This time last year, I was in Haiti working with a sister city program and reporting to the ONE Blog. One of the most meaningful experiences I had there was when I met with the mountain community Savanèt, located near Jacmel. I had run into Jackson Jean-Batiste, the chair of their community committee Komité Relèvman Savanè, on a hike the day before, and he had asked me to meet with his organization. I was interested in learning about the earthquake- and food-related challenges they faced, so I did.

At the meeting, I was careful to let them know that I was not going to do anything for their community directly, and, although I would take what I learned to Washington, I would not be lobbying for their community, or even for Haiti, but for people around the world who also depended on land and faced similar challenges.

Interestingly, they were more than okay with that and grateful that I wasn’t there to make promises I wouldn’t keep. Many foreigners had passed through Savanèt doing post-earthquake surveys and promising to replace tents with houses. But none had returned.

As an agriculture policy wonk, I talked about food and food production. When I asked what they typically eat, all of Savanèt all shouted in unison, “DU RIZ!!” Rice. The community doesn’t eat many fruits or vegetables, but they do grow and eat bananas, which the women sell in the city from time to time. With women selling bananas and the men working odd construction jobs, the community doesn’t have money to buy fruits and vegetables.

So, what about home gardens? I knew that Helen Keller International (HKI) has had a lot of success in Africa and Asia with homestead gardens. In Savanèt, one woman named Lucilia Darent said she had had a garden when her husband died but now she was too old to work in it and her three grown daughters didn’t know how to garden and had no interest. Violette Charlemagne, the co-chair of Komité Relèvman Savanèt, said they would love to grow gardens but that they needed know-how and water.

The community received rainfall only six months per year. But with the famed Bassin Bleu (a waterfall that is definitely worth the visit if you’re in the area) up the hill, they thought they should be able to irrigate from the stream that fed the basin, but weren’t sure how to go about doing that or where they would get the money to do so. I asked what they thought about catching rain, and, again, the same questions in response: how do we do it and where do we get the materials? With barely enough money to buy rice and little engineering knowledge, Savanèt and other Haitian communities, need a hand-up from programs like Feed the Future.

But Feed the Future hasn’t yet completed a strategic plan for Haiti, so it’s impossible to tell whether it will help communities like Savanèt. Meanwhile, US food aid and cheap imports continue to pour into Haiti, undermining local farmers in the fertile Artibonite river basin in central Haiti. The residents in Savanèt can’t help their countrymen in a campaign to “Buy Haiti.” They have to buy the cheapest rice available, which is often supplied by heavily-subsidized US rice farmers.

This has been going on for some time, ever since the Clinton Administration pressured Haiti into lowering their rice tariffs from 15 percent to 3 percent. But in a Foreign Relations Committee hearing in March 2011, the former President admitted that he had made a mistake in pressuring Haiti into reducing tariffs on food imported from the United States

When will US foreign policy align with the needs of the world’s poorest? The US Farm Bill presents an opportunity to reform food aid, and you better believe ONE will be keeping an eye on it.

My friend Dave and I talking with a displaced family at Port-au-Prince Cathedral, a few hours before I got sick.

I caught cholera in Haiti. I lived. And, because I had immediate access to the incredibly simple treatment for cholera, it wasn’t so bad. Because of how simple the treatment is, I am astounded that nearly 4,000 people in Haiti have died from Vibrio Cholerae in less than three months.

With cholera, people die from dehydration, not the cholera itself. They lose a ton of fluid from pooping (rather, pouring out) what looks like rice water for as long as the illness lasts. Because of my access to rehydration solution and antibiotics, my experience with cholera wasn’t much different than experiences I’ve had with food poisoning or gastro-intestinal flu here in the US. However, many people in the world aren’t so lucky.

My treatment consisted of drinking large quantities of an electrolyte solution and taking a single 300 mg dose of an appropriate antibiotic. Antibiotics help shorten the duration of the diarrhea (mine lasted about six hours and stopped almost immediately after I took the antibiotic). However, medical experts say that rehydration is the key to saving lives. Electrolyte solutions, such as Pedialyte and others, can be found in pharmacies, but one can also make them at home by mixing water, salt and sugar. Rehydration is so important that using dirty water is better than no water. In fancy medical terms, drinking these mixtures is called Oral Rehydration Therapy (ORT). It is simple and it saves lives.

