Beyond Maine Borders: Haiti & Africa #255

Pamela White:

I started my career as a Peace Corps volunteer and I ended my career as a US Ambassador, which is very unusual to go from one end to the other. And I had made my mind up when I was very young.

Nicole Wolf:

I was worried I wouldn't emotionally be able to handle what I was going to see and experience. And I hadn't traveled, you know, I traveled a lot, but not in that capacity, not to a developing country before and as on the ground as it would be.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine radio show number 255Beyond Maine Borders Haiti and Africa, airing for the first time on Sunday, August 7, 2016. Many talented Mainers are working working on projects that benefit people around the globe.

Pamela White:

Today we speak with two people who

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

have used their skills to help out after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Pamela White spent several decades with the United States Agency for International Development and served as the Ambassador to Gambia and then Haiti. Nicole Wolfe founded the organization up from under, raising money to build houses in Haiti. Thank you for joining us.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Today I have in the studio with me Pamela White who served as the United States Ambassador to Haiti from August 2012 until September 2015. Prior to that, she was the US ambassador to Gambia. She also was the head of multi million dollar aid programs in Mali, Tanzania and Liberia. Originally from Auburn, she now lives in Orr's island with her husband Steve. And I hear that you also have two lovely grown sons who live in the Washington D.C. area. And Steve also has two children. So you guys have been all over the place and you've Been raising children in the midst of it all.

Pamela White:

That's right. We have.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So congratulations and thanks for coming back to Maine and also for coming in and talking to me.

Pamela White:

It's a pleasure. Great.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I'm interested in hearing more about why a woman from Auburn, born in Lewiston, ended up doing things all over the world. Some people just kind of hang in there and never really leave their place of origin. But that wasn't your path.

Pamela White:

Nope. I made up my mind basically what I was going to do with my life. When I was 18, I was a senior at Little High School, and my cousin Jim had come home from the Vietnam War almost dead. And he. All kinds of things coming out of him, and he was my favorite, favorite cousin. And I was just devastated. And as luck would have it, circumstances would have it, that very same week, a team, I think the first and the last team ever from Peace Corps, Washington, D.C. came to my high school. And they had these slides about how you could help people in Africa, how you could make a difference in the world. And back then, there were kind of two ways of getting out in the world. One was the military, and one was this thing, Peace Corps, which was pretty new back then. I mean, that was 1967. And so I went home and I said to my dad, who's a Marine dad, I'm going to join the Peace Corps. And he said, absolutely not. And I said, I'm going to go to Africa. And he said, absolutely not. But I said, I am going to do it. And four and a half years later, I was in Africa. I never changed my mind. I knew that was what I wanted to do.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Why? What was that? What was the draw for you?

Pamela White:

It just was a different way for engaging in the world. And I kind of knew I wanted to engage in the world. I mean, I saw these pictures up on this giant screen at my gym, and I've gone back to that same gym and talked to students about trying to engage in the world also. And it was so spooky to be in this place where I had made a life decision and fun and kind of. It was interesting because I started my career as a Peace Corps volunteer and I ended my career as a US Ambassador, which is very unusual, to sort of go from one end to the other. And I had made my mind up when I was very young.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I believe that your father was in the audience watching you give your speech at the University of Maine 2016 commencement in Morano.

Pamela White:

He certainly was. He was in the audience. Steve was in the audience. My son from one of my sons from Washington D.C. was in the audience. My best friend Cindy Watson was in the audience and my mother, Sandy Peters was in the audience. So she, my mother, sorority sister Alpha Fee from University of Maine. So very close, long time friends were there and it was such so much fun to have them there because they had not been with me my whole career, but they had followed my whole career. And so to turn around and be able to wave to my 95 year old dad was really special. And he told me later that he just, he didn't really know that he was crying, but there were tears coming down his cheeks unexplainably through the whole thing because it was a matter of just pride and interest and seeing his daughter up there and giving a speech that got a standing ovation, which was very unusual. They told me it's the first time in 25 years that they had seen a standing ovation. So to have him there was very special.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So why did he doubt that you would make it in the Peace Corps or why would he say to you, don't do it?

