Being blessed with abundant health, amazing friendships,  connections, a passion for teaching and sharing all that I know, with four amazing children and beautiful granddaughters are just the beginning of all that I am thankful for each and every day.

As the season of gratitude, abundance and joy engulfs so many of us, I want to ask my readers one favor. Just ONE! I don’t think I could ever ask more of you but it’s one gift that will reverberate through a thousand lives.

Here is a link to an article about my friend, Margaret Trost, and the organization she grew out of a trip to Haiti.

(Photo courtesy What If? Foundation website)

Margaret founded the What If? Foundation ten years ago as a Haitian-run food program for the children in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Port-Au-Prince. They are still feeding thousands of people each week, unstoppable in their zeal not to allow the tragedy of Jan. 12 or the travesty of failed mega-philanthropies to allow their neighbors to go hungry.

Please read this article from beginning to end.

Then send the link to that article to 12 of your friends (or more) by email and ask them to read it. Tell them that you just made a $12 donation on the What IF? Foundation website. (Why 12? Because the 12th of January is when the earthquake occurred.) That’s all I’m asking–the cost of a couple of fancy lattes at Starbucks.

Ask your friends to do the same: read the article, forward to 12 friends, donate $12 to What If? Foundation. Feed a child for an entire month.

If you send $12 and your friends send $12 and their friends send $12, do you see what we can accomplish?

The world has turned its back on Haiti, but What If? has stood with the Haitian people through every tragic, painful, hopeful, angry, hungry moment and allowed the gift of good food, education and joy to remain if even for a few moments each day. Read the article. Send the link. Send $12. Change the lives of thousands!

Here are some more ways you can help spread the word:

Send your friends a link to the What If? website with your personal recommendation.

Join our Cause on Facebook and ask your friends to join as well.

Search the web using GoodSearch and invite your friends and family to do the same.  Every time you do a search a penny will be donated to the What If? Foundation, and every penny adds up!  Its free and easy – learn more here.

Forward our e- newsletters to your friends.

Share a What if? Foundation overview packet (brochure, bookmark, DVD, Annual Report) with your faith community, congregation, rotary club, etc. Contact our office to request a packet.

Recommend What If? Foundation President Margaret Trost’s book – On That Day, Everybody Ate: One Woman’s Story of Hope and Possibility – to your friends, book club, school, and anyone else who you think might enjoy it. Click here for more information about the book.

And enjoy this very special thank you from the children in Haiti.

As Margaret says: “Piti piti na rive.” Little by little, we will get there.

May you and yours enjoy warm food, much laughter, intense gratitude, light and joy in this year of Hope, 2011.

Much love and as always, many thanks for reading my posts. Yvonne

PS: Do post a message when you participate in our $12 fundraiser! It will make my day!

Best gardening dates will return New Years to get you ready for spring, but our friends at Kitchen Gardeners International show you how you can grow a garden, even in the snow! ENJOY!!

Permaculture is a design system based on ethics and principles which can be used to establish, design, manage and improve all efforts made by individuals, households and communities towards a sustainable future.

There is a growing buzz on the internet and social networking systems about a “different” kind of aid effort: a Permaculture relief corps. There is actually a listserve devoted to this discussion and articles are popping up all over engaging in this theme. Why Permaculture and what would a “permaculture relief” team look like? Here’s one article I found helpful on Maddy Harland’s blog Permaculture Magazine Editorial. She points out how the principles of permaculture design lend themselves so well to healing the Earth following natural disasters, and by extension, the people living there, as well.

Co-developed by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren back in the good ol’ days of the 1970′s, Permaculture deals with the basic issues of sustaining life wholistically by dealing with what is in front of you.  If you need water, look at where and how you can collect it, reclaim it, clean it, save it; don’t wait for the USAID truck to drive down your road with plastic bottles shipped in. (They may not come.) You don’t wait for heavy moving equipment, you create smaller versions of your system with your hands or invent simple tools. And you don’t let anything go to waste. (Something most Haitians have more experience with than I ever will.)

But why is there such poverty and lack of infrastructure and why has it continued for so long? The people and the island of Haiti have endured several centuries of interventionism by the United States and European nations under the guise of “stabilization.” In this interview by Amy Goodman of Democracy NOW!, journalist Kim Ives discusses how this has crippled the Haitians from recovering more rapidly from natural disasters.

People trained in Permaculture understand and honor systems for working together, by developing the best approach based upon the resources–human and otherwise–available. Rather than utilizing a cookie-cutter approach to any situation, PC’s carry in a value system, a way of looking at a situation and developing answers based on what they see and experience hand in hand with the local population.

