A house along the seashore in Las Cayes. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

By Brad Whitehouse

The pickup truck Sara Naab '02 bought this summer only cost $500, but price isn't everything. She said the 1985 F-150 was "built like a rock, with a solid steel body, manly enough to make any man grunt." The guy selling it assured her it was a good buy. "Even in the dead of winter, it always started right up, always handled the snow." She and her brother popped the hood, checked the oil, checked the spark plugs, checked for anything that dripped. It wasn't brand new, but she could tell it was a truck with a lot of hard living left in it, the kind that will get you where you're going. In her case, that meant all the way to the southern tip of Florida, and beyond.

Hoping for the best, she paid her money and drove it home. She painted it, fitted it with high plywood sides, loaded it to the hilt with textbooks, donated desks, medicine, and 30 some computers. Then she said good-bye to her family and headed for Miami, where she planned to load the truck on a boat for Haiti.

Everything seemed to be going so much more smoothly this trip.

Not ten minutes down the road, the truck gave out. The load was too much. Everything that wasn't leaking before started now, and the clutch was gone.

She had no choice but to concede to Plan B-store all her supplies and wait for another solution-and she did not like Plan B one little bit. As she put it, "If God had provided me with all those wonderful things to take to Haiti, surely they were not supposed to sit in storage."

And so she prayed.

And then she checked her e-mail.

What happened next might be viewed as a sort of miracle. A month before, she sent the word around to area churches: She'd helped start two computer schools in Haiti last year, and when she went back this year she needed a truck. No one had responded, and she'd bought the Ford. But when she clicked on the new message, she suddenly had a new offer. A man who was selling his big dually pickup for $4,500 had heard about her request and was touched. At first he wanted $2,000, but soon after they talked on the phone, he called back. "I talked to my wife and money is just money. We've decided to donate the whole thing." Sara sat down on the floor and laughed.

The supplies still didn't make it to Haiti on time. It wasn't the flat tire in Tennessee; that slowed her down, but she still arrived at the dock in Miami on schedule. It was the hurricane that did the truck in. After all that trouble, the boat would be delayed for weeks.

But as Sara has learned, you have to learn to roll with the punches when it comes to a place like Haiti.

Most of today's Haitians are descendents of Africans. When Spain expanded to America, the first place it settled was Hispaniola, the Caribbean island that today is divided into Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The native population back then was more than a million strong, but within 50 years they had all but died off, worked ragged in Spanish gold mines and exposed to European diseases like smallpox and measles. The gold ran out by 1530, and African slaves were brought to the island to grow sugarcane. When the French took over, they started growing cotton, too, and brought more slaves.

Haiti exerted its independence earlier than most countries in Central and South America, when the black population rallied to expel the French in the 19th century. What followed, however, was almost 200 years of dictatorships, environmental degradation, revolts, and lawlessness. It culminated in the 1990s, when the U.S. and the United Nations placed sanctions and embargoes on Haiti due to human rights violations, and when the country's first democratically-elected president was ousted. The economy was in shambles, and thousands of desperate Haitians fled to Florida in overcrowded, homemade boats.

Needless to say, there is room for economic development in Haiti. It is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and among the poorest in the world. The country is overpopulated, unemployment is rampant, and the mountainous terrain makes it incredibly hard to develop a technological infrastructure.

Or a computer school, for that matter. After all, you can't even get electricity in Haiti for most of the day. There's a national power company that only turns on the juice from around 11 p.m. to 3 a.m., so that's when Haitians use inverters to charge up car batteries.

"During the day, we ran everything off of car batteries. The whole town is run off of car batteries. It's rather interesting," Sara chuckled. "They're all electricians, man, everybody down there knows so much about electricity.

"We went to this crazy-remote village, like, huts. And there was this big satellite on this hut, and, like, a car battery. The guy out front was wearing a three-piece suit, because he worked in another town, and he was living in a hut. I was like, you are awesome, my friend. I don't understand this picture, but that is so tight.'

