Arkansas widow leaves legacy for Haitian children

c. 2008 Religion News Service CHERIDENT, Haiti _ Frances Landers climbed into the front passenger seat and braced herself for another bone-rattling journey. The white Isuzu truck wended its way up a steep, rocky track hardly wider than a hiking trail. The 20-minute trip took Landers past women with baskets balanced on their heads, wooden […]

c. 2008 Religion News Service

CHERIDENT, Haiti _ Frances Landers climbed into the front passenger seat and braced herself for another bone-rattling journey.

The white Isuzu truck wended its way up a steep, rocky track hardly wider than a hiking trail. The 20-minute trip took Landers past women with baskets balanced on their heads, wooden shacks with tin roofs, the occasional goat with its nose in the vegetation, and rows of corn terraced into the mountainside.


Finally, the truck reached its destination, a tiny village named Hess. The Isuzu stopped at a half-finished concrete building that will soon be a primary school that will be named for her late husband, Dr. Gardner Landers, who died in 2006.

For the past two days, the 91-year-old widow from El Dorado, Ark., had braved three airplane flights and the harrowing drive into Haiti’s remote southern mountains just for this moment.

“He would be so pleased,” she said. “And then to think there’s going to be a school that’s near enough for the children to belong to.”

This was Landers’ 43rd trip to Haiti, and her first since 2004. And at age 91, she knew it would likely be her last.

More than 25 years ago, while working as a volunteer with her ophthalmologist husband, Landers discovered a village that had no school and vowed to do something about it. She launched one school, then another, then dozens more.

Landers is the chairman and founder of the Arkansas-based Haiti Education Foundation, which last year provided a free education to 11,474 Haitian students with money given by U.S. churches and individual donors.

In the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, where nearly half the population is illiterate, thousands of Haitian children are getting an education and at least one meal a day because of Landers’ vision.


For many of the children, it’s the only meal they get all day.

“It just gives the children purpose to be able to go to school,” Landers said. “The kids have hope for the future. They realize that without an education, they don’t have a chance to have any kind of life. They’ll have an existence, but not a life.”

Anci Fils-Aime, 31, is a graduate of the schools that Landers helped start in Cherident, and now serves them as treasurer. Without Landers, he said, many of the children in rural west Haiti would be tending their family’s gardens with picks and machetes or selling produce on the side of the road. Like their parents, most of them would have never learned to read.

“This is a God thing,” said Susan Turbeville, the foundation’s sole employee. “A lot of people have stepped out in faith to make this happen.”

It’s the kind of faith that prompted Landers, before her most recent trip, to dismiss travel advisories issued by the U.S. State Department because of recent civil unrest. In her 30 years of traveling to Haiti, Landers said, the unstable country has always been under some kind of travel warning.

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The new Gardner Landers School in Hess is roughly 50 miles southwest of Port-au-Prince, the nation’s capital. It is the most recent addition to the 40 primary schools and 10 secondary schools financially supported by the foundation.

The new school in Hess will replace a flimsy one-room tin building that currently houses about 80 children and doubles as an Episcopal church. It was started by parents because the nearest primary school was too far to reach by foot, and money from Landers’ foundation will replace the cramped, windowless quarters with spacious and solid classrooms.


When Landers pulled up in the Isuzu, the teacher and the children filed out in their yellow uniforms to greet their elegant and spry Arkansas benefactor.

After posing for photos, the youngsters serenaded Landers in French. “Come to school,” they sang. “Don’t stay in your house. Come to learn.”

Teacher Cerisier Bernadette, 32, is a graduate of the secondary school in Cherident, named the Frances Landers Technical School.

“I loved the education I received there,” she said through a translator. “That’s why I am a teacher today.”

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Landers first came to Haiti in 1977 to help her husband provide eye care in a country where most people with cataracts were likely blind for life.

The couple volunteered at a hospital in the coastal city of Leogane, where she became fast friends with the Episcopal chaplain, the Rev. Jean Wilfrid Albert, known as Pere Albert.


Landers remembers Albert continually telling her that education was the answer to Haiti’s many woes. He took her to Mercery, a village where he said no one could read or write. The next year, he asked Landers for help in establishing a school inside his church.

She appealed for assistance from local Presbyterian churches near her home in southern Arkansas. One congregation donated money from its Vacation Bible School to pay a teacher’s salary. The school continued to grow, and is today self-supporting.

In 1989, Albert told the couple that he was moving to the Grand Colline Mountains of southern Haiti, where God told him in a dream that he should build a school next to each of the seven Episcopal churches in the mountains.

“We were still supporting the school at Mercery, and I said, `Pere Albert, how can we support seven more schools?”’ Landers said.

“He said, `I don’t know how we’ll support seven more schools. But there’s one thing I do know: If God wants schools in the mountains, there will be schools in the mountains.”’

Landers wasn’t sure where to start until her husband suggested that she call national Presbyterian women’s groups. Her first speaking engagement netted a $10,000 donation from a woman in the audience. Landers said she looked down at the check and thought, “God does want schools in the mountains.”


Looking back, she marvels at what has transpired since.

“If anyone had told me 12 years ago that this would be here, I would have said, `No way,”’ Landers said. “But what I’ve learned is that if God wants it, it’s going to happen.”

(A version of this story first appeared in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.)

KRE/PH END HAHN

Photos of Frances Landers in Haiti are available via https://religionnews.com.

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