Demons of Poverty

By Ted Boers

For ten years, Ted Boers, a well-intentioned, successful American entrepreneur, devoted himself to improving the conditions of the poor in Haiti. His journey would take him into many dark places including a crisis of faith that launched him on a mission to discover what he did not know and wished he had known before he began. This book is the fruit of that journey. It contains hard lessons forged on the anvil of what might look like failure. However, this perceived failure may in fact be the doorway to hope. In it are keys to making a lasting impact on the lives of the poor in Haiti and around the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Acton Institute
• Release date: Feb 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9781938948831

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Demons of Poverty

by Ted Boers and Tim Stoner

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2014 Acton Institute

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked CEV are taken from the Contemporary English Version. Copyright © 1995 by American Bible Society. Used by permission.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or any other — except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior permission of the author.

It has been said that as many as twenty percent

of Haitians have left Haiti in the last forty years

to seek a better life in the United States,

France, Canada and other countries.

This book is dedicated to the Haitians

I have met who have the option to leave

but made the decision to stay

so that they could make a difference.

You know who you are.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Foreword

About the Author

The Vision

Prologue

CHAPTERS

1 Wanting to Make a Difference

2 God Opens Doors

3 A Vision Is Born

4 A Passive Investment in a God Project

5 A Miracle Well, a Conversion and Our First Prime Minister

6 Shaken to the Core

7 The Day God Went Silent

8 Questioning God

9 Three Questions about Poverty

10 Reflections

Epilogue

Another Side of the Story

Where Do We Go from Here?

SPIRITUAL REFLECTIONS

Does God Really Call People to Specific Tasks?

Can a God Project Fail?

Is It OK to Doubt God?

PRACTICAL REFLECTIONS

Practical Lessons Learned

Development Work Do’s and Don’ts

The Bottom Line

Discussion Questions

Conclusion

APPENDICES

The Remove Curses Prayer

Seven Critical Questions

Acknowledgments

MY WRITING STYLE IS TO MAKE NOTES ABOUT WHAT I AM learning on this journey we call life. Sometimes those notes end up in my journal, sometimes they end up in a topical index and sometimes they end up in the wastepaper basket. My ten-year Haitian journey resulted in a lot of notes.

I would like to thank my wife Jan for encouraging me to share my Haiti notes so that others can hopefully learn from them. I would also like to thank her for encouraging me along the way and for making her own unique contribution to this book.

I would like to thank Tim Stoner for helping me to take hundreds of pages of these notes and turning them into a story.

I would also like to thank friends of mine who walked parts of this story with me and who were then kind enough to read the manuscript and offer their thoughts and suggestions. For this I am indebted to Marc Andreas, Dave Arnold, Tim Berends, Trish Borgdorff, Mike Buwalda, Tim Cole, Henry Doorn, Dave Genzink, Jon Genzink, Chris Jensen, Lesly Jules, Jonathan Loux, Rob Petroelje, Doug Seebeck, David Tigchelaar and Robert Ulysse.

Foreword

FOR AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER HAITI HAS BEEN REFERRED to as the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Thousands of international NGOs (Non-Government Organizations) and tens of thousands of people have been at work for decades trying to improve the quality of life for the Haitian people. During this time billions of dollars of international aid was invested in this country. And yet, even before the 2010 earthquake, Haiti was still considered to be the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

For ten years (2002 – 2011) I was one of those people trying to make a difference in Haiti. This book is about my experiences. From these experiences I draw some conclusions and some lessons. My hope is that they will be helpful to the thousands who are devoting themselves to improving the quality of life for the people of Haiti and the millions of others in similar impoverished areas of the world. You may not agree with all of my conclusions. That is okay. However, it is my hope that this book will stimulate a fair and respectful conversation, one from which we will all be able to learn.

Ten years ago I had the boldness and the audacity to tell Haitian people what they should do to improve their lot in life and to tell Americans what they should do to help the Haitian people.

I don’t anymore.

I have learned some of what I did not know.

That is what this book is about.

TED BOERS

2012

About the Author

TED BOERS WAS BORN IN THE NETHERLANDS IN 1946. HIS PARENTS immigrated to Canada in 1952. As was the case with most immigrant families, Ted’s family experienced relative poverty for many years. However, since most of his peers were in a similar situation, the experience of poverty was not particularly traumatic. Ted came to the United States in 1964 to attend Calvin College in Grand Rapids Michigan. One semester was prepaid as a result of a summer job and a small scholarship and he had $20 in his pocket that his mother had given him.

Ted started his business career while still in college, selling everything from strawberries to encyclopedias and a legal pepper spray that could be used for self-defense. During his college years he also worked for the Fatman International Private Detective Agency putting a healthy fear into straying husbands.

It was at Calvin College that Ted met Jan who was from Highland, Indiana. They married in 1968. During the next eight years three children were born who in turn have added eight delightful grandchildren to the family.

