Konbit in the 21st Century, Louino ROBILLARD

Konbit: Finding Haitian Solidarity in Modern Times Robillard Louino Final Practicum for Master's Degree in Applied Community Change and Peacebuilding Future Generations Graduate School Class of 2013 TABLE OF CONTENTS: I: BACKGROUND AND RESEARCH III DATA ANALYSIS Introduction Page 3 Elements of konbit Page 51 Methodology Page 4 Perspectives/Challenges Page 54 Literature Review Page 9 II CASE STUDIES ON KONBIT Agricultural Konbit Page 13 St Raphael Page 14 Artibonite Valley Page 16 Gwayavye Page 19 Financial Konbit Page 23 Sol in Cite Soleil Page 24 Mutuelles in Vodrey Page 25 Cooperative Business, Limbe Page 29 Community Konbit page 32 Road building in Gan Bad Page 32 Fort restoration in Fo Oge Page 35 Canal cleaning in Cite Soleil Page 38 Symbolic Konbit Page 42 Kita Nago Page 42 Earthquake remembrance Page 47 Other perspectives on konbit 2|Page Page 49 IV: RECOMENDATIONS & CONCLUSIONS Recommendations Page 59 About the author Page 63 V: ANNEXES Interview transcriptions Page 64 I: BACKGROUND AND RESEARCH INTRODUCTION: A people that have forgotten their history and abandoned their culture is a people without a direction. Haiti is a country that was created by freed slaves that came from Africa, who founded the Background Information: Haiti is a small country in the Caribbean that shares an island with the Dominican Republic. It covers 27,750 square kilometers and is first independent black Republic in the New World. administrated through departments, communes, What launched the Haitian Revolution was a voudou communal sections, and localities. ceremony, drawing on the culture and spirituality of 9,719,932 inhabitants according to 2011 estimates. this African Diaspora to carry out the first successful slave revolt in history. If it was this shared culture, There are It was originally a French colony used mostly for cultivating sugarcane until a slave revolt led by Toussaint Louverture and Jean Jacques Dessalines spirituality, and solidarity that broke the chains of succeeded in creating the independent republic of slavery, how can these same things be used to break Haiti in 1804. Haiti is currently known as the the modern day chains of poverty? poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, with a GDP per capita of just over $1,242 USD. But from the founding year of Haiti's independence, 1804, Haiti has been struggling to hold onto its culture because of waves of international marginalization, occupation, evangelization, globalization, acculturation, structural readjustment, coup d'etats, and so on. In light of all of this, Haiti is presented to the world as a backwards and poor country, practically calling out for charity. This has caused Haiti to become known as "the Republic of NGOs", and this has further eroded our sense of national pride and self-reliance. Despite all of this, many places in the country that are holding onto their traditions, that are building interdependence instead of dependence, and that are in many ways going against the trend of dependency in Haiti. And while this may not be a solution to all of Haiti's problems, it is providing a way for communities to sustain themselves in spite of great difficulties. As the creole proverb goes: tout tan tet la pa koupe, gen espwa met chapo or "as long as the head is not cut off, there is hope for wearing a hat." Many communities are sustaining themselves through a traditional system called konbit. 3|Page Konbit is a system that came from rural Haiti where peasants help each other in cultivating the earth. Konbit has many different forms and uses, and although konbit is beginning to disappear in the country, it is still a practical system for countless Haitians today. The question is: how has konbit changed over the 2 centuries Haitians have been using it, what role does it play in the modern lives of Haitians (and not just rural ones), and how could it be used in the future? This paper is looking to study these questions. METHODOLOGY This paper is being written for a Master's Degree in Applied Community Change and Peacebuilding. Because it is an applied degree, the purpose of this thesis is that it contributes to social change in Haiti. That means the foundation of this research is something called an Underlying Theory of Change - this is the author's assumption about what can cause social change in Haiti and guided the planning and research of this paper. Underlying Theory of Change: Haitian people have mostly undervalued the potential of konbit and have come to see the potential for change in money and foreign solutions; this is one of the things that makes Haitian dependent on money and forget their roots and their culture. As a consequence, the task is to make a research that looks for the communities they are still using konbit and make these examples visible so the whole of Haiti can learn from them what really is the konbit and how it can be applied to broader Haitian problems today. The medium impact will be that more Haitian communities will be inspired to readopt the konbit and its principles of self-reliance and mutual cooperation back into the community way of life. The long-term impact is that this will make the Haitians less depend on the foreign money and more depend on the community strength and existing local resources. Based on this Theory of Change, the research question was formed to investigate how Haitians see konbit and how it can be used in modern times: Research Question Where are Haitian communities using the konbit system and how is this system still practical in the modern life in Haiti? 4|Page To answer this question, I decided to do a qualitative research because I was not interested in how many people are doing konbit, but how people are doing konbit, and how they understand what they are doing. I wanted more depth than breadth, to understand certain examples of konbit very well instead of many statistics about konbit very superficially. And because konbit is something that has been documented (as will be seen in the literature review on konbit)to be practiced all across Haiti and with many many variations, it would be almost impossible to make a quantitative study that really represents the reality for all Haitians using konbit. Therefore, this is paper is not supposed to give a detailed and universal description of konbit all over Haiti, but to open a window into the current practice of konbit, how it is changing, and how Haitians could use it for modern problems. I also used a deductive approach instead of an inductive approach. As we can see in the literature review, there is some research that touches on konbit but not a lot, so many of the questions about konbit are very open. Before a valid hypothesis can be framed for inductive testing, it is necessary to frame the issues most broadly to understand what dynamics might be relevant for testing. I started with informal consultations with people in many different domains and areas across Haiti to get a general idea about konbit so I can write my questions and make sure I am responding to my Underlying Theory of Change. I asked them if they saw konbit in their domain and how they saw konbit, and this is what showed me that konbit has many different forms and that each form needed specific questions if I was going to understand it. The 4 domains of konbit that I develop were konbit in the agricultural domain, the economic (business) domain, the community domain, and the symbolic/cultural domain. Then I drafted my questionnaire based on the information I got from these first consultations and the data I needed: 5|Page INTERVIEW QUESTIONS/ KESYON POU ENTÈVYOU GENERAL KONBIT QUESTIONS/KESYON KONBIT JENERAL 1. Ki definisyon konbit? (what is the definition of konbit?) 2. Koman moun yo itilize konbit jounen jodi a? (how do people use konbit today?) 3. Eske gen chanjman ki fet nan konbit depi lontan? Si wi, koman? (Has the use of konbit changed since the past? If so, how?) 4. Ki enpotans/valè moun nan kominote w bay konbit nan jounen jodi a? (what importance/value do people in your community give to konbit today/.) 5. koman konbit ka itil ayiti? (how can konbit be useful for Haiti?) KESYON SPESIFIK SOU KONBIT AGRIKILTIREL/ SPECIFIC QUESTIONS F OR AGRICULTURAL KONBIT 1. Dekrive jan konbit fonksyone (describe how the konbits function) 2. Ki es ka patisipe nan konbit la? (who can participate in the konbit?) 3. Ki diferans genyen ant konbit jodi a e lontan? (What differences, if any, are there between the konbits of today and of a long time ago?) KESYON SPESIFIK SOU KONBIT FINANSYÈ/ SPECIFIC QUESTIONS FOR THE FINANCIAL KONBIT 1. Koman aktivite sa a (sol/mitiyel/bisnis, elatriye) fonksyone? (how does this activity function?) 2. Ki enpakt aktivite sa a fe nan lavi pèsonel/familyel w? (what impact, if any, does this activity have on your personal and family life?) 3. Dekrive eksperyans tet-ansanm nan (describe your experience with working cooperatively) 6|Page KESYON SPESIFIK SOU KONBIT KOMINOTÈ/ SPE CIFIC QUESTIONS FOR COMMUNITY KONBIT KESYON SPESIFIK SOU KONBIT KOMINOTÈ/ SPE CIFIC QUESTIONS FOR COMMUNITY KONBIT 1. Pouki sa a nou te mete tet nou ansanm pou nou reyalize aktivite sa a? (why did you decide to work together to realize this activity?) 2. koman moun nan kominote a we sa a le nou mete tet nou ansanm? (how do other people in the community see you when you work together like this?) 3. Eske genyen yon diferans ant le nou fe aktivite sa yo pou kont nou e le lot enstans vin fe pou w? Si wi, koman? (is there a difference between when you do these activities by yourselves and when others come and do things for you? if yes, how?) KESYON SPESIFIK SOU KONBIT SENBOLIK/KILT IREL / SPECIFIC QUESTIONS FOR SYMBOL IC/CULTURAL KONBIT 1. Ki sak pouse nou pou nou fe aktivite sa a ki pa gen okenn benefis direk nan lavi w? (what motivated you to do this activity that has no direct benefit in your life?) 2. Koman lot moun yo te we le w te fe aktivite sa a? Ki sa yo te pense? (How did other people perceive this effort? what did they think of it?) 3. eske w te we chanjman ke w tap tann? si wi, koman? (did you see the change you were working towards? if so, how?) To make sure that I got a good understanding of each of these kinds of konbit, from the above survey—rather than presenting my data in a more customary sociological mode of numbers and cultural statements—I decided to develop 3 case studies for each kind of konbit, because case study lets me get into detail so I can understand each case well and lets me compare the different case studies too. I decided to do key informants for each case study instead of focus groups, because I wanted enough diversity from different communities and opinions that it would have been impossible to organize 20 focus groups. I also conducted many informal focus groups because as a Haitian it was simple for me to talk to people in the public transport system (called taptaps) or in the street, but not simple to record these things. For the past year, I have been making a research called "Success Mapping" with an organization called Future Generations Haiti, where we looking for the Haitian 7|Page communities that are resilient and successful in making change. In this research, I found a lot of them use many forms of konbit. I used this basic research to help me pick 3 communities for each type of konbit to develop as a case study. And in each community, I had an idea of the people who can speak about the experience the konbit in this community. In the same way, I chose several people who are not part of these 12 communities but who still have a lot to say about konbit in Haiti, like Madame Odette Roy Fombrun (who is one of the most respected scholars in the country that has made a lot of advocacy for konbit) and Dominique Romuald (leader of a strong peasants' movement called OPADEL in La Montagne, Jacmel). I was looking for a lot of diversity in geography, in age, in sex, in education level, in kind of organization, in domain of activity. I made 20 interviews in total (not counting the informal focus groups), some of them in person with a recorder, some of them over the phone with a software that lets me record the voice over the phone. Interviews ranged in time from 1 1/2 hour to 5 minute - it depends on how much the person interviewed wanted to talk. I was not very strict with the questionnaire because I wanted to follow the conversation more naturally, so the questions have a lot of variety. I asked everyone before I record if I can record, this is to respect their privacy if they are not comfortable with me recording. If I did not ask for permission to write their names in the paper, I do not use their names in the paper, and all of the transcriptions they are using the initials of the names of the respondents, not the real name, to respect the privacy. 8|Page I: LITERATURE REVIEW : THE HISTORY OF KON BIT Although this is a practicum and based largely on field work, it was important to position my research on previous scholarship. Ideally I wanted to start with the research fellow Haitians had done on the idea of konbit, but this was very challenging: the National Library was destroyed in the earthquake of January 12, 2010, the State College of Anthropology was also affected by the earthquake and I had difficulty getting access to those records. I had to use published books that were available internationally, online documents, and peer reviewed journals. However, when I researched the term "konbit" in a lot of peer reviewed journals, nothing came up. And when one types the word "konbit" into Google, the majority of results will be the names of NGOs or large aid projects that use the word because of its meaning but do not necessarily because they practice its principles. I will do my best to present the current literature on konbit, even though it is very limited. My first great question was on the origins of konbit and the word itself (sometimes spelled "coumbite" or "koumbit"). There were several articles written studying the origins of konbit in West Africa, where most Haitians were originally from before slavery brought them to the Caribbean. One of them, a series of papers written for Teaching for Change, describes how konbit comes from West African roots. In a section based on Harold Courlander's 1960 book The Drum and the Hoe: Life and Lore of the Haitian People published by University of California Press, the paper describes that "The rhymic, synchronized use of the hoe, the singing leader and the musicians who stand to Photo credit: Teaching for Change one side to 'encourage' the workers, the calling of the workers by drum rappels, the special consideration for the sick, and the concept of long-term community endeavor are all of West African origin. The konbit is the legitimate descendent of the Dahomean dokpwe, the kurum of the Mambila (Cameroons), the Ku of the Kpelle (Liberia), and other West African 9|Page cooperative systems1." Other African Diaspora societies that came from West Africa have similar systems that have different names: "day work", "work sport", or "digging match" in Jamaica, , "lend-hand" in Tobago, "gayap" in Trinidad, and "maroon" in Grenada1. Konbit has been studied mostly by anthropologists from both Haiti and the outside world, and there are many characteristics and descriptions that they agree on. According to an article written by Hudler Joseph for the