Profile: Mission in Haiti: Meet Mark Hare and Jenny Bent

Mark Hare and Jenny Bent’s ministry with Haitian people transcends international borders. Since 2004, Mark has worked helping Haitians learn to grow a lot of food on a small amount of land. Jenny began working with the organization as a volunteer after their marriage in 2008, but in 2012 their ministry base moved just across the border to Barahona, Dominican Republic. Mark and Jenny have two small children. Mark continues his work in Haiti. In 2011 Jenny came under mission appointment and began a new ministry with Haitians in the Dominican Republic. Jenny helps the Evangelical Dominican Church with its health ministries in the bateys, company towns largely populated by Haitian sugarcane workers.

Mark works with the Mouvman Peyizan Papay (MPP) in the Central Plateau of Haiti. MPP is a grassroots movement whose goal is to help small farmers improve their living conditions. It began in 1973 in the small community of Papaye.  Mark works with MPP member farmers, advising them on ways to increase food production. His work helps farmers provide adequate nutrition for their families and generate income by selling excess crops. Mark has trained a cadre of Haitian agricultural specialist—Road to Life Crews—that continual teach and share agricultural information with farmers. In 2012 Mark and a Community Leadership Team will begin to “Join Hands” with other farm organizations to share the successful experience of the Road to Life Crews in other regions of Haiti.

Jenny helps the Evangelical Dominican Church with their health clinics and with the development of its program to train health care leaders and develop community based health care programs. The Evangelical Dominican Church operates a community health program in bateys, company towns where sugarcane workers live. Many of these workers are from Haiti and work long days for low wages and live in conditions that often lack basic services and health care.

Mark’s work in Haiti demands resourcefulness. One of the most popular agricultural techniques he teaches involves making garden plots and red worm composting inside discarded auto tires. “In the dry season, there is no rain for five to seven months and people run out of food,” Mark says. “So the tires are a way that they can produce something even during the time when they normally couldn’t.” This and other productive practices developed by MPP and the Road to Life crews helped rural Haitians feed family members and friends who fled to the countryside after the 2010 earthquake devastated Port au Prince.

Grace Covenant has had an ongoing relationship with Mark and now Jenny since 2007. Bill Gettys traveled to Haiti in 2009 to help set up a medical laboratory for Jenny’s volunteer work in Papaye, where she is a medical technologist. In 2011 GCPC funded a water project with Mark to help provide water to home rain water collection cisterns to increase production during the dry season. Details about this project is reported in Mark’s August/September2012 Blog.