Haiti Offers Window on Successes, Shortcomings of Assistance Efforts

The plaudits and pitfalls of the Adventists’ relief work come into sharp focus in the hungry faces of the young and old in this strife-torn Caribbean nation, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest.

One morning a group of elderly peasants--some blind, others crippled, all hungry--walked miles from their mud shacks for the promise of food at Kathy Land’s mission.

A one-time hairdresser from Indiana, Land is not an Adventist but she relies on the church’s relief arm to provide U.S.-government-funded food at her makeshift community center.

On this day last fall, she had nothing to offer except home-picked bananas and a bit of cooking oil from tins stamped “USA.” Delivery trucks from the Adventist Relief and Development Agency, or ADRA, hadn’t come for weeks, and Land had run out of bulgur, green beans and the other government items she usually offers.

Not that the locals were complaining. “When God puts something in your hand, you eat,” an elderly woman in a worn blue dress said as her name was called for the week’s ration. “When God doesn’t put something in your hand, you pray and you sleep.”

U.S. Freezes Funds

A few miles away, down a decrepit pathway that passes for a road, ADRA administrator Bill Holbrook was stewing as he surveyed the 135-employee compound he runs on a hill next to an Adventist hospital and an Adventist school in Port-au-Prince.

A dozen of his group’s trucks sat idle in front of him, their drivers huddled nearby, whiling away the time. The trucks were supposed to carry food to thousands of poor residents at spots like Kathy Land’s mission, but for weeks they had gone nowhere.

“Our trucks are parked and school’s starting and we’ve got [thousands of] kids who we’re supposed to be feeding,” said Holbrook. “Running a program here can really be a frustrating thing. Most of us wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t honestly love what we’re doing. Some of us honestly believe we can change the world.”

At the moment, such grand ambitions were on hold because the U.S. Agency for International Development had frozen $600,000 to ADRA in Haiti. Officials assured Holbrook that diplomatic wrangling between Washington and Port-au-Prince was to blame, but he suspected initially that concerns about ADRA itself might have triggered the holdup.

Those concerns grew out of a review that U.S. officials in Haiti conducted last summer. They were not happy with what they found.

“I have serious concerns about ADRA/Haiti’s administrative and financial management control capability with regard to ensuring efficient operations and adequate accountability,” Jack Winn, then-controller for the U.S. government’s Haiti operation, wrote in a July 1997 letter to the group. Citing program “weaknesses,” including about $30,000 in questionable expenditures in the span of just a few weeks in 1995, he demanded a full audit, which is only now coming to a close.

‘A Question of Competency’

Among the problems in the $4.5-million operation, auditors preliminarily questioned whether ADRA personnel had properly sought bids on contracts and why they regularly spent government money traveling to the United States to buy supplies after economic sanctions against Haiti had been lifted.

“Do you need to go to Miami to buy these things? . . . It just seems like something that needed to be questioned,” Winn said in an interview. He said ADRA’s management appeared weaker than those of the other two major U.S. relief groups operating in Haiti.

Even church auditor Wayne Vail found basic fiscal practices open to question in Haiti. “The biggest issue there is not a question of honesty,” he said, “it’s a question of competency.”

Holbrook, who took over in Haiti after the period covered by the government audit, said: “There’s no question, we did have some problems. . . . We were a little thin in financial management, but corrections that needed to be made have been made.”

A U.S. official in Haiti who helps oversee the program said ADRA has responded to the government’s concerns. “Their program has grown very quickly, and their management structure has not always grown as quickly,” he said. “But I am very confident they will get their house in order.”

Children like Marilyne Polynice hope so.

The lanky 15-year-old attends a dilapidated school in the mountains of Haiti’s central plateau, and her only solid daily meal often is served at school by ADRA. At home, she said in a small voice, her diet usually consists of “coffee with milk.”

Last summer the food at school ran out for several weeks, the principal told ADRA workers during an inspection last October. With the student population pushing past 340, a replay would be even worse. The Adventists had planned on food for only half that number.

Such complications grate on longtime Adventist relief workers such as Randy Purviance, a self-described “skeptic and a true believer” when it comes to the church’s humanitarian work.

“Yeah, we can do better,” the 40-year-old Idaho native said while visiting an ADRA food site in Haiti one morning. “But the fact is that at least we’re doing something. . . . We don’t feel it’s God’s will to see people starve, to see children in misery.”