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Richmonder Danny Yates was stunned to find Haiti’s universities buried under rubble. A William and Mary student, Yates and Haitian priest Jean Navarre Bourdeau are trying to bring Haitians to a North Carolina college.
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when the Cathedrale Notre Dame de L’Assumption collapsed, more than 300 people died, including Haiti’s Archbishop; now people gather for services in an open square near the church
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Frandy, Suze and Samuel Prince, siblings from the city of Hinche, were university students in Port-au-Prince when the earthquake struck. They hope for a second chance at college through Yates’ program; the high school in Hinche, attended by students who now hope to become part of Yates’ program.
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Danny Yates meets with Judith Germain, goddaughter of Father Bourdeau (at right), who applied to Yates’ Hinche Scholars program
The truck carrying Danny Yates zigzags down a steep hill, passing toppled buildings alongside streets smelling of human waste and smoke from dampened fires. It's been eight months since the 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti's capital city of Port-au-Prince, but the devastation is still as painful for Yates, a Richmond native and William and Mary student, as it was in the first days after the disaster.
Crumbled walls give way to makeshift tent cities that cover acres of city parks. They're home to 1.5 million people displaced by the Jan. 12 quake. The strain of their lives shows in the slow shuffle of their feet and in their hollow-eyed faces. The heart of Port-au-Prince, around its Presidential Palace where the earthquake hit hardest, is still raw, though normal life goes on in undamaged streets a few blocks away.
Yates' truck comes to a lurching stop, and he hops down, holding out a hand to his mentor and friend, the Rev. Jean Navarre Bourdeau, the Haitian pastor of the Sacre Coeur church in the mountain town of Hinche some 50 miles away. They make their way past the massive carcass of what was once the Cathedrale Notre Dame de L'Assumption. More than 300 people died here when the church's spire collapsed on them as they prayed.
Today the cathedral square is again filled with singing, this time for a late-day Catholic mass attended by hundreds, including Yates and Father Bourdeau. They join in the responsorial chant of the Litany of the Saints.
"Sancta Maria," the priests say.
"Pray for us," the crowd replies in unison.
Yates' mission was driven by this place — the center of calamity that ended more than 250,000 lives. A witness to the aftermath, Yates is determined to bring about a measure of change in the country, tackling its higher-education system. It has been an obstacle to the country's success for nearly a century, and it was virtually obliterated by the earthquake.
"Education is a luxury," says Yates, acknowledging that some might view university training as unrealistic, even irrelevant in a country where housing and sanitation are still inadequate. But from Yates' point of view, education is the best long-term solution.
Motivated by that belief, the 19-year-old formed his own nonprofit organization — the Hinche Scholars program — to bring Haitian students to the United States to attend Barber-Scotia, a historically black college in North Carolina founded by the Presbyterian Church. His goal for the program is to pay room, board and tuition for Haitian students until they finish their degrees. Then they are to return to Haiti to use their education to help rebuild the country.
Still in its infancy, the program has passed only its first milestones. Yates has raised $23,000 of his $70,000 goal for his first six students, and he's enlisted the support of an array of people — U.S. senators, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, presidents of Virginia universities, Richmond education leaders and the city's residents.
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The U.S. Embassy mission rises like a palace against the vast sky above Port-au-Prince. The building is only three stories high, but it looks magnificent and enduring in a landscape of ramshackle cinderblock structures. The streets outside the embassy are jammed with honking cars. People are crowding the entrance to the consular office, because they hope to get visas that will take them out of Haiti.
Yates' introduction to Haiti came in a classroom at St. Bridget Catholic School in Richmond's West End. Bourdeau was on one of his frequent visits to Richmond and came to speak to Yates' French class. Yates stood out from his seventh-grade classmates not for his understanding of French, but because he was nursing a broken arm wrapped in a florescent orange cast. Yates says now that Bourdeau was bemused by the cast, and its image remained in the priest's mind.
Soon after, Yates began translating e-mails between Bourdeau's parish and St Bridget's Haiti Committee. (Bourdeau's church and St. Bridget are linked as sister parishes.) In the process, Yates and the Haitian priest became friends, bridging the miles between them in French and Haitian Creole. As Yates' grasp of French improved, he volunteered, despite his parents' wariness, to go to Haiti as a translator for one of St. Bridget's missions to Hinche.
It was on Yates's fourth trip to Hinche that the Jan. 12 earthquake struck.
"We had no idea what was happening," Yates says now. "The dogs were yapping and Father Bourdeau said ‘Relax, this happens in Haiti.' " But though earthquakes are common in the Caribbean nation, there'd been nothing like this. The next day, refugees arrived by the thousands in Hinche.
"I was being driven crazy in the compound listening to the radio," says Yates, who managed to talk his way onto Bourdeau's truck when the priest left on a mercy mission to Port-au-Prince. There, Yates saw "bulldozers and trash trucks collecting bodies." Bourdeau's pickup evacuated more than 30 people, including a handful of young people attending universities in the capital city.
When Yates returned to Virginia a week later, he grappled with what he had seen and with how to help. At William and Mary, "with its all-you-can eat cafeteria buffet and hot showers," he thought about the Haitian students whose education had ended.