And while a Permaculture Relief Corps couldn’t replace medical emergency personnel, its practitioners would be able to get other life-saving systems underway like composting toilets and rudimentary sanitation systems, water purification, solar ovens, and of course, survival gardens. Rather than watching the defunct systems continue to implode day by day, the PC relief workers could guide and empower the citizens on the ground to regain some of what they have lost. Here’s an article by Cory Brennan, one of the movers and shakers for this idea, that relates how Permaculture  can help to re-structure and revitalize an area after a disaster.

Permaculture systems create sustainable, long term solutions that incorporate the needs of the local population and its culture while training its citizens to replicate these systems when the PC workers are gone. Permaculture becomes a way to reconnect the various components or threads of community no matter how tattered they may be.

My blog on “outrageous gardens” is a direct result of my own permaculture training. I took one principle– “the problem is the solution” –to its limits and learned that you can create a growing space anywhere, anytime from whatever you have available and it’s probably more effective than what you had before.

So just thinking about all the possibilities related to a team of PC’s going to Haiti brightens my day, and there haven’t been too many bright days since Jan. 12th.

For more information about the Permaculture relief effort for Haiti, go to www.permaculturehaiti.org. There, you can also sign up to volunteer, request assistance or offer materials and supplies.

To participate in the on-line discussion and dissemination of information on this endeavor, sign up for the PC Relief listserve here.

To read more about some of the Permaculture work that was already in place in Haiti prior to the earthquake, check out: www.oursoil.org

And here you’ll find just about everything related to permaculture on the web.

This is an idea whose time has not only come but is fundamentally necessary for rebuilding Haiti from within. There are Permaculture relief workers on the ground in Haiti today and we’ll keep following their progress on my “Haiti” page. If you know of other PC Relief sites, please send them to me or add in the comments for this page!

“Permaculture is that art of the possible”

Graham Bell ‘The Permaculture Garden”

On May 28, Father Gerard Jean-Juste allowed himself the privilege of resting after unceasingly working for more than three decades, shoulder to shoulder with the poorest of the poor in Haiti, seeking justice and basic human rights for his fellow Haitians.  He was a most remarkable human being and one of the primary influences for initiating this website.

No, we never met. We never even spoke. I’ve only seen him in photos. I learned so much of him and his love for his people and his commitment to ending all this unnecessary hunger and poverty in Haiti through someone else I have never met yet, Margaret Trost. In emails with Margaret, I felt more and more the urgency to do something to counteract the unrelenting and unnecessary scourge of hunger visited on those who already had nothing to eat. And I began writing this blog, promoting simple ways to grow food, educating myself primarily to learn how to teach this information for that ‘some day’ when I hoped I would have the privilege of traveling to Haiti and working with her and Fr. Gerry, as he was known.

I don’t recall now exactly how I found her on this amazing networking apparatus called the internet–some story about feeding hungry children in Haiti and how she found solace from the grief of losing her husband by working with a certain priest in one of the poorest parishes in Haiti. She saw the unrelenting hunger and heard Fr. Gerry’s idea of a soup kitchen or a “cantine” at the parish center. Margaret took all this in during her first visit,  turning over in her mind what she personally could do to help him feed all these children whose one constant companion was an empty belly. She was, according to Fr. Jean-Juste, the miracle he prayed for.

She returned to the United States and started asking herself and family and friends “what if” we could make a difference and thus was born her foundation, now in its ninth year of feeding thousands of nutritious meals each week to the children of Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. You can read the story of the What If? Foundation and order Margaret’s book On This Day Everyone Ate through my Amazon link on this website. (Any commissions earned revert to What If? Foundation.)

The Haitian Lawyers Association said of Father Jean-Juste: “This man has devoted all his life to the cause of the poor, the powerless, and the voiceless. He strived to do good, seek justice, and foster change in a world where injustice, poverty, racial discrimination, and inequality dominate many governments and institutions around the globe. Now that he is no longer with us, may his legacy serve as a moral compass to us all as we continue our journey in this world.”

Father Gerry: Your faith in your God brought Margaret to you to carry on. And her work with you ignited in me the desire to learn more, to do more, and I am not alone. You have inspired generations of the most neglected citizens of our hemisphere. You gave them hope. You helped them regain dignity. No, the work is far from over, but as you said “pitti pitti na rive” — little by little we will arrive.

Merci, ‘Pere’ Jean-Juste, for being among us, not only for the children of Haiti, but for the hungry child that lives in all of us. For as long as one child goes to bed hungry tonight, we are all hungry–for justice, for compassion, for morality and for love.

READERS: I thank you for taking the time today to donate to What If? Foundation.