Building Isn't Enough: What Two School Water Committees Taught Us About Leadership
Last week we held our fourth Haiti Voices live event, an opportunity to hear directly from our team and the communities doing the work in Haiti. This time, we heard from the water committees at two schools in the Maïssade Commune: École Nationale de la Source Igname and École Nationale Toussaint Louverture de Madame Joie.
The conversation kept returning to one theme: construction versus ownership. As one committee member put it, "The traditional model of development in Haiti has been just one of building infrastructure, and there's no conversation around the management and oversight of that." These committees exist to close that gap.
Ask the committees what actually changed, and they don't start with pipes or budgets. The commune's water and sanitation technician said the lesson that stuck came down to two words: reason and responsibility.
"When people are giving reasons and excuses, nothing gets done and everybody's angry," she said. "When we're being responsible, we can work through the problems together." The choice, in her words, is ours to make: "We make a decision to be a leader."
A year of that decision looks like this: both schools funded their own soap, water, supplies, and a paid caretaker through parent contributions, filed a cleaning report every Friday, and carried money and materials forward into this year. "Before, we had a facility no one wanted to use," one committee member said. "Not even the teachers. Now we have a beautiful facility that's clean and maintained, and we're standing firm to keep it that way."
