Without him there would be no One Hundred For Haiti.
A post from Greg Bennick, founder of One Hundred For Haiti…
I met Josue Lajeunesse almost twenty years ago. We were doing interviews for The Philosopher Kings, our documentary about wisdom seen through the eyes of custodians at prestigious universities. Josue is the lead custodian at Princeton University.
During his interview Josue told us that he was from a tiny village in the south of Haiti and mentioned working as a custodian all day at Princeton University and driving a taxi all night to help provide clean water to his village back home.
That led to a trip to Haiti in 2009 to see that village, which led to his village getting water, and then after the earthquake in 2010, to me sailing to Haiti on a sailboat with a determined crew, a mission which turned out to have us be the first private relief boat to make it to the southern coast of Haiti with food and supplies.
I stayed in Haiti as the boat sailed home and went back to Josue’s village to check in on all of his loved ones. I went to Port Au Prince to visit a Haitian doctor friend of Josue’s who was giving away medicine and medical care for free to people in need in areas of the city which had been badly impacted. I decided to support that friend and that was the start of the fifteen year One Hundred For Haiti journey helping in various parts of the country.
I’ve barely posted in the last few years about the work One Hundred For Haiti has been doing, but we (donors in the USA who I will be posting about soon, regular monthly donor/contributors, and of course as a priority Haitians who have been calling the shots all along) have been busy nonstop, building houses, providing clean water for dozens of communities, sending kids to school, providing internet for those schools, helping farmers plant crops, and also directly feeding hungry people. Huge updates to follow both on the One Hundred for Haiti socials and here on our website.
Josue and I met for dinner in New Jersey this past weekend and it was like a true family reunion. We talked for hours about the past, not seeing one another for many years, what it was like to reconnect after all we’ve accomplished and dreamed of and still have yet to do, and of course excitement over Haiti making the World Cup after almost fifty years.
He’s an unstoppable force of energy and inspiration, continuing to serve his community back home, often on his own. One Hundred For Haiti’s work has been in another region of the country for many years but Josue is an example of how one person with focus can create a reverberation effect and transform countless lives.
More One Hundred For Haiti updates, long overdue, very soon!