Of the 194,000 people in Haiti who have reported being affected by cholera, nearly 4,000 people died because they did not have access to treatment advice and/or materials they need to rehydrate themselves. I think that, above all, this illustrates a very deep need for community health worker training, basic public health education, and clean water and sanitation in Haiti and other parts of the world.

To learn more and to act, our friends at Partners in Health ask you to Stand with Haiti one year after the earthquake. Learn more about community health workers in other parts of the world by watching this Living Proof video.

“I love my little country. There is always something, but what can I do? I love my country so I keep coming back,” a Haitian woman told me as our flight descended into Port-au-Prince. The earthquake of January 12 was undoubtedly “something.” Some have doubted whether Haiti has the strength to pull itself out of the tent camps, the cholera epidemic and the fragile government that have kept it in the international news in 2010, but I think it can. The Haitian spirit is resilient, resourceful and creative.

The country’s multicolored and themed mini-buses, or taptaps, that whiz down the main avenues embody this spirit. They are tired and packed with people, but they somehow make it to their destination — with artistic flair, smiles and a lot of conversation.

Signs of vigor and healing are abound in Jacmel. On Monday, I had a chance to see the enduring creative spirit of Haiti coupled with support from a project called the Art Creation Foundation for Children. It empowers children and beautifies the city through public art, while providing three meals per day to its participants. The participants are all children ages 6 to 11 who, prior to enrolling in the program, had never attended school or eaten on a regular basis. In addition to learning art skills, they gain self-confidence, interpersonal skills and the nutrition they need to succeed in life.

The children were working on a mosaic mural that was dedicated yesterday to those who lost their lives, to honor those who survived and to celebrate life and the future. One of the keystones of the mural is the ancestral “Tree of Life,” representing Haiti and its innate power to persevere despite the loss of individual lives.

Watch the accompanying video and meet Whitney, a student at Art Creation Foundation for Children, as she talks about the project and what the Tree of Life means for her.

Partners In Health (PIH) and our Haitian sister organization, Zanmi Lasante (ZL), have advocated for a human rights-based approach to earthquake recovery and reconstruction. Such an approach engages and employs the Haitian people, strengthens public institutions and governance, and works not just to repair the damage caused by the earthquake, but also to address the extreme poverty and lack of infrastructure that greatly worsened the disaster’s impact and weakened the country’s ability to respond.

For recovery to be effective and lasting, Haitians must be the main actors and aid should be coordinated by Haitians. They must have a voice in how aid money is spent in their country and be the principal agents of the work being planned and implemented. Currently, the mechanism organized to ensure Haitians’ role in implementation and coordination is the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC). Rather than a collection of temporary solutions consisting of tarps and tents, the Commission will help lay the building blocks for the future for Haiti: hospitals to heal the sick, roads to help farmers bring food to market, municipal water supplies to stop deaths from cholera, and schools, at all levels, to build Haitian capacity. Haitian involvement in plans and projects submitted for approval to the IHRC also helps ensure that national participation is included in rebuilding.

The international community responded to what’s been called the most destructive natural disaster in modern times with robust emergency assistance, but much more is needed to help Haiti build back better and reduce grinding poverty. To learn how you can get involved in our efforts with Haiti, please visit www.pih.org. We’re gathering signatures for a letter to ask donors to embrace Haitian-led initiatives to ensure that donors disburse the aid they promised, please add your name.

-Meredy Throop and Donna Barry, Partners In Health

Over the next few days, I will write about the resilient and creative spirit of Haiti and in particular, of Jacmel, the small coastal city where I am spending my vacation. After the January 12 earthquake, 85 percent of Haiti’s buildings were damaged, most of its 18th century New Orleans-esque downtown was condemned, and thousands of people were moved into tent camps.

