Poetry in Motion

A conversation with Andrew Oerke ’52, MA ’59, is like a lesson in poetry, history, and economics all rolled into one. With an easy smile, a confident stride, and a passion for humanitarianism that consumes his speech, Oerke has done everything—well, almost. Now seventy-seven and residing in Miami, Florida, he has been a poet-in-residence, a Togolese tribal member, a Peace Corps country director, a president of a microfinance organization, and the CEO of an environmental foundation.

While discussing his life’s work, Oerke referred to Jesus, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, and Lorca in a span of thirty minutes. It’s not surprising considering he earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in English from Baylor. Yet, although he’s a witty and intelligent man, Oerke is no stodgy academic. He describes himself as a father and as a poet.

Now, during a time in his life when many people would consider supporting an organization or writing a check as a charitable activity, Oerke is flying to earthquake-ravaged Haiti to help in relief efforts and heading up a fifty-year study of the western hemisphere. But he doesn’t boisterously proclaim his accomplishments. His voice, like his demeanor, is mellow—a voice ripened with age.

“You talk about people dying with their boots on—well, Andrew Oerke will still be working,” said Dr. Jack Allison, a Peace Corps volunteer under Oerke and a previous president of the American College of Emergency Physicians. It came as no surprise when Oerke called him trying to recruit doctors to send to Haiti after the recent earthquake. Allison knew that Oerke and his organization, Greater Caribbean Energy and Environment Foundation (GCEEF), would be involved in relief efforts.

The Haitian government has given GCEEF responsibility for two districts located about six hours outside Port-au-Prince, Haiti, for both short-term relief and long-term reconstruction. The districts, Gressier and Grand Goâve, were at the epicenter of the earthquake. “Eighty percent of everything was destroyed,” Oerke said.

He visited Haiti in early February to assess the current and future needs of the two districts. Since his return, Oerke has worked tirelessly through GCEEF, sending doctors to Haiti and supporting them with supplies. In reference to his organization’s efforts, he said, “It’s extremely difficult.”

Difficult or not, Oerke is committed to humanitarian efforts. And this commitment has a long history—dating back to his Baