home to New Brunswick, Canada, and saw the magazines in a coffee shop and contacted Susan and Kevin. That’s how the relationship started. It was great.
Lisa Belisle: What are some of your favorite things to photograph for the magazines?
Nicole Wolf: I’m really enjoying shooting food and I’ve shot a lot of it since I’ve been here. The restaurant scene is pretty incredible but the chefs – you know, because I’m a portrait-based photographer. Having the relationships with the chefs that has cultivated into this whole, beautiful visual representation of what they do has been really awesome.
I really enjoy the food aspect and then also just the portrait aspect of what I do as well. I shoot a piece called “Culture” for Old Port Magazine and I get to meet some really incredible people and be creative about the approach. Those are my favorites, I would say.
Lisa Belisle: The relationship that you have with your subjects is really important when you’re doing portrait photography.
Nicole Wolf: Yeah, very important. We were speaking before we went on air about just making people feel comfortable in front of the camera. It’s something that I don’t necessarily think is a learned behavior, I think you just either have it or you don’t. I’m definitely a director when I’m taking portraits of people and I’m very communicative and try to make them feel as comfortable as possible and bring out something about their personality, both visually and through our conversation that allows them to just feel relaxed and it not to feel forced or contrived.
That aspect of it is really important. It’s something that I’ve really developed over the years and learned to- It’s one of the first things that I do a lot of times when I get a portrait assignment in any capacity is do a little bit of research of who the person is. I meet with them a lot of times so that I have an idea before going into it. Like a musician, for example, I always listen to their music, get an idea of what their sound is, what they’re trying to convey through that. A lot of times I pull ideas from lyrics and things like that to create something that’s not just, “Hey, guys, let’s stand on these train tracks and do the photo” (laughs).
It’s important to me. Just as much for me, I think, too, because I want them to be different each time and I want to be excited about every photo I take.
Lisa Belisle: There is something that’s really important about the storytelling aspect of the photography. To really get to know someone helps with that storytelling.
Nicole Wolf: Absolutely, absolutely. The scariest thing about being in front of a camera is that you’re being very vulnerable and you’re opening yourself up a lot of times to somebody that doesn’t know you. That’s a gift, when somebody gives that to you and they feel comfortable enough to reveal themselves to you in a way that feels authentic. It’s a really cool thing to watch unfold. It doesn’t happen every time.
The storytelling aspect of photography, it’s something that I’ve really worked on developing with my career. Portraiture is a little bit different. The photo essay work that I’ve done independently in my personal work is, I feel, very different than traditional journalism. Traditional journalism, you’re on the street in a situation documenting what’s unfolding in front of you. There’s not a lot of personal interaction that happens. That’s an important part of that medium with photo essay work and storytelling. It’s usually more engaged. You’re spending time getting to know someone. They can be more long-term projects as well. It creates, I think, a dynamic and a level of authenticity that sometimes doesn’t happen when you just show up and document something as its unfolding.
I prefer that type of photography, actually. I’m not a great journalist. I’m way too emotional and I prefer more the photo essay type perspective or opportunities that I get because I get to be more engaged with the people that I’m photographing.
Lisa Belisle: I have never thought about the difference between the photo essay and photo journalism and the difference in objectivity. It seems like you would have to be, if you’re out there on the street shooting something that’s happening unfolding in front of you, you just have to be the eyes.
Nicole Wolf: You’re just very present, yeah. It’s not to say that they don’t kind of intertwine. Some photographers may have a different way of looking at it, but I think a lot of times, with journalism, it is very in the moment. It’s quick. You don’t oftentimes know the subjects that you’re working with. As far as the media is concerned, it has to happen. We need that documentation. Like I said, the photo essay aspect of it can be more involved and more long term so that you get to know the people that you’re working with.
Lisa Belisle: How did you end up in Haiti?
Nicole Wolf: January 12th, 2010, was the earthquake that went through Port-au-Prince. Two months after that- Well, actually, it was within the first month, I had a friend from California that had an organization called New Reality International. It was medical relief team that was going in. They were sending relief workers in, emergency relief. She had contacted me to see if I would hop on one of the trips because they needed visuals of the mobile clinics that they were doing, the surgeries that they were performing, just basically for fundraising efforts. I said no in the beginning because as I said earlier, I’m a highly emotional person and so things affect me very- I cry at the Folgers coffee commercials on TV (laughs). I was worried I wouldn’t emotionally be able to handle what I was going to see and experience. I’d traveled a lot, but not in that capacity. Not to a developing country before and as on the ground as it would be.
I thought about it for about a month. Then they did a second trip and she approached me again. I just decided to get on a plane and was fearful of what I was going to see. It was one of those things that I knew at that point in my life that it was something that needed to be done. I wanted to help. I didn’t know what that meant and at that point, I was not educated on the different aspects of international aid and what that meant. I went in, kind of eyes wide open and jumped in this team. It was really intense. The debriefings at night were very difficult.
During the day, we were so involved with the communities of people. The visuals that I saw were really disturbing. The country was on the ground, the city was on the ground. You didn’t really have time to be emotional because we were just go, go, go, and there were so many people that needed help. My focus was, for New Reality, to document everything that I saw. It was more journalistic-based, if I want to use it in that way. I was just photographing everything that I saw, not super interactive, just allowing the medical team to do their jobs, and not being too involved that way.
That’s kind of how it happened first. Then things developed from there.
Lisa Belisle: When you say that you had some fear around doing that, I’m surprised because my experience of you is a kind of bold and fearless person. I remember when you came back to Maine and you were creating this new life for yourself and you really put yourself out there. As someone who also is affected in a very emotional way, especially by seeing patients, for example, there was a point in my life where I was like, “I don’t know if I can be a doctor because this is really intense stuff” and pushing through that. That’s not easy.
Nicole Wolf: It’s not. What I noticed really quickly was that I had a job to do. What I was going to say about the nights- What I noticed very quickly was that they did not need my pity. They needed my help. They needed all of our help. To be emotional and broken and crying all the time was not doing anyone any service at all. I just kind of channeled it and allowed myself to just be present in what I was photographing. We would have these debriefing sessions at night where you could kind of get it out and the things that you saw.
I felt connected, but it wasn’t until I went in- The first two times I went to Haiti, I was working with New Reality International. Then I started going in solo, which was one of those things, I am very fearless. In that regard, I will put myself in situations that a lot of people might not, but I just am full speed ahead, head up, eyes open. I just make it work. On the medical relief teams, we had a bunch of English interpreters that were Haitian. Three of them, they were three best friends, I became really close to. We would spend a lot of time together, clearly, at night, listening to their stories. That’s kind of how everything developed for me, was from Pepé, Sissan, and Sam and the relationship that I started building with them and hearing about their families and their homes that they had lost in the earthquake. Family members that they had lost.
It was at that point that I knew I needed to do something more or I could do something more. I didn’t know what that meant, but at the time, I was living in Washington, DC. My company was doing really, really, well. I had a very large network of important people and people that I knew would be able to assist in raising money. I didn’t know exactly how to approach it at first, but I knew that I wanted to help build homes for these three families that had lost their homes. I started a cause page on Facebook initially in October 2010. By January 2011, had raised 15 thousand dollars on Facebook. People responded in droves. I had spent that time period from my first trip in solo was June 2010 and I was journaling every morning and writing down how I felt. I would share those journal entries or parts of them and some of the photos that I had taken every time I was in. People were just starting to become very vested in these people.
Sorry, to back track. I started living with these three guys and their families periodically. Sissan lived in a tent city in a place Carday just outside of Port-au-Prince. The first time that I met Sissan’s family was when I knew that this building project needed to happen. He took me to the tent city, there were about 20 thousand people living in tents. I walked in and greeted with open arms. They were very excited to see me and to have me as guest in their home. I call it their home because that was the initial thing that kind of triggered this whole project for me. I walked in and Sissan’s mother was preparing food because a guest was coming and his sister as well. Inside the first tent flap was kind of their sitting room. There were some broken plastic chairs and a little table that had a rabbit ear television on it and some plastic flowers hanging from the ceiling.
In the back room, his sister, Beverly, was laying on the floor. This was the part of the tent that they slept in. There were nine people sleeping in this 8×12 space. She was super hot. It was like July, I think. She was studying. I could just remember seeing her laying on the floor and the sweat’s just dripping off of her, as she’s studying, into this book.
I looked around the room. There’s a mirror on the wall that had the girls’ earrings kind of stuck in the side of the tent around the mirror, stuffed animals on make-shift beds that were either slats with cardboard over them. The beds were all made and the pillows were all positioned and the stuffed animals. Clothing kind of organized in one corner. It was in that moment, it makes me emotional to think about it, because it was in that moment that I realized that… I’m sorry… That this wasn’t a temporary living situation for them. This was their home. Sorry, it brings back a lot of memories even though it was like six years ago. I stepped outside and I broke down. I wept. It really hit something hard in me.
Anyway, it was in that moment I had kind of a paradigm shift internally that I could do more. It was possible in this situation that I was living within in the United States that there were people that I knew would be participatory in helping to change the situation of this family. That, to fast forward, is why I started the cause page and how the first home was built.
It was really important for me at the time, as I learned things going through, that this home needed to be really sustainable. A lot of the temporary housing that was being constructed in Port-au-Prince was not something that would withstand another natural disaster. It was just to move people out of the tents and get them into- A lot of times it was just plywood structures with no air flow. They just weren’t going to be sustainable long term. There were a lot of great organizations that were doing really great housing projects as well. For me, I knew that I could build multiple houses for a lot less money or I could just concentrate on building really sustainable homes for about 15 thousand dollars, 15 to 20 thousand.
So that’s what I did. I knew nothing about building a house. It was also really important for me to make sure that the work was done in country so that the people that I knew were making money and that we were providing jobs through this process as well. One of my friends- Made a lot of friends in Port-au-Prince, but one organization called HCM, Haitian-based organization in Fonds-Parisien for about 35 years, and the owner’s son was an architect and he was a friend of mine, Kirby. I approached him about helping to design and facilitate these homes. It kind of started from there. That’s how Up from Under actually started.
After the Facebook cause page, I was like, “Okay, if I can raise 15 thousand on Facebook, what could I do if I really tapped into the community?” I talked to my girlfriend Laila that owned New Reality International, which was the organization that I first went in, and we umbrellaed Up from Under. Up from Under, kind of a literal term for coming up from under the earthquake, but not just that, but just kind of up from under whatever is holding you down. That’s how the name was coined. We umbrellaed it under her 501 c3.
I started reaching out to my community in DC and decided I wanted to do a benefit a year later in DC. I reached out to a lot of people and we organized this event that happened about ten months later with some chefs. I was really good friends with a chef named Brian Voltaggio, who is a Maryland-based restaurateur. The reason that we drew the crowd that we did for this event was because of him and his friends. I just had to give a shoutout because he is just a really great person. We did an art auction. We did a silent auction. We did a photography auction that I reached out to friends that are photographers around the country. They sent work for us to auction off. I also, in the process, through that year’s time, I was also doing relief work for other organizations like the Red Cross, USAID, Pan American Development Foundation, and met some different people through those organizations. I taught a photography class to some Haitian students and had an idea for them to photograph and we would auction off some of their photos at the event, too.
Very long story short, that next November, we threw the event in DC and raised another 65 thousand that night, which was really great. We had the first home almost completed. We had enough for the next two homes plus some micro-financed loans that we did for small business opportunities and put a couple kids in school.
Lisa Belisle: Do you still go back?
Nicole Wolf: I do, I do. Not in the same capacity. The thing that I learned – I learned a lot from being in this country – that it’s really difficult to really understand the magnitude as an international person of what it’s like to be there. It was really important to me when I was documenting for the two years that I documented and lived with these families. I lived with [Sisson’s 00:51:08] family in the tent city. I lived with my friend [Pepé’s 00:51:12] family in Port-au-Prince, in this broken home in Port-au-Prince.
My whole point as a photographer and a photo essayist was to live as authentically as possible within these families. I didn’t stay in hotels at night. I slept where they slept, I ate when they ate. I bathed where they bathed. I walked where they walked every time that I went down there. I knew that the only way that I would be able to develop a project that was really authentic to what I was seeing was to not go to a hotel and take a hot shower every night and eat a full meal and wake up refreshed because the Haitians have a lot pride and respect is a huge thing for them.
I learned to speak Creole fluently. That was a huge part of gaining respect with them because I could communicate with them in their own language and recognizing that this was not my home, it was theirs – meaning the country. That to implement my own ideas about things wasn’t necessarily the best way to approach this whole situation. I really developed a really great connection with a lot of people, not just with the families that I was working with, but within the communities. I spent a lot of time getting to know hundreds of people within those communities and developing this project.
I do go back. I spent about four-and-a-half years pretty consistently in country. The thing is that I’m never going- There’s always going to be a separation there. I learned very early on that- Well, actually it wasn’t that early on, it was a couple of years in, that unless I created sustainability for myself, it wasn’t going to be possible for me to create it for someone else or help to facilitate it for someone else. I needed to have my life here and figure out how to balance it with my life there. I do go back now. Some things transpired, and like I said, I learned a lot about myself and I learned a lot about what I needed to do to make sure that I was being taken care of as well.
It’s not an easy place. I’m trying to figure out how to consolidate into a very short amount of time. Charity work in other countries, a lot of times I think we as a community of people, we’re very compassionate and we have big, old mushy hearts that want to help anytime we see a commercial with kids on it. We want to write a check. A lot of times what happens on the ground, too, is large groups of people will go in with good intentions, but not realizing that a lot of times they’re stripping away dignity and they’re not allowing people to create sustainable opportunities for themselves because we just give, give, give, give, give because it makes us feel good.
For me, I think that I learned that very quickly that in order for me to best serve the people that I loved, was to not allow that to happen. Not easy to do, when someone’s hungry, you want to give them food. When someone doesn’t have shoes, you want to put them on their feet. In the long term, that’s not really helping to build a really strong, independent community of people. Sending shoes to a country doesn’t allow them to buy them from the local cobbler or whatnot. The food aid that goes in, the local agriculture is depleted because people aren’t buying from the farmers in the country. There are a lot of things that I learned I’ve been trying to implement now moving forward.
My very long, drawn-out way of saying why I don’t go there as much as I used to is because I’m not needed. There’s no reason for me to get on a plane and spend 15 hundred dollars if I’m just going in to have fun or hug a bunch of kids or whatnot. Where that 15 hundred dollars could be used in multiple other facets. When I go in now, it’s for a very specific purpose. It’s not just to go and fill a hole for myself because I miss them or I want to do something that is based in a selfish nature. I’m much more thoughtful than I was in the very beginning. That’s based on education, not necessarily that I wasn’t thinking in that way. It’s just I didn’t know. I think a lot of us don’t know.
Lisa Belisle: I appreciate your coming in and talking with me today. I think it’s great that you were able to build the four houses that you did and are shining a light on a situation which sounds very complicated and very emotional. I encourage people to go to your website to see some of the images that you put out there. When your book comes out, I will encourage people to read your book and also to see your beautiful photography that you do for us here at Maine Magazine, Old Port, Maine Home Design.
I’ve been speaking with Nicole Wolf, who is a Maine-based commercial photographer, who after a volunteer trip to Haiti in 2010 founded the organization Up from Under, which aided in building sustainable housing for four Haitian families as well as providing funding for micro-finance job opportunities and education. Thank you so much.
Nicole Wolf: Thanks for having me.
Lisa Belisle: You have been listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 255, “Beyond Maine Borders: Haiti and Africa.” Our guests have included Pamela White and Nicole Wolf. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit LoveMaineRadio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter as @doctorlisa and see my running, travel, food, and wellness photos as @bountiful1 on Instagram.
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This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our “Beyond Maine Borders: Haiti and Africa” show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.
Announcer: Love Maine Radio is made possible with the support of Berlin City Honda, The Rooms by Harding Lee Smith, Maine Magazine, Portland Art Gallery, and Art Collector Maine. Audio production and original music have been provided by Spencer Albee. Our editorial producer is Paul Koenig. Our assistant producer is Shelbi Wassick. Our community development manager is Casey Lovejoy and our executive producers are Kevin Thomas, Susan Grisanti, and Dr. Lisa Belisle. For more information on our hosts, production team, Maine Magazine, or any of the guests featured here today, please visit us at LoveMaineRadio.com.