From the moment Winston Tellis, professor of information systems at Fairfield University in Connecticut, got his first glimpse of Haiti, he knew he had to get involved. Haiti shares the Caribbean island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic, their common border cutting the island roughly in half.

"Right from the air, it is very obvious. One side is green, where the Dominican Republic is, and the other side is brown," he says. "You see the dirt, the topsoil, washing down into the ocean because there's nothing to hold it.

"Once you pass the mountains and start to come down, there's a haze across Port-au-Prince. It's all dust. No trees, no moisture. Your eyes start to water. You feel it in your throat," he says.

On his first visit, in March 1997, Dr. Tellis was one of a group of faculty members from Fairfield's business school who spent a week in Haiti seeing how the university and organizations in Haiti could work together.

"There was a lot coming in from a lot of directions, and each person absorbed things from his or her own background and training," he remembers. "I allowed the experience to sink in without opening my technical eyes, my computer background. If you're open to things touching you, they do."

Destination Fondwa

Last fall Tellis was on his way back to Haiti, this time traveling alone, to deliver two solar cookers to Fondwa, a remote farming community about 30 miles from the capital. His memory of Haiti as a place stripped bare of trees, pulled out by their roots and used for fuel, was what brought him back. After he had returned from that first trip, he had pondered the deforestation problem.

"You know, it really bothered me that they continue to cut down trees. They had to do something to arrest that cycle," he says.

But Haitians' need for fuel for cooking is basic and unrelenting. "There was no alternative, at least no apparent one," Tellis remembers thinking. "Then, just for the heck of it, I checked on the web for solar cooking or something like that. Goodness me, I got a list of things!" It happened that a Haitian student at Stanford had introduced solar cook-ing to Haiti in a village not far from Fondwa and had writ-ten his senior thesis about it.

Soon thereafter, Dr. Michael Tucker, chair of Fairfield's department of finance, was in Tellis's office talking about plans for his fall course¯International Environmental Management and Policy.

"I picked out the study by the Haitian student and handed it to him," recalls Tellis. "Two days later, I got an e-mail saying he was implementing it in his class. ‘It's a very complete plan,' said Tucker. ‘All I've got to do is get my hands on some cookers.' "

"Two days later, he'd done that, too," laughs Tellis. The model Tucker had chosen was the Sun Stove, manufactured by Burns-Milwaukee, which ran $195 fully assembled.

Tellis alerted Dr. Russ Boisjoly, dean of the business school, and decided to go back to Haiti to see how feasible the plan really was. He knew he had the backing of Boisjoly and Fairfield University itself.

"It's the Jesuit spirit of going beyond yourself," says Tellis. "You can't be satisfied with bettering yourself if you don't bring along those who don't have your opportunities."

Two rural towns were considered for the cookers, Fondwa and Milot. The deciding factor was the better communication link with Fondwa. There was also good personal contact through Fr. Josef Phillipe, founder of a self-help cooperative there. Phillipe was born in the town and has worked to develop it as a model community.

The next step was getting the solar cookers into operation, and that meant flying them to Haiti. Tellis hit a snag when, ready to check in at 5:30 one morning at New York's JFK airport, he was informed that the boxes the solar cookers were in were not baggage and would have to be shipped as cargo from another terminal. From the sidelines, a Haitian woman motioned him over. For $100 she sold him two big bags in which to put the boxes, explaining that the airline would now accept them as baggage.

"You adjust very quickly," he laughs. "When I got back, I told my students this is a lesson in being conscious of customs regulations, import regulations, and all kinds of things you don't really give a second thought to as a Western traveler."

Upon arrival in Port-au-Prince, Tellis was met by Ancelot Phillipe, a native of Fondwa now living in the capital. Phillipe drove Tellis and the cookers to the village, a journey by pickup that took three hours along roads marred by huge potholes every few feet. "I'd never seen roads this bad anywhere else in the world," Tellis remarks.

Fondwa, in a valley, was another 45 minutes by foot from where the truck stopped.

"And there's no other way down," Tellis says. "Going up is twice as long. I can tell you, it's a killer."

Once in town, Tellis quickly let the villagers take command of the situation. To their many "hows" and "whys" he played it cool.

Years of reliance on trees for firewood have left Haiti's hillsides denuded and subject to erosion.

"I really don't know about solar cooking. I just brought them here," Tellis told them. "One thing you should remember¯they told me to warn you not to be fooled just because there is no fire. Inside, the oven is very hot. Other than that, I'm here to learn from you. The cookers are yours."

Plantains For Lunch

"Can we try the cookers now?" someone asked Tellis.

"Sure," he replied.