Haitian newspaper "Le Matin", the konbit "constitutes a form of social organization that allows peasants to exploit their farms more cheaply. This traditional structure, based on the reciprocity of services, is woven into the national fabric. It is about an exchange of consent about a non-lucrative activity"2. He also describes the cultural elements of the konbit that are important, such as the conch shell calling peope to work, the drum giving a rhythm, alcohol beverages to motivate people, and sometimes would be associated with voudou ceremonies to honor Cousin Zaka, the lwa of agriculture2. Both Joseph and an African anthropologist he draws from, Denetem Touam Bona, talk about the very important role that music, dance, and rhythm played in the konbits. They said that the konbit revolved around a central rhythm3, and that it was as much of a form of choreography as it was a labor2. Bona saw the konbit itself as completely opposed to the capitalist structure of the plantations, because they were very horizontal and based on shared goals3. One of the most well-known anthropologic books that talks about the konbit is Where the Hands are Many: Community Organization and Social Change in Rural Haiti by Jennie M Smith. She also talks about the importance of songs, drums, and music in the konbits, how this "lightened the load" for difficult agricultural activities, how that represented a connection with Haitians' African roots4. Smith says that konbit and its 10 | P a g e associated form of kòve "“have been foundational building blocks for much contemporary community-based organization in rural Haiti”4. There is also a good amount of literature on konbit and its associated gwoupman, which is a general term for a rural community group. Salena Tramel of Grassroots International described how konbit and gwoupman are important in Haitian society: " There are two words in the Haitian Creole language that act as the foundational building blocks of the Haitian movement, gwoupman (local community group) and konbit (cooperative communal labor). Operating in the spirit of both, movements on the local, regional, and national levels see their shared vision for Haiti as self-determination through healing a broken food system and unlocking the land's potential"5. One of the most commonly-cited examples of this is Mouvman Peyizan Papay, Haiti's largest peasants' movement5. Their movement defines itself on its website as "a peasant organization whose goal is to unite all of the peasants in Haiti and assemble young rural workers to organize into groups to promote their culture and economy"6. It was founded in 1973 and includes more than 4,500 rural groups across Haiti7, and they are the most successful form of the gwoupman concept that is tied very closely with konbit. The scholar who has written about and advocated the most for konbit is Madame Odette Roy Fombrun. Born in the year 1917, Madame Fombrun spent many years in various political exiles because of her and her husbands' progressive views, including time in Africa8. When she came back from exile in the late 1980s after the fall of the Duvalier regime, she dedicated much of her time and scholarship to the ideas of civic education, education reform, and konbit. She published the book Konbit tèt Ansanm pou Ayiti Kanpe in 19878, which focused on the true meaning of konbit as a national form of solidarity. She advocated for a social contract for Haiti and Inspired by the peasant custom of the konbit, she proposes "Konbitism" as the base for a unifying social contract, which was supposed to be Haiti's response to capitalism, socialism, and communism9. 11 | P a g e But there are few intellectuals besides Madame Fombrun who write about konbit as a philosophy; most scholarly work focuses on konbit as only an agricultural practice for rural Haitian peasant groups. There is a gap in research about Haitians using the approach of konbit for solving other problems besides agricultural problems, and also that analysis how konbit is changing to keep up with modern times. To summarize, based on the existing literature, konbit is understood as a traditional form of agricultural cooperative in Haiti where peasants work together in the fields, using traditional music, dance, and alcohol to animate the work. There are a few people, like Madame Fombrun, that see konbit as the basis of a broader social contract. REFERENCES: 1. "The Konbit: Working Together". Teaching for Change: Teaching about haiti. http://www.teachingforchange.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Haiti_Literature.pdf 2. "Le rythme et la danse dans le "Coumbite". Hudler Joseph, Le Matin, 07/08/2011. http://www.lematinhaiti.com/contenu.php?idtexte=24526 3. "Negros Cimarrones". Denetam Touam Bona. 07/21/2005. http://destee.com/index.php?threads/negros-cimarrones.39134/ 4. When the Hands Are Many: Community Organization and Social Change in Rural Haiti. Jennie M. Smith. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. ix + 229 pp 5. "Haitian movements Branch Out". Salena Tramel, Huffington Post. 10/13/2011. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/salena-tramel/haitian-movements-branch_b_1008807.html?page=NewsArticle&id=13695%20(-tramel/haitian-movements-branch_b_1008807.html 6. "Qui sommes-nous?" Mouvman Peyizan Papay website. Last accessed on 8/28/2013. http://www.mpphaiti.org/-Historique-.html 7. "Mouvement Paysan de Papye - MPP (Haiti)". Alternatives. Last accessed 8/28/2013. http://www.alternatives.ca/content/ally/mouvement-paysan-de-papaye-mpp-haiti 8." Odette Roy Fombrun, educator feminist and Historian" Kreyolicious. last acess 28/8/13 http://kreyolicious.com/odette-roy-fombrun-1917-educator-feminist-and-historian/6574/ 9. "rename the island : Quisqueya, not Hispaniola " Odette Roy Fombrun. December 2000. http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ile.en.ile/paroles/fombrun_quisqueya-en.html 12 | P a g e II: STUDIES ON VARIOUS T YPES OF KONBIT AGRICULTURAL KONBIT: CHARACTERISTICS OF THIS KONBIT: In general, agricultural konbit is what is closest to the traditional konbit that was described in the last section. Because of this, when one says "konbit"( Koumbit, Coumbite , most Haitians will think of the agricultural konbit and only the agricultural konbit. There are many names for konbit: kolonn, kòve, eskwad, asosye, joune, and others. Every region has their own words for konbit, but they all function with the same characteristics: Konbit is a form of agricultural cooperative, but they are different from many agricultural cooperatives because there is no shared land. Generally, people participating in a konbit have their own land (there are some exceptions: see case study 3 in this chapter). The land is usually too large for a farmer to farm by himself, and there is no access to machines like tractors. So the farmer makes a team with other farmers that have the same problem as him (these groups can be called kolon, eskwad, asosye, etc depending on the area). In the group, each farmer gets a turn where all of the other farmers in his kolon will spend an entire day helping him on his farm - he does not need to pay them money (there are some exceptions: see case study 3) but is responsible for providing alcohol, music, and sometimes food. The group makes a schedule and there is a rotation: every farmer in the kolon will get a turn with the group helping him until everyone has had a turn, and then they will start again. There are always variations in different communities, but the general principles of the agricultural konbit are consistent across Haiti. 13 | P a g e THREE CASE STUDIES OF AGRICULTURAL KONBIT: 1. Family farms in Guacimal, St Raphael, North department: i. Background on St Raphael: St Raphael is a commune that is in the North Department, which is situated half-way between Hinche (the capital of the Central Department) and Cap Haitian (the capital of the North Department). Its GPS coordinates are 19°26′21″N 72°11′59″W. It also has roads that lead to the Artibonite Department through the commune of St Michel de l'Atalaye. This means it is a very important crossroads for commerce in the Greater North of Haiti. It is a big area with 18,381 hectares, with 48,884 people living in it according to a 2009 statistic [Wikipedia]. There are a few big rivers that come through St Raphael, the biggest is the River Bouyaha. This means it is the place that produces the second-most amount of rice (after the Artibonite) and a lot of vegetables like tomatoes, onions, carrots, peppers, etc. St Raphael, because it makes a lot of food and is this big crossroads, has one of the biggest markets in Northern Haiti where people come from all over to buy and sell things. Normally, everybody has a family land that their grandparents left for them that the people use to farm vegetables, corn, sweet potatoes, and millet. But there is also a large land that measures many acres that is irrigated land called Nan Sipa that is divided into many parcels. Many families own a parcel of irrigated land in Nan Sipa to plant things like rice and carrots and tomatoes that like a lot of water; if someone does not own the land in Nan Sipa he can have the chance to rent a parcel of land for a season. St 14 | P a g e Raphael also has a large orange plantation that is owned a private businessman and are sold to industries in Cap Haitian. ii. Family farm konbits/kolons in St Raphael: St Raphael is a place that uses a traditional form of konbit to work on their family gardens and their land in Nan Sipa. This is the way that a local leader describes konbit in St Raphael: " in the morning today, I work in your garden. After today I work with someone else, after the other day I work with someone else. When I need help, now all the people I helped are supposed to come and work with me" [1.1, 2:00]. In many other counties, when people talk about agricultural cooperatives they mean people that share one piece of land; in Haitian version of cooperative, everyone has their own land, but they each help each other in farming until everyone benefits from the labor. The important idea is reciprocity: a local farmer explained that, " when you help me I help you. If I help you and then ask you to help me and for some reason you can’t help me, maybe you can say, ‘ah, I can’t help you today, but I can buy some liquor for you to give to the people’" [1.2, 1:40] There are many important elements in konbit in St Raphael: a farmer describes it like this, " konbit is when people make a garden, and he does it with a lot of people. After that, today you help the person, we make food, give people food, liquor, singing, and when the time comes, we go at it [1.2, 0:29]. All of these things are called "stimulants" and help give people energy and motivation to work all day, sometimes even with no food. Konbit in St Raphael that is done this way has some advantages and some disadvantages according to local leader: the advantage is that it can mobilize a lot of people to help you for no money, but the disadvantage is that people sometimes do not show up so it is less dependable [1.1, 3:15]. But once people show up, many konbits have a structure where everyone does exactly an equal part, usually measured out by rope: "I show up and ask to be given 4 lengths of rope [this is used to measure off a small parcel that he will work], and when I finish my area, I go home, and that person knows that he owes me 4 lengths of rope" [1.2, 2:08]. Also, for many reasons, konbit is starting to disappear in St Raphael. One reason is that Haitians are becoming more interested in money and are not thinking they will work for 15 | P a g e the promise of someone else's labor. One local farmer in Bouyara, a rural section of St Raphael, talked about the peasants, saying: "But now, they almost don’t want [the konbit] anymore, and they more want to work for money these days" [1.2, 1:18]. Some people make a reference to the kòve of the past (that was talked about in the literature review) and think it is like giving their labor for free [1.2, 1:10]. Many peasants they have sold their land and so they cannot participate in the reciprocal system of this kind of konbit and they prefer to sell their labor to someone for money. And konbit is something that is based on trust, so when there is less trust in a community, the konbit cannot survive. But it still is being done in St Raphael, even if it is less, and people still think that konbit can be useful in the community, especially for the poorest of the peasants. A local pastor explained this: "they need to continue with the konbit, because the konbit is not to the advantage of the chiefs... and that’s why since a long time ago, the state doesn’t like konbit because it makes us unite ourselves. And when we unite ourselves, we can accomplish great things. With union we can accomplish great, great, great things. So the state tried to break it with this system of [cant hear well]. [7:26] In the past it was like that, well it really was the best system. You helped me in any way you could, if it was food you could bring, bringing water, bring a goat, if it’s corn I can give you, if it’s beans I will bring them. Well now they’ve put in a system of money to divide us" [1.1, 7:56]. 2. Rice farmers and cooperatives in the Valley of the Artibonite: i. Background on the Valley of the Artibonite: The Valley of the Artibonite is the "rice-basket" of Haiti, the place that is producing the most rice in the country. It is a fertile valley that is 30 minutes north of the city of St Marc. The communes that are in the valley are Petit Riviere, Verette, Grande Saline, Dessalines, Estere, La Chapelle. In the past, Haiti was self-sufficient in rice, that means that it produced enough rice to feed the whole country. It was like this until 1980s, when rice production began to decline and 16 | P a g e was further accelerated during the Photo credit: Felipe Jacome 1990s because of trade liberalization policies Haiti has become dependent on imported rice (called "Miami rice") and has the lowest tariff on rice in the region at 3%. Local Haitian rice is often more expensive than imported rice, and many Haitians think imported rice is higher quality. Despite this, rice production is still thriving in 3 areas of the country: Les Cayes, St Raphael, and the Artibonite Valley. A federation of 7 rice cooperatives in the Artibonite Valley (covering the 6 communes of the Valley) called RACPABA is very active in the area and helping to transform the way local rice is produced and sold. Even though the cooperatives do not share land, they share inputs, technical expertise, and pool their sales. Through special cultivation methods, they have succeeded to increase the yield per acre more than 4 times over. And even though the cooperative has access to some equipment like tractors, it is not enough to help all the farmers and many still rely on the konbit. ii. Cooperatives and konbits in Valley of the Artibonite: (relationship between konbits and formal cooperatives) According to Agronomist Jesnel Louis-jeune, who is responsible for the production sector of RACPABA, konbit is not something that is new: " RACPABA, as the intermediary of these 7 cooperatives that are engaged in rice cultivation in the Artibonite Valley, konbit is not a word that is foreign to us. Any child today can tell you what konbit is" [Interview 1.3, 1:36]. The agronomist defines konbit as the following: "Konbit is a means that all planters use to arrive at carrying out a quantity of work – because when it is only himself working on a parcel of land and his interventions are not enough to finish the work on time, and what he was hoping to achieve he cannot achieve – it is an initiative that has been around a long time, that when I was brought up everyone was using it, that allows for people to work 17 | P a g etogether to form a sort of association." [Interview 1.1, 2:14] When the agronomist described how the konbit works in the Artibonite, he mentioned the following elements that all konbits have:  Group of farmers spend a day at one farmer's garden, then they rotate  It is done for free, no money is involved  Food and "stimulants" are given (stimulants are alcohol)  Songs are sung, and this is an important motivation to work harder  People work like it is their own garden, and even if the owner of the garden cannot be there, when his day arrives, the work will get done. [Interview 1.3, 2:22-3:22] The Agronomist Jesnel Louis-Jeune is a young man, he is about 35 years old. He studied agronomy at one of the biggest private universities in Haiti, the Episcopal University of Haiti. He studied modern agriculture with machinery and science, so how does he see the importance of an old tradition like konbit?"Konbit is extremely important, and it is extremely important for the advancement of agriculture across the country, and not only in the Artibonite Valley , because konbit gives results" [1.3, 5:40]. He also says that the cooperatives that RACPABA works with are like konbits themselves, so that makes RACPABA a big konbit. But the agronomist is worried about konbit being under a threat because people they are more interested in money today than cooperation [1.3, 3:40]. Another threat, according to the agronomist, that the konbit finds is mechanized agriculture. Many people think that mechanized agriculture is the absence of konbit, is the absence of manual work, and they don't know how to adapt konbit to the mechanized agriculture. But the agronomist has a different idea: "The mechanized system doesn’t exclude konbit too. Mechanized agriculture came to help us evolve the agricultural sector, to grow the agricultural sector in the country, but it doesn’t exclude konbit. Why? Because there are a series of activities that are still carried out manually that konbit can still do. There are some times you can give [mechanized] tilling service but someone doesn’t have enough people to help out and can’t pay anyone for their services, and there are a number of other more minute tasks that need to be carried out in the soil and because those can’t get done, the whole thing fails, and this could be avoided with the use of konbit." [1.1, 6:15] 18 | P a g e The Agronomist shows the importance of the konbit, even sees ways that it can evolve, but during the whole interview, we can see that everything is at the level of agriculture. This is easy to understand because this young man is an agronomist and RACPABA is an agricultural cooperative, and so he is speaking in his area of expertise, so he sees konbit associated with manual labor in the gardens. This is a clear example of the agricultural konbit. 3. Sell-your-day konbits in Gwayavye, Artibonite: i. Background on Gwayavye: Gwayavye (Goyavier in French) is the 3rd communal section of St Marc in the Artibonite Department. It is 46.63 kilometers squared and is in the mountains on above the city of St Marc, the big problem of the community is lack of road. There is a some kind of road going up to the community but it is in bad condition and dangerous – if one car is coming up the mountain then there cannot be a car coming down the mountain because they will get stuck. This makes life very difficult for the population of Gwayavye because all of the agriculture produce they have it is hard to get to market even while the big city of St Marc is on the bottom of the mountain. It is also a big problem because the young people when they want to keep going with the school they have to go down the mountain and many times they live down the mountain and never come back and like this Gwayayve loses the young people. Another big problem of the community is the water: Gwayavye is at a very high elevation above and it does not have any water bodies (stream, spring, pond, etc). They only depend on the rain for the water, for the plants and the animals and the drinking. The children must miss a day of school to walk long distance in the mountains to carry water to the 19 | P a g e home. This problem start to see a solution because the people learn to capture the rainwater that fall on the house roofs and keep it in a cistern to use more. ii. Sell-your-day konbits: With the traditional konbit, there is usually not money there – but sometime they see a variation of the traditional konbit where the people who do not have the land they can “sell their day”. Normally the people have inherited land from the family called abitasyon it can be understood like “homestead” but sometimes the people do not have they own land and this means that the konbit can be no good for them, so this type of konbit is present in some communities today. A good example of this konbit type is in Gwayavye, Artibonite: Life is very hard in Gwayavye as one can see – the road and the water problem make normal things very difficult. But even with this problem Gwayavye is a very rich community because it produce almost everything: beans, cabbage, breadfruit, corn, spinach, millet, etc. The only thing it do not produce is rice because rice cannot grow on the mountain. But Gwayavye is difficult and there are no agriculture machines (like tractors) and it is impossible to farm the mountain by your own self. Even if you had all the money to rent a tractor the tractor cannot climb the mountain so the only thing left to help you with the land is the people. So the system of konbit is the biggest tool the population of Gwayavye have – even a bigger tool than the pickaxe and the machete. Every area has a way to do the konbit. In Gwayavye they use the kolonn system, and in this system there are the groups (called kolonn) that the farmer joins and it is organized so you have to be a member of a kolonn you cannot just change from this to that like that. Every person in the kolonn has a right to call a konbit and this is a day that the other member of the kolonn come to work in his garden for free that day – and then the next time a konbit is 20 | P a g e called then everyone works in the garden of the other person (just like the traditional konbit I describe in the chapter before). A young man from Gwayavye, Jonel, described how the konbit system works in Gwayavye: " Sometimes the first way they do it, they start with about 4-5 people. When they start with 4-5 people, today, I am the head, and I am hosting the konbit in my garden. Then tomorrow, we will do the same in the garden of someone else who is a part of this same konbit. That means we will continue to advance and do it on another [garden]" [1.4, 1:06]. This is a very similar description to how it was described in St Raphael. But there is a variation in the way konbit is done in Gwayayve: what if there is a person who has not the land? Does he have a right to join kolonn? Yes, and the people are very much interested for everyone to have a land. So normally if there is a member of a kolonn he can call a konbit and everyone work for him for free on his land, but if he has not land, he can “sell” the day of work to someone else who is not in the kolonn who has the land and needs the people to work for him. Then, all of that money for everybody’s work for the day goes to the person who does not have the land so he can start saving money to buy the land. Then when he finally can buy the land, this time when he needs the konbit he can use it on his land and does not have to sell the day anymore. Jonel describes how the konbit's day is "bought" by someone outside the konbit: "there might be someone who is not in this konbit who has the means to work. How does he do it? He has the means to work but isn’t in the konbit, and he doesn’t want to work in the garden. So what he does is he makes a deal that the konbit will work in his garden, and he will give the money to the head of the konbit, and the head of the konbit will separate the money with every member of the konbit" [1.4,1:37]. Everyone in Gwayavye belongs to a kolonn because almost all of the community make their livelihood on farming. And even there is many difficulty, the konbit lets the people make a life on the mountain: there is a farmer in Gwayavye who has 10 children and with konbit made enough money to send all of the 10 children to school in St Marc. Jonel is one of the 10 children of this farmer and really sees the importance of konbit: 21 | P a g e "Normally, [konbit] is the best way for peasants to organize themselves to work. If you are working the land, you understand? Because in the day, the land used to yield more, and at the same time, it wasn’t possible to find the means to work the land. Today, if everyone could do konbit to work, the conditions of life for people in the countryside would be improved. Because the amount of money that would be spent for people to work for you, if you made konbit, put your heads together, you work in someone else’s garden today and tomorrow they work in your garden, you would see that you would economize better and find a better yield from the garden" [1.4, 3:36]. 22 | P a g e FINANCIAL KONBIT: CHARACTERISTICS OF FINANCIAL KONBIT: A long time ago, the economy of Haiti was based on the agriculture. That made the peasants more valued and work hard to give the results. But in the last 50 years, the country day to day is coming more to depend on the international and on money. Because of the lower of the value in the countryside, there becomes a rural exodus to the city. When people go to the city, there is no work that can respond to the people’s lives. Many Haitians they live on less than 1 US dollar a day, but for these people to respond to the needs of paying for the house and the school and the food, they all are obligated to live with a Haitian ideology of “one for all, all for one”. And because of the social condition of these people, the bank or the micro-finance that is should be there to lend people the money to start business, they do not trust the people to lend them the money legally. Because of the economic barriers the people have, they use the same ideology of konbit they use in the countryside in working the ground – to assemble the resources to help a person in need and then that continues to help all the people in a kolonn – and they use it for the money problems too in modern Haiti. Financial konbits often share the same characteristic of rotation with the agricultural konbits: everyone takes a turn financially helping someone, knowing that eventually it will be their turn to be helped. It is a pooling of resources to give people a boost when there is no access to other financial services. 23 | P a g e THREE CASE STUDIES OF FINANCIAL KONBITS: 1. The use of sol in urban Cite Soleil: i. Background of sol Sol is a type of cooperative that a group of people does to put what they have together to give to one person an amount of money that they could not have for a long time. The way it works is that a sol can be let us say 10 people they accept to give a certain amount of money every week – no one gives more than the other gives - and they decide together which one of those people gets all of the money for that week. The money is distributed through a mama sol, or a sol "mother" [2.1, 2:15]. This amount of money is good cash grant and is more than they could have gotten all at once ever, so it helps them make a big purchase or do invest in their business. After that, every week or month, a different member of the sol gets the money until everyone has got a turn. There is a version of sol where the turn-around is much quicker and the payments come through every day; this is called sabotay [2.1, 2:00]. This is done with no official papers but it is with the confidence and trust of the people in the group. It is the very same idea of the konbit in the gardens, because in the gardens everyone puts together to give one person a big push and then everyone else gets their push too – in the sol, everyone gets a push from the group eventually. And the sols are done not only for money but for things like meat and goods and services. The sol sits on the trust and conscience, because the last person to get money from the sol has to have the trust that everyone else will continue the sol and not drop out. ii. Description of a sol in Cite Soleil: For example, there is a baker a man who owns a bakery in Cite Soleil called Pierre Rolin he belongs to a sol for people who are in businesses. He was working at a bakery and saving his money, and put it in a sol, and with the pay-out was able to build his own bakery [2.1 2:50]. 24 | P a g e Sols depend a lot on the trust between the members. Pierre Rolin is currently in 2 sols, one of which is working very well and one of which is not: " And the sol has its advantages and its disadvantages. For instance, I was in a sol that finished 2 years ago, and I still haven't gotten paid. I was supposed to be paid 30,000 gourdes. But I'm in another sol in Soley 20, and this is a good sol. I've benefited several times already" [2.1, 0:30]. In the well-working sol, he has to contribute 500 gourdes a day, and the sol has 30 people in it. Every week somebody gets 105,000 gourdes to invest in their business. When he got his turn in the sol, he bought all of the flour he needed for a year – and this is something he cannot get a loan for from the bank, so he gets a solidarity loan from his other businessmen and women. He says the sol is the place he turns to when he has business troubles: " When the business is going through hard times, I invested it in the business. I might have a problem and I might ask the sol mother to let me have the next turn, and the money helps me resolve the problem" [2.1, 1:27]. He considers it the "bank of the poor" and a way for poor people to pool their money together to accomplish greater things. 