Upon graduating from Calvin College, Ted went to work for a large Insurance Company. The corporate world felt constraining so he left after five years. This turned out to be a false start into his own entrepreneurial career so he returned to the same insurance company for five more years. This time he left for good, starting seven different businesses over a period of twenty-five years. Today he continues to be the majority owner of two of these businesses.

Ted learned that starting businesses was difficult and time consuming but he also learned that once the business was on its’ feet it could be very rewarding and liberating. That is what he wanted; time to do what he wanted to do. As he evaluated his options, it became clear that what he really wanted to do was to help other people who had not been as fortunate as he had been.

By 1993 Ted had accomplished his goal of freedom of time. He bought his first sailboat, which he and Jan enjoy sailing on Lake Michigan and he started a financial counseling ministry at his local church. This ministry gave Ted the opportunity to council many couples who were struggling with their finances and it led to various opportunities for public speaking in local churches as well as churches throughout the United States and Canada. After ten years of focus on stewardship and financial counseling, Ted wrote a book in an attempt to share what he had learned about stewardship and finance. The book is called Three Simple Rules … Guaranteed to Improve Your Financial Situation.

By the year 2000, Ted’s journey had evolved from helping local people with their finances to wondering about poverty issues on an international scale. That raised the question of who are the poor of the 21st century? It was that question that started the journey described in this book.

The Vision

As I walked along the beach I had a vision.

And in this vision I saw the Spirit of God

hovering over the country of Haiti.

The Spirit saw the squalor, the anguish

and the poverty of the Haitian people.

The Spirit saw the sick old man who had no medicine,

the poverty-stricken parents who had no job

and the hungry little girl who had no food.

And the Spirit of God was grieved and the Spirit’s heart was broken.

As the Spirit of God shifted focus slightly to the west,

Miami came into view and then the entire state of Florida,

followed by Atlanta, Chicago and then

Grand Rapids, my hometown.

The Spirit of God saw the wealth, the affluence and the abundance

of the people in Miami, Atlanta, Chicago and Grand Rapids.

The Spirit saw the retired old man driving to the golf course

in his BMW, parents showering guilt presents on their children,

and the little girl competing in a beauty contest.

And again the Spirit of God was grieved

and again the Spirit’s heart was broken.

This is not the way it is supposed to be.

Aren’t there over 2000 verses in my Holy Book

that tell those who have,

to share with those who have not?

Don’t they know?

Don’t they care?

TED BOERS

March 2008

Prologue

THAT FRIGID MORNING IN 2008, I ARRIVED IN my office in Grand Rapids, Michigan unaware that I was about to receive a telephone call that would undermine everything I believed about God, and much of what I believed about myself. It would precipitate a crisis of faith that would last for almost three years; one that would challenge some of my core assumptions and bring hidden weaknesses into the light. And it would mark me indelibly. It was January 30, 2008.

For almost three years I had invested in and led the Nouveau Kiskeya (New Haiti) Development Project in Northwest Haiti. We were a group of American investors committed to developing fifteen miles of pristine ocean-front property about 100 miles north of Port-au-Prince. Our primary objective was to start a tax-free trade zone that would create thousands of jobs and help transform the neediest area of the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Our model would be the one that had put the Bahamas on the map 50 years earlier.

It was an ambitious project with a primarily philanthropic motive. As Christian business people whom God had prospered, we were all in agreement that a profitable return on investment was secondary to the goals of providing jobs for thousands and introducing them to the God of the Bible. The Nouveau Kiskeya Project was driven by a vision I was convinced God had prompted and repeatedly affirmed. I kept track of the miraculous interventions that supported the conclusion that this was a God-project which He had stamped with His seal of approval.

My involvement in Haiti had begun almost seven years earlier. It had not been easy. I, as well as others, had invested a significant amount of money and enormous amounts of time in business and political strategies that had not achieved the results we had anticipated. But the Nouveau Kiskeya project was different. As I walked into my office on that snowy morning, the Miracle List, what I took to be miraculous affirmations of our development project, numbered sixteen. They reinforced my belief that, unlike those earlier attempts, this one could not fail.

I was about to begin a journey that almost cost me my faith. It would take several more years of my life, but painfully and ever-so-slowly, I was able to distill a handful of lessons I wish I had known at the beginning.

What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds … In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

JAMES 2:14-17

CHAPTER 1

Wanting to Make a Difference

I SUPPOSE I COULD BLAME IT ALL ON A BOOK I READ EARLY in 1998, Half Time, authored by Bob Buford. I was in my early 50’s. I was CEO of Datacomp, a company I started in 1987 specializing in manufactured home appraisals. At the time we had 80 employees and about 3,000 independent-contractors all across the country. It was obvious that God had significantly blessed our business. Buford’s book brought me up short and caused me to take appraisal of my own life. It prompted me to ask an important question, "God, what is it that you want me