Skip to content
Education
Link copied to clipboard

School seeks to teach Haitians how to help themselves

Kristen Hertzog was 16 when she discovered why people say Haiti is a place that can steal your heart while breaking it.

Kristen Hertzog was 16 when she discovered why people say Haiti is a place that can steal your heart while breaking it.

A typical adolescent, worried about "boys and pimples," she had traveled to the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere with a church group from her hometown of Edison, N.J.

One day, a Haitian woman rushed up to the teenager on the street, thrust a wad of dirty towels into her arms, then tried to run away. She did not get far.

"I started screaming, 'She just gave me her baby! Stop her!' " Hertzog recalled.

Now 38, Hertzog is a former actress and model who, with her husband, runs a bed and breakfast on the Ephrata, Pa., farm that his Mennonite family bought from the William Penn family in 1786.

But the improbable part of Hertzog's resumé is rooted in that first traumatic trip to Haiti. Besides adopting a child from there, Hertzog founded a nonprofit, tuition-free, online vocational school soon after the 2010 earthquake. Haitian Connection Network is dedicated to "building a better-educated, more self-reliant Haiti, one student at a time."

Filling the void

The seed for Haitian Connection was planted in 2004, while Hertzog was volunteering in a Haitian high school.

By then, she had been organizing humanitarian trips to Haiti for five years, leading friends from Sight and Sound Theater in Lancaster, the largest Christian theater in the nation, where she was a supporting lead actress. She was married to Scott Hertzog, a high school English teacher, and they were in the process of adopting their daughter, Taicha, now 10. Their son, Kiefer, 5, was born during that arduous four-year process.

A Haitian student approached Hertzog after class and showed his arm, horribly burned at the plastics factory where he worked. He was quitting school because he had been fired and could not pay the tuition. "Madame Hertzog," he said, "school is not free in Haiti."

She already knew that, just as she knew that Haiti - once a rich French colonial paradise, the "jewel of the Antilles" - was now a deforested, destitute purgatory, lacking water and sewage systems, electricity, health care, and public schools.

Her friends gave the boy, Esperando, $300 they had planned to spend on souvenirs. After he graduated, Hertzog raised $1,500 to put him through one of Haiti's primitive computer training schools.

He is now married with two children, working for a humanitarian organization, and putting his brother through high school.

By 2010, when an earthquake wrecked Haiti's tenuous higher education system, Hertzog told her husband she wanted to help fill the void.

"I knew there were more kids like Esperando," she said, "motivated young people who, with just a little help, could change their lives."

Philanthropists

To create a virtual school with virtually no money - the first year's budget was about $15,000 - Hertzog turned to family and friends.

But she was also fortunate to find patrons in two entrepreneurial philanthropists.

The first was Shai Reshef, who made his fortune by building up a tiny Israeli test-preparation firm and then selling it to test-prep titan Kaplan Inc. in 2005.

In 2009, he launched the University of the People, the world's first tuition-free online university for the poor in the developing world. It now has 1,500 students in 130 countries, and partners include New York University, Hewlett-Packard, and Intel.

Hertzog read about Reshef and managed to get a meeting. Soon, they had a deal. University of the People would provide online curriculum and exams toward associate's degrees in computer science and business administration. Hertzog would provide the physical space.

"Kristen is one of the most efficient and dedicated nonprofit directors I've ever seen," Reshef said. "She hardly makes a living; all her money goes to Haiti. She's amazing."

Nonetheless, she was hard-pressed to come up with the basic infrastructure: rental space with electric generators, backups, Internet service, technical support, building security, running water.

Seeking advice, she met with Joel Trimble, an American expatriate who heads Haiti for Christ Ministries. He also produces and stars in a Creole Christian TV travel show, and his family owns Haiti Satellite, a provider of high-speed Internet service.

He harrumphed a bit, then gave her a room, rent-free, with everything she needed to launch Haitian Connection.

"We had 10 kids crammed in there elbow to elbow," she recalled, "but it was perfect for the first year."

Resentment

Like Hertzog, people worldwide were moved by the post-earthquake images of death and destruction.

But despite $3 billion in private donations and an influx of thousands of "non-governmental organizations," Haiti shows few signs of improvement, and many signs of resentment toward the charities.

"Few could have predicted two years later the long and deep thread of anger toward NGOs that now runs through Haitian society," Marjorie Valbrun, a Haitian-born journalist and former Inquirer reporter, wrote this year.

Hertzog agrees. "A lot of the money that was donated didn't reach the people, or it went into activities that were not sustainable," she said.

Haitian Connection is about helping Haitians help themselves. Its 40 students are now well on their way to marketable skills. Hertzog, who runs the school from Ephrata and travels there quarterly, has no trouble placing them in internships or jobs because NGOs are eager to hire them.

The sad part is that the school is not at full capacity.

Last year, Haitian Connection moved into a new, cotton-candy-pink stucco building. The school can accommodate 80 students, working in shifts. It has a waiting list of 100. But with a budget of about $60,000 this year, Hertzog can't add to the enrollment until she can cover the infrastructure costs, $1,600 per student per year.

"It's a hard sell," she said. "But think about it: If four people give just $40 a month for a year, that covers another student. Forty dollars is pizza and a movie!"

Or a better-educated, more self-reliant Haitian.

For More Information

To learn more about Haitian Connection Network, visit www.haitianconnectionnetwork.org

EndText