Las Cayes sits upon the southern shoreline of Haiti.  A bustling small city, the beach is strewn with washed up rubbish and clothing. Pigs and goats root through the rubble looking for food.

Directly south of Les Cayes, the island of Ile a Vache hosts two small resorts that are shocking in their beauty and contrast to the mainland. The beach is unbelievable!

After a delightful break on Ille de Vacche, we drove to Port-Au-Prince for a few meetings. A traffic-clogged and mad rush to the airport got us to Mission Flights International and their Cessna 206 for the thirty minute hop to Pignon in the Northern Plateau. Pignon is the small village that I have visited and photographed for the past ten years.

You can see from the aerial that the landscape is denuded of trees. In the 1700′s, the French colonists stripped the hillsides and valleys bare of hardwood trees. Lacking natural resources for fuel, Haitians continue to cut down their larger trees for charcoal.

Reforestation efforts and underway with limited success. The Haitians need for fuel for cooking creates a Catch-22. Bel Soley the group I was shooting for this past week, has an answer to the problem and I hope it can make a significant impact by positively changing lives.

More to come…..