"If your plan is for a year, plant rice. If your plan is for ten years, plant a tree. If your plan is for one hundred years, educate children."
Confucius
On January 12, 2010, when a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti just outside its capital Port-au-Prince killing an estimated 200,000 people and leaving 1.5 million homeless, Shad St. Louis was attending to his guidance counseling duties at Middletown High School in Orange County, New York. Shad only became aware of the devastating quake when his sister called him at work to give him the news.
For Shad, the earthquake wasn’t a tragic event happening in some faraway place. It had struck the home of his childhood – the village of Sibert in the Croix-des-Bouquets community about 7 miles outside of Port-au-Prince. Shad had spent the first 12 years of his life there. Although none of his relatives living in Haiti had died in the quake, many had lost their homes.
By the time the quake struck Haiti, Shad was no stranger to natural disasters. Five years earlier, when he was a student at Mercy College, Hurricane Katrina had flooded 80% of New Orleans. Shad immediately organized a relief effort on campus. He collected donated goods and had them shipped to victims of the hurricane through a local church. School officials were so inspired by Shad’s efforts that they raised funds to fly him and a team of students and faculty members to New Orleans to work alongside FEMA in the removal of debris from houses.
Shad took the organizational skills he had developed and immediately put them to work for the victims of the Haiti earthquake. In February of 2010, wanting to assess the damage on the ground for himself, Shad flew into the Dominican Republic, traveled to Sibert and saw first-hand the destruction left by the quake. When he returned to the States, he organized benefit concerts, collected donations and flew back down to Haiti in March to distribute close to 3 tons of donated goods. While Shad was in Haiti overseeing distribution of the donations, he started talking to the people of Sibert and asking them what their needs were. Many people told Shad that what their community really needed was a school.
Why were people, many of whom had lost their homes, asking for a school? Because, in Haiti, 90% of schools are private, meaning many parents can’t afford to send their children to school. And so, Shad was committed to building a school that would provide not only a great education but also be tuition free.
To accomplish this, he was going to need some help. Surveying the relief efforts in Haiti at the time, Shad decided to reach out to Jonathan Nash Glynn. Through his organization Wings Over Haiti, Jonathan had been flying medical supplies, food and aid from Port-au-Prince to remote areas of the country. Impressed by Jonathan’s work, Shad sent him an email, not really expecting to hear back. But the idea of building a school for the children of Haiti appealed to Jonathan, who joined Shad’s team and became instrumental in raising the initial funds for the HEART (Haiti Education And Resource Team) School.
But Shad needed more than money. He needed leadership on the ground, leadership that would inspire and give hope to the people of Sibert who had suffered so much. He knew that the only person who could provide that leadership and hope was himself. As Shad explained, “My goal was to be there for 3 years. To build it, oversee it, make it a beacon of hope. I needed to be around, needed to show the sacrifice that I was willing to make. I needed to lead by example.” Even though no one in his family supported his decision to move back to Haiti, in 2011, Shad left his job as a high school guidance counselor and moved back to Sibert to build his school.
While many people might see Shad’s move back to Haiti as a tremendous sacrifice, Shad will be the first person to tell you that his move back to Sibert ended up giving him untold blessings. The best and most unexpected blessing was meeting his wife, Carina. After the quake, Carina (who is American) flew down to Haiti to help with the relief effort. After numerous trips to the country, she decided to move to Haiti to help Shad build his school. While working together on the school, Shad and Carina started dating. Carina ended up spending 2 ½ years in Sibert and remains one of the pillars of the HEART School.
Shad knows from personal experience that it takes a village to raise a child (or, in this case, a classroom of children) and is quick to acknowledge the HEART School as “a team effort.” One critical member of the HEART team was Dick Martin, who was an architecture professor at Georgia Tech. Dick had the idea to build the classrooms from retired shipping containers and raised funds for the school with the support of the Midtown Atlanta Rotary Club. He not only provided architectural designs and plans but also spent 2 months in Haiti supervising the work. Dick died in 2013, but his wife, Barbara Rose, is still involved with the school today.