2. Mutuelle de Solidarite in Vodrey, rural Cite Soleil i. Background on Mutuelle de Solidarite: Mutuelle is like a sol but has more principles than a sol. It is still a group of people who decide to put their heads together to help their economic situation. It is a system that functions like a sol where people can put their money together to help each other’s businesses but it is also an emergency system so that if someone is in need they can find money and it is a type of bank too. The Finance Secretary of REMUSOV, who I will introduce next, describes the mutuelle like this: " it’s a group of people who have the same objective, for 25 | P a g e instance working in a garden, or working in animal husbandry, or working in another domain, who decide to work together to resolve some problems they are known to find, to reinforce their activity and to carry out both economic and social activities" [2.2, 1:05] There are 3 boxes: a red box, a blue box, and a green box. Again, the financial secretary of REMUSOV describes the system: "there are 3 chests: a green chest, which is for when people need credit for commerce or to maintain their gardens or raising animals, this is where they come to borrow. There is the red chest, which is a chest for assistance, in the case of an emergency like a natural disaster, a serious illness, it’s this case that people use to help one another. and there is the blue chest, which is the re-financing chest, if there is an organization that is interested in giving a gift to the mutuelle or if there is a financing problem that is so large they can’t address it they can go to another financial institution to go after this money to address the financial need that they couldn’t respond to. [2.2, 2:17]" There are many principles that make the mutuelle work: mutuelle sits on 3 rocks: the first rock is solidarity, the second rock is equality, the third rock is the principles and rules that govern the mutuelle. A mutuelle has no chief. Each box has its own lock – and each box is with a different member and the key to that box is with a different member, and these people cannot be family. And there is a separate person who has the record books. This is a way they have control of the mutuelle. ii. Description of mutuelle de solidarite in Vodery: For example, there is a community that is called Vodrey that is in the north of Cite Soleil, it is a community that is very advanced in agriculture . But like in many parts of Haiti, there was almost no possibility for agricultural credit. Banks in Haiti do not trust the poor people, and ask them to leave a lot of property as a deposit or ask for a big interest, and this is so common that Haiti has a proverb that says "money goes to the house with money". So people are obliged to go to informal money lenders who are called ponya, which means a "big knife", because they ask for such high interest rates that it is like getting cut by a knife. 26 | P a g e In English these people are known as "loan sharks". Gardy Guerrier, the president of an organization called REMUSOV, describes the situation the way it was in Vodrey: "many people that were in the agricultural or economic sector, whenever they had a money problem, they were forced to find someone that would give them a loan or let them pawn something. These things they were good, they were bad, because the people who were worst, they would have to go to a loan shark, where the interest rate on the loan would get to just 25%, 30%, even 35%, and you had to pay every month [2.3, 1:41]" In 2008, the people got training from a national organization on mutuelle de solidarite. Hudson Rene describes how they got the idea: "we have to say that the activity of mutuelle de solidarite, the way it came, it was in sitting in reflecting on the different problems in the sectors – here in particular it’s the domain of agriculture that we are in. We reflected about the different problems we encountered, like when there were problems of drought, the gardens died and there was no water, or maybe there were gardens that we couldn’t find money to maintain. And when they presented the model of mutuelle de solidarite we saw it was a good model, and we worked together to enter in the activity of konbit mutuelle, which allowed us to put our money together and find solutions to the problems of water that there were in the past, the problem of maintenance of gardens, in commerce too there were people who couldn’t do anything, it allowed us to do this as well" [2.2,4:35]. They started with one mutuelle and this mutuelle advanced so much that so many people who are interested that now there are 14 mutuelles in Vodrey, each with its own name, history, and membership.. Almost every family in Vodrey has at least one person in a mutuelle and it succeeded to change the entire economy of the community. These mutuelles they now are a coalition called REMUSOV and they combined they can do great things for the community. And they give a lot of trainings on mutuelles to other communities because the mutuelles were so important to them. Here is an example of how one mutuelle, Miso-Viv, got started, according to Prevoir, its president: "So it is people who were trained about the mutuelle who become part of the mutuelle. From that point, we start, 27 | P a g e we signed people up, and they themselves they contribute, it’s like a family, they say how much they themselves can give in the mutuelle. In my mutuelle, it is 100 gourdes. In a little bit, around 3:00, my mutuelle will start to work because it’s at 3:00 we meet. At this point people started to meet, and 3 months afterwards we were able to start with a small bit of credit with the members, so with the amount of money we have in the chests, we can say we can start the credit. And according to the amount of money we have, we start with a bit of credit, with a very low [interest] rate. [2.4, 2:34] I want to make a distinction here between a mutuelle and a mutuelle de solidarite. There are many communities that use this system of credit where they put money together to lend to other people, but they do not have a sense of putting their heads together, of solidarity. They do not have a red case for when the members have an emergency. And in the mutuelle de solidarite, it is not just about finances. There are songs, there are stories shared about the community, there are times for you to share about what happened in your life. Gardy, the president of REMUSOV, talks about the sense of solidarity: " This kind of solidarity is in many domains. People work together to put their small amount of money together every week, when the money accumulates to a certain level, they lend each other money. And it’s not just an economic konbit where people come to discuss about money only, there are other things that are discussed in the mutuelle. If someone in the mutuelle happens to have a problem, she knows she’s not alone, that she has other people that are in the mutuelle de solidarite that are aware of her problem... that means, for me, once a group of people have started a mutuelle de solidarite together, they are welded together, they’ve formed a family. Because the problem of one is the problem of the other. [2.3, 3:46]". Hudson also talks about how, unlike the sol mentioned above, mutuelles are forever: "it’s with the idea of sol that the mutuelle was born because the sol is something that doesn’t last, because when you finish the sol, after everyone gets their turn, the sol falls apart and is not continued. The mutuelle is something that is more direct, it is more formal, and it is sustainable. It is there for all of time, as long as its membership exists" [2.2, 5:09]. In this sense, mutuelle is definitely a form of konbit. According to Gardy Guerrier, "konbit, what is it? It is a problem that exists in the area, a canal to dig, but if I was going to do it, it would take me 2 weeks. But with konbit, it will take 1 day, 2 days. It’s the same thing with the mutuelle de solidarite: an amount of money that it would take me a long time to amass, with the mutuelle de solidarite I can get access to it in a small amount of time" [2.3, 4:39]. And also we can see that the cultural part 28 | P a g e that is so important in the agricultural konbit, like we learned from the last chapter, we can also see it here in the songs in the mutuelles. The red case is also another form of solidarity that you can see in the konbit: maybe today your neighbor has trouble so the red case helps him, and you trust that tomorrow if you have the problems, the red case will help you. This is the same way that in an agricultural konbit, it is 'come to help me today, because I will help you tomorrow'. 3. Cooperative businesses in Ravine des Roches, Limbe i. Cooperative businesses Many groups, especially women's groups, do a kind of cooperative business where their members put their money together to buy something that will be useful for all of them, like a sewing machine or a goat that will have kids that can be shared. These are almost always informal businesses and depend a lot on trust, but some can be more structured and formal. Some are for profit and in some the profit is invested back in the community. They can take many forms and have different rules of operations, and the most unique approach to the cooperative business can be found in Ravine des Roches. ii. Description of financial konbit in Ravine des Roches Ravine des Roches is communal section in the commune of Limbe with a great history: according to Haitian legend, the rebel slave Makandal came from this area. The name Ravine dse Roches means "Rocky Ravine" and it is an accurate description: it is a very rocky but green ravine, with poor infrastructure even though it is no more than 10 kilometers from the town of Limbe. In Ravine des Roches, there is a women's organization called OFARR (Organization of Active Women of Ravine des Roches) who have a unique approach to the collective business. The women in the community they identified that they had many problems, one of them is that there was no school in the community. So the women mobilized themselves to make a cooperative business where they pooled their money to buy goods like rice, oil, and ice, and women took turns selling the merchandise every day. Wilna Telusma, the president of OFARR, describes the activity: 29 | P a g e " The organization has more than 90 women, and we work together and pool our money of 10 [Haitian] dollars [which is 50 gourdes] so we can buy sacks of rice, when we first started, and then a gallon oil, and then maggi [bouillon cubes], and we have one person be responsible for the business to sell. And then we were able to get to two sacks of rice, and after we sell those, and when we finish selling those, this gives us the money to buy even more and so we can augment the economic means of the women. Now we have arrived at a moment where the organization is engaged in commerce, and the commerce is raising money for the women and the organization. If they make 100 gourdes profit, this 100 gourdes is divided up between the organization and the person that is selling. Just so we can facilitate the economy of the women in the organization. [2.5, 2:14]" The way this is similar with konbit is that the same way that a farmer cannot really make his farm work without the konbit, these women really couldn't make a business work without this activity. Wilna described that "there are many among them that never had the chance to engage in commerce, they were always dependent on someone else, and now they see that they are making progress, and with the profit they get they collect it to buy other products to sell alongside what they’re selling for the organization" [2.5, 2:57]. So instead of helping each other with working on the land, the women are helping each other by working in the commerce, and everyone gets a turn to benefit. Some of the profits went to helping to build a school. Finally, in 2012 they saved enough funds to build the school with the help of volunteer community labor (here there is an example of a community konbit that will be described in the next chapter) and members contributing the materials they had as well. Women cut bamboo, looked for rocks, partnered with a location organization that looked after children, and built a simple structure for the school. "It’s how we put our heads together to advance, but there wasn’t a difference where people were getting jealous, it was our efforts put together that allowed us to construct the school "[2.5, 6:00]. 30 | P a g e And this is what Wilna thinks of konbit in general: "Because konbit is good because it is a gathering of people who put their heads together to succeed in a kind of work, and it is konbit, whenever it is konbit, we know we give food, if everyone works together, sings, and then we can succeed in a beautiful initiative for our country, for development of Haiti too!" [2.5, 7:35] 31 | P a g e COMMUNITY KONBITS: CHARACTERISTICS OF COMMUNITY KONBITS: Community Konbit is when there is a problem in a community that the people in this community decide to put hands together to fix. This problem is not a direct problem for anyone in the community, it is something that all the community is touched by it. This sometimes the people call it kòve that means the community work, but this word has the bad meaning now because during the American occupation they use it to force the people to work on the roads for no money and the Duvaliers they do the same thing. So some communities they call it the kòve but others they do not like this word and have other ways of calling it, so for this article it will be called “community konbit”. THREE CASE STUDIES OF COMMUNITY KONBITS: 1. Community konbit for local infrastructure: Gan Bad i. Background on Gan Bad: Gan Bad, the French name is Gambade, is one of the six sections communal in a commune that is named Grande Riviere du Nord. This commune was very important in our past, where the founding father of Haiti, Jean Jacques Dessalines, was born on September 20th, 1758. Gan Bad is a mountainous place where people have a lot of problems to work because even if you work in the mountains it is very difficult to find a road to pass with your donkey to take the harvest to go to the market. Gan Bad produces a lot coffee, cocoa, pineapples and oranges. When you talk to the people of this area, they say that they used to produce more in the past. But as for the oranges, they are still the biggest orange producer in Haiti. There are some schools but not enough for the population with is estimated at more than 7000 people. There is no hospital in Gan Bad. Gan Bad has the big river of Grande Riviere du Nord pass by their door. Even though gives a lot of problems in Haiti, Gan Bad still has its natural cover. The people of Gan Bad regrouped themselves into small community organizations. They use these organizations to make garden, roads etc. 32 | P a g e Gan Bad is suffering a lot because of the roads access. During the cholera epidemic, the suffering did not only come directly from the cholera and not only because of the hospital problem of Gan Bad, it came from the problem of accessibility of the roads. The people who had cholera in the mountains, the pregnant women who should needed service at the hospital, sometimes people had to take them on a door to get down the mountain, sometimes the patients fall down and died on the roads to the hospital. So the whole community identify the road problem as a priority. ii. Community konbit to fix local road: Community Konbit is when there is a problem in a community that the people in this community decide to put hands together to fix. This problem is not a direct problem for anyone in the community, it is something that all the community is touched by it. In Gan bad, the people are touched the most by the road problems which continue to block the community’s progress. One day the people sat together and thought about some strategies how to respond of all these difficulties with the road that was causing deaths and problems. The answer they found was that all the groups in the Gan Bad should work together to build a road by hand where the road didn’t exist before. They wanted to build the road from Gan Bad over the mountains to connect with St Raphael because St Raphael has a very big market, but it is 18 kilometers over the mountain to St Raphael. They chose Saturday as a a community day when everyone in the community needs to contribute: people can give their labor as a volunteer, but