Real Community Organizers

What does a community organizer do?

by Jerry Agar

Chief among the claimed qualifications Barack Obama brought to his campaign for the office of president was that he was a community organizer in Chicago.

I have always been suspicious that he did more campaign organizing than community good.  The reason for this suspicion is that I can’t find details on any real improvement Obama affected.

Last week in Haiti, among the devastation, crushed buildings and crushing poverty, I met two people who have dedicated their lives to organizing their communities.

Pastor Jepthe Lucien serves the community of Pignon in north central Haiti, which faces many challenges including lack of running water, limited access to electricity, very little economic opportunity, and deplorable road conditions.

Pastor Jepthe’s response is to get out onto the narrow, dusty streets of Pignon every day to build the infrastructure.  He has started 13 schools in a country where 90 percent of the schools are private.  Government education is effectively nonexistent.

Money is always a problem, but he recently offered a teacher a bicycle in lieu of salary.  I was there when she got the bike, and she was thrilled to finally not have to walk everywhere.

When the earthquake hit, he took trucks and drove to Port-au-Prince to bring people out.  He then secured the services of some graduate psychology students and opened an in-take center to serve the mind as well as the body.

He runs a micro-loan program to help enterprising people build their own businesses.  An example of the success of that program was a man who borrowed the equivalent of $50 American to clear some extra land and expand his sugar cane crop.  He upped his syrup production by forty percent, allowing him to buy a bull and pay for his daughter’s year of school, as well as to pay back the loan and the interest.  The money came from a Chicago area group called Bright Hope Ministry, which is the organization that took me to Haiti.

In Port-au-Prince we met a lady who calls herself Foe-Foe.  Foe-Foe is a nurse.  She has served a poor community in the city for eight years with a clinic that dispenses medical care and drugs for the cost of less than an American dollar per visit.  After the earthquake she stopped charging at all.

As people found themselves homeless – or reluctant to re-enter concrete housing – Foe-Foe organized a tent city on top of the only open area: the former garbage dump.

Pastor Jepthe and Bright Hope have enlisted Foe-Foe’s help in distributing food and shoes.  Her knowledge of the people of the community assists in ensuring that the aid goes where it is intended.  She now has even more to do.  She does it.

Their work is hard, the situation is depressing and sometimes seems hopeless.  The pastor and nurse persevere.  They plan, they work, they direct activity to improve the lives of people who stand below the ladder of success.

That is what a community organizer does.