From Banana Bread to Building Bricks

How One Local Family is Building a School—One Loaf at a Time

By GABRIELLA BOCK | Reporter

Palisadian father-daughter baking team Billy and Charlotte Jones have been hard at work in their Hartzell Street home kitchen.

For the past three weeks, the Jones team has churned out nearly 500 loaves of chocolate chip banana bread in hopes that they will be able to raise enough money to give an impoverished community of Haitian students a brick-and-mortar school of their very own.

An ambitious goal, the idea to build a school began last February when Charlotte took an eighth-grade class trip to Haiti with St. Matthew’s School.

Accompanied by her mom and dad, the family saw firsthand the devastation still lingering from the 2010 earthquake that rocked the small island nation.

But it was when they arrived in the town of Mirebalais that the family stumbled upon L’Ecole de Bon Samaritan–The School of the Good Samaritan—sitting in a muddy trash field nearly unrecognizable as a public facility.

It was a moment that 14-year-old Charlotte said lit a fire inside of her.

Built in the open air from tarps and scraps of furniture, the school operates on the goodwill of volunteer teachers who serve 200 local students, aged 3 to 16 years old.

“Seeing a school in this bad of shape made me realize just how much we all take for granted,” Charlotte Jones, a freshman at Palisades Charter High School told the Palisadian-Post. “The roof was leaking and the desks were falling apart, but inside were eager kids who were excited to learn, despite their school’s condition.”

Now back at home in the Alphabet Streets, the father-daughter duo have equipped themselves with a secret family recipe and a double oven.

Spending most of their free time whipping up batches of the breakfast bread, Charlotte and Billy are selling the loaves for $25 dollars a piece, with all of the proceeds going toward giving the Good Samaritan students a structurally sound building that will house nine classrooms, a library and an administrative office at a total cost of $50,582.

So how much money can you make selling banana bread?

“In just under three weeks, we have already raised just over $40,000,” Billy reported to the Post. “The response from members of our church and the community—and even others across the country, we’ve shipped as far as New York—has been incredibly uplifting.”

Only $10,000 shy of their goal, they plan to spend the coming weeks peeling, mashing and baking their way toward making a difference.

“The small cost of labor and materials in Haiti compared to the States screams at me in my grandpa’s voice,” Billy explained. “‘It’s just a little extra for us, but more than most folks can imagine.’”

For more information or to find out how you can help fund the Good Samaritan School, visit goodsamaritanhaiti.com/about.