for the people who cannot work hard they can sing songs and play music to inspire the people that are working, they can give beans and oranges and breadfruit and whatever they grow so that the volunteers can eat, they can volunteer to cook the food for the people working, and any other way that they can help. This konbit it started not formally because there is many community groups in the past they each have their own name and their own members and their own activity and many of 33 | P a g e them on their own ideas decided to work on the road. By example Frere Cadet is like a pastor in the community and is one of the powerful leaders. He makes lots of advocacy for the road, he said ”Even it’s only me I will be working on the road every Saturday myself”. But then there was the advice from someone the community trusted to take these groups working by theyselves and make them into a federation and that is what the groups did – they founded the Federasyon Tet Kole pou Devlopman Gan Bad (FTDGB) and then they started working together in a organized way about the roads, and still with the konbit. One day in June 2012, with Future Generations Haiti’s project of mapping success, one of our colleagues discover that initiative and invited us. It was a Friday and the people in the community asked us to participate on the Saturday road Konbit. Friday afternoon the community collected food together to feed themselves during the Konbit. They collected breadfruit, avocado, orange, sweet potatoes, and other thing. On Saturday very early about 7h30 am, the community started to regroup themselves, a man with a conch shell made a loud sound that called the people to the konbit . Some of the they women led by a woman named Elvie met and started to think about the food, and the rest of the women and the men led by Frere Cadet took their tools, what they had go to the road. They started to sing the traditional music, played the conch shell, played the drums, and worked until the sun was very hot at noon and then everyone ate food together and go home. For this day they made almost 50 meter of road. 34 | P a g e The music that was sung by an older man went like this: Haitian creole: English: "An'n nou leve pye nou pi wo, "Lift your feet higher, an'n nou leve pye nou pi wo, travayè Let us lift up our feet higher, workers Pinga nou dekouraje We shouldn't get discouraged Pinga nou dekouraje We shouldn't get discouraged Kembe moun yo fèm, kembe moun yo fèm Hang in there, stay strong Nou pap dekouraje ak travay la We won't get discouraged with the work Nou pap dekouraje ak pep la We won't get discouraged with the people Nou pap dekouraje nap kembe fèm" We won't get discouraged, we'll stay strong" [see link in references] [see link in references] While the people were singing traditional songs, someone was playing the lambi, and the workers also made the rhythm of their tools go along with the music. There were also lots of jokes and stories being told, all of this is to keep up the motivation of the workers. Gan Bad doesn't just use the konbit for the road, they also use the same energy, the same people to make the agricultural konbits also during the planting season. When the rains come, the same group stops working on the road and works in each others' gardens, and when the rains stop, they go back to the road. 2. Konbit for historical preservation in Fort Oge, Jacmel i. Background on Fort Oge: Fort Oge is a historical fort on the mountains of Cap Rouge, above the city of Jacmel. The fort was constructed in the early 1800s after the Haitian Revolution under the orders of Jean Jacques Dessalines (Haiti's founding father) to protect the young country against the French. But like many forts and other historic sites in Haiti, the Haitian state has not done anything to protect or preserve it. 35 | P a g e Fort Oge has a small community around it, and there is a lot of agricultural in the community because of the cool climate. But the infrastructure is very bad: the road to get to Fort Oge is in terrible state and very dangerous. Dieudonne Cyprien, not a resident of Fo Oge but someone who visits often and helps with local organizations, described the state of the fort: " It’s not just Fo Oge, there are many forts, but in Fo Oge we don’t have the sea, we don’t have other things to attract tourists to come in the community, it’s the Fort that we have. The tourists always come to see the Fort and we remarked that it was always dirty, there was no preparation being done in the fort" [3.2, 2:00] Because of how isolated life is up on the mountain, most of Fort Oge's young people leave to live in the cities or the Dominican Republic. ii. Description of community konbit in Fo Oge There is a group of young people from Fort Oge that studied in the cities and in the Dominican Republic that decided to come back to their community and make a change. They grouped themselves together to make an organization called OSODEFO. Their objective is to transform Fort Oge into a zone for tourism and to attract the local Diaspora to come back home. OSODEFO saw the Fort as a resource that had great potential, and they decided to work to transform it. They organized their community into big konbits, collective work parties, where everyone worked together to restore the fort. But in the beginning, it was very hard to get people to participate [3.1, 2:43] Jean-Pierre, the president of OSODEFO, described the situation in an interview: "I need to tell you, this kind of technique is something that the community is very used to, but as time has gone by and with the new emphasis on money, it was something that was starting to disappear. But with the presence of OSODEFO, we have been able to re-introduce the idea of community konbit. And now they appreciate it, and they consider us like heroes" [3.1, 1:35] What was interesting here is how many people think of konbit as something that the older generation did. But in OSODEFO, konbit was saved by the younger generation: " It’s a source 36 | P a g e of pride for people in the area, especially for older members of the community, because in the past, they had lost this system, and everything that got done was because of money, and now they see that in the 21st century, they see a group of young people with the sensibility of much older people, working together to realize this kind of work" [3.1, 6:46]. Like Agronomist Jesnel talked about konbit being threatened by the modern agriculture system, for Jean-Pierre, the system of konbit lost a lot of strength because of the way the system of the NGOs came with big money to resolve the community problems. "The first thing – when it is an NGO is there, you feel as if that when the NGO is there, it’s that they’re bringing something and imposing it, because the community didn’t need it or maybe it wasn’t their priority or how they wanted it done. People are more concerned about quickly taking what little money the NGO is bringing for them to work, and they don’t participate with all their hearts in what’s going on" [3.1 2:49]. Now when Jean-Pierre talks about the power of konbit, this is what he says: " but when it’s work – let’s say community konbit – we sit down about what we need and we put our heads together and say how are we going to get this done, you see that people feel more devoted. for example in the construction of the public park, there is a little kiosk, there is a shade structure, automatically when we finished, it’s a pleasure for each individual person who has one piece of wood to bring it, those that have water bring it, those that have beans bring it, those that have a can of food bring it, every gives what they can, and you see that people have more dedication, they feel good about themselves to collect whatever they can to make this happen. You feel people have this deep motivation, to participate like this, ‘many hands make the load light’ and when it is an NGO that comes and imposes something you don’t see that [3.1, 3:51] Because konbit is something that is not being forced, people can volunteer to help in any way they can. If you cannot work, you can bring alcohol, you can bring beans for food, you can cook the food, you can bring wood, you can sing and encourage the people, and if you are not there you can leave your drum for someone else to play. This way of holistic participation means that this kind of konbit is very open, more open than the agricultural or financial konbits, because everyone can participate. There is a Haitian proverb that says "no one invites someone else to a funeral", which means there are certain things that 37 | P a g e people don't invite you to, but if your conscience moves you to go, you go. Community konbits are viewed in this way: no one will force you to participate or pressure you to participate, but if you see that this is something for your conscience, you participate. But there were people that OSODEFO invited: they used social media to broaden the call for konbit to people who lived outside of the community. They used Facebook and SMS to contact people from Fort Oge living outside of the community to come and help, and founded a group called OSO-Volontè (Volunteers). Every Saturday, members of this new group come up to the community and volunteer to help restore the fort [3.2, 0:44]. This is an important example of touris lakay ("home tourism") that Madame Odette Roy Fombrun advocates strongly for. This spirit of community konbit went so far that members of OSODEFO and OSO-Volontè spent one weekend in the nearby city of Jacmel, cleaning the streets. 3. Konbit to clean streets/canals in urban neighborhoods, Cite Soleil, Port au Prince i. Sanitation situation of Cite Soleil Cite Soleil is the most densely populated commune in the country, and is often called a "slum" or "ghetto". Hundreds of thousands of people live on less than 9 square miles. The sanitation system is very poor: there are a series of badly managed latrines, an open canal system, and almost no trash collection. Also, large secondary canals carry trash from all over the city of Port au Prince to Cite Soleil, clogging the canal system and 38 | P a g e causing floods. This is often the worst in the rainy season. ii. Description of community konbit: There is a small neighborhood in Cite Soleil called La Difference. La Difference was very different because since 2004, the neighborhood organized itself into cleanup crews to keep the streets clean and organized a kind of "neighborhood watch" to supervise the children in the community. But La Difference had a problem: they were next to Canal St George, a big secondary canal that carried lots of trash from the other neighborhoods in the capital and was always causing flooding problems. Every time the canal overflowed, the neighborhood would take a day or two to clean up the mess, and it encouraged the young people to organize themselves into volunteer clean-up crews that worked in a participative way [3.3, 0:30]. The founder of La Difference, Stephen Italien, described how they saw the way they were doing like the urban version of the peasants' konbit: "Konbit means putting your heads together. Because the way that people in the countryside do this to grow food, we do it for cleaning our neighborhoods. Everyone is working: those that can work, work; those that can contribute a television box, an old fan, do so. All of this deals with the trash until we arrived at this level. The ones that could contribute wheelbarrows contribute wheelbarrows. Even the way people in the countryside make food to encourage the people who are working, we tried to do that as well" [3.3, 2:05] Then the konbit got larger. In 2011, La Difference was a founding member of a young social movement in Cite Soleil called Konbit Soley Leve. Konbit Soley Leve united neighborhoods who wanted to work for positive change in the structure of a traditional konbit: every neighborhood helps every other neighborhood when they have a problem or a project. 39 | P a g e In May, 2011 Canal St. George overflowed and covered La Difference in sludge, mud, and garbage. Early in the morning, a mass text message was sent out to all of the members of Soley Leve, and every neighborhood sent people to help La Difference within less than an hour, while the mayor and the NGOs hadn't yet even begun organizing an assessment of the damage. Within 3 hours, La Difference was clean, and in the keeping with the spirit of konbit, residents of La Difference provided the volunteers with hot coffee, water, and jokes. Leader Stephen Italien described the event: " I didn’t think we could have a success like this. I didn’t think that the people of Cite Soleil could have that kind of appreciation for their neighbors. It helped us to see the movement in another light. It’s true, we used to see young people cleaning their own neighborhoods, but after we saw that Canal St. George overflowed and covered La Difference, we sent out the call for other people, and it was very, very good. Because that showed us really that Cite Soleil can change. I don’t know if the world understands this, but with this konbit that we did across all of Cite Soleil, especially inside La Difference, I saw the way the young people saw their environment in a new way... That would have taken a day to do the work that in a little bit of time, we realized with konbit" [3.3, 6:58] This example of community solidarity was very powerful, and the principle of reciprocation and rotation carried on because when other neighborhoods needed help cleaning or painting afterwards, La Difference sent members to go and help. But Stephen says that organizing the urban residents into konbit is harder than the rural konbits: " what we’re doing here, well, I can say it’s something that we’re bringing because it 40 | P a g e wasn’t something in people’s minds because they weren’t brought up in the countryside. We needed to work hard to help people understand what konbit is. It’s the same way that motivating people to take care of the trash in Port au Prince is difficult because these people grew up with trash" [11.1, 3:11]. However, Stephen does see that people are starting to see the "necessity" of this activity in the absence of state services, and that they are even beginning to see it as "beautiful". 41 | P a g e SYMBOLIC KONBIT: Characteristics of symbolic konbit: There are some konbits which are not for something concrete, but something that a group of people can use to show something. Those ideas are to looking for the conscience of the population, those ideas are to make the people understand who they are, those ideas are some ideas which are not clear to understand – anyone can give his or her definition to this kind of thing. And those symbolic konbits like that, you can’t immediately see the results, but long-term, you can see something come from those ideas. TWO CASE STUDIES OF SYMBOLIC KONBITS: 1. Kita Nago Kita Nago are African words or name for a place in our history before we was slaves, but in the Haitian logic, when you can’t do something, you can’t go anywhere with an idea, they say, “this idea will not go to Kita or Nago” [4.1, 1:18]. There is a man in Haiti his name is Harry Nicolas, he’s very interested in the national production of Haiti, the agriculture of Haiti, for that the people call him “Met Fey Vet” that means “The Master of the Green Leaf”. He made a lot of things in Haiti to promote the national production, like a song called “Mama Doudou;” it was a campaign to remember Haitians about the good Haitian food that is healthy and help the national production. According to him, he said he has for a very long time thought about something that can really truly help Haitians understand they need to put hands together to answer their problems. 