Ladies and Gentlemen,

Good evening!

My name is Serge Fontaine and I am the Founder of Haiti Environmental Rescue Organization (HERO). It is a great privilege for me to stand here tonight, to welcome everyone of you to HERO’S first fundraising event benefiting the environment and the ecosystem of Haiti. Your presence here tonight is invigorating. It spurs me to move forward with the agenda of this organization. And my sincere hope is that this first contact between us is nothing but the beginning of a beautiful marriage in which you and I, will vie for a peaceful, vibrant, prosperous, and greener Haiti.

Before I go on talking about Haiti and its deforestation saga and how we are planning on resolving the problem, please bear with me for a while if I am moving a little bit away from my topic.

Tennis star Arthea Gibson, the first black woman to win the Wimbledon Cup in England, once said, "regardless of what your accomplishment is in life, directly or indirectly someone helped you."

Tonight, I am attesting that there is a great deal of truth in Gibson’s statement, for I know that I would not be standing here in front of you today without the support, the participation, and the tenacity of my family. And so to my family I say many thanks, even if, in the process, I had to endure a lot of nagging, but your help was invaluable to me and I am pleased with the end result.

I must also acknowledge the Secretary of HERO, Lisa Perez, as well as our accountant Mr. Maurice Bullett for their pro-bono services to this organization, simply because they believe in what we stand for. To Lisa and Maurice, from the bottom of my hearth, I say thank you.

And you, forming the public, I do not want you to think that your gesture will be left unnoticed. For, if this event is thus far a success, it is because of your participation. And so, I would ask to join me, to give to the person next to you and to yourself a warm hand that you all deserve.

When it comes to the rebuilding of our homeland, Haiti, the participation of all Haitians and suporters of Haiti is imperative. Each one of us has within something wonderful that can be explored and given to the cause. But because of the lack of support and encouragement, some of our people never get to become a participant in the shaping of our country. Desirous to bring these Haitians to the fore front as direct participants and contributors in the affairs of their county, under the leadership of Alderman Lionel Jean Baptiste, an umbrella organization being called Haitian Congress to Fortify Haiti was formed. I am proud to say that HERO is operating in close collaboration and under the auspices of the Haitian Congress.

When I left Haiti in 1977 to migrate to America, the intent was for me to return with something to give back to Haiti. But, what I should do to help was a big question to which I have spent many years searching for the answer. The response to my inquiry was indirectly suggested to me while watching TV, I stumbled upon one of the documentaries of the late Jacques Cousteau, when he was stressing the phenomenon of deforestation in Haiti and the ensuing problems.

This program was heart breaking. For the first time, I saw how badly my country was suffering. It was astonishing to me to see acres and acres of land completely deprived of their vegetation. The question that came into my mind was, how do our people live? Yet, this was happening around the time of Jean-Claude Duvalier, when things were a little bit better.

After watching the documentary I knew what I could embark on to help Haiti. Within me, at that moment, a flame, fueled by anger and determination, was ignited. I knew then that I had to do something to fight deforestation in Haiti as well as the ignorance that leads to these conditions. And so, the next day I started building my network until HERO was formed.

Now, what lead me to wage a war against deforestation and why is it necessary to do so?

As you may be aware, energy is one of the most important commodities required to satisfy the needs of mankind. In developing countries, charcoal is used mainly as a domestic fuel for cooking and heating, but it is also an important industrial fuel. In those countries with abundant forest resources, the exportation of charcoal can be a profitable industry. In a country like Haiti with a population of 10 million people, these practices have take a toll on the forest lands. Some experts predict that most of the trees will be non-existent in less than 20 years if nothing is done to slow down or completely stop the uncontrolled harvesting of trees for fuel.

Also, forests provide essential benefits and services that protect and enhance human health, productivity, and quality of life.

Forests protect humans from potential harmful viruses and infectious diseases, and even provide raw materials to cure human illnesses. By sustaining the delicate balance between parasites and hosts, predator and prey, forest ecosystem can hold some potential harmful viruses and diseases at bay. Additionally, the carbon sequestration function of forests is of critical importance due to enormous implications of global warming threatening mankind. The heat also fuels hurricanes, thereby, increasing their intensity to become more potent. Forests help to mitigate the effects of global warming by consuming carbon dioxide while producing oxygen.

