How Harsh is helping a troubled country get back its green cover
HAITI's Hope: Harsh Valechha has been staying in Haiti since July, as part of a reforestation project
“Waking up to a giant centipede chewing on your arm and spending the next hour scrambling in the dark to clean your sleeping area at 3 am” these are the kind of updates you would get from Harsh Valechha. It was only last year that he was here in Hyderabad completely engrossed in the routine of a corporate job. Right now, he is in Haiti as part of a reforestation project to ensure food security for the locals.
“I started my career working with GE as a financial analyst and then moved to Hyderabad, which still remains my favourite city in India, after joining Deloitte. My biggest takeaway from Deloitte was that the company had a day dedicated to community service Impact Day; where all employees spend one day in a year serving the community. I remember speaking to a few friends after one Impact Day and I said, ‘I wish I could make this impact every day!’ I think this conversation got me thinking,” he recalls.
Soon he began making changes in his immediate surroundings. He listened to the calling in him to be closer to nature. “Living close to nature was always a dream but the corporate career demanded city life. So I turned my apartment balcony in Hyderabad into a small garden to help realise that dream in a small way,” he says. Then came the research which led him to Auroville, Tamil Nadu. “In a few months’ time, I had quit my job, done away with most of my material belongings and packed bare necessities plus a little more to make the transition to the forest community life,” adds Harsh.
That is how he got associated with the Sadhana Forest — a collective of three reforestation communities based out of Auroville, India, which includes Samburu County, Kenya and Anse-a-pitres, Haiti Having been associated with the India project for over a year, towards the end of his stay in India, Harsh was jointly directing the India project. And as life would have it, the next stop would be Haiti
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Harsh has been in Haiti since July 2014. The very mention of the country might shake many, considering the devastating earthquake in the 2010 and the stories of violent crimes against tourists. But Harsh doesn’t think he is a tourist, he works as part of the local ‘very hard working’ community. “I think Haiti’s biggest gift is also its biggest challenge.
After the 2010 earthquake, donations in the form of money, kind and volunteer projects started pouring in from all over the world. Hundreds of new projects were started that aimed at giving handouts, clothing and food to the affected people. I have a lot of respect for that, but the problem is, most of these projects were short term and they soon left, leaving the locals stranded,” he explains.
“To this date, Haiti receives a lot of foreign aid. The biggest challenge is creating something long term; something that stays with the people even when the project ceases to exist,” he says.And life, obviously, has not been the same since he left India. Travel has opened up a lot of experiences for Harsh. “I feel that I’ve been truly gifted to be able to live this life and also travel, all that without earning a corporate salary for more than 18 months! My most memorable travel experience was when I recently went backpacking on a shoestring budget to North India. I had elaborate plans but as the journey progressed, I realised that nothing is in our control.
But every time I ran into trouble, I would always meet beautiful people going out of their way to help me and I learned to accept help when offered,” he shares.And for all the work Harsha does trying to rebuild a self-sustaining Haiti, the land has been treating him good too. “Here in Haiti, life is really different from what it used to be and I spend most of my time doing forest work, but when I’m free, I read or listen to music. I have a new found love in snorkelling in the crystal clear Caribbean waters, besides hiking and cycling. Also, the night sky here can be quite a view. So sometimes we climb the roof and stargaze for hours and on a good day, spot quite a few shooting stars,” he says.
Currently, the project has six Haitian volunteers who have dedicated themselves to the project for more than a year, along with a group of international volunteers from India, Sweden, Israel, Germany, United States, France, etc. And for Harsh the driving force will always be the connect he established with nature and the community life long before he left India. And he quotes a friend: “As one of our volunteers put it very nicely in her letter to us when she left, ‘May there be many forests to grow people’.”
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