Women dedicated to island’s revival
Returning from USA to home country after earthquake, they bring entrepreneurial spirit to start businesses, ease poverty
CROIX-DES-BOUQUETS, Haiti – Regine Theodat had just passed the bar exam and at 25 years old was beginning a promising, if predictable, career in U.S. corporate law. She went to work, to spin class, home and to bed.
“Wake up and repeat,” she recalled. “I was very much a corporate lawyer — very strait-laced; not very adventurous.”
Then on Jan. 12, 2010, a magnitude-7.0 earthquake struck Haiti, killing hundreds of thousands of people. And the child of immigrants who left Haiti for greater opportunities did something shocking. She traded her comfortable life in Boston for the chaos of the poorest country in the Americas.
Aid groups and volunteers from around the world also poured into Haiti. Most have left. Eight years later, Theodat is still here.
She is among a small army, most of them women, who returned to Haiti and started businesses. Theodat makes food and cocktails. Another woman supplies castor-oil beauty products to North American stores, including Whole Foods. Some of the others sell fruit smoothies, jewelry and chocolate.
More Haitians may return from the USA but not voluntarily. The Trump administration announced in November that “temporary protected status” for
59,000 Haitians will end in 2019. Remittances make up almost a third of Haiti’s GDP, so for each person deported, several local people suffer. For those with education, drive and money, moving back is a chance to create jobs and help change practices that many believe perpetuate poverty.
Family members thought Theodat was insane for going back to a country they’d left in the 1980s.
“They said, ‘She’ll be back. The first demonstration that happens, she’ll be back. The first rocks she sees thrown, she’ll be back,’ ” she said. She has indeed seen a lot, but she has stayed.
Theodat spent her first year running a human rights clinic until she found out Haitians wanted something else. “People kept asking me for jobs,” she said.
She teamed up with two collaborators from her human rights work, including a man she later married. They launched MyaBèl, a restaurant and cocktail bar in Croix-des-Bouquets, northeast of Port-au-Prince.
They started bottling drinks and sauces in a house on a dirt side street and began a farm to supply ingredients.
MyaBèl sells products at more than a dozen Haitian supermarkets and boutiques. It employs 18 people and works with 65 farmers.
Jezila Brunis, 37, a single mother of three, makes minimum wage, about
$5.50 a day, in the workshop. She’s able to send her children to school.
Even paying the minimum is a challenge because other costs — generators, fuel, imports and wear-and-tear on vehicles — are extremely high, Theodat said. Hiring and managing people is difficult because so few held jobs before, and they often fail to do basics, such as keeping kitchen doors closed, getting to work on time and finishing tasks quickly. Five of the restaurant’s original six employees lost their jobs.
Most Haitians subsist in part on farms or work informally, so unemployment is hard to measure. According to the World Bank, almost 60% of Haiti’s
11 million people live in poverty. In May, the insurance company FM Global rated Haiti the worst place to do business among 130 countries it studied.
Theodat came face-to-face with endemic corruption the first time she went to pay taxes. She was told she needed to pay someone to speed up the process. “I refused,” she said. “And then I just sat there until I was able to do it the way I was supposed to do it.”
Some of the émigrés couldn’t cut it. “They came, they tried, Haiti pummeled them, and they left,” said Isabelle Clérié, who came home to work after studying anthropology in the USA. “Some were able to stick it out, and through some truly big challenges.
“One of the most valuable exports from Haiti is our brains,” she said. “It’s been really great to see these people come back.”
Unlike Theodat, Corinne Joachim Sanon long planned to start a business in Haiti. She grew up in Port-au-Prince, graduated from high school at 16 and headed to the University of Michigan to study industrial engineering. She was in Wharton’s business program when the earthquake struck, destroying her family home and killing her grandmother.
She launched Askanya, Haiti’s first bean-to-bar chocolate company, in her grandmother’s childhood home in Ouanaminthe, a town on the border with the Dominican Republic. The company works with cacao and sugar cooperatives representing more than 3,000 growers and employs 10 people.
Askanya sells bars at scores of locations across Haiti and the USA. Joachim Sanon looks to expand production and double its number of growers.
MyaBèl also is growing, clearing and planting more than 30 acres.
Theodat and Joachim Sanon know that returning émigrés can’t end poverty in Haiti. “I don’t think I’m going to go to bed and wake up and Haiti is going to be totally different,” Theodat said.
Refusing to take part in corruption might result in incremental change. Theodat said the more collaborative style of émigrés has rubbed off on their local counterparts.
Joachim Sanon is encouraged that a Haitian company sells high-end chocolate bars. “Sometimes you want to see someone else succeed first before you try to put your toe in the water,” she said.
“It’s definitely changing the image of Haiti,” she said. “It creates a momentum.”
“One of the most valuable exports from Haiti is our brains. It’s been really great to see these people come back.” Isabelle Clérié