WAUKESHA – Retired president of Waukesha County Technical College, Richard Anderson will speak at neighboring University of Wisconsin-Waukesha at noon on Tuesday, March 14. The topic stems from a more distant trip he’s made, however, to “Haiti: The Poor Sister in the Western Hemisphere.” The presentation will be in the Commons, Room 101, on campus at 1500 N. University Dr., Waukesha. The public is welcome, and there is no charge.
He first went to Haiti after his retirement in 2002 with a mission group from his church. Since then, he has made the mission his own. A carpenter who became an educator, Anderson returns to the island country to try to relieve the source of poverty. He builds schools, both rolling up his sleeves and organizing other volunteers.
Haiti lies a mere 700 miles from Miami and 40 miles from Guatanamo Bay, Anderson says. Some 8.3 million people occupy the country, which is about a fifth the size of Wisconsin. The poverty is palpable in that third-of-an-island nation, which was 20 percent clear cut by its invaders and has been deteriorating for 250 years, he claims. From the air, the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic forms a sharp line of Haitian brown on one side and Dominican green on the other, Anderson observes.
Anderson designed a campus for a regional technical school in Mirebalais, Haiti, and workers broke ground last January and expect to have Phase I of the project ready for classes in fall 2006. With no electricity, no running water, and no sewers, the obstacles are immense. For a carpenter who started teaching at Waukesha Vocational School in 1957, went to college part-time for 18 years to earn a bachelor’s degree in industrial education and then master’s and doctorate’s in educational administration, and grew a school from 8 faculty and 300 students to one with 1,500 staff and 32,000 students, even this could be possible.
He donates his time as an educational consultant, and partners Pete Van Horn, a building contractor, and Ken Schumann, a project coordinator, also volunteer unpaid. All chip in trying to raise funds for the effort.
The Visions & Expressions presentation is sponsored by the UW-Waukesha Lectures & Fine Arts Committee.
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