Community Corner

Haitian House Is Built with Help from Somerset Residents

Lauren Rubenstein and her son Jake Shapiro—and Shapiro's friend Eli Schwat—traveled to Haiti to help finish building a house for a family left homeless after the January 2010 earthquake.

When Lauren Rubenstein first went to Haiti in the summer of 2011, she had no idea what she was getting into.

Rubenstein—a yoga teacher and therapist from Somerset—took that trip to teach yoga (through a YogaKids program) to some of the poorest kids in the western hemisphere—kids who had been left homeless after the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake.

But the trip turned into so much more. She bonded with young Michelda (who was 2 when the earthquake hit, and who had been living in a tent ever since) and her mother, and decided—when she got back to Chevy Chase—to sponsor Michelda through Partners in Development

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For only $30 a month, the sponsorship program "[enabled] these kids to have clothes and food and be able to go to school," and the kids’ parents could benefit from classes in small business development and from microloans to start small businesses.

Rubenstein went back to Haiti to teach yoga in the winter of 2012, and decided to do even more. When she got back from that trip, she started raising money to build a house for Michelda and her parents and baby brother. The total sum needed was $4,000, but she did it.

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Rubenstein had help from the community. A Somerset Girl Scout troop , and also sewed a baby blanket for Michelda's baby brother. Local businesses—including Chevy Chase Florist, The Yoga Fusion Studio and Simon Says Yoga—held special classes to raise money for the house. 

This past winter—on her fourth trip to Haiti in two years—she brought her son Jake Shapiro and his friend Eli Schwat (both high-school seniors) with her to help finish building the house, and to help Michelda and her family move into their first solid house in more than three years. While Rubenstein taught yoga, Shapiro and Schwat worked on the house.

It's a basic structure—just two rooms, no plumbing, no electricity and made of concrete with a tin roof, Shapiro wrote in an email to Patch. "But it's a shelter that doesn't get wet when it rains," Rubenstein added.

"What they now have is still ... not at all ideal. This is not the be-all and end-all, the two-room shelter. This is how everyone lives in that area," she added.

Meanwhile, little Michelda is growing up, and has started kindergarten. Her mom—who now runs a grocery store in the tent city where they lived for three years—invited Rubenstein to attend Michelda's kindergarten graduation this June, but it conflicts with Shapiro's graduation from high school.

Shapiro missed a week of school to help build Michelda's house.

"Going into the trip I really didn't know much about Haiti besides that it had a big and deadly earthquake and lots of its citizens were still living in tent cities. ... But any opportunity to both help others and travel to a foreign country and experience a different culture is welcome," Shapiro said.

In Haiti, Shapiro helped build Michelda's house as well as an office building for the Partners in Development medical compound. It was a lot of manual labor—mixing and moving concrete, fetching buckets of water and digging an 8-foot-by-5-foot-wide hole for a sewage tank, Shapiro explained to Patch.

Still, "I got a lot out of the trip. ... [It] really struck me how the Haitian people not only just survive with less, they still manage to enjoy their lives, even with few possessions. ... To think that Haitians could be enjoying their lives even more than many Americans do, even in such hard living conditions, is very striking," he wrote in an email to Patch.

"I've definitely come home looking to gain satisfaction out of the simpler things in life, and look forward to continuing to live my life in that manner."

Shapiro has plans to maybe, one day, start an organization to help provide capital to Haitians looking to start a business.

"My desire to create an organization like this comes from learning about how incredibly un-sustainable the Haitian economy is, and how little foreign influence is actually helping. While Haiti has an immense number of [non-governmental organizations] ... doing service work within its borders, this help is only short-term," he explained.

"The NGOs are not organized with each other or the Haitian government, and therefore only address finite problems. One NGO might offer medical services, and one might offer clothing, but none offer a way for the Haitians to learn how to provide these things for themselves and set themselves on a path to sustainability. I want to take all of these organizations who are metaphorically giving the Haitian people fish, bring their services together, and instead of giving the Haitian people fish, teach them how to fish. It's the only way the culture of poverty that exists there can be broken," he added.

The most memorable moment of the trip for Shapiro was walking with Michelda and her mom to visit their new house.

"What my mom did for Michelda became incredibly real to me during this time. The day before we had visited a tent camp, and just thinking about the difference between living in a tent, and living in a real home in a nicer community blew me away. That is truly life changing."

Even though Michelda's new house is just two rooms made of concrete and tin, it's home for her and her family.

Before leaving Haiti, Rubenstein nailed onto the door of Michelda's house a mezuzah, "which is traditional in Jewish homes, to bless all who enter," and she recited the Shehechyanu—"a prayer for something new." 


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