42 | P a g e The idea was: Kita Nago. His definition of Kita Nago is that Haitians can go from the Kita to the Nago if they just put hands together. He had the plan for about 30 years, but everyone thought it was a hopeless idea until in 2012, he managed to build a team of respected leaders from the Voudou community, the Catholic community, the Protestant community, etc. [4.1, 10:36]. He collected a tree trunk that weighed 500 kilogram and put it in the southweatern of Haiti a place called Les Irois; and he said with the unity, with konbit, the Haitian people need to take this trunk to to northeastern Haiti to a place name Ouanaminthe, the border of the Dominican Republic. But, to put it over there, we, the Haitian people, will not put it in a boat, in helicopter, in truck: we need to carry it with our hands for 700 kilometers(see map to right). Everyone thought he was crazy, that we will not be able to do that. According to Caleb, a Haitian citizen who was very interested in Kita Nago: "There were people who didn’t want to believe him, and he said he’d show them. He took something that didn’t even really have great significance, which was a tree trunk, he decorated it, and he had people follow him from one end of Haiti to the other end, to show you that even though he’s not holding anything of significance and just a tree, he’s bringing the idea forward to show us something about leadership [4.1, 2:10] Everyone had their opinion what they thought about this trunk: someone thought it is voudou, someone thought it was political, a lot of thoughts were floated on this trunk. But Met Fey Vet kept saying it was a symbol of unity of Haitians. In January 1st represents a very good day for the Haitians because it is the day we were officially liberated ourselves from slavery. Despite all the problems of the country, the January 1st always represented a good thing for the Haitians. Mr. Harry Nicolas launched this event on this day, January 1st 2013. And the people from all over the countryside in Les Irois, took the trunk and ran with it to give it to another community and it started. 43 | P a g e The trunk was very heavy. Normally, it required 32 people to carry the trunk. The people took the trunk, run with the trunk, play music – when someone tired, another takes the other person’s place. This was a very important lesson about collective leadership, according to Mr. Harry: " Because it was to wake up in people’s hearts their individual and collective capacity! It is Individual is you that can decide based on an idea to participate, but it is collective because one person cannot carry Kita Nago, not even 12 people can carry it. It is 32 people who need to carry it to feel that it is light. If 31 people carry it you start to feel the weight... what did you get out of the experience when you were carrying the trunk? One person leaves, you feel the weight, [static], and so therefore if someone in society doesn’t take his responsibility, you’ll feel the weight in the country" [4.1, 15:40-19:00]. This is also something you see in the other forms of konbit, because in the other forms of konbit, if one person is absent, the work is much harder. And the people they were excited by it, and no one wanted the Kita Nago to fail in their community. So the people from a community they ran to take the trunk, and they didn't stop running until it was in the hands of another community. That community would run with it to another community, and the trunk traveled many distances in a day. Sometimes there would be hundreds of people just running alongside the trunk, singing and offering encouragement. This kind of national relay-race also said something important about the inter-connectedness of Haiti: "without the people who brought it to Jeremie it couldn’t have 44 | P a g e arrived in Petit Goave, and without the people who brought it to Archaie it wouldn’t have arrived at Gonaives, etc. so it was really the people from Les Irois who brought it to Ouanaminthe" [4.1, 18:20]. There is a slogan in Haiti it is “many hands make the load light” and people from all over the country, from the mountains to the cities, come to see, come to carry the tree. Even the president carried this trunk. Some communities, like Cap Haitian, let the students take off the school to come to see the trunk and carry the trunk. But many people thought that Kita Nago was all about the people who were carrying the trunk. But Met Fey Vet understood it different: there were women in Petit Goave who ran to the river to get water for those in the march, there were peasants on the road that opened up their fields for the marchers to eat, there were small merchants who offered their food for free, and of course the thousands of people who accompanied the march, singing and dancing [4.1, 12:30]. To Met Fey Vet, even if you never once touched the tree trunk, you could still be important in helping it arrive. Just like the reference in the community konbit section, where even the people who leave their drums are part of the konbit, this shows that it is about participation in a holistic way. It took 27 days for them to reach the Ouanaminthe, and according to many analysts, national and international, there were about 3.5 million Haitians that participated in this Kita Nago. Haiti has ten departments, this trunk passed through seven. Haiti has 140 communes, the trunk crossed 47. They crossed many rivers, they climbed many mountains. And in the last moment in Ouanaminthe, it was the women who put the trunk to its final place. This Kita Nago has a lot of importance for the Haitians after this the Haitians remember when they put hands together what they can do. 45 | P a g e But what was the meaning of all this effort, and was it successful? The objective was to do something that would wake up people's consciences, to show them what Haitians were capable of, to make them work together. According to Met Fey Vet: " there is an aspect that succeeded in kita nago and that is that we left Les Irois and arrived in Ouanaminte. But the ideological aspect, I don’t think it surpasses 20%", although he said that it would take years to see what the impact is" [4.1, 37:55]. But the 20% of change is still visible in the short-term. Caleb gives this testimony: " In my life – the impact I saw was that the impact Mr. [Harry] was trying to make, before he made it I wasn’t that sure of it. I wasn’t sure that Haitians truly just needed good leadership, if they could have solidarity between themselves. But this showed me that there is a possibility for Haitians to put their heads together, it’s just that they haven’t found the idea to unite them together yet, or a leader" [4.2, 3:09]. Another example was in a conversation that Met Fey Vet overheard on the road: " and while were close to Ouanaminthe, I overheard a young man say to his friends ‘guys, let’s go home already, ok? Because if we keep following Kita Nago we’ll end up in Africa, you hear?’ That says a lot to me. Between themselves they’re speaking: ‘if we follow kita nago we’ll end up in Africa, you hear?’" [4.2, 21:27]. This is very powerful, because even though this was a joke, it meant that this made the young people think about their roots, where they were from. This is another powerful part of the konbit, because it is something that was carried over in the slave ships from Africa, so remembering the heritage is important. And in the streets after Kita Nago, many people began to say, "if we can take this piece of wood that doesn't mean anything from Les Irois to Ouanaminthe, there is nothing we can't do together" [personal communication, 2013]. But how is this a konbit? Let us take Met Fey Vet's definition of konbit: "It was when a group of people put their heads together to attain an objective. And konbit it is a group of people who meet somewhere and reflect together, and they say what they want to achieve as a goal. And then they decide how they will arrive there, and they all share the load" [4.1, 0:40]. According to this definition, Kita Nago was a konbit: it was a country that set a goal of moving this large tree trunk from one point of the country to another, they decided how they were going to do it (on foot), and they shared the load the whole way. But it is a symbolic konbit because there is nothing concrete that is happening, because the work is happening inside the people: it is people's minds being 46 | P a g e stirred, it is their consciences waking up. Because the change is internal, not external, we classify this as a symbolic konbit. 2. Earthquake remembrance in Cite Soleil On the 12th of January, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit Haiti at 4:53 in the afternoon. In less than 53 seconds, over 230,000 Haitians were killed and more than 1 million Haitians lost their homes. The devastation stretched from the capital city of Port au Prince to the southern city of Jacmel, but the epicenter was in a town called Leogane. The earthquake was new for Haitians, and it touched the conscience of Haitians all over the world. In the moments after the earthquake, because of all of the problems Haiti was suffering, Haitians showed a lot of solidarity: helping neighbors get out of the rubble, sharing food and temporary shelter, protecting each other. But slowly, as more help arrived from the outside and the recovery got more complicated and politicized, that feeling of solidarity got smaller. Cite Soleil was not as badly affected as other parts of the capital, but the earthquake still shocked the hundreds of thousands people living in the community, and there was a lot of solidarity after the earthquake. A young woman in Cite Soleil named Abraham Sterline talked about her feelings after the earthquake: " for me, here is how the 12th of January affected me. It affected me morally and made me change internally. And not just for myself, but for Cite Soleil... ]. I had friends and family that died in the 12th of January, and it made a big impact on myself and my family. And 12th of January made a change that was positive and negative, because where it was positive, there were a lot of people who wanted to remember and commemorate, and the negative thing is that we lost so many people" [4.3, 1:15]. The young social movement Konbit Soley Leve (described in an earlier chapter) wanted to build on this feeling of solidarity to help motivate the people of Cite Soleil take more responsibility in their communities. Soley Leve held 2 earthquake memorials, one on January 47 | P a g e 12th, 2012 and one on January 12, 2013. The idea was for multiple communities to work together to mobilize the community through the use of powerful symbols that would draw people together. Different organizations from different neighborhoods in Cite Soleil pooled their money and talents to build a white cross, create T-shirts that memorialized the occasion, and purchase Photo credit: Romeal Jean Pierre balloons (the konbit of preparation). In the morning on both days, representatives from each block in Cite Soleil got onto a bus to take them to Titanyen, which is where the mass grave is that the earthquake victims were buried in. The representatives held a ceremony with music and then planted a white cross. Abraham describes the events again as they were preparing: "But this 12th of January this year, we have something that is very representative that we are going to do in Soley Leve - we are working on a cross that we are going to bring to St Christophe. Last year we did it and this year we will do it again. Just as every year we think we will continue it this way so we can have these people's memories in our spirits and commemorate them" [4.2, 1:20]. Then in the afternoon, there was a large gathering in the central park of Cite Soleil, and at exactly the moment of the earthquake, at 4:53, the crowd released hundreds of balloons into the air to symbolize the hundreds of thousands that died. After the 2013 memorial, representatives of many different neighborhoods gathered together at a community center to plant trees in memory of the victims. This qualifies as a symbolic konbit because there was a collective, voluntary effort to create something symbolic that would have a greater effect in the community. Abraham confirms this by saying, "This is what makes us Haitians of faith. We will never forget the 12th of January, and it's like this that we know that the 12th of January helped us discover something" [4.3, 1:30] 48 | P a g e OTHER PERSPECTIVES ON KONBIT Some people were interviewed for this paper whose community efforts could not be included in the case studies, but who had important perspectives. Many of these were of an older generation, and they needed to be included in this piece as well. According to Madame Odette Roy Fombrun, whose life was introduced in the Literature Review section as an intellectual inspired by konbit, defines konbit like this: "[konbit] stands on two things: one is called cooperation, the other is called participation" [5.1, 3:17]. She sees konbit as something larger than an agricultural practice, and sees it as the social contract for Haiti: " As long as the people believe in putting their heads together, let’s put out heads together, and do everything by konbit. I say that the Haitian social contract, instead of the political parties using things that other countries developed on their own, these countries arrived at socialism, communism, and capitalism by their own evolution, and we, we can say that the movement of the Haitian people that says ‘let’s work together to rebuild the country’, this is called konbitism"[5.1, 1:38]. An older peasant in the community of Tyot, which is close to the southeastern border Haiti has with the Dominican Republic, reflected on the importance that konbit has in development: " For me, konbit we can put in the place of the first local development. Because it is with it, everyone who doesn’t have a lot of money to buy konbit from people, it’s with it that they develop themselves. There are some changes now where people are starting to buy konbit from people but there is still the idea of konbit that is there, and if there is no konbit then there is no work. It’s the first necessity in the domain of agriculture that is a true part of it... It represents, how can I say, the first special part of our culture and in resources that we have in our community. Konbit is the first point, because in the early days, during the birth of our country, we were born with konbit" [5.2, 2:48]. A woman leader of a rural women's cooperative called ANAM in St Raphael, a town in the Northern Department of Haiti, described how to them, konbit is an approach that they use for all of their problems: " We use konbit because it’s what we’ve chosen, which isn’t nothing, we do every kind of konbit. Sometimes if there is a death, we find the person we help him – that’s a konbit. You understand? If there if a death, you find the person [affected], you help them break up the costs of the bereavement, you bring a lot of people, all of that is konbit. [5.3, 0:43] Dominique Romuald, the founder of the rural peasant's movement called OPADEL in La Montagne, a communal section in Jacmel in the southeast of the country, sees konbit in a similar 49 | P a g e way: " the definition of konbit for me is a type of activities that there are many people who don’t have means [money] who work together to realize it without money and in a way that is quicker" [5.4, 0:15]. But he is concerned about the future of konbit in a world that is more and more used to money: " As I’ve already said, konbit is starting to lose its value, but if we don’t return with it, I wont say we’ll lose the country, but I’ll say that we risk every day declining into a situation that is more difficult. Because today, if we take the rural environment, because it’s there that most uses konbit, a peasant doesn’t have enough money to allow him to produce, and with konbit he never needed money, it was one helping the other, that allowed they succeeded in accomplishing many things. Today, we think the importance is that they need to return with konbit to allow the peasants, especially those that are working in agriculture, to allow them to get things done and save their money, to spend less while they’re working more, and the conditions of their life to change" [5.4, 1:44]. Riffin Daceus, an older member of a mango farmer's cooperative called UCOOPEDSA in St Michel de l'Atalaye in the upper Artibonite Department, is also concerned about how konbit is losing its value : " The first thing that comes into my mind when I hear about konbit, is a group of people that one person cannot lift, and when they work together, they lift it. For example, when an ant encounters a crab, he can’t lift it, so it goes and gets its partisans and they lift it. For us as people, I feel myself I am vexed in terms of the ant, because we don’t do what we need to do as people, the ant has a greater spirit than us. They do konbit to lift the load, and us to, Haitians as a people we should do the same" [5.5, 1:24]. 