Today, I met with Roland Zenny, Jacmel’s Chamber of Commerce President, to talk about whether foreign direct investment is happening in Jacmel. Upon arriving in his office, Zenny handed me a 2′ 8 block of what looked like really dense Styrofoam. This material is the basis for a vision that he and a group of private investors from the United States are making a reality just a few miles outside of the center of the city.

Using an incredibly sturdy version of polystyrene patented by the company MilleniumBlok, the investors plan to build a village of earthquake and hurricane tolerant houses that will be sold for around $10,000. While this may seem like a lot in a country that where the GDP per capita is around $733, they expect that people with steady jobs will be able to afford them.

In an effort to create a market, they will develop a textile factory in the village that will provide 1,200 jobs. Tax incentives will encourage other factories to set up shop nearby. Local banks like Fonkoze have committed to marketing a mortgage product for houses in that price range, making such housing affordable for more people. Zenny’s plan is for the development of inexpensive earthquake-resistant housing and a mortgage market to spur increased movement from tent cities to permanent housing.

While this project is not targeted to the poorest of the poor (the private sector rarely has the capacity to do so), it has the potential to spur growth, change the public’s perception of what is within their reach, and introduce builders and aid groups to disaster-tolerant materials. As an indicator of how much hunger there is for opportunity and reconstruction, Zenny estimated that 4,000 people attended the Chamber’s information session on the project.

Could the private sector be a key to reconstruction in Haiti? Earlier this week I passed a cooperatively-owned agricultural school in the countryside outside Jacmel. I asked my companion, a local pastor, about who funds the school. “It is part of a cooperative,” he said. “The classes are funded by the farmers who take them. That is the Haitian way.” In many ways, this is similar to how the planned village will work in that, in the end, they will both be funded by the same people who benefit from them and will be driven by demand for the final product.

People here want to make their own way and are hungry for opportunities to do so. A great question to ask is: What can we do to support that?

On a recent visit to Delmas 32, a neighborhood in the heart of Port-au-Prince, I had the opportunity to see Haitians rebuilding their country and their lives firsthand. Here, at one of the 30 food-for-work and cash-for-work projects financed by World Food Programme (WFP), I meet Cassandre Chery, a would-be beautician-turned-rubble remover.

It’s got to be tough digging with a shovel under the hot sun, but Cassandre, 28, is glad to have work. As the mother of two who has been homeless since the earthquake, she is now able to pay school fees and feed her two daughters.

Joining Cassandre are more than 200 men and women who are motivated to clear the rubble from the streets and the plots they used to call their homes in the hopes of one day soon being able to return.

When the earthquake struck, Cassandre was relatively fortunate. She only broke her foot, but not much was salvageable from the ruins of their house.

She explains how tough it’s been.“My husband used to get work as a security guard but he hasn’t had any jobs since the earthquake. Sometimes the girls have gone hungry but usually I’ve been able to borrow enough food from neighbors. When this job came along, it made a big difference.”

The government of Haiti estimates the earthquake produced more than 20 million tons of rubble, that’s enough to fill 1.2 million trucks full, if only this country had the road network and infrastructure to move things.

While there’s a lot of work to be done and the removal of the debris will take years, street by street and building by building, teams like Cassandre’s are making a difference –- and earning some useful money to feed and take care of themselves.

Little by little, we can help create a better and stronger Haiti — and statistics like these show that we are making a difference on the ground. Got any numbers you think we should add? Tell us in the comments below.

Photo credit: LISANDRO SUERO/AFP/Getty Images

As we look back over the last year in Haiti, we must acknowledge the critical role water and sanitation has played in the country historically and in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake that struck one year ago.

Before the earthquake, 45 percent of the population lacked access to safe water, and a staggering 83 percent of the population lacked access to sanitation. The consequences of not having access to safe water and basic sanitation are enormous for the Haitian population. Even before the earthquake, diarrhea — which can result from consumption of contaminated water — killed one in five Haitian children each year.

The earthquake exacerbated the problems of an already weak infrastructure and highlighted the need for serious investments in the water and sanitation infrastructure in order to achieve health and economic gains. It is estimated that the earthquake caused $235 million in damages to water and sanitation facilities, and 437 settlements currently lack adequate sanitation. Even more disturbing, a severe and deadly cholera outbreak — which started in October and continues to plague the country today — has led to 171,304 cases and claimed the lives of 3,651 Haitians.