Pamela White:

Oh my God. Back then going to Africa was like going to Mars or something. You know, anything knew about Africa was what they read in the National Geographic, which was not exactly comforting. You know, kind of wild looking people barely dressed and you know, animals roaming around. And so Africa was not the Africa that, you know, I've grown to know and love with some, you know, kind of freaky, exotic, strange, scary place. And so when I went home and said, I want to go to Africa, like absolutely not. You go to the University of Maine, you have babies and you know, that's, you know, that's what women do around here. And like I said, you know, it was just so, I mean, no one that I knew in University of Maine had ever even heard really a Peace Corps. And certainly no one was joining Peace Corps. I mean, they called me the ape lady and strange sounds all the time. I was just convinced I was gonna do it and I ended up in this village. You know, it was so idealistic. I mean, I was going to save the world and then it came down, well, maybe I could just save Africa. And then, well, maybe I could just save the region. And then, well, maybe just Cameroon, which is the country I went to. And then, well, maybe I could just save my village. But interestingly enough, really my village, you know, saved me in many ways because they taught me lifelong lessons, as I mentioned in my speech at the University of Maine. And they taught me this lesson that poverty is not about money. Poverty is much more something of the soul or lack of friends and lack of family and lack of culture and lots of history. I mean, when you're rich in all those things and you are in fact rich, and so you don't worry about the fact that that person sitting across from you is not a multimillionaire, is not making tons of money, that person, especially the elders in my village, they were so rich in so many important ways. And it's a lesson I've carried with me forever. And it was a lesson. It was a village, no running water, no electricity, very few vegetables, no red meat, no white people, no one speaking English. And I looked around when I first got there, scared to what am I gonna do here? I mean, there were no white people and I grew up in Maine. There were no black people in Maine. And yet these people took me in and loved me and taught me, as I said, life lessons. So it just changed my life.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It's interesting to me that you were a young white woman from Maine, chose to go to Africa, was chosen to become the ambassador to Gambia. You also, you are also the mission director of USAID in Liberia, and you are also the mission director of USAID in Tanzania. But this must have taken some like. Well, I can't use an impolite term,

Pamela White:

but it must have taken some guts,

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

let's say guts to be willing to go into those situations.

Pamela White:

Yeah, it did. Actually, at the time of it, I didn't think about it so much, I just did it. But Liberia, tough, tough place. Just coming out of a violent 14 year civil war where people did horrible things to each other. And it was a country led by Ellen Sirleaf, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who was a Nobel Peace Prize winner, fabulous woman, but as fabulous as she was, was a country still in turmoil, very difficult to make progress in a country where the entire or at least 70% of the population hadn't recovered from the war. They had blanks on their faces. And so in many ways, Liberia was my toughest country and a real challenge it was. One of my favorite stories about Liberia was that I had gone from Liberia, much to the disappointment of President Stirleaf, to be ambassador in the Gambia. And then when I was in the Gambia, I got a phone call, call from Secretary Clinton asking me to be ambassador to Haiti. And just after that, Secretary Clinton was in Liberia with President Sirleaf again. And President Sirleaf said, bring Pam back here, please bring her back here as ambassador. So they called me in the Gambia and they said, okay, you've got a choice. You can Go to Haiti, or you can come back to Liberia, because President Sirleaf so wants you to come back. And I so loved her. And I really thought about it, but I said, no, I'm so sorry. And I've seen her since then. She said, you turned me down. I decided to go to Haiti for a couple of reasons, but the major reason was that I had been there before. I'd started my Foreign Service career in many ways in Haiti. I joined the Foreign Service in Haiti in the 80s. And so to have that as my first Foreign Service post and have at my last as a junior, junior nothing officer in the 80s, an ambassador. And I used to take my kids to the residence, the ambassador's residence in the 80s, when they were babies, little tiny, and say, you know, you make you, you know, keep your little jackets on, and you make sure that you don't go anywhere, any room you're not supposed to go in, and you make sure this. And you make sure that you're well behaved, you know, and then to bring them back for cocktails on the terrace 30 years later was a great experience.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Is it unusual to be raising children as you're working with the Foreign Service or being an ambassador?

Pamela White:

No, it's. I mean, we, you know, my husband Steve, was raised as a Foreign Service brat, as we sometimes call them. Child lived all over Africa when he was growing up also. So now the Foreign Service, that's very, very common. But my children, by the time I had gotten into roles of very difficult, roles that were extraordinarily time consuming, were already in college. And I don't think you could be really an effective either mission director or certainly ambassador, because as ambassador, I was not in the Gambia, which was a much less taxing job. But in Haiti, I was working 16, 17, 18 hours a day for sure, seven days a week. It was never off. I had 1,400 people in the embassy. I had well over a billion dollars I was responsible for. I had 13 agencies, the CIA, the FBI, the DEA, trying to bring them all together to form one team for the United States of America. So it was very taxing. I mean, one of your questions was, what would you have done differently 10 years ago? And I thought about it for a long time because I'm so lucky how my career has turned out. But I think I would have tried to balance work, life maybe a little tiny bit better, which I was not good at at all.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

But how would you have done that? I mean, if you're in a situation where people are looking to. To you for Coordination and leadership and sometimes answers. How do you. Easily.