50 | P a g e III. ANALYSIS OF DATA ELEMENTS OF KONBIT According to all of the research, interviews, and experience as presented in the last section, it is evident that konbit has a lot of variation and a lot of ways people understand it. There were many varieties of konbit and many ways that konbit was carried out. There are places that konbit is done in day-by-day, places where there is a fixed group that helps each other only, some where you can purchase the day of the konbit, and some where you cannot. These strategies vary by region, and the names that describe the shared community process vary region, but what is common across Haiti is the value of shared community process for collective advancement. For instance, in Gwayavye, people belong to a fixed group that they call a kolonn, but you can purchase the day of work from a konbit. In contrast, in St Raphael, the konbit is more spontaneous: someone will say that they have work to do, the word is passed around, and anyone who can come, comes. In the South, people call it more eskwad (squad), which is close to kolonn in how it is organized; in the Southeast they call it men kontre, which is closer to a community konbit where people unite for a common community goal. Other names are tet kole (heads together), kole zepol (shoulders together), men ansanm (hands together), tet ansanm (also heads together)- these names are all variations on the idea of konbit and many peasants' organizations use these words in their group names. Kòve is also a common word that is used many times to talk about a large community konbit, although since the American Occupation in 1915, the word kòve has also started to have a negative connotation meaning "forced work". The research also talked about economic and symbolic konbits. Taking the overarching idea—shared community process for collective advancement—from the evidence presented there can be shown a series of principles and themes that are common among all of the examples that were in this research: Konbit means solidarity, collaboration, participation: Madame Fombrun said that "konbit is participation and collaboration". While this is true, there is another element in the research that in the evidence appeared again and again: the idea of solidarity. Solidarity was talked about the interviews with the phrases tet ansanm ("put our heads together") or men ansanm ("put our hands together"), but these are Haitian phrases that mean collaboration and solidarity. When participants were asked to define what konbit meant, they 51 | P a g e consistently described working together for some sort of common goal. In this simple idea there are 3 ideas: participation because it is about working (and no one is forcing you to work), collaboration because you are working together and there is no sense of competition, and solidarity because there is a common goal. You can find these three elements in all of the forms of konbit we talked about:  In agricultural konbit, there are a group of farmers participating in a kolonn (for example) by working together for a common goal, which is to have their gardens ready.  In economic konbit, there are a group of people who are participating in a sol/zabotay or a mutuelle de solidarite and putting their money together for a common goal, which is to have their businesses advance  In community konbit, there are a group of people who are victim of a certain problem (like bad roads or no water) who are participating in an activity (like building a road), working together to solve this common problem  In symbolic konbit, there are a group of people who are participating in a symbolic action that are working together for a certain objective, which is to touch people's consciences. Konbit uses human energy as a currency instead of outside money Konbit is something that mobilizes human energy to accomplish something that otherwise would need to be accomplished with outside money.  In agricultural konbit, a group of peasants may not have the money to hire a tractor to turn the soil over in their field, so they mobilize the energy of the peasants to make a field. In St Raphael, people's contribution to the konbit is measured by lengths of rope they have harrowed, and the farmer that benefited from the konbit now owes the worker that same amount of corn length. There is no financial transaction in this relationship.  In economic konbit, community members don't have access to outside financial institutions like banks or investors so they mobilize their own money within the community to make investments. In Vodrey, we see this with the mutuelle system, where the banks don't loan people money so the community puts their little money together over a long time to give out better local loans.  In community konbit, communities that don't have the state coming to invest money in public works projects like roads or schools mobilize local energy and resources to do the 52 | P a g e same thing. In Gan Bad, the community doesn't have the money to hire heavy machinery to make a road, so they mobilized the human energy in the community so that every Saturday people work to accomplish a goal  In symbolic konbit, in Kita Nago, it took the human energy and sweat of 32 people at a time (and 3 million people in total) to lift the tree trunk and carry it 700 kilometers, and no money was spent to transport it. Konbit is a system that lets everyone participate, especially the poor Access to all. Because konbit is based on human energy, everyone can participate - because one thing that everybody in a society has equal amounts of is human energy. Because of this, konbit is used more by people who do not have access to money to get a certain work done. Access is a central theme; all of the examples in this research are from communities that do not have access to money, and because of that they use a system of konbit, anyone can participate.  In agricultural konbit, farmers with no money can participate, and in Gwayavye, even people without land could participate, because if they gave their time in the konbit they could earn money to buy land  In economic konbit, people often need a small amount of money to enter into the system (enough to make the small weekly contributions of a mutuelle or a sol) but it is often small enough for even very not-well-off people to afford. In the business konbit of Ravine des Roches, even women who had never ever been able to have their own businesses could participate in the shared business and even earn enough to start their own businesses.  In community konbit, people are encouraged to contribute whatever they can to the efforts. In Fo Oge, people could participate in the community konbit by working if they could work, bringing water or food if they could bring that, or just coming for support and encouragement.  In symbolic konbit, people are participating in an event that doesn't cost them any money to participate in. During the earthquake remembrance in Cite Soleil Konbit is something that is related to our roots, our culture, our spirituality One of the elements that defines a konbit is not just the work, but the culture that surrounds it. Most konbit have alcohol, traditional songs, folkloric dance, prayer (both Christian and voudou), stories and jokes, and sometimes food. And in the past, all konbit were announced by someone blowing into the conch shell, something that has been done since the time of slavery on the island. 53 | P a g e All of these are things that animate the konbit and motivate people to use their energy to accomplish the goal.  In agricultural konbit, the konbit that are carried out in the fields almost always have alcohol or food, and the work is synchronized to traditional music sung by the workers. In Ti Rivye Latibonit, the agronomist for RACPABA talked about the importance of "stimulants" in motivating farmers to do their work.  In economic konbit, there is often a cultural or social element to the money exchanges that you will never find in a bank. In the mutueuelle solidarite of Vodrey, people spend the first 15 minutes of their meetings singing, praying, telling stories. One of the local leaders said that the difference between a mutuelle and a mutuelle solidarite is that the latter has all of these elements of culture in it that help bring people together and really develop solidarity.  In community konbit, there is always music and dancing and spirits to encourage the people who are volunteering for their communities. At the road konbit in Gan Bad, there was the conch shell, singing, drums, and dancing, and whenever the music stopped, the people stopped working, and refused to start again until the music came back.  In symbolic konbit, the action is very much influenced and draws from Haitian culture. Kita Nago was full of people dancing and singing to encourage the people who were carrying the tree to keep going, sometimes with thousands of people in the crowd. Mr. Harry said that without the music and dancing, Kita Nago would not have succeeded, because it was the excitement and the culture that made people forget the weight they were carrying. PERSPECTIVES ON AND CHALLENGES FOR KONBIT In the last section there are reflected some common elements that make up a working definition for konbit. However, the konbit still has many ways of looking at its past, its present, and its future: Konbit is present in Haitian history, even if it wasn't called konbit at the time According to the definition of konbit as "working together of a common goal" and "solidarity", one can say that konbit is what founded Haiti. In the year 1518, Spanish colonist under Charles Quin began to buy slaves in Africa to bring to their new colonies in the Caribbean, especially in the colony of Saint-Domingue, which we now know as Haiti. History tells us that many of these people came 54 | P a g e from West Africa, from places like Guinea and Dahomey. There was a system of cooperatives in West Africa, and when the slaves arrived in the colony they couldn't continue to use this system. But there is a creole proverb that says bos van zoutil men li pa bliye metye'l, or "the mason may sell his tools but he never forgets his trade". So even though the Africans couldn't practice their cooperatives because they were in chains, the spirit of cooperation and solidarity was still there. And in the earliest days of slavery, escaped slaves (known as neg mawon) would use the conch shell to mobilize people for secret meetings during the night; to this day the conch shell is still a symbol of konbit. On the 14th of August, 1791, there was a voudou ceremony held at a place called Bwa Kayiman in northern Haiti that was attended in secret by hundreds of Africans in secret that came from across the country to participate. They had a ceremony where they lit a fire, killed a pig, prayed, danced, and sang together, and in this moment of solidarity they launched the Haitian Revolution that would eventually bring an end to slavery and colonization in November of 1803. The last battle of the revolution was not far from the place where the Bwa Kayiman ceremony was held 12 years before. Even though the people at the time didn't define what they were doing as a konbit, if we use the elements that have defined konbit in this analysis (participation, collaboration, and solidarity), we can find these elements in the Haitian Revolution. Without access to money or arms, the Haitian slaves risked their lives to participate in the slave revolts, collaborate with each other with absolute trust (because any traitors could have ruined the revolution), and work towards the common goal of freedom. Could this be defined as a revolutionary konbit? Answering this question will take specific research, but noting this point may be suggestive for why (and how) the Haitian Revolution was successful, the first great modern freedom revolution: our revolution was grounded in participation, collaboration, and solidarity. These are distinctively different features from “fighting an enemy.” People see konbit mostly as agricultural, not as much in the sense of solidarity. After the Haitian Revolution, the freed slaves mostly returned to the land and used the same sense of solidarity and collaboration to farm for their survival and the survival of this young country. In this sense, the idea of konbit is mostly linked with agriculture. Today, if you ask someone about konbit (including many of the interviewees in this paper), the majority will think about peasants farming the land. This is so prevalent, it is even found in popular 55 | P a g e music: a song by Michael Benjamin (Mikaben) goes, "Haiti is a konbit, peasants who are planting their land". Stephen Italien from La Difference in Cite Soleil referenced how hard it was to convince urban Haitians that they could do konbit too, because for them, they think of konbit only as something farmers do and they do not have land to farm. Konbit hasn't yet been modernized, but can be modernized Because of the way that people understand konbit as being only for peasants in rural zones, psychologically people in Haiti do not believe that konbit can evolve and adapt to modern life. The findings from the research represented here would argue that, to define their future, the people of Haiti may be missing a powerful resource and vehicle to deliver that resource. Even in agriculture, people see konbit as an outdated farming method