Although numerous challenges persist, there are many groups working hard every day in Haiti to bring clean water and sanitation to communities. While the task at hand is enormous, it’s encouraging to see the work that is being done across Haiti, including the installation of family latrines, promotion of hygiene practices and repair of water infrastructure systems. InterAction’s Haiti Aid Map provides an overview of all water and sanitation projects in the country and a description of each.

Recently, I took a trip to Port-au-Prince to visit my family. I’m happy to report they’re healthy and well. But a lot of what I saw on the ground surprised me. It looked to me as if the earthquake had just hit. There were piles and piles of concrete debris. Blue and white tents were scattered everywhere. These tents were meant to be temporary. Right now, they’re what a lot of Haitians call home.

But even amongst all this ruin, the people of Haiti still have a whole lot of hope. Take my aunt, for example. She’s been a teacher in Haiti for 20 years. During my trip, she showed me the remains of her school. I saw rubble and mangled desks. She saw — and quickly pointed out — a few planks standing upright in front of me. “Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ve started to rebuild.”

The road to recovery has been a bumpy one, and Haiti has faced some big set-backs — most recently the devastating cholera outbreak, and a precarious political situation with the Haitian government. But moved by the outpouring of concern and long-term help because of members like you, my aunt — along with millions of other Haitians — are finding ways to rebuild their lives, one plank, one nail, one classroom at a time.

Haiti is slowly rebuilding. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Schools across the country are reopening, hospitals are staffing up, and communities are fighting to come back, stronger than ever before. It hasn’t been easy — and they’ve still got a long way to go — but this progress would not have been possible without the determination of the Haitian people and the hard work and compassion of people like you, ONE members who worked together to cancel Haiti’s crippling debt last year.

This is just one story — the story of my family in Haiti. But there are projects and organizations pitching in to help for the long-term all across the country. Take a look at the slide show of photos from my own journey, and learn more about the work happening each and every day in Haiti in our blog series.

Today marks the one year anniversary of the earthquake in Haiti, which killed more than 200,000 people and left millions homeless. Immediately following the earthquake, President Barack Obama charged former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush with launching a fund-raising effort –- later named the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund –- to help alleviate the short-term suffering of the Haitian people and make a meaningful investment in their future.

The two former Presidents agreed that the mission of the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund would be based on a simple and powerful belief: Haiti needs smart investments that will put people back to work and create the environment for vibrant, sustainable economic growth.

The aim is to eliminate the root causes of poverty that exacerbated the effects of the earthquake and to help Haiti transform itself into a country where all people have the opportunity to prosper.

Over the last year, we have made grants and investments in dynamic organizations that support this mission, and just in the last week we announced $3.4 million in new partnerships. Our progress may not be as fast or robust as some would like, but I know that we are moving in the right direction.

We are moving in the right direction because of our mission to collaborate with Haitians in building their own future. It is so easy to forget sometimes that there are energetic and committed people behind all of the rebuilding efforts. Today, I want to introduce you to three people who are working with and for International Medical Corps, a two-time Clinton Bush Haiti Fund grantee that is operating mobile medical clinics that create jobs and deliver much-needed treatment to displaced Haitians.

People like Alex, Fabiola, and Marie-Keline are the ones who are going to create a brighter future in Haiti, not the NGOs, international commissions or even the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund. We want to empower them with the tools they need to thrive -– and then we want to get out of the way.

When you think about tweeting, volunteering or doing anything to support the rebuilding effort in Haiti, think of Alex, Fabiola, and Marie-Keline. Your support is helping to put them in the driver’s seat of Haiti’s recovery.

Paul Altidor leads decision-making on grants and investments, and oversees programs on the ground with regular visits to partners in Haiti. Prior to joining Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, Paul worked at the International Finance Corporation (IFC) in, a unit that advises governments on public-private partnerships. He has worked for the World Bank and also in the private sector.

Photo credit: THONY BELIZAIRE/AFP/Getty Images