Solar on Haiti

The following story is about Shash Broxson’s Team Game in the World, created in Landmark Education’s Team, Management and Leadership Program, to send solar ovens and solar water pasteurizers to Haiti.

Shash is an Earth’s loving soul. She has always travelled, and not to just tourist destinations. “The idea of who we are as a world, expands when you travel and visit villages, and we owe it to ourselves to get to know those places”, says Shash.

It is difficult to assess in which one of all her journeys did she came across with the idea of sending solar ovens and solar water pasteurizers to Haiti. It seems as if it is a project that has been “cooking” in her soul for a long time (perhaps since her trip to Haiti in 1991), just as the food in her ovens.

Like a recipe, her experience with solar ovens while living in a wilderness situation in Arizona for five years might be an ingredient that played an important part in designing this project.

What is clear is that her participation in Landmark’s Team, Management and Leadership Program, gave form to “Solar on Haiti”, her Game in the World. Her love for a harmonious way of living has taken the form of a transnational project. By facilitating the access to these solar ovens, Shash is opening a door to a life of learning, sustainability, dignity and self-respect for Lory, a small village in northern Haiti. The use of solar ovens and water pasteurizers, will make it possible for Haitian people in that community to stop deforesting their surroundings for firewood for cooking, will reduce the possibility of children falling into cooking fires, will free women’s time, and will make drinkable water available at a minimum effort.

Through her project, Shash has built a community those bridges between New York, Florida, and Arizona, all the way to Haiti. This is just the beginning. She envisions her ovens and water pasteurizers reaching not one, but several villages in Haiti, and others in various countries in W. Africa.

By being in the TMLP, and playing this game, Shash has learned the power of team at a new level. Her friendship with Jessianna has reached a new scope, and through her work in the airlines industry, Jessiana will facilitate the transportation of the ovens and the water pasteurizers to far reaching northern Haiti. Pierre Leroy, Shash’s longtime friend from New York, has supported her immensely not only by assisting her and her team in raising half of the funds for the project, but also by bringing into the game the possibility of doing it through the Haitian People Support Project. Included in Shash’s team is a Church community in New York, and Pierre’s brother, Frantz.

Shash’s Game in the World has impacted not only people in the Cap Haitian region, of Haiti, but her own life. “It has opened a new level within me of relatedness with people. In the past, I was judgmental of myself and of others. In fact, I was very hard on myself.” Now, by playing with integrity, whenever results are not achieved Shash sees it as a failure of performance, rather than failure of her or others as human being.

One can hear she has also a new way of being grateful. Lovingly and in peace she admits “I am becoming someone I am more pleased to be with, I react to people differently, I honor people differently, and I enjoy being one to whom people are attracted because of the energy and presence that I am with them and to them”.

Written by Paola Bortoluz. Edited by Sandra Villacis.