A new school, the fifth realized within the project related to education carried on by Andrea Bocelli Foundation in partnership with Fondation Saint Luc: in less than two years after the first inspection, today the St. Raphael school in Devarenne Grande Rivière, in Jacmel (in the south of Haiti), is already operational.

The school recently opened in the presence of Andrea Bocelli, is the only one in the area and will host four hundred students. The community gravitating around the school – and that will benefit directly or indirectly – is of over twenty six thousand people. Also our President Stefano Aversa attended the ceremony last April 23rd: to him we have asked a testimony.

– This is not the first time you have been to St. Raphael. Last June during your first mission to Haiti, you had faced a journey particularly complex from the logistic point of view, to reach and return from that area of the island…

The first time I reached St. Raphael was about one year ago to check the progress of the construction work which had just been started. There were only the first foundations made with the stones collected near the river that runs close to the school, but all the community was at the school waiting for us to proudly show us the obvious though tiring progress. To reach the school was not easy, even though with a fully-equipped off road vehicle, because we had to wade through the river twice. It had started raining heavily as it often happens during the afternoons of tropical summers; the river had swollen and the steep road had become all mud we could not go through. With the help of all, our team and the locals, a little while walking and a while pushing we returned to Port-au-Prince in eight hours…

– While building the school structure has ABF also made any intervention on communication roads to reach De Varenne site?

 We had to build and strengthen the school access road, both to accelerate construction (much of the concrete was brought on mule’s back for the last kilometer), and to make it easier the use of the school itself for students, teachers and non-teaching staff.

  – Through your two visits have you got an idea of the quality of life of the local community and how to sustain it, responding to its needs, without forcing its balance…

The local community is very poor and lives exclusively on land products and raising some yard animals. Most part of the population is distributed in small isolated houses, often made up of wood and sheet metal, jutting out from the hillsides of the local mountains in a wonderful tropical landscape that is, anyway, difficult to work and reach. The St. Raphael school was built mostly by local personnel and is therefore considered even more part of the community.

 -The school opened – the only one in the area – aims at representing more than just an educational center…

…Exactly! St. Raphael, like all the other schools we have built, is a structure conceived to last. It has a horseshoe shape that seems to welcome visitors, and a large inside space used also for sports events not dedicated to students only, but to the entire local population. Thus the school will soon become a point of reference and aggregation through which many other activities and services will be made available, like training programs also for older people, medical services through the ‘Mobile Clinic’ that periodically visits schools, up to improvement projects for life quality in the communities, like more efficient cultivation systems and the use of solar panels to provide a minimum of light, in the evening, to students and their families.

 – This intervention formula that ABF is carrying out starts from the school, but around it, has the ambition to start a sort of 360 degree virtuous circle involving the whole community. This has already been experienced in other sites such as St. Philomene, St. Augustin and Notre Dame du Rosaire…

St. Raphael is the fifth school that ABF has built and started in Haiti in cooperation with our local partner Fondation Saint Luc. Much has been learnt during this five-year time, but our goals and our inspirational principles have remained always the same: provide an international quality education to children and teen-agers otherwise destined to remain illiterate and socially marginalized, but also a possibility of growth as individuals and communities, together with the development of potentialities and talents. We are happy that the first students have finished the cycle of secondary school and are now attending university, or that the 60 kids of the Choir ‘Voices of Haiti’ have had the possibility to see New York and sing with Maestro Bocelli in temples of music such as Lincoln Center and the Radio City Music Hall, or in front of prestigious audiences like the United Nations Assembly or the Clinton Global Initiative.

 – The fact that the inhabitants of the area (many of whom are the parents of the 400 students that will attend school in St. Raphael classrooms) have contributed to the construction of the building, besides giving them a provisional source of money, will it perhaps also contribute to the perception of it, on the part of the local community, as a benefit not imposed from the outside, but as something to live without any suspicion or uneasiness?

Certainly, we have observed and studied other initiatives, even very well funded and with important resources, and we have noticed that many of these interventions lasted a very short time; they quickly ran out as soon as the outside support was missing. The collaborative and inclusive approach that we have developed and adopted since the very beginning has been a key to our initiatives that have been conceived to last and become an integral part of community life. 

 – The context of Jacmel and De Varenne Grande Riviere is a particularly isolated region that has seldom had contacts with different cultures. What sort of mediation has been put into place to achieve such an important result? How would you describe the type of welcome received from this community?

The particular isolation of these places represents an objective logistic difficulty, but has also allowed preserving a unique culture and life style. The simplicity and sincerity of relationships, the sense of generous hospitality and the genuine gratitude these Haitian populations show are a great reward for the efforts made, and make feel those who give, at ease and really rich. There are no words to describe the happy eyes of the pupils and of their proud parents watching them dressed in their uniforms, neatly arranged for the daily flag raising, or seated behind their perfectly equipped school desks.

 – Education is the most powerful weapon that can be used to change the world. ABF seems to share, with particular conviction, Mandela’s reflection, given that the EDU project absorbs a substantial part of the philanthropic activities of the Foundation…

 Education is the corner stone on which to build hope and future for the next generations. Education gives freedom of thought and action, it provides the basis for civilization and awareness of one’s own possibilities, and finally it helps to avoid ending with easy populism and extremism. In my professional life I often have to deal with great investors and multinational managers, I see many interesting plans and development projects with important expected returns even if uncertain. I think I can say that today there does not exist an investment with a higher return, for our society, than education.