Haiti Place T&C Philanthropy 2015, with Activist-in-Chief Bill Clinton

News Information

  • NEWS_POSTED_BY: Haiti Place Staff
  • NEWS_POSTED_ON: Apr 13, 2015
  • Views : 750
  • Category : Haiti News
  • Description : Helping facilitate 3,100 projects in 180 countries, the Clinton Foundation is the most powerful reimagining ever of what post-presidency can be. But can the fixer-in-chief work his magic on Haiti?

    Photo: Bill Clinton photographed by Alexei Hay on Haiti's Central Plateau.

Overview

  • I am standing under the scorching late February sun in an open field in Haiti's Central Plateau, waiting for the helicopter bearing former president Bill Clinton to arrive and getting a lesson in limes. More precisely, in what The Clinton Foundation, the philanthropic organization of global ambition founded by Clinton in 2001, is doing about limes. It's complicated.

    Introduced in the 15th century to Hispaniola (the name Columbus gave the island that now comprises Haiti and the Dominican Republic when he shipwrecked here in December 1492), limes were successfully cultivated in Haiti until the 1990s. "Their oil, used in cosmetics and the beverage industry, was, like Haitian vetiver, considered the best in the world," says Hugh Locke, a blan from Westchester (one is acutely aware of skin color in Haiti). Locke heads the Haitian nonprofit Smallholder Farmers Alliance(SFA) and is scanning the sky, as am I, for Clinton's craft.

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