For Shad, it’s been a duty and a privilege to give back to his home country with the HEART School because, as Shad told me, he “stands on the shoulders of giants.” Two of those giants are his mother and father whose sacrifices made it possible for Shad to be in a position to give back.
His father’s great sacrifice was leaving Haiti when Shad was born and coming to the U.S. as an undocumented worker to support his young family. With his dad unable to travel, Shad didn’t meet his father until he was 7 years old. After that meeting, his father started coming to Haiti once a year for a 2-week visit. He would spend part of his time visiting remote areas of the country to aid churches and organize revival meetings. Even then, having sacrificed so much, his father “always put service above self.”
Although Shad grew up in Haiti without his dad, he was faithfully surrounded by family and friends. Every afternoon, like clockwork, both his grand-fathers would show up at his home. They would give Shad seeds to plant and taught him how to farm. When he was 10, a men’s prayer group recruited Shad. The group would go around the community and pray for people in need. These young men took Shad under their wing and, like his father, instilled in him the idea of giving back. As Shad remarked when describing his childhood, “Haiti is not as individualistic as the United States.”
On Thanksgiving, 1997, Shad, his mom, sister and baby brother finally joined his father in the U.S. It was an extremely difficult transition for 12-year old Shad as he struggled to learn a new language and adjust to a new country and school. For a while, he considered going back to Haiti and finishing school there. Then in June, 1998, Shad, his father and sister were in a tragic car accident. Shad’s father died in the crash. Shad barely survived the accident.
All of a sudden, Shad’s mother, Marie, found herself a single parent of 3 in a foreign country. Determined to give her children a better life than the one she had, the vision she and her husband had shared, she made the decision to stay in the U.S. To support her family, she started working two jobs as a home health aide for elderly people and as a packer at a local factory, while Shad took over the care of his young brother when he returned home from school.
Those sacrifices by his parents allowed Shad to attend Mercy College on a full scholarship. When he graduated, he was offered a job at the school as a “transfer-credit counselor.” His boss noticed how good Shad was with people and encouraged him to get a master’s degree in counseling. Because Shad was an employee of the school, his graduate work was paid for by the college.
Shad has come to see life as a circle -- the more you give, the more you receive in return.
His relief efforts for the victims of Hurricane Katrina brought him into contact with Mercy College administrators, which eventually led to his first job and a free master’s degree. His efforts also introduced him to an intern from the New York State Attorney General’s Office, John Katzenstein, who now serves as the treasurer for the HEART School.
His participation in that prayer group when he was a child ended up rewarding him years later with one of the best teachers at the HEART School. One of the men in the group, Lucien Morinvil, went on to become a math teacher. When he heard that Shad was looking for a teacher, he told the assistant principal that he would make any sacrifice to help Shad and his school. Shad describes Lucien as “one of the school’s hidden jewels.”
The HEART School launched in 2010 in an earthquake-damaged house that was a family home of Shad’s with 43 students. Today, the school sits on a 2-acre campus and consists of classrooms, a cafeteria, library and an all-purpose building that provides space for the community as well as school activities. Each day, the 260 students attending the school for free receive two hot meals made with ingredients from the local market and from the school garden that the students tend themselves.
Giving back is integral to the HEART School’s philosophy as is living sustainably. You can take a brief tour of the school here.
Shad is filled with gratitude for the people who sacrificed so much to give him the life that he enjoys today, for the many people who helped him build the school and give hope to the people of Haiti, for the school’s teachers and administrators and their unwavering commitment to the children, for the many volunteers and people who have donated to the school to help keep it running. Most of all, he is grateful for the children of the HEART School who have filled his life with joy, purpose and hope.
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Please consider supporting The HEART School this holiday season by sponsoring a child, making a one-time donation to the school, or purchasing one of the many cool items available in the school store. Any contribution, no matter how small, makes a difference. All donations go directly to the school. You can learn more at https://heartinhaiti.org/.
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This is an incredibly moving story. The work being done by Shad and his team on behalf of the children is truly inspirational!!!!
You are such an inspiration, Shad! Thank you for all your good works. Will definitely be donating to the school.
This is a beautiful portrait of a man who has truly shown how one person can be a difference in this world. The impact of his work will easily go beyond 100 years.