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V.I. Donations Build New School in Haiti

Students at the IMECT school near Petit Goave, Haiti, went back to school this month in a new classroom building built by a St. Croix charity run by local artists, who used a $10,000 grant from the Virgin Islands Haitian Relief Fund to get the project done.

The building isn’t quite finished – there are doors and windows to install, and the roof isn’t quite done. But it’s better than the temporary plywood structure they’ve been using for three years, and that was better than the rubble they’d been left with after their island nation was devastated by an earthquake in 2010.

Mandy Thody, a St. Croix artist and one of the leaders of the charity 100 Percent for Haiti, said the funds had been raised by a telethon and donations after the earthquake. Her group has applied for them before, but never received a grant. Now, withe the fund being wrapped up, she applied one more time and was successful.

The key to her success this time, she said, was that the project was ready to go, and one requirement of the grant was that the funds had to be spent immediately.

100 Percent for Haiti received the grant in September and the funds have already been spent, she said. And the schoolchildren are already using the building.

IMECT is a first through sixth grade school with about 200 students. It had originally been built on a concrete slab with a slab roof, in the hopes that a second floor would eventually be built. The earthquake turned the building into rubble. All that was left was the original foundation.

"Nothing was left of it except the foundation," Thody said. "And on one end a very small concrete back room, the original office."

After the quake a "very kind anonymous donor" gave them funds to build the temporary plywood school, where students have been taught ever since. That’s been the school for three years.

"Now we’ve been able to almost finish it, using the original foundation," Thody said. "It was put together within the last month."

As it happens, the builder of the original school is the father of the school’s headmistress, and working with Thody they came up with a plan for a building that used the same footprint, squeezing as much school out of the $10,000 as they could. The biggest change is a gallery that runs around the building, giving students a place to stand out of the sun or rain.

The group is raising an additional $6,000 to complete the project, and is a third of the away toward its goal, with another $4,000 to go, according to the website, www.100percent4haiti.org.

Since 2010 the group has raised about $50,000, she said, which has gone to support the salaries and costs of operating the school, including fuel, water, and salt and spices for preparing the rice and beans supplied by another organization.

"We’ve not been able to raise money to also give the children milk," Thody said, but they are still hopeful.

Most of the children are undersized, she said, because their diet is lacking.

"If they get anything to eat at home in the morning evening it’s usually just rice, or a boiled yam or plantain," she said. "A lot of the water there is no good or they have to walk to the springs to get it."

Thody said she started 100 Percent for Haiti, "then I roped my friends in." They rely on a small database of other artists – Thody is a sculptor and painter – in the U.S. and British Virgin Islands. Sales of their donated artworks fund the bulk of their work. The last sale was in April. They also send monthly reports of the school’s progress – 95 percent of their students successfully completed their classes last year – and occasional letters asking for more donations.

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