from the 1800s before there were tractors. In his interview, agronomist Jenel from RACPABA felt that konbit and modern agricultural equipment like tractors could be complimentary, that tractors didn't have to mean leaving konbit behind. In 1986, after the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship, Madame Fombrun described that people suddenly felt they could do konbit for any of their problems: there was konbit to restart businesses, konbit to build schools, konbit to unblock the roads. At that time Madame Fombrun worked to enter konbit into the Haitian Constitution, but that was ignored, and the general positive progress of konbit was lost in the political turmoil of the early 1990s, and konbit faded away to the countryside again. If people understand konbit on the level of participation, collaboration, and solidarity, the mindset is there so they can apply this to other aspects of their lives. Modern problems could be addressed through the principles and approach. Today, even when certain people are using konbit to tackle modern urban problems such as trash in Cite Soleil, there are parts of the community that didn't want to accept that what they were doing was konbit, but in going forward there is a statement made of participation, collaboration, and solidarity even to the non-participants. At the national level, for a country that often is claimed by some to lack participation, collaboration, and solidarity, in a number of events these features can be seen. For example, in the great symbolic action of Kita Nago, no one in the media called it a konbit, but as the evidence shows, that event reflected these three defining features. Recently, there was a national fundraiser for the national 56 | P a g e soccer team where Haitians could donate money through their phones (very modern); no one was calling this a konbit even though it was the whole country participating in a collective action for a shared goal. After the earthquake, Haitians worked together to pull people from the rubble, feed their communities, build temporary shelters; no one called them konbits, but it was Haitians deciding to participate in the collective action of saving lives. Then the flood of international aid made Haitians forget about what they had just accomplished together. All of these are examples of modern konbit, but no one recognizes them as konbit. In creating a future, much of what is needed is recognition of the past. Both the law and society have left no place for konbit in the modern world, the same way that kreyol, voudou, and traditional dress are being left behind as "outdated" or "archaic" parts of Haitian culture. The evidence of this study would argue that there are traditions such as konbit that are presently being utilized but could be utilized to a greater extent, in a greater number of places, and across a greater number of sectors; this would cost very little financial capital and would preserve Haiti's cultural capital. Konbit is often exploited The argument being made above is that there is an issue of lack of recognition, and yet there is also a question of mistaken recognition. Specifically, even though konbit is not given recognition in modern society, the word still brings up strong emotions in Haitians and brings to mind an image of cooperation. Because of this, many people exploit the word or the concept of konbit to cover up activities that do not follow the principles of konbit. In this sense, Haitians are gullible and easily led astray when these words are used. Many NGOs, including large international aid organizations like USAID, use the word "Konbit" in their project titles, even though these are top-down heavily-financed activities that do not reflect the principles of konbit. At the core the principle they reflect is that of the people being controlled for the objective of the donor; this may be “participation,” it may be “collaboration,” and it even may also be “solidarity”—but simply being these three is not konbit. Konbit requires that the ownership and the desire for participation, collaboration, and solidarity come from the people, not from external control. . If you Google "konbit", what will come up are dozens of organization and project names, most of which are funded by international organizations, even though self-reliance is one of the main principles of konbit. Political parties take names with the word "konbit" inside of them, even though they may not leave the place for the poorest and most marginalized Haitians to participate. 57 | P a g e Stephen Italien of La Difference cited an example of the exploitation of konbit in Cite Soleil: he said their neighborhood cleanup konbits were so successful that MINUSTAH co-opted the idea with their "Quartier Propre" program, without acknowledging La Difference or the konbit that started it, and investing a large amount of money into the program. This is not something new: since the time of the American occupation in 1915, they used the word kòve (which is a variation on konbit)for the forced labor programs they carried out to build roads. The approximately 167-kilometer road from Port au Prince to Cap Haitian was built using this forced labor, and it made Haitians resent the word kòve because it felt like slavery for them. Then during the Duvalier era, this same system of forced labor on public projects like roads was put in place, all in the name of kòve, further reinforcing the idea that kòve was just a modern form of slavery. 58 | P a g e IV. RECOMMENDATIONS AND CONCLUSION According to the research that was conducted for this paper, konbit is not only a traditional cooperative used by Haitians to farm the land for agricultural purposes. It is a system of solidarity in which Haitians who are motivated by their consciences voluntarily participate in collaborative action that preserves their livelihoods, their cultures, and their interdependence, in any aspect of life. The research also shows that konbit is an essential element in Haitian life that is being lost, but has not been lost completely. If konbit is synonymous with solidarity, then we can see where the loss of konbit is a serious threat to our country. Haiti is often accused of being "a country of individuals, not a nation" because of a new trend of individualism that is taking over the country; the only way to fight this is with konbit. I visited Kenya as a part of the Future Generations Graduate School program to learn from community leaders in East Africa, and met with the Ugandan scholar professor Lutu. After explaining to him the challenges in my country Haiti, he told me, "the only thing holding Haitians back is that they don't know the length of their roots". Haitians are ashamed of where they are from - acculturation has made us ashamed of our culture, our spirituality, our food, our language. A people without culture is a people without direction, and Haiti has been slowly losing its culture for centuries. Our ancestors left Africa without clothes, without possessions, without food, but the one thing they carried with them was their customs, such as konbit and the spirit of solidarity. Going back to konbit is like going back to our roots, reconnecting with our past, and using the strength of our ancestors. During the Kita Nago march, Met Fey Vet overheard some young men joking that, "we shouldn't go any further with this thing, because if we do, we will end up in Africa", and he was so happy, because symbolically with this konbit, they were returning to Africa. According to Dr. Daniel Taylor, the founder of the Future Generations Graduate School, true social change grows out of human energy which the people control in partnership with the government. And konbit is the manifestation of human energy in Haiti from the community. For the past three decades, the world has been trying to solve Haiti's problems with money, and it has failed. It failed because of the absence of engaging people’s energies from the community. It is time for Haitians to use their human energy, their consciences, and their willpower to change this country the same 59 | P a g e way our ancestors did at Bwa Kayiman. This will not be done by that energy alone—although that energy is central, what drives the process—but it will be done by engaging with the government, and in so doing reshaping the government, and it will be done by engaging with the internationals, and in so doing re-directing their external assistance. Even while Haiti is modernizing, with one-third of our population living in the cities, working in factories or chatting on Facebook, we cannot forget that it was the sweat of our parents in the konbits in the mountains that gave us the opportunities we have today. Technology shouldn't replace konbit; it needs to augment konbit. Haitians today are more connected through phones and Internet and roads than they ever have been in history. In the time of Bwa Kayiman, people walked for miles at night in the dark to attend meetings and made announcements through the conch shell. There is no reason that our generation should be more divided than their; we have no excuse for the lack of solidarity between us. And yet we are more divided. In our parents' and our grandparents' generations, people worked together. Mothers used to share food with neighbors; when someone in your family died, the community supported you; the nights were spent not watching television but roasting a sweet potato on the fire and telling stories. These were communities. The progress we have been sold by the world is one where everyone is racing to own the biggest house, the nicest car, the most money - we have become a people in competition with each other to race out of misery, and have lost the spirit of collaboration and sacrifice that this country was built on. And our ancestors sacrificed for us. Dessalines wrung the blood out of his shirt to give us freedom, our grandparents wrung the sweat of our their shirts to send us to school, and for what? So we can abandon the country and live abroad. So we can live behind high walls with barbed wire. So we can forget who we are. Our grandparents did not know how to read and write, but they knew who they were; we know how to read and write but we are illiterate in our own culture. It is our generation's turn to cultivate the spirit of konbit. We saw it a bit after the earthquake of January 12, 2010, but it was drowned by international aid. In voudou, practitioners summon the spirit of a lwa in a ceremony, and it possesses them and then leaves; we treat konbit like this, calling on it in moments of emergency (like the earthquake) and then forgetting about it. Konbit cannot be brought back by crisis and emotion, it has to be sewn into the fabric of our society. Here are some recommendations for how to bring konbit back into Haitian society: 60 | P a g e 1. Konbit should be entered into the Haitian constitution. As Madame Fombrun said, other countries might have capitalism or socialism or communism, but konbitism should be accepted as the Haitian social contract. A clear argument can be made that konbit is the currency of our social change much as money is the currency of our economy. 2. Konbit should be taught and studied in our educational system. Young people should be able to reflect about the spirit of konbit and how it applies to their lives. 3. Konbit should be studied and researched by university students and academics; we need a new kind of intellectual class that does not think only for the elite but thinks for the peasants, an intellectual class with calluses on their hands. 4. Konbit should not be seen as being associated with only voudou, it is a part of our national culture that is open to voudouist, Catholics, and Protestants. Konbit should not only be seen as something for the rural peasants, but also people in the cities. Konbit should not only be seen as something for the poor, but something that all classes of society can participate in. 5. Konbit should be used as a bridge to connect Haitians from different areas, different classes, and different religions - the way the Konbit Soley Leve started to connect neighborhoods in Cite Soleil 6. International aid organizations need to understand that there are 3 kinds of sustainability: economic sustainability, environmental sustainability, and cultural sustainability. If a country "develops" and loses its culture, it will remain dependent. Assistance should not replace the practice of solidarity through konbit, but rather support the ability of Haitians to rely on each other. 7. Politicians should develop a politics of konbit, which would be the politics of solidarity and sustainability, where the person from Port au Prince is genuinely concerned about the person from Port de Paix and advocates for what is good for the whole country. They should stop paying lip-service to the idea of konbit while pursuing selfish policies. 61 | P a g e 8. The Haitian Diaspora should consider themselves part of a broader konbit to reconstruct Haiti; if they choose to participate in collaborating with their hometowns towards development, this is a form of konbit. 9. Against this national frame for konbit as the country’s formative force, we need national symbols of konbit. The National Palace of Haiti that was destroyed by the earthquake of 2010 should be reconstructed through konbit, collecting the strength and contributions of Haitians at every level of society. This can serve as a model for how the state can engage with its citizens through konbit, and something to remind Haitians of the strength they have 10. Haitians should follow the motto which is in our constitution, which is "men anpil chay pa lou" in Kreyol, "L'union fait la force" in French, and "union makes us strong" in English. This means practicing solidarity in everyday life, creating interdependence instead of dependence. This may be difficult for Haitians to picture now, but it is important that the national vision grows to include an era of konbit. Imagine the National Palace being reconstructed by Haitian hands, with Haitian architects and engineers, with buses full of volunteers coming from the mountains and the cities in the provinces, funded by small contributions from ordinary Haitians around the world. Imagine a Haiti where our education system is based on the principles of collaboration and solidarity instead of memorization. Imagine a Haiti where we become a nation instead of a country of individuals. This is possible through konbit, but Haitians need to take responsibility for our past, our present, and our future if this is going to happen. 62 | P a g e ABOUT THE AUTHOR Robillard Louino is a Haitian citizen that was born in the year 1986 in the commune of St Raphael in rural northern Haiti. He raised in Cite Soleil from the age of 3 after the death of his mother, and finished all of his schooling in Cite Soleil. He studied communal administration in a state program to help City Hall of Cite Soleil. He never finished undergraduate education because of the earthquake that hit Haiti in January 2010, but he considers Cite Soleil to be his university as he was taught real life lessons on peace, conflict, and community organizing there for over 2 decades. Because of this work, he was accepted into the Future Generations Graduate School's Master's Program on Community Change and Peacebuilding. He will graduate with the Class of 2013. 63 | P a g e