The indiscriminate cutting down of trees, to produce wood charcoal for households, and wood fuel for the small industry in Haiti, has created a problem that has exceeded crisis proportion. And the mudslides of Mapou and the devastation inflicted upon Gonaives by hurricane Jeanne point to a culprit, one that charcoal producers, wood fuel sellers and users are apparently oblivious to deforestation.

How do we plan on resolving the problem?

To satisfy the needs of the Haitian consumers in energy, trees are cut down to amount to 450,000 tons every year. Although charcoal is made out from the smallest percentage of the wood harvested, it represents a stable industry of $80 million US dollars per year.

When we began with this project, although we were leery about specifics, we knew then that another alternative to wood was the key to the solution of deforestation.

After many years of research, we were able to determine that bamboo is the best viable solution to resolve permanently the deforestation problem in Haiti.

Why bamboo?

Bamboo, which belongs to the grass category, is the fastest growing plant on earth. There are over 1000 species around the world and some can grow 1/3 faster than the fastest growing plant. Because of this huge variety, bamboo is the ideal plant to grow on any type of soil, including the overgrazing ones.

Our aim is to go to Haiti in view of establishing and maintaining a bamboo nursery, to respond to planting need projects present and future. Through this nursery, we will establish an inclusive system, destined to do of the creators of the problem part of the solution.

Since we do not have enough time to enumerate the 5000 ways bamboo can be utilized, we will simply state how Haiti can greatly benefit from the adoption of bamboo, as opposed to other plants, to improve our environment.

Bamboo is a peerless erosion control agent. Its net -like root system creates an effective mechanism for watershed protection, stitching the soil together along fragile riverbanks, deforested areas, places prone to earthquakes and mudslides. Bamboo greatly reduces rain runoffs, preventing massive erosion and keeping up twice as much water in the watershed.

Bamboo is one the strongest building materials. Using bamboo to replace timber gives to the young trees a chance to grow and adorn our mountains and valleys once more. With 10-30% annual increase in bio-mass, versus 2-5% for trees, bamboo creates greater yields of raw material for use. Bamboo generates a crop every year.

Bamboo is the fastest growing canopy for the re-greening of degraded lands, and its stands release 35% more oxygen than equivalent tree stands. Some even sequester up to 12 tons of carbon dioxide from the air per hectare.

Nutritional Values

To further protect our bio-mass for a faster regeneration of our forests, Haitian artisans can be educated to re-direct their art around bamboo. A market can also be generated as well for Haitian products derived from bamboo.

Through the propagation method, after having secured the need of the small industry in energy, our leitmotiv is to produce enough bamboo to be transformed into charcoal for the households, thus alleviating considerably the demands imposed on wood for fuel.

These are a few ways, among the many, bamboo can be put to our services without having any negative effect on the environment. If you ever dreamed of clean air, green mountains and valleys, true socioeconomic change for many of our people, bamboo is the way to go.

Ladies and Gentlemen, when looking at the evolution of the Haitians throughout the years, from 1797 up to today, with respect to the outcome, there is no need to be a rocket scientist to realize that the demoralizing shock of negativism and individualism have contributed a great deal to hurt us tremendously. Some of us, because of that, have lost our love for one another, the desire to come to the rescue of a brother or a sister in need, and the willingness to come together as a people, to save our country from reaching the bottomless pit of the abysmal shame. Regardless of what the past holds, the truth is that the potential is still in us.

The triumph of our journey toward the future, as a people, depends on our willingness and ability to lay down our differences for the sake of peace and progress. At this stage, our devastated country is in need of everything and of all of us. The support we need to rebuild our country will never come from the outside world alone, but from ourselves. After all, we need to understand that "We are each other’s harvest, we are each other’s business, we are each other’s magnitude and bond." as Gwendoline Brooks once said. And when we finally realize the advantages of unified action, we will be surprised to see what we can accomplish in our homeland in one day of labor.

It is my hope to come in front of you, next time, with a list of work that has been done and to lay down what we will be working on in the near future.

By way of closing I will simply say, while we lay submission to the absolute truth, unity begets power, we remain confident, however, that in this endeavor, wise Haitians and supporters will be swayed to make the right choice.

Thank you.