By Claire Walla

In the small Haitian village of Croix-de-Bouquet, just past a tent camp with hundreds of Haitians left homeless after the earthquake last January, and surrounded by dozens of homes flanked by piles of concrete rubble, there is a school.

The spray foam building is just large enough for 32 students, ages three to five, who come five days a week dressed in collared shirts and navy blue skirts to learn both in French and their native Creole. They also have access to four laptops.

The school was conceived and built in a matter of months by an American organization called Wings Over Haiti (WOH), and it’s part of a larger plan for grassroots community development to “help the Haitian people help themselves,” said WOH founder Jonathan Glynn.

This notion is far too uncommon, Glynn said, in this impoverished nation decimated by corrupt leadership and a recent natural disaster, the remnants of which are still visible throughout the towns. Though the school is relatively small, currently serving only 32 children in a country of 10 million, it’s just the beginning of a larger effort to build a sustainable foundation for continued education and fundamental change at the grassroots level, all of which wouldn’t have been possible without Jonathan Glynn and his single-engine airplane.

It all started right here in Sag Harbor.

Glynn, an artist by trade, had found success as a potter, painter and sculptor before moving to his house on William Street in the mid 1990s. But, after 25 years in the field, Glynn found he was no longer happy.

“As an artist, you’re basically thinking about yourself all the time, which is limited and somewhat lonely,” Glynn said. “I felt the need to be more involved and to give back. I wasn’t really accomplishing anymore to the level I thought I was capable of. But, I didn’t know where to go.”

After a trip to Australia, during which Glynn took a ride in a friend’s small plane, he decided to get his pilot’s license “as a birthday present to myself.”

“I was enamored with the freedom of it, with the ability to go wherever I wanted,” he said. And after reading a book called “Aloft,” Glynn said he was attracted to what the author described as an ability to separate himself from the complications below.

However, Glynn came to realize that flying was anything but.

“It’s a fantastically intricate experience and you have to concentrate so much,” he said. “It opened me up to a whole new experience of seeing the world. And I thought, I want to do something with what I’m now capable of.”

After the earthquake hit Haiti, Glynn flew down to help out. But, not knowing what to expect, Glynn said he was shocked by what he found.

In the weeks after the quake, countries around the world pledged million of dollars in aid and the international community sent supplies, medicine, volunteers and money earmarked for reconstruction to the Turks and Caicos Airport, a common stop on the way to the nation’s capital, Port-au-Prince.

But according to Glynn, that’s also where much of it would stay.

“At Turks and Caicos, jets filled with volunteers were turned away and [customs officials] weren’t letting jets with supplies into Port au Prince,” he said. At least not without paying steep fees. “It costs thousands of dollars to get supplies off the tarmac,” he continued. “There are thousands of tents rotting away on the tarmac because people didn’t have the money to get them off.”

With his own mode of transportation, however, Glynn had the ability to bypass customs officials in Port au Prince altogether.

He spent about a month transporting much needed medical supplies and emergency equipment to different parts of the island. He estimates he must have delivered about half-a-million dollars of medicine in that time. Glynn simultaneously updated his facebook page with details of his journey, creating a far-reaching social network of supporters and volunteers back home. Upon returning to Sag Harbor, Glynn found he had the drive to do more. “I realized I couldn’t keep flying solo,” he said.

So he created a non-profit foundation called Wings Over Haiti and planned to use his fundraising efforts to focus not on gathering supplies, but on promoting education.

After local media picked up on his story last spring, Glynn was eventually contacted by Melissa McMullen, a sixth-grade English teacher in Port Jefferson, and Shad Saint Louis, a high school guidance counselor in Orange County, NY. Both had been donating their time and resources to the relief efforts in Haiti and both shared Glynn’s vision to build a foundation for sustainable growth.

The idea for the school had been on McMullen’s mind ever since she got her own class involved with local relief efforts. In order to successfully collect supplies and send it off to Haiti, she said her students had to use math, reading, writing and critical thinking skills, “more skills than I could have ever put into one lesson plan,” she added. “I’ll never forget the day I thought, I feel guilty because my kids have learned more and gotten more out of this than those kids ever could.” She wanted to bridge the divide.

Working together with Glynn, she developed an education system for the WOH school that fostered a direct relationship with the students in her class in Port Jefferson. Using Skype and Flip-Cams, her students keep in regular contact with the teachers and the students in Haiti. Under McMullen’s guidance, and with the help of computer technology, her students even had a hand in selecting the school’s teachers and developing certain aspects of the school’s curriculum.

“I want these kids to make it,” Glynn said of both the students in Haiti and those in the U.S. “And that’s why it’s so important for the kids here [in New York]. If, for whatever reason, our school doesn’t work [in Haiti], we’re helping our kids here. We’re teaching kids that helping is a good thing to do.”

Wings Over Haiti began construction on the school in September, thanks to a generous donation from local contractor Jack Hunter, plus a private donation of $50,000 and a plot of land deeded to the organization by Saint Louis’ cousin in Croix-de-Bouquet.

Saint Louis grew up in the small, Haitian village just outside of Port au Prince. After reflecting on his own experiences, he said conveyed how education can be a turning point for the Haitian people.

“It was very difficult growing up. Any of those kids you see on TV… I could have been one of them,” said Saint Louis, who lived in Croix-de-Bouquet until his family moved to the United States in when he was 12. “I remember going to school in 1993 and seeing dead people in the middle of the street on a number of occasions. My mother used to sleep with a machete at the side of her bed because there were bandits who were raping young girls and I had an older sister.

“It was very difficult, and it still is difficult,” he added. “Nothing has really changed.”

Saint Louis said he’s passionate about bolstering the education system in Haiti because he wants to give the Haitian people the educational opportunities that he had here in the United States. “The kids in Haiti are taught to memorize. There are the same core subjects as there are in the United States, but you have to memorize four to five chapters [of a text book] then come back the next day and recite it word-for-word,” he said. “Basically, you’re like a robot.”

And this way of thinking, Saint Louis said, has only allowed for the division between the rich and the poor to persist.

“Education is the only way that Haiti can get back up from its knees,” Saint Louis continued. It will help Haitians learn how “to make a difference in their own country instead of waiting for the international community to come in and make change.”

And though it starts with education, Wings Over Haiti has bigger plans for the future.

In addition to the school, which will increase by one grade level a year, Wings Over Haiti plans to educate the local community as well. The organization will teach students’ parents the basics of farming and growing their own food. And by next summer, Saint Louis said, WOH plans to buy an additional two acres of land to create residences for those families who are a part of the school community.

“It’s not only the children, it’s the parents who need to be educated. The elected officials are so corrupt; they’re not the future of Haiti,” Saint Louis said. “We’re making the future leaders of Haiti.”

Eventually, Glynn added, one of his goals is build a landing strip for the community in Croix-de-Bouquet so that, with an airplane at their disposal, the Haitian people will have their own individual means for bringing in and distributing their products.

But, one step at a time.

On a crisp October morning, from his home just up the street from Espresso’s Italian Market, Glynn expressed his appreciation for the people of Sag Harbor. “Within nine months of the earthquake,” he said, “we, as a community, have contributed more than people realize.”

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