By Sénèq Pierre-Martelly
“There are times I would give my remaining 10 Gourdes (0.20 USD) to my children, then go to church all day and tell myself I was fasting; it helped me cope with the hunger.”
Those are the heart wrenching words of Belmise Petit. This 50 year old mother of six (6) is one of beneficiaries of the Food for Peace/USAID funded Food Voucher program “Kore L’avni Nou” implemented by CARE. Belmise doesn’t have steady work, and yet she alone is the sole provider for the household. Due to severe arthritis pain, she can no longer earn money by doing laundry work. She struggles to find food for herself and her children.
“One day, she recalls, I was feeling desperate, the children were hungry and I had nothing to give them. I resigned myself to go begging by the mayor’s office. There was a lot of commotion when I got there. I went inside to see what it was about. I met a young lady who asked me if I was there to register for the tikè manje I did not know what she meant. She went on to explain to me what it was about. I could not believe my ears. I felt like God must have listened to my prayers and guided my feet there that day.”
After being screened based on the eligibility criteria, Belmise Petit became a beneficiary of the “Kore L’avni Nou” program serving extremely vulnerable and food insecure by providing electronic food vouchers to beneficiaries. Beneficiaries then exchange these vouchers with project monitored merchants in exchange for nutritionally balanced foods. This serves to not only meet minimum dietary needs of participants but also frees up valuable meager funds for the purchase of additional food supplies and/or more sustainable food sources, such as the purchase of livestock or land. 12,000 beneficiaries were served in nine communes in the first phase of the project. 5,708 families especially affected by hurricane Sandy in 5 communes are being served in phase II.
Empowered by the food voucher programme, Belmise can now go to a participating merchant store and once a month use her electronic voucher to buy products like rice, beans and cornmeal, among others, to feed her family, including her two grandchildren from her eldest daughter. Belmise also helps her neighbor, who’s also struggling, but unlike her, wasn’t nominated to participate in the program. “We do what we can to help each other; she lives so close to me, I could never eat while knowing she’s hungry”.
When asked what she will do at the end of the six month projects, she replies in smiling and yet resigned expression: “I pray to God every day for the people responsible for this program. I ask him to cover them with blessings so they can continue to help us “.
Find out more about our work in Haiti here.