Pamela White:

I don't think it's easy. I don't know. I couldn't do it. I didn't do it. But I mean, I've seen other people, you know, when it's six o', clock, they walk, they go home and they say, I put in my long day and they get to the office. But I mean, there was one of my, if I may say, few criticism as ambassadors. Someone came down and said, you know, Pam, please stop sending texts to your staff at two o' clock in the morning. And I said, well, I don't expect them to answer at 2:00 in the morning. But I'm up and I'm thinking and something's going through my mind and they're like, well, they think that they should be sort of up 247 like you are. So just wait, you know, put it on. Fine, if that's when you're thinking, but, you know, put it on, save and send it when you get up and you're on your way in the morning. So I said, okay, okay. So it was a lesson well learned, because not everyone is an insomniac like I am and working. And I didn't want them to. I mean, I said to them, I want you to have a family life. I want you to go home at 5:30, 6 o' clock at night. And, you know, I can't do that. Especially when you go home. Either you're entertaining or you're being entertained. So it's not like you go home and, oh, the day's over ever, and it's fun, you know. Last night, President Martelli was a somewhat controversial president, but I believe with my heart and soul, a guy that truly had the best interest of Haiti and loved the Haitian people. But he called me last night and said, you know, I'm coming to Manhattan, I'm going to do a concert in Manhattan, and then maybe I'll come up to Maine and visit with you. And so you build these relationships, these lifelong relationships with people who are in the same circle as you are. They're trying so hard to make that country a better place. And, you know, President Stralieff was the same, the President Kikwete of Tanzania, you know, over and over and over. You see people who are so dedicated to try to move the needle a little bit on the quality of life of people who are less fortunate.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You referenced the questionnaire that we have all of our guests fill out when you said, if you could go back in time 10 years, what advice would you give yourself? And you said, find a better work, life balance. And it's interesting to me that on another question, we asked, what's the most rewarding part of your job? And you answered, making the world a better place for the disadvantaged, especially women and the poor, and influencing policy. And it really doesn't sound like you've changed your views on what you want to do in the world since you began this journey when you were in high school.

Pamela White:

That's right. That's very true. I've kept my eye on that goal for decades, and I thought it was a worthy goal back then, and I still think it's a worthy goal. It was a whole lot harder to move the needle than I thought it was going to be. There is no doubt that I have done that. You know, there are absolute successes that I could look at and think, wow, you know, you really hit the mark then. And then there are also years and years that I was working so hard to move countries forward like Mali, which I adore, and spent four years there right on the Sahara Desert. I certainly, at the time I was there, increased the number of young girls in school tremendously by thousands. And thousands got women involved in politics. I think we started with women's groups that maybe had 5,000, and when I left, there were maybe 50, 60,000. I mean, it was a real difference in the ability for women to participate in civil society. And it was wonderful. And then, and two years ago, the bad guys, the terrorists, come from the north of the Sahara desert into Mali, who was a very peaceful country of very moderate Muslims, don't like to fight. Loved people, share everything. And these bad, bad guys come down through Mali and disrupt everything that we had done for years and years and years. And all these little schools that we had built that all these girls that had never had access to education were in these schools and learning how to be historians and dietitians. And it's one of my favorite stories, because when I first asked the men of the desert to send their girls to school, they were like, why would we do that? Why would they need to go to school? And so I said, because these girls can write down your history. These girls can be your dieticians. They can write down the recipes that you passed down for years. These girls can be taught help methods that will help your women to be healthier across the board. And all of a sudden, it was not that they were just sending their girls for no reason. You can't just have no reason to send young children to School who have never been to school. So I had to change the curriculum. I had to get people trained in a whole new thing. We were practically at the beginning using little notebooks that people were writing stick figures in. And over the end, we got it all organized, but we changed the way people felt about education, for sure. I mean, these were Touaregs. These are these blue men of the desert. When I first met them, they would come across the desert on their camels from 50, 60 miles away. They didn't want me to come to their homes at first because they didn't want this nutty white woman to be where they were. And we would sit in a circle with their camels in the background, and me talking about two things. I wanted them to use condoms, which didn't work very well, and sending their girls to school, which worked very well. So good success on one side and not a success at all in the other.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So when you're talking about the type of work that you are doing, sounds like there's a significant amount of kind of sales and marketing that takes place.

