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J. Ron Byler named MCC U.S. transitional executive director

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By Ed Nyce
June 9, 2010

AKRON, Pa. – The board of directors of Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) U.S. has named J. Ron Byler as the organization’s transitional executive director. He succeeds Rolando Santiago, who has resigned as of August 2010 when his six-year term is complete.

For the next three years, Byler, of Goshen, Ind., will lead MCC U.S. while a long-term executive director is sought. He will be instrumental in guiding MCC U.S. through New Wineskins, an MCC-wide restructuring process.

In addition, Byler will oversee all MCC programs in the United States. He will coordinate four regional offices, as well as the Washington Office and the Akron-based national peace and justice staff. He will continue the priority of working closely with the supporting church denominations of MCC U.S.

The Rev. Leonard Dow, chair of the transitional leadership search committee and vice-chair of the MCC U.S. board, identified Byler’s faith commitment and lifelong understanding of Anabaptist values as foundational to Byler’s selection. He also noted Byler’s experience with organizational change.

“Transition is very much a way that God has gifted Ron,” said Dow. “Ron is sensitive to the dynamics of change, to the stress that accompanies it, while moving forward. ‘Courage’ is a word that was used when people spoke of Ron. In the midst of transition, we need to have courage in order to move forward.”

Dow also noted Byler’s familiarity with MCC’s complex organizational system, and his ability therefore to “hit the ground running” in his new role. Byler has been a board member of MCC U.S. since 2006, serving as treasurer for the past year.

During the past 13 years, Byler worked in leadership roles in Mennonite Church USA and one of its predecessors. Most recently, he was interim executive director for Mennonite Church USA. Earlier vocational experience includes stints with Mennonite Media Ministries and American Friends Service Committee.

Byler said that he was drawn to this role by the opportunity to help shape MCC at an important point in its history. He looks forward to collaborating with MCC Canada and the overall organization in providing “seamless oversight” to domestic and international programs.

“One of the things I value the most about MCC is our commitment to build bridges and connect people across their cultural, political and economic differences,” he said. “And I’m pleased that we respond to immediate needs, but we also work to address the root causes of injustice in this country and around the world.

“MCC is one of the few places where we come together as Mennonites, Brethren in Christ and Amish, regardless of our sometimes differing beliefs, to help others in the name of Christ. When we work together, we are a symbol of God’s intentions for the church and for all of God’s people.”

Born in Lancaster, Pa., Byler graduated with a bachelor of arts in communications from Messiah College, Grantham, Pa. He holds a master of arts in communications from the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Ind., and a master of arts in religion from Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary (now Palmer Seminary), Wynnewood, Pa.

“We are deeply grateful that Ron is available for this key role in the MCC system,” said Ann Graber Hershberger, MCC U.S. board chair. “We are drawn to his love of the church and its mission, his careful approach to issues and his courage in leading change.”

Byler is a member of Eighth Street Mennonite Church in Goshen. He is married to Mim Shirk. They have one adult son, Jesse. Byler will begin his new position in July, allowing for some time of overlap with Santiago. He will continue to live in Goshen.

MCC to help build infrastructure in rural Haiti

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by Linda Espenshade

Mennonite Central Committee’s (MCC) response to Haiti’s devastating earthquake will gradually shift from the capital city of Port-au-Prince to rural communities that are expected to play an integral role in rebuilding the country.

By 2011, MCC’s work will center in the Artibonite Valley, about 1½ hours north of Port-au-Prince. Eight MCC staff members live in Desarmes, a town in the Artibonite Valley, where MCC already has program.

The Haitian government estimates that 162,500 of the 600,000 people that fled Port-au-Prince after the earthquake sought shelter in the Artibonite Department, where the Artibonite Valley is located. The movement of displaced persons to the rural areas puts an economic strain on those communities, but it also presents an opportunity to change some of the underlying problems that made the earthquake so devastating.

MCC Haiti staff and international program development leaders embraced the decentralization approach when they met in Haiti in late March to develop a long-term plan for MCC’s earthquake response. They were acting on the advice of MCC’s partners, MCC Haiti national staff and international workers and Haitian political leaders.

“The majority of our work needs to be outside the city,” said Virgil Troyer, an MCC regional disaster management coordinator, “so the rural areas can have the infrastructure to support the people migrating there and to keep people from moving back into the city.”

Decentralization is a concept espoused by the Haitian government and many international aid organizations, Troyer said. According to The Miami Herald, Haitian President René Préval told President Barack Obama in a March meeting that Haiti needs to adopt decentralization by offering healthcare, education and jobs across the country to avoid overcrowding in Port-au-Prince.

The infrastructure in Port-au-Prince was never set up to handle the population that was living there, Troyer said. Even before the earthquake, the systems for water, electricity, roads and housing could not handle demand. People built houses in ravines and hillsides and on top of each other, which resulted in massive damage during the earthquake, he said.

