SODA was conceived through the experience of a group of passionate young Haitians in Jakè, a poor neighborhood in Port-au-Prince not far from an upscale zone called Petionville. Jakè is not the poorest neighborhood in Port-au-Prince, but it shares the same problems as the city’s worst slums. Streets are covered in trash, houses are made with cinder blocks and sheet metal, and there is little or no access to potable water, a sewage system or electricity. Kids don’t go to school and unemployed young people sit all day on stoops and broken-down cars with nothing to do. The population is dense and there are likely more than 10,000 residents, although there is no reliable census information.
In early 2005, a group of mostly young people in Jakè decided to take it upon themselves to improve conditions in their neighborhood. They formed Asanble Vwazen Jakè (AVJ), or Neighborhood Assembly of Jakè, a horizontally-organized community group committed to providing free education and inspiring civic participation in the neighborhood of Jakè. They decided AVJ would have no president, or all-powerful committee that could later be susceptible to corruption as often happens with neighborhood organizations in Port-au-Prince. Instead, in weekly townhall-style meetings, or "assemblies," all neighbors are invited to participate and everyone has the same voice and vote. Any actions taken by individuals or committees within AVJ are held accountable to all the neighbors of Jakè in these weekly assemblies held on Sundays.
After many weeks of meetings, AVJ took its first actions in the summer of 2005, organizing a youth basketball tournament and forming a street-cleaning team. After this experience, the members of AVJ decided that the priority for their community, and their country, was education. In January 2006, they started a free school for kids who didn’t have enough money to afford tuition and other costs at private and public schools. Some 85 percent of the schools in Haiti are private, and public schools also require payment. As a result, half of all Haitian children do not study and only one in 50 graduates from secondary school.
The AVJ school now has a dozen volunteer teachers and 120 students who go to class five days a week and are served a hot meal and clean drinking water everyday. But AVJ has not stopped there. Its members have transformed a dirt alleyway into a concrete-floored public plaza where every week the assembly holds meetings and gives free public screenings of movies. Meanwhile, AVJ has broken ground on a community garden and is hoping to soon launch a poultry project that would provide eggs for the school’s lunch program.
From their very first meeting, the members of AVJ have made a commitment to work for change not only for Jakè, but for their country. They dreamed that their efforts in Jakè would become a model that would be replicated in other poor communities in Port-au-Prince and throughout Haiti. On their own dime, they have visited other slums in the capital and even peasant communities in the countryside to share their experiences and to help inspire the creation of other neighborhood assemblies. Their efforts have already borne fruit.
In January 2007, in a slum called Solino, a group of young people formed an assembly and started another free school that now has more than 120 students. Soon after, an assembly was formed in the poor neighborhood of Delmas 60 that has organized collective street cleaning efforts and is launching an adult literacy program. Nearby, residents of the Mon Laza slum have started a free school for some 50 children, and in Simon Pele, a group of young people have begun giving classes to 60 of the poorest kids from the area.
In 2006, the members of AVJ, together with some young leaders from Solino and other Port-au-Prince slums, decided to create Sosyete Djòl Ansanm pou Demokrasi Patisipatif (SODA), an umbrella social movement that would link neighborhood assemblies throughout the capital and the country. As of this moment, SODA is still a nascent organization. But the spark that caught fire in Jakè is already taking hold in other communities, as new members of SODA begin to organize assemblies, create schools and take action to improve living conditions and to create civic consciousness.