Pamela White:

Absolutely. In fact, at the end of my career, the last five years or so, I became very, very interested in behavior change and what really makes people change behavior. Why would you, after centuries of not sending your girls to school, why would you do that? And I found out saying it's a good thing to do is not good enough. You need a better reason. And just like the condom thing did not work because, you know, we want you to space your children, that was not a good enough reason. So I learned right then and there, if you're going to do family planning, do not count on the men to do it. Count on the women to do it. So I completely changed my outlook. You give speeches all over the place. This is how you should approach family planning, at least in Africa. Let the women take responsibility for their own bodies and their own the number of children that they want, which tends to be very different in rural Africa than men, because having babies is sort of a status symbol, and the responsibility does not lie with the men. I mean, the women, you know, have full responsibility for babies until they're, I don't know, teenagers. So that was an interesting thing. But, yeah, you know, how do you get people to use a bed net when bed nets aren't comfortable? And, you know, we figured out a way of doing that. How do you get people to not be corrupt? And it's interesting because it's often not what you think. It's not an easy answer to say, well, if we tell them it's not good for you. That's good enough. That in and of itself, almost never is. So it is. It's figuring out, how do you make that needle move? And it's so hard. And we spend millions on it, and I think we are getting better at it, but I'm not so sure that we're still there. And we, for many decades, we never measured it either. So, you know, did more people use actual used bed nets? You can distribute bed nets easily. It's very easy to distribute a million bed net. It's the use of them afterwards that makes a big difference. On Zanzibar, which is an island right outside of Tanzania, we started with an incidence of about 40% of the people on that island every year had at least one incidence of malaria. And we had this program that we put in place, and after two years, it went down to 2%, and it's still less than 2%. And how did we do it? We had a fabulous marketing campaign. We had all the nets that we needed. We sprayed all the houses. We sprayed all the dead areas where the dead water was. We had people trained in doing rapid testing for malaria. We had people trained, the clinicians trained, so that as soon as a diagnosis was made, they could get treated. And it just. It was one of my favorite moments of my career. In fact, I was invited with the minister of health there to go to the White House as a reward for this amazing achievement. But part of it was just using political voices. The president of the country, minister of health, minister of education, me running around day after day, the ambassador. I wasn't the ambassador at the time. I was the head of aid, but the ambassador also. We were over there saying, if you're a good Zanzibarian, you're going to use a bed net. And we. We convinced them. And like I said, it's still, you know, 20 years later, still going strong.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You strike me as a woman that doesn't like the word no or maybe doesn't even hear the word no. I'm not really sure if you even acknowledge that no is a possible response to one of your suggestions.

Pamela White:

Yeah, no, it's not. My husband's laughing over there. No, it's not a word that I use very often or is used with me in the room. It has been tried, but I can almost always find a solution to almost any problem. And if it fails, I'm not afraid of that either. I always tell young people, make a decision. Make a decision. You know, evaluate it as soon as you can. Often decisions in the developing world are done. Evaluations are done two years after a decision is made or a program has started. And I'm like, don't wait two years. Start evaluating within a month. Keep it coming, keep it coming. Because with technology today, there is no reason that you don't have a read on what is being done and how successful it is right away. And I have shut down programs. I mean, there was a program in Liberia on literacy, and so I went and visited some schools that were teaching. It was adult literacy. So it was at night. So I showed up at 5 o'. Clock. I'm looking at the whiteboards and like, there's nothing on the whiteboard. And they're like, oh, well, we haven't started yet. Oh, no, no, we, no, no, we started, but we finished. I said, well, you know, it's, you know, the lessons only started 10 minutes ago, 20 minutes. Oh, well, tonight we're kind of, we're gonna concentrate more on, you know, drinking coffee or whatever. So I'm like, this does not look. It's working. And it was a $50 million program. And so I went to another school and another school, and they were so proud because. Because the enrollment numbers were supposed to be 5,000 and they were 15,000, because everyone was coming, eating the cookies and drinking the coffee and tea and kibitzing. So I said, well, this doesn't look too good to me, so let's do a rapid assessment. And so I had a team come up from Washington, a rapid assessment team, and went around to 10 or 12 of these schools, and we found out that no one really knew how to read. No one. And no one knew how to count. They could count if you, they had two fingers. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. But if you said, what's six plus six? Forget it. They could not get that far. So I said, we're going to close down this program now. And the contractor at the time said, no, we're not. No, we're not. We were only contracted to a number of, you know, our indicator was how many kids were in the classroom. And I said, you know what? Do you really want me to go on national radio? Do you, do you really want me to go to the Congress? Do you really want me to start Talking about how $50 million of the US taxpayers money is being spent in Liberia? They decided to play along with what I wanted. And what we did there was we started tying literacy to skills. So if you wanted to be. In order to rebuild Liberia, you know, if you wanted to be a mechanic or a plumber or hairdresser or whatever, then we would teach you language skills around that skill area. So that meant something to you. You weren't just sitting in a classroom. And also it meant that you could have a job which was very, very, very important for the rebuilding. So you have to be creative, you can't say no. And you have to be always one step ahead of failure, which in the third world is very easy to come by. And you can't get discouraged either. It's so easy to say, oh, we'd spent two years doing building this thing up and now what? Well, how can we make it better? How can we make it more sustainable? How can we get people more involved, especially politicians? And corruption in the third world is a huge problem. And so how do you work around that so that you can make sure that the people that you're working for and with really benefit from what you're doing? And it's possible.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Pam, it's really been a pleasure too have this conversation with you. I appreciate the work that you've done really all over the world. I love the fact that you are from. Well born in Lewiston, raised in Auburn, went to Edward Little, went to the University of Maine.