"That's when I also said a few prayers," Tellis remembers. "Oh my God, I'm right here and they want to do this."

For reasons of climate, there had never been a successful test run of the solar cookers at Fairfield. In the Connecticut September, students were never able to get water hotter than 200 degrees, though the cooker sat in the sun for two hours. Now, in Fondwa, people were ripping open the boxes and yelling for one cook to come use them for the plantains she was about to boil.

With that, Tellis took off to visit an old man elsewhere in the village. "It was just an inspiration, that's all," he says of his move to make the villagers take complete ownership of the cookers and figure things out for themselves. "You need a lot of humility. You need to be able to say, ‘I don't know,' instead of walking around like a big shot. You have to get people to help themselves. They had not seen a solar cooker, but neither had I used one, really. Why should I have pretended to know anything? I could have, I suppose, but I figured they would learn a lot more when they figured this out. They owned it, I didn't."

After 40 minutes, Tellis wandered back to the center of town and noted that the cookers had disappeared. "Oh, my, what am I going to ask?" he remembers thinking. Ushered indoors for lunch, he saw plantains on the table.

"What did they get cooked in?" Tellis asked, casually.

"Don't you know?" came a question right back. "In 20 minutes the water was boiling and they were done. Then we took them in and fried them."

Cookers in place, Tellis headed back to Fairfield University, where the students in Tucker's class were going to monitor the project's progress from afar.

"I call every Monday morning; I want them to see that this is not a frivolous gift," explains Tellis. The calls, actually to Ancelot Phillipe when he returns to Port-au-Prince after the weekend in Fondwa, are for a full report.

"I ask what worked and what didn't, what they liked and didn't like." During the semester, Tellis kept Tucker and his students continually apprised of everything that was happening, including "all the successes and failures, because there were a lot of each." Likewise, students' questions went back to Phillipe and then to the people in the town. With the course's hands-on component, the business students not only researched pertinent aspects of the Haitian situation but also were actively involved in brainstorming solutions.

When word came back that people were dubious about using the cookers during the rainy season, afraid that the sun might not be out long enough at a stretch to cook a whole meal, students recommended that future designs have a propane backup.

"The students learned, first of all, that you can't succeed in introducing a new technology in another culture so readily," Tellis explains. "It's not an easy thing to do. It's a long, drawn-out process."

At present, word is that the cookers are in use, though not every day. However, in an interesting twist, one of them is in a clinic where it is being used to sterilize instruments.

Haitians Giséle and Nicole, residents of Fondwa, boil plantains in a pot using the solar cooker. Using solar power (with propane backup for rainy days) can help preserve the country's natural resources.

Beyond Self

"In this course we're really bringing business and service together in a unique way," Tellis explains. "It's the Jesuit aspects of service and looking beyond the self into the larger community, all woven into the context of a regular course."

Four or five times a semester he also takes different students to cook and serve at local soup kitchens.

"Most have never done something like that, and you need that kind of experience in your life," Tellis remarks.

Meanwhile, in Haiti, the solar cookers have generated interest in another project: a solar bakery that can produce 50 loaves of bread an hour and, in an improvement over the smaller cookers, does have a propane tank for backup. This time, Tucker's MBA students got involved, putting together a formal business plan that Tellis is shopping around, looking for a $15,000 loan.

"We figure that with this one oven they can start a business," he says. "I've got my hooks out in various places. Somebody's going to nibble."

"The students who worked on this project certainly came to understand that it's a lot more complex than it appeared at first," Tucker explains. "In order to help an economy develop, or even a single village, you have to come up with things that are economically viable. We have to be able to make money to pay back the investment so that things are not always a handout. The villagers will learn how to run a business as part of this and how to function in a capitalist world." He adds, "It's kind of mushroomed. It's neat to have something that started out as a little brainstorming come to this point."

Tellis and Tucker may even find another village and get another group of students involved.

"They're the driving force," says Tellis. "Is there some way we can bring the students into partnership with us?" Then, reflecting on the service aspect, he continues, "It just becomes part of your life, which is really what it should be. It's a matter of conscience in the end."

"They say one person doesn't make a difference¯but yes, one can," Tellis concludes. "Probably 600 people by now have seen the cookers in Fondwa. Now, I'm going to encourage them to use those ideas to design a cooker of their own. Maybe it won't be as efficient. But as long as you now know that kind of thing works, let's see what you can do. Something might happen."  

Freelance writer Janet Barrett met Winston Tellis and Michael Tucker when writing about their work for NOW, Fairfield University's magazine. She lives in Chester, Conn., with her husband, a carpenter, and three cats, a dog, and a retired racehorse (no, she didn't).