When the earthquake hit Port-au-Prince, it destroyed the nation's already weak educational infrastructure. All of Haiti's universities, as many as two dozen, were located in a cluster near the heart of the worst destruction. All of them collapsed, killing or injuring hundreds of students and professors.
Yates identified with the students, especially those from Hinche, and he decided to take action. Through his response, the relationship between him and Bourdeau transformed from father-son mentoring to a partnership. In the months since, Bourdeau has come to rely on Yates to reopen doors slammed shut for university students.
Although Yates' program began with the six Haitian university students expected to attend Barber-Scotia College, it's growing beyond that.
Yates' return visit to Haiti in August opened his eyes to more need. While there, he was inundated by requests from students who came to Bourdeau's church looking for the American who would take Haitians to study in the United States.
After returning home from the August trip, Yates met with Ken Henshaw, founder of the "I Have a Dream" Foundation-Richmond. (Henshaw's nonprofit agreed earlier this year to partner with Yates.) During the recent meeting, they agreed to work toward expanding the program to as many as 30 students.
If that comes about, it will be built on earlier successes. It took Yates only a few months to secure almost one third of the funding for the first students. He created a one-man media blitz, speaking on Richmond radio stations about his organization and writing op-ed pieces in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Richmonders responded, and he raised thousands of dollars, mostly through small donations.
He garnered high-profile support, including an award from the national "I Have a Dream" Foundation. He qualified to apply for funding from the William J. Clinton Foundation, and he gained the support of Richmond School Board representative Kimberly Gray, who accompanied him on his August trip to Haiti.
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The U.S. Embassy mission rises like a palace against the vast sky above Port-au-Prince. The building is only three stories high, but it looks magnificent and enduring in a landscape of ramshackle cinderblock structures. The streets outside the embassy are jammed with honking cars. People are crowding the entrance to the consular office, because they hope to get visas that will take them out of Haiti.
The 50-mile drive here, seemingly endless over rough roads, began at 6 a.m. so that Yates could be on time for his 10 a.m. meeting with the deputy director of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Yates, looking even younger than his 19 years, is wearing a dark suit and tie purchased for less than $10 at a thrift store in Richmond. His mission: To ask USAID if it will support the Hinche Scholars project, which could fund expansion of the program and help clear one of the biggest roadblocks — getting visas for students.
Inside, he and School Board member Gray meet with three key officials — USAID's deputy director, Anthony Chan; the agency's development counselor, Julee Allen; and U.S. State Department representative Jerome Oetgen. Right away, the session is tense, as Yates and Gray lay out their needs.
Chan questions the credentials of Barber-Scotia College: "Is it a high school or a four-year university?" He asks about Yates' financing and goals. He listens for a few more minutes, congratulates Yates on his youthful initiative, then moves to wrap up the meeting with what amounts to a rejection.
"Haiti has a lot of illiterate persons, and it's very hard for us to justify spending money in universities," Chan says. "My suggestion would be to use your [political] contacts to find money. Tim Kaine could easily call President Obama, and it would be a far more efficient use of your time." Nor can he help with the student visas, Chan says.
For Yates and his partners, the meeting has been demoralizing. Still, at least the State Department representative showed enthusiasm, telling Yates he'd like to review his (Yates) presentation binder. Yates has already drawn on other sources of funding, and besides, Bourdeau is used to relying on faith.
"You must pray a lot for Haiti," Bourdeau says. "It's almost unfathomable that a country can suffer this much." "This is why what we're doing with the university students … [is a] wonderful thing."
Among Yates' first students are three siblings from Hinche — Samuel, Frandy and Suze Prince, who grew up under Bourdeau's care. Their mother, Mancilia Duvil, was homeless with three small children until she found a job cooking for Bourdeau and his staff. The priest took Samuel, Frandy and Suze under his wing, and when it came time for college, he found U.S. sponsors to help with their tuition.
Until the earthquake, Frandy had been studying engineering and computers in Port-au-Prince, pursuing a lifelong dream of working with technology.
"Since [I was] a child, I can maneuver a computer — games, software, photos and so-on," he says. A shadow seems to cross his face as he considers his future. "My university, it's crushed down. It's a five-year program, and I was only in year one."
Now, he wiles away the days in Hinche. His sister, Suze, who was in a nursing program in Port-au-Prince, helps her mother in Bourdeau's parish kitchen. Their older brother, Samuel, an electrician, had planned to become an electrical engineer.
"They are here day in and day out, and they have nothing to do," says Bourdeau, whose parish house is visited by dozens of students who've heard about Yates' program.
Earlier in the week, when Yates and Bourdeau attended the Catholic service in Port-au-Prince, Samuel Prince traveled with them. Instead of joining the crowd next to the cathedral ruins, Samuel stayed in the truck. He lay lengthwise across its bed, his arms folded behind his head. Eyes closed, he listened to the repetitive Litany of Saints voices that blended with the buzz of late-day locusts. A smile passed across his face and for a moment his eyes opened. "Slowly," he said, closing them to the devastation around him. "Slowly."