Pamela White:

I did.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I have many family members who have gone, including my son.

Pamela White:

Right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Watched your commencement speech and I appreciate the work also that your husband Steve did as part of the foreign service. I think this, this type of work is maybe something that we here who live in Maine most of our lives don't know that much about. But I know that it's important and I think it's great that we have someone from our state who was out there really on the ground doing this and I appreciate your being here.

Pamela White:

Well, thank you so much for having me. I loved every minute of it. Congratulations. Great studio here and keep on the great work.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Thank you.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

friends of the magazine is here with us today. This is Nicole Wolf, who is a Maine based commercial photographer and after a volunteer trip to Haiti in 2010, she founded the organization Up From Under. Up From under aided in building sustainable housing for four Haitian families as well as providing funding for micro finance, job opportunities and education. It's great to see you here today.

Nicole Wolf:

Good to see you, Lisa.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And it's interesting because you're always responsible for our visual and today you're responsible for our audio.

Nicole Wolf:

Right?

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You've been photographing for the magazines for quite a few years now, I think.

Nicole Wolf:

I think about seven years actually. Before I moved up here, I was living in Washington D.C. and had a random trip to Maine on my way home to New Brunswick, Canada and saw the magic magazines and a coffee shop and contacted Susan and Kevin and that's how their relationship started. So it was great.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And what are some of your favorite things to photograph for the magazines?

Nicole Wolf:

Oh, I mean, I'm really enjoying shooting food and I've shot a lot of it since I've been here. You know, the restaurant scene is pretty incredible, but the chefs, you know, because I'm a portrait based photographer, you know, and, and having the relationships with the chefs that has cultivated into this whole, you know, kind of beautiful visual representation of what they do has been really awesome. So, yeah, so I really enjoy the food aspect and then also just the portrait aspect of what I do as well. I shoot a piece called Culture for Old Port magazine and I get to meet some really incredible people and be creative about the approach. So that's probably. Those are my favorites.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I would say the relationship that you have with your subjects is really important when you're doing portrait photography.

Nicole Wolf:

Yeah, very important. I think, you know, we were speaking before even on air about just making people feel comfortable in front of the camera. And, you know, it's something that I don't necessarily think is a learning behavior. I think you just either have it or you don't. And you know, I'm definitely a director when I'm taking portraits of people and I'm very communicative and try to make them feel as comfortable as possible and bring out something about their personality, both visually and, you know, through our conversation that allows them to just kind of feel relaxed and not to feel forced or contrived. So, yeah, no, that, that aspect of it is, is really important. It's something that, you know, I've really developed over the years and learned to kind of. It's one of the first things that I do a lot of times when I, when I get a portrait assignment in any capacity is, you know, do a little bit of research of who the person is, meet with them a lot of times so that I have an idea before going into it. Like a musician, for example, I'll listen to their music, get an idea of, you know, what their sound is, what they're trying to convey through that. And a lot of times I pull ideas from lyrics and things like that to create something that's not just, hey guys, let's stand on these train tracks and do a band photo. So it's important to me, and just as much for me, I think too, because I want them to be different each time and I want to be excited about every photo I take.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So there is something that's really important about the storytelling aspect of the photography. So to really get to know someone.

Nicole Wolf:

Right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Helps with that storytelling.

Nicole Wolf:

Absolutely. And I think it creates, you know, the most. The scariest thing about being in front of a camera is that you're being very vulnerable and you're opening yourself up a lot of times to somebody that doesn't know you. And so to try to, you know, I mean, that's a gift. You know, when somebody gives that to you and they, and they feel comfortable enough to like reveal themselves to you in a way that feels authentic, it's a really cool thing to watch unfold. Doesn't happen every time, but yeah, you know, the storytelling aspect of photography is. It's something that I've really worked on developing with my career in portraiture. It's a little bit different. The photo essay work that I've done independently and my personal work is, I feel very different than traditional journalism. Traditional journalism, you're kind of on the street in a situation, documenting what's unfolding in front of you. There's not a lot of personal interaction that happens. And that's an important part of that medium. With photo essay work and storytelling, it's usually more engaged. You're spending time getting to know someone. It can be, they can be more long term projects as well. And so it, it creates, I think, a dynamic and a level of authenticity that sometimes doesn't happen when you just, you know, show up and, you know, document something as it's unfolding. So I prefer that type of photography, actually. I'm Not a great journalist. I'm way too emotional. And I personally prefer more the photo essay type perspective or opportunities that I get because I get to be more engaged with the people that I'm photographing.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So, yeah, I had never thought about the difference between the photo essay and I guess, photojournalism and the difference in, I guess, objectivity.