Yet the capital city has been the center around which the country revolves, Troyer said. It’s the primary place Haitians go to conduct government business, attend universities and good secondary schools and get care at respected hospitals.

As a result, the essential services kept enticing people to move to the capital — until the earthquake. Then about 600,000 people fled the city to find shelter in the country, the Haitian government estimates.

“What the provinces lack is the services of the state,” said Garly Michel, an MCC worker who is from Haiti and works in Port-au-Prince. “If they can get roads, health centers and schools, people could stay there.”

To encourage people to stay there, the government is appealing to international governments and nongovernmental organizations to help establish that infrastructure.

Yoline Jules, a resident of Desarmes, lost three daughters in the earthquake because they were in Port-au-Prince for education.

“There must be decentralization in each region, in each neighborhood so the youth that are still here… can go to school and at least find something to learn about so they don’t leave home,” Jules said in an MCC video interview. “If this was done already, many people that died wouldn’t have died,” she said.

The provinces already have resources for work, said Michel, who is always called Garly. They have water, land and a labor force.

However, in recent years production has dwindled because trade agreements have made imported food cheaper to buy than food grown in Haiti. MCC is focusing some earthquake response money toward increasing profitable production and encouraging local production and consumption.

“For the long vision, there must be a development plan that allows for more food in the provinces,” said Jean Remy Azor, an MCC staff member in Desarmes. “If there is no such vision to augment local production, there will come a time when we depend too much on imports…. Our stomachs will be in the hands of foreign countries.”

MCC’s Haiti response continues with medical teams, engineers and food aid

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by Marla Pierson Lester

Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) medical teams and structural engineers are providing immediate assistance in Haiti now, and distributions of food and relief supplies are ongoing even as MCC plans the next steps in its multiyear response to the Jan. 12 earthquake.

A five-person MCC medical team from Canada is serving in Port-au-Prince March 7 to 20. A three-person medical team from the United States will be in Haiti from March 21 to April 3.

Short-term teams of structural engineers that began arriving in January have examined more than 250 buildings, and MCC is seeking additional engineers who are interested in serving in Haiti this spring.

MCC continues to provide rations of rice, beans, cooking oil, canned meat and spaghetti to nine communities, reaching at least 6,000 people who have been forced from home by the earthquake. It is likely that food is also being given to additional relatives and friends, echoing the strong emphasis on sharing in Haitian culture.

MCC is also providing materials for bamboo and cement-base showers for people living in camps of displaced people. Those living in the camps had identified the need for a private space to wash, especially for women, said Betty Kasdorf, MCC’s Food, Disaster and Material Resources program manager.

MCC relief kits, tarps for shelter, comforters and flat sheets are being distributed as soon as they arrive in Haiti, and additional shipments are on their way to Haiti. Because of expected Haitian government changes that might slow items coming through customs after April, MCC is striving to ship all its initial emergency material aid in the next three to four weeks.

An MCC assessment team visited dozens of people, including MCC partners and government officials, from Feb. 21 to March 6 – hearing from each the enormity of the tasks before them.

MCC’s response will not only address the needs of people within Port-au-Prince, said Ron Flaming, MCC’s director of international programs, but will also include significant efforts to improve the livelihoods and prospects of people who have moved to rural areas.

The assessment team recommends that MCC can meet significant needs in areas including shelter and housing, economic development, food security, education, peace-building and advocacy, health and trauma healing.

“What struck me most is the complexity of the situation,” stressed Kasdorf, who recently visited Haiti as part of the assessment team. “The whole country is affected by this.”

The assessment team found that while food was being distributed within Port-au-Prince, many rural areas had not yet received any assistance and were struggling to share limited food with new arrivals.

Kasdorf said the group heard from nonprofit organizations, from MCC partners and from government officials that what is needed now is for relief, government services, education and jobs to be made more widely available throughout the country.

The scope of this effort will be far greater than rebuilding in a single geographic location.

“It’s a massive, complex humanitarian disaster,” Flaming said. “Right now people are still focused on trying to clean up, on figuring out how to survive today, tomorrow and for the next few months.”

Even as MCC’s response in Haiti continues, planning for the next five years is also well underway, says Flaming. Longer-term planning includes determining which communities to focus on and top priorities. He noted that in MCC’s response to the 2004 Asian tsunami, some projects that had the most lasting impact were not planned until a full year after the tsunami hit.

Paramount in all MCC efforts will be listening to the voices of Haitian people and partners and providing tools to help Haitians recover from the quake and build up their own communities, said Kasdorf.

To learn more about MCC’s response to the Haiti earthquake, go to mcc.org/haitiearthquake.

Marla Pierson Lester is publications and website content editor for MCC.

MCC Perspective: The place of peace in constructing Haiti

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by Rebecca Bartel and Alexis Erkert Depp

As the world rallies in response to the catastrophic earthquake of Jan. 12, 2010, in Haiti, the global Christian family is invited to consider the place of God’s shalom, God’s peace, in the rebuilding of Haitian lives and infrastructure.

Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) is doing just that, as we provide immediate emergency support, but also plan for medium- and long-term efforts.

MCC’s commitment to working toward the holistic well-being of communities and churches around the world stems from God’s vision of peace and dignity for humanity. The prophet Micah describes this as instruction that goes forth from Zion, “the word of the Lord from Jerusalem,” that “they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid.” (Micah 4:4, NRSV)

This vision holds central basic human rights, such as access to food, health care, meaningful employment, security and education.

It also underscores the necessity of justice for the vision to be fulfilled, and the importance of human empowerment.

To understand the strategies needed for Haiti’s construction, it is appropriate to consider the obstacles this country has experienced. Natural disasters are beyond our human control, but the vulnerability of Haiti to their horrific consequences is human-made. There is nothing natural about poverty, hunger and political unrest.

Poverty. Beginning with the exorbitant debt of 150 million francs (the equivalent of $21 billion U.S. today) forced on the population after independence from France in 1804, to more recent structural adjustment policies and conditions on foreign aid, Haiti has been under the heel of external economic policies that exacerbate and systematize poverty.

Until June 2009, Haiti was paying $56 million to $70 million a year to service debts to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Close to 45 percent of that debt was incurred during the U.S.-backed Duvalier dictatorships (1957-1986). Until the forgiveness of $1.2 billion of Haiti’s foreign debt by the IMF and the World Bank last year, the government spent $4 per person on health care and $5 per person on education each year, while paying $5 per person in debt service.

Hunger. Until 1985, Haiti was self-sufficient in rice production – a staple in the modern Haitian diet. Under the tutelage of international financing institutions, such as the World Bank and the IMF, Haiti liberalized its economic policies, opening the door to foreign exports, such as rice.

In 1994 conditions on foreign aid to the country and the reinstatement of ousted President Bertrand Aristide by the U.S. chiseled Haiti’s import tariffs on rice from 35 to 3 percent, the lowest in the region. Because of U.S.-subsidized rice entering the country at half the price of locally produced rice, and because these aid conditions prohibited the Haitian government from subsidizing local production, thousands of rice farmers were put out of business. Many were displaced to urban centers such as Port-au-Prince, where weak infrastructure and the lack of jobs forced millions of people to live in shanty towns and poorly constructed housing.

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton, now U.N. special envoy to Haiti, publicly apologized on March 10 for championing these policies. Quoted in The New York Times, Clinton said, “It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake. I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else.”

Dependence on foreign food imports magnifies misery in times of crisis.

Political unrest. Haiti has a history of foreign military intervention. This usurping of national authority has weakened state institutions and civil society.

While the foreign troop presence in Haiti is decreasing from the early days following the earthquake, there is still confusion about its mandate. MCC’s Haitian partners say they want military personnel to refrain from carrying assault rifles in public, and for Canadian and U.S. troops to clearly articulate their mission within the framework of the United Nations Mission in Haiti.

Principles that guide MCC’s response. God’s vision of shalom, for the people of Haiti to sit unafraid “under their own vines and under their own fig trees,” calls the Christian family to consider the long-term investment that must be made for Haiti to rise out of the crisis it faced even before the earthquake of Jan. 12. In response to this call, MCC has developed internal principles to guide its part in the work.

These include emphasis on local and sustainable development, Haitian-led decision making about development and investment priorities, demilitarization of aid efforts, and immigration policy that respects the Haitian Diaspora and dignifies the migration process.

It calls us to respond immediately, but also to consider how our governments and institutions make policy decisions that victimize the world’s marginalized people.

It calls us to witness to policymakers, faithfully sharing God’s vision for justice, peace and dignity for all people, and encouraging policy decisions that bring life, not death, to our brothers and sisters around the world.

As relief efforts continue, more opportunities will arise to work for human dignity in Haiti. We cannot control the movements of the earth, but we can control how our voice is heard in government.

The Haitian people call us to share our prophetic voice, as does Isaiah 62:1:

“For Zion’s sake, I will not be silent.” “Jan m’ renmen mòn Siyon sa a! Se pou m’ pale.”

See washington.mcc.org/haiti for more information about the Christian advocacy principles that undergird MCC’s response to the Haiti earthquake.

Rebecca Bartel is MCC policy analyst for Latin America and the Caribbean. Alexis Erkert Depp is MCC policy analyst for Haiti.

Pastor Lesly Bertrand reflects on strong faith of Haitians in MCC Podcast

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Pastor Lesly Bertrand, pastor of Assemblée de la Grace Mennonite Church (Grace Assembly Network) in Haiti, speaks about the strong faith of his congregation and many Haitians. Yet their practical needs are many. MCC and Mennonites from the Dominican Republic are helping to meet their needs.

Strong in Faith (click to listen)
Running time: 3:29