For the past five years, Sara has worked on and off at her dad's computer-oriented business. She's seen consumers junk a lot of computers for newer models, and it gave her an idea. Brainstorming with her family at their kitchen table, she thought about how useful those machines would be to the Haitians she had met on a church trip in 1998. When a Haitian pastor she knew came to her church in Ann Arbor, he asked her if she knew anyone who could help set up a computer school back home. Just like that, concept and opportunity collided.

Soon she was rounding up old, donated computers and sending them to Haiti. Then the summer after her junior year, she decided to go to Haiti herself, to troubleshoot technical problems and help develop the curriculum.

She got more than she bargained for. When she arrived, she found out the teacher who had been there was gone, and before she knew it she was director of the school.

Here she was, a 20-year-old college student alone in Haiti, without the help of an official organization, trying to get a school off the ground. She wanted to go home. Her parents wanted her to go home.

'At first, they really didn't like the idea. Especially when I got malaria. And then there was a military coup, they were not happy!" But despite obstacles, she hung on.

"I have pretty strong faith, and I think that has been an overriding theme or source of help in the work.'

"Pretty much I can sleep wherever, eat whatever as long as it's not still alive, whatever is pretty much good. I'm easy to please, but I'm never satisfied. I'm OK with everything, but I'm always pushing for something better."

That's why when the summer was almost over, she found she couldn't leave. Enrollment had dropped from 40 to 15 due to a series of setbacks, and there was no staff to carry on the work. Had she built something that would last?

So she decided to stay longer. She came back to the U.S., arranged for independent studies courses at AC, and continued her work in Haiti through December. She started a second school in a different town. She wrote a computer textbook. She found a teacher to continue her work. Slowly but surely, she was making progress for these people.

There are images burned in Sara's brain. She's tipsy on sugarcane moonshine, doing laluz, the Haitian street dance for chickens, and her friends are laughing, clapping, laughing. She's with the gatekeeper's children, speaking the native Creole or climbing coconut trees. She's stuck in a mountain compound, recovering from malaria, and all these Haitian nurses want to bathe her to make her well. Hours after being with her friend Watson, six armed bandits break into his home, force him to the floor, strip off his work shoes, strip his sister. Returning to Haiti unexpectedly, she goes to her friend Nadine's front door, meowing like always; the family screams "Sara! Sara!", and Nadine hugs her with a face full of tears. After a month away from the school, she finds her classroom converted to a storeroom, and no students coming. She sees a man dying along the street, parched, 110 degrees, and she finds him shade and water.

While it's hard to deal with some of these images, it's also hard not to.

'When I realized what you do for people.. It doesn't take much to give people hope or to give them dignity." She remembers something she learned on a missions trip at age 14. "I felt at that point that there's nothing better to live for than to do stuff for other people."

Sara went back to Haiti again for three weeks this summer. (She took a plane. At last check the pickup still hadn't shown up, but she's trusting it will, and that it still runs.) While there, she visited old friends, learned from professionals about the technical infrastructure-or lack of it-in Haiti, and made public lectures on the possibilities of computers.

Sara's higher education is preparing her well for Haiti. At Adrian, she majored in international studies and minored in French (which is one of the languages spoken there). She will attend graduate school at the University of Michigan this fall, where she will study computers and international policy.

When she's done, she wants to start a business in the U.S. that funnels work to programmers in Haiti. As has been discovered in India and other underdeveloped countries, programming is a good way to get into the international market, because the only resources it requires are know-how and e-mail (à la car battery and satellite, if need be). Haitians will provide programming, and Sara and her U.S. counterparts will provide design. "We can pay very low wages, and still give people middle-class status, so it will help the people, and it will provide income and help develop things."

In the meantime, there are plans to open four or five new schools in other towns in Haiti. The schools offer two programs, a basic class for computer users, and another for A+ certification, an internationally-standardized course for technicians. And in the future, she plans to offer other programs at even higher technical levels.

"That's a big step for the country, for the people, for education, for a lot of things. So, it's worth it."

Sara has just filed as a non-profit organization called Computer Training Center International, and is set up for donations. The biggest needs are for monitors, computer references books (preferably French), software, and laptop computers. Financial contributions are structured as follows: $50 to ship a computer; $200 to sponsor a student for a full year; and $5,000 (organizations or grant donations) to sponsor a new school. Contact her through this magazine by clicking here.