Nicole Wolf:

Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And it seems like you would have to be, if you're out there on the street shooting something that's happening, unfolding in front of you, you just have to be the eyes.

Nicole Wolf:

You're just very present. Yeah. And it's not to say that they don't kind of intertwine. There's definitely, you know, and some photographers may have a different way of looking at it, but I think a lot of times, you know, with journalism, it is very in the moment. It's quick. It's. You don't oftentimes know the subjects that you're working with and, you know, it's. But as far as the media is concerned, I mean, it has to happen. You know, we need that documentation. And then like I said, the photo essay aspect of it can, can be more involved and more long term so that you get to know the people that you're working with.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So how did you end up in Haiti?

Nicole Wolf:

Oh, well, January 12, 2010 was the earthquake that went through Port au Prince. And two months after that. Well, actually, it was kind of the first. Within the first month, I had a friend from California that had an organization called New Reality International. And it was medical relief team that was going in. They were sending relief workers in emergency relief. And she had contacted me to see if I would hop on one of the trips because they needed visuals of the mobile clinics that they were doing, the surgeries that they were performing just basically for fundraising efforts. And I said no in the beginning because as I said earlier, I'm a highly emotional person. And so things affect me very, you know, I cry at like the Folgers coffee commercials, you know, tv. So I was worried. I was worried I wouldn't emotionally be able to handle what I was going to see and experience. And I hadn't traveled, you know, I traveled a lot, but not in that capacity, not to a developing country before and as on the ground as it would be. And I thought about it for about a month and then they did a second trip and she approached me again and I just decided to get on a plane and was fearful, excuse me, of what I was going to see. But it was kind of one of those things that I Knew at that point in my life that it was something that needed to be done, and I wanted to help, you know, and I didn't know what that meant. And at that point, I was not educated on, you know, the different aspects of international aid and what that meant. So I went in kind of eyes wide open and jumped in this team, and we basically. I mean, it was. It was really intense. It was. The debriefings at night were very difficult during the day. We were so involved with the communities of people. And, you know, the. The visuals that I saw were really disturbing. The country was on the ground, the city was on the ground, and you didn't really have time to be emotional because we were just, go, go, go. And there were so many people that needed help. And, you know, my focus was, you know, for new reality to document everything that I saw. And it was more journalistic based in. If I want to use it in that way, like, I was just kind of photographing everything that I saw. Not super interactive and just a lot of the medical team to do their jobs and not being too involved that way. So that's kind of how it happened first. And then things kind of developed from there.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

When you say that you had some fear around doing that, I'm surprised, because my experience of you is kind of a bold and fearless person. I remember when you came back to Maine and you were creating this new life for yourself, and you really put yourself out there. And I, as someone who also is affected really, in a very emotional way, especially by, like, seeing patients, for example, There was a point in my life where I was like, I don't know if I can be a doctor, because this is really intense stuff. And pushing through that, that's not easy.

Nicole Wolf:

