This article was written by guest author and ASU student, Colton Shone.
- Alicia Marseille waits to hear a response from her husband, Jean, who was in Haiti during the earthquake on Jan. 12, 2009. Photo by Colton Shone.
Waiting
Alicia Marseille’s iPhone rings in the middle of our conversation … She glances at the incoming call number. It’s foreign. Instinctively, she knows it’s her husband Jean, who is Haitian, calling from the Dominican Republic. Marseille presses the green accept button on the touch screen.
Frantically putting the phone to her ear, she answers.
“Jean?”
No response.
“Jean? Are you there? I can’t hear you. Jean?”
Static.
Looking defeated with a strained smile, she sets the phone back on the kitchen counter.
“He’ll call again,” she says hopefully. “At least I know he made it.”
She walks into the kitchen and continues feeding her 1-year-old son Ethan.
An eye-opener
Marseille always wanted to make a difference in the world. She longed to expose the social ills of third world countries and raise global awareness about the problems. To make her dream into reality, she graduated with a degree in international development from Miami University of Ohio in 2001. After that, it was off to see the world.
“My first trip was to Africa about 12 years ago,” she remembers. “It was a real eye-opening experience.”
From giving clean clothes and water to orphans in Africa to volunteering at local hospitals in South America, Marseille knew she was doing exactly what she was meant to do. However, she says it was her first trip to Haiti that changed her life forever.
“The poverty,” she whispers. “I’ve never seen poverty anywhere else in the world like I’ve seen in Haiti.”
Shocked to see so many people living in slums. Shocked to see so many people wearing rags. Shocked to see so many children without mothers and fathers. The poorest country in the Western hemisphere captured Marseille’s heart.
“I was amazed,” Marseille says. “These people had nothing, but they were so happy and so alive.”
Happy-go-lucky
Marseille went back to school and received her master’s degree in international business in 2006 from Western International University. Armed with new knowledge and a “gung-ho” attitude, it was time to take the next big step in her life. Newly married to her husband Jean, whom she met through an organization that helps Haitian orphans, Marseille says she was on top of the world.
“We had a lot of similarities,” she says of her relationship with Jean. “We’re both very passionate about helping other people.”
She and her husband started their business Ka Bell LLC. The phrase Ka Bell, she explains, means “can be beautiful” in Haitian Creole. Marseille says she decided to tap into the coffee culture of America by importing and distributing Haitian coffee beans to buyers all over the country.
In the beginning of their business, Marseille says she had to get the proper certification and fill out a lot of paperwork. But she says the hardest part was gaining the trust of Haitian coffee growers. It didn’t help that she was a woman trying to do business with men in a patriarchal society. The farmers would ignore her. They wouldn’t look her in the eye and they wouldn’t answer her questions. She didn’t take no for an answer.
Marseille eventually gained the trust of the 25,000 farmers in a cooperative who work in the countryside outside of Port au Prince, near the Dominican border.
“[We] started out because we wanted to create some economic activity in Haiti,” she says. “This activity affects all the farmers and their family, people working the port system and packaging.”
At its peak Marseille was importing 20,000-pound containers and selling them in days. As if stimulating the coffee growing and export economy wasn’t enough, Marseille decided to use some of the profits from her business to help other Haitians establish small businesses of their own.
“The whole idea behind the coffee business was the ‘give a man a fish he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish he’ll eat for a lifetime’ philosophy,” she says.
To date, she helped start a string of Internet cafes. “By helping them start through micro-loan programs (there isn’t a credit program in Haiti) the entrepreneurs were able to sustain and not only open one, but other cafes,” says Marseille.
She says they also helped an organization set up a computer lab to help with ESL training. In two years, she helped launch seven businesses.
Everything was going smoothly. Marseille was importing 20,000 pounds of coffee beans and selling them in days. Business owners she helped were beginning to pay back the micro-loans. Then a massive earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale, the biggest earthquake recorded in the area, devastated the country on Jan. 12.
Her world crumbled
“About an hour after the earthquake hit, my husband’s brother called,” she says silently. “All of his family lives in Haiti.”
Her husband left Phoenix on Saturday for the hard-hit country to help volunteer at a local hospital. Jean is a nurse who works at Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center.
“He told me he’d call when he’d get to Dominican Republic. Friends through a church are going to get into Haiti,” she says. “He’s supposed to be back on Sunday.”
Besides the one call from her brother-in-law, who said he was okay, there was no word on the rest of Jean’s family.
“It’s devastating,” she says looking at the floor with tears at the corner of her eyes. “It’s just very hard to know that he’ll never probably hear from everybody. They’re burying people in mass graves. People he’ll never hear from again.”
It turns out a hospital she and her husband used to volunteer in, collapsed.
Marseille avoids the news coverage altogether. She says she can’t bring herself to see images of dead bodies piled in the streets, or mass graves; she doesn’t want to see people sleeping outside because they’ve lost their homes. She says she can only assume the businesses she helped to launch are destroyed.
Ka Bell will also suffer. Just before the quake hit, she had placed an order for 25,000 pounds of coffee beans.
“There’s no way to get that coffee out now, the ports are destroyed. There’s no way to get the paperwork if I wanted to restart because the place where the documents were, the Haitian National Palace, collapsed,” she says.
Silver lining
As of this writing, the American Red Cross reports receiving more than $25 million in U.S. text-message donations for on-going relief efforts in Haiti. More than $112 million dollars have been raised.
Celebrities, former U.S. presidents and large-corporation executives are using their high-profile statuses to raise more money and amp up global awareness.
“With the bad that has happened we also have to try to see the good,” Marseille says optimistically. “It’s going to give Port au Prince a chance to rebuild.”
She hopes that the country will be more prosperous in the future.
“Haiti has a bad reputation because it’s so poor, but the culture is so beautiful and rich,” she says. “This country, as tiny as it is, is tough.”
As many organizations and people have done, Marseille has started a matching grant program for relief aid through Friends of the Orphans.
Although she doesn’t know what lies ahead, she says she just has to stay positive.
Contact the reporter at Colton.Shone@asu.edu
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