How engineering and chocolate are building a stronger Haiti, Part 3: The Flood

(Go to Part 1 : Go to Part 2 : Go to Part 4 : Go to Video)

A view out the back of Askanya’s hired tap-tap. Floods are common in Haiti. Cities have little or no drainage systems and water from the deforested mountains rushes into the lower-lying cities after a storm.

Story: Gabe Cherry
Photos and Video: Marcin Szczepanski

Outskirts of Cap Haitien, Haiti
Saturday, 11 p.m.

“OK, adventure!” The weary crew looks up as Askanya’s co-founder and University of Michigan industrial operations and engineering alum Corinne Joachim Sanon announces herself, her face emerging from the rainy night. She budgeted three hours for the 70-mile trip from the harvest site to Askanya’s fermenting and drying center. That was seven hours ago.

Torrential rain has turned the road ahead into a river, stranding the team at a gas station near the city of Cap Haitien. To make matters worse, the driver of one of the two hired tap-taps has given up and turned back.

A member of the Askanya crew watches a volunteer direct traffic in the flooded streets outside Cap Hatien.

The 10-member crew is now shoehorned into the back of the remaining vehicle along with 14 buckets of raw cacao beans. The cacao is snugly sealed against the rain blowing in. The crew, not so much. Soaked to the skin, they sit on benches, buckets and each other.

To stay fresh, the beans need to get to the fermentation and drying center by 8 a.m. It’s not going to be easy. The road is flooded and the clock is ticking.

Outside, the gas station’s lights lend a glow to pounding raindrops. The station is closed but they’ve left the lights on for security, drawing a swarm of stranded buses and motorcycles. The heavy air smells of charcoal smoke and sodden travelers. Creole rap music plays from a motorcycle’s radio.

Packed into a tap-tap, the Askanya team waits out the storm. They set out from Ouanaminthe at 6:00 p.m. Friday, spending the night in a village near the harvest site. They are now in hour 29 of the harvest trip.

Somehow, Sanon has found dinner for the crew. She passes out a stack of Styrofoam take-out containers filled with fried chicken and cold spaghetti. She also brings news: the storm is even worse than it looks. They may be stuck here until morning. She grins wryly behind her red-framed glasses. “We promised you adventure,” she says, and produces a stack of paper napkins, unaccountably dry.

The rain eventually lets up and they decide to push through the flood to a hotel Sanon has secured in nearby Cap Haitien. It takes them nearly two hours to travel the two miles to the hotel. They arrive at 2 a.m. and are back on the road at 6 to get their cacao to the fermentation and drying center in time.

Built from scratch by Sanon and her team, the center sits at the end of a narrow dirt path that winds across fields and farmland. Lugging a bucket in each hand, the crew carries the cacao over a muddy creek past cows, chickens and pigs toward the plastic-covered drying tunnels ahead. As they approach, the smell of fermenting cacao gets stronger: a decidedly un-chocolatey odor somewhere between spoiled fruit and vinegar. At long last, they dump the cacao into a coffin-sized wooden box.

Sanon has traveled a long, difficult road to Askanya’s fermentation and drying center. Drying time varies according to factors like humidity, wind speed and weather. These beans are from an earlier harvest and are nearly dry.

The center’s concrete floor and hand-built wooden structures look simple. But they took months to design with the help of a cacao consultant from Hawaii. First the cacao ferments, sandwiched between layers of burlap and banana leaves, for a week. The beans are then transferred to wooden drying racks where they dry for two to three weeks, taking on a brown color that begins to look like chocolate.

Fermenting beans between layers of burlap and banana leaves improves their flavor. It’s a time-honored trick.

Careful fermenting and drying is a key component in Sanon’s system. It enhances the flavor of the cacao and helps Askanya squeeze maximum value from every bean. That’s what funds the labor-intensive harvesting and transportation process and nets the farmers a good price for their cacao.

Building the center took months of hard labor; there’s no electricity, so all the work had to be done with hand tools. The concrete for the floor had to be pushed over that same dirt path, one wheelbarrow at a time, by a small army of hired help that Sanon recruited from the streets of Ouanaminthe. Askanya pays private security guards to watch the center twenty-four hours a day.

For the harvesting crew, this trip has been even more grueling than most. But James Dobson Belizaire, Askanya’s head of production, takes it in stride. He sees his role leading the team as more than a job. And like the beans themselves, he has travelled a long and difficult road to get here.

Askanya’s 24-hour security guard watches the company’s head of production, James Dobson Belizaire, right, as he helps build a new drying rack. Askanya is expanding the center to process cacao from a planned on-site plantation.

Belizaire grew up in Cite Soleil, one of the most dangerous and destitute slums in Port-au-Prince. His family was poor — some nights, dinner was a stalk of sugarcane. Only about half of Cite Soleil children attend school. Belizaire’s parents saw that he was bright and made sure he was one of them.

Belizaire moves fermented beans from a fermentation box to a drying rack. His family fled the Port-au-Prince slum of Cite Soleil for northern Haiti when he was young; then-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide began arming street children with guns in an attempt to tighten his grip on power and it became too dangerous to stay.

In 2007, he was one of 4,900 students who applied for admission to Universite d’Etat d’Haiti’s business school. Of those, 300 passed the exam. Belizaire was among them.

Now 28, he makes about $450 per month, an impressive salary in a country where per-capita GDP is $863. Belizaire sees the job as a way to help Haiti reclaim its agricultural heritage and make a product that shows people — inside Haiti and elsewhere — what Haitians are capable of.

“There is so much cacao grown in Haiti, but before Askanya, all our chocolate came from the USA. Now that has changed. I’m helping the people who plant that cacao get more money, I’m helping the other workers get money and I’m promoting the culture of Haiti. I think we can transform Haiti by growing and processing more food here, and I plan to be a part of it.”

Part 4: The Factory

Part 4 visits the Askanya factory in the border town of Ouanaminthe to see how Sanon turned a modest house into an engine for opportunity. Learn how creative engineering is overcoming obstacles and helping Haitians improve their lives.

Read it here.

In the meantime, visit the Les Chocolateries Askanya website or learn how you can help Michigan Engineers build the infrastructure that’s desperately needed in the developing world.

Watch the video: If you missed the video that’s included with Part 1, you can watch it here.

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