It's not. And, you know, what I noticed really quickly was that I had a job to do and what I was going to say about the nights, you know, it's like what I noticed very quickly was that, you know, they did not need my pity. They needed my help, and they needed all of our help. And so to be emotional and broken and crying all the time was not doing anyone any service at all. And so I just kind of channeled it and allowed myself to just be present in what I was photographing. And then, you know, we would have these debriefing sessions at night where, you know, you could kind of get it out and the things that you saw. But, you know, it wasn't until really, you know, I felt connected. But it wasn't until I went. I went in the first two times I went to Haiti, I was working with New Reality International. And then I started going in solo, which was, you know, one of those things. I am very fearless, and I, you know, in. In that regard, you know, I will put myself in situations that a lot of people might not, but I just am full speed ahead, head up, eyes open, and I just. Just make it work. And so when on the medical relief teams, we had a bunch of English interpreters that were Haitian, and three of them, they were three best friends I became really close to, and we would spend a lot of time together, clearly, and at night and that, like, listening to their stories. And that's kind of how everything developed for me was from Pepe, Sis, and Sam and the relationship that I started building with them and hearing about their families and their homes that they had lost in the earthquake, family members that they had lost. And it was at that point that I knew I needed to do something more or I could do something more. I didn't know what that meant, but at the time I was living in Washington, D.C. my company was doing really, really well, and I had a very large network of people that important people and people that I knew would be able to assist in raising money. And I didn't know exactly how to approach it at first, but I knew that I wanted to help build homes for these three families that had lost their homes. So I started a cause page on Facebook initially in October 2010, and by January 2011, had raised $15,000 on Facebook. People responded in droves. And I had spent, you know, that time period from my first trip in Solo was June 2010, and I was journaling every morning and writing down how I felt, and I would share those journal entries or parts of them and some of the photos that I had taken, you know, every time I was in. And people were just starting to become very vested in these people. So sorry to backtrack. So I started living with these three guys and their families periodically. So Sisson lived in a tent city in a place called Carande, outside of Port au Prince, just outside of Port au Prince. And the first time that I met Sisson's family was when I knew that, you know, this building project needed to happen. He took me to the tent city. There were about 20,000 people living in tents. And, you know, I walked in and, you know, greeted with, you know, open arms. They were very excited to see me and to have me a. As a guest in their home. And I call it their home because that was the initial thing that kind of triggered this whole project for me. You know, I walked in and Sisson's mother, you know, was preparing food because a guest was coming and his sister as well. And, you know, the inside, the first tent flap was kind of their, like, sitting room, and there were some, like, broken plastic chairs and a little table that had, you know, a rabbit ear television on it and some plastic flowers hanging from the ceiling. And in the back room, his sister Beverly was laying on the floor. This is the part of the tent that they slept in. And there were nine people sleeping in this like 8 by 12 space. And she was super hot. It was like July, I think. And she was studying. And I can just remember seeing her laying on the floor and the sweats, like, just dripping off of her as she's studying into this book. And I looked around the room and, you know, there's a mirror on the wall that had like the girl's earrings, like, kind of stuck in the side of the tent around the mirror. Stuffed animals on makeshift beds that were either slats with cardboard over them, but everything, like the beds were all made and the pillows were all positioned and the stuffed animals and clothing kind of like organized in one corner. And I just. It was in that moment, it makes me emotional to think about it because it was in that moment that I realized that. This wasn't a temporary living situation for them. This was their home. Sorry. It brings back, like a lot of memories. Even though it was like six years ago and I stepped outside and I broke down and I. And I wept. You know, I was really, really hit. Something hurt in me. And anyway, it was in that moment I had kind of a paradigm shift internally that I could do more. And it was possible in the situation that I was living within in the United States, that there were people that I knew would be participatory in helping to change the situation of this family. And so that, to fast forward is how I started the cause page, or excuse me, why I started the cause page, and how the first home was built. And it was really important for me at the time, as I learned things going through, that this home needed to be really sustainable. A lot of the temporary housing that was being constructed in Port au Prince was not something that would withstand another natural disaster. It was just to move people out of the tents and get them into. A lot of times it was just plywood structures, no airflow, and, you know, no, it's. They just weren't going to be sustainable long term. There were a lot of great organizations that were doing, you Know, really great housing projects as well. But for me, I knew that I could build multiple houses for a lot less money or I could just concentrate on building, you know, really sustainable homes for about $15,000, 15 to 20,000. So that's what I did. And I knew nothing about building a house. And it was also really important for me to make sure that the work was done in country so that the people that I knew were making money, you know, and that we were providing jobs through this process as well. So I, one of my friends made a lot of friends in Port au Prince, but one organization called hcm, they had been Haitian based organization in Font parisiennes for about 35 years. And the owner's son was an architect and he was a friend of mine, Kirby. And so I approached him about, you know, helping to design and facilitate, you know, these homes. And it kind of started from there. So, so that's, that's where the whole up from, that's how up from under actually started. So after the Facebook cause page I was like, okay, if I can raise 15,000 on Facebook, what could I do if I really tapped into the community? So I talked to my girlfriend Lila, that owned New Reality International, which was the organization that I first went in and we umbrella'd up from under and up from under kind of a literal term for, you know, coming up from under the earthquake. But not just that, but just kind of up from under whatever is holding you down. And so that's how the name was coined, I guess. And we umbrella ed it under her 501C3 and yeah, and then I started reaching out to my community in D.C. and decided I wanted to do a benefit a year later in D.C. at the. And so I reached out to a lot of people and we, we organized this event that happened about 10 months later with some chefs. I was really good friends with a chef named Brian Voltaggio, who is a Maryland based restaurateur. And he basically the reason that we drew the crowd that, that we did for this event was because of him and his friends. And so, you know, so I just had to give a shout out because he is just a really great person. And we did an art auction, a silent, we did a silent auction, we did a photography auction that I reached out to friends that are photographers around the country and they sent work for us to auction off. But I also in the process, through that year's time, I was also doing relief work for other organizations like the Red Cross, usaid, Pan American Development foundation and met some different people through those organizations. And I taught a photography class to some Haitian students and had an idea for them to photograph, and we would auction off some of their photos at the event, too. So, very long story short, that next November, we threw the event in D.C. and raised another 65,000 that night, which was really great. And so we had the first home almost completed, and then we had enough for the next two homes, plus some microfinance loans that we did for small business opportunities and put a couple kids in school and. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So do you still go back?

Nicole Wolf:

I do.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I do.

Nicole Wolf:

Not in the same capacity. You know, the thing that I learned, I thought I learned a lot from being in. In this country, that it's really, really. It's really difficult to really understand the magnitude as an international person of what it's like to be there. It was really important to me when I was documenting for the two years that I documented and lived with these families. So I lived with Susan's family in the tent city. I lived with my friend Pepe's family in Port au Prince and this broken home in Port au Prince. And, you know, my whole point as a photographer and a photo essayist was to, you know, to live as authentically as possible within these families. I didn't stay at hotels at night. I slept where they slept. I ate when they ate. I bathed where they bathed. I walked where they walked every time that I went down there. And I knew that the only way that I would be able to develop a project that was really authentic to, you know, what I was seeing was to not go to a hotel and take a hot shower every night and eat a full meal and wake up refreshed, because the Haitians are very pride, you know, have a lot of pride, and respect is a huge thing for them. And so I learned to speak Creole fluently. And that was a huge part of gaining respect with them, because I could communicate with them in their own language and recognizing that, you know, this was not my home, it was theirs, meaning the country. And that to implement my own ideas about things wasn't necessarily the best way to approach this whole situation. And so I really developed a really great connection with a lot of people, not just with the families that I was working with, but within the communities. And I spent a lot of time getting to know hundreds of people within those communities and developing this project. And I do go back. I spent about five or four and a half years pretty consistently in country. And. But the thing is, is that I'm never going. There's always going to be a separation there. And, you know, I learned very early on that. Well, actually, it wasn't that early on. It was a couple of years in that unless I created sustainability for myself, there wasn't. It wasn't going to be possible for me to create a. For someone else or help to facilitate it for someone else. And so I needed to, I needed to have my life here and figure out how to balance it with my life there. And so I do go back now, some things transpired and, you know, like I said, I learned a lot about myself and I learned a lot about what, what I needed to do to make sure that, you know, I was, you know, being taken care of as well. But it's not, it's not an easy place. I'm trying to figure out how to kind of consolidate everything into a very short amount of time, you know, charity work in other countries. A lot of times we have, you know, I think we, as a community of people, we're very compassionate and we have big old mushy hearts that want to help. Anytime we see a commercial with kids on it, you know, we want to write a check. And a lot of times what happens on the ground too, is large groups of people will go in with good intentions but not realizing that, you know, a lot of times they're stripping away dignity and, and they're not allowing people to create sustainable opportunities for themselves because we just give, give, give, give, give, because it makes us feel good. And so for me, I think that I learned that very quickly that in order for me to best serve the people that I loved was to not allow that to happen and not easy to do. You know, when someone's hungry, you want to give them food. When someone doesn't have shoes, you want to put them on their feet. But in the long term, you know, that's not really helping to build a really strong, independent community of people. You know, sending shoes to a country doesn't allow them to buy them from the local, you know, cobbler or whatnot. You know, all the food aid that goes in, you know, the local agriculture is depleted because people aren't buying, you know, from the farmers in the country. And so there are a lot of things that I think I learned that I've been trying to improve, implement now moving forward. And my very long drawn out way of saying why I don't go there as much as I used to is because I'm not needed. And so there's no reason for me to get on a plane and spend fifteen hundred dollars if I'm just going in to like have fun or to hug a bunch of kids or whatnot where that $1,500 could be used in multiple other facets. And so when I go in now, it's for a very specific purpose. It's not just to go and fill a hole for myself because I miss them or, you know, I want to do something that is based in, you know, kind of a selfish nature. So I'm much more thoughtful about it than I was in the very beginning. But that's based on education. Not necessarily that I wasn't thinking in that way. It's just I didn't know and I think a lot of us don't know so well.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I appreciate your coming in and talking with me today and I think it's great that you were able to build the four houses that you did and are bringing some shining a light on a situation which sounds very complicated and very emotional. I encourage people to go to your website to see some of the images that you put out there. When your book comes out. I will encourage people to read your book and also to see your beautiful photography that you do for us here at Maine Magazine Allport, ME Home Design I've been speaking with Nicole Wolf who is a Maine based commercial photographer who after a volunteer trip to Haiti in 2010, founded the organization Up from under, which aided in building sustainable housing for four Haitian families as well as providing funding for micro finance, job opportunities and education. Thank you so much.

Nicole Wolf:

Thanks for having me.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You have been listening to Love Maine Radio show number 255 beyond Maine, Haiti and Africa. Our guests have included Pamela White and Nicole Wolf. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit Love Maine Rad. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on itunes. Follow me on Twitter as DrLisa and see my running travel, food and wellness photos as bountiful1 on Instagram. We love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our Beyond Maine Borders Haiti and Africa show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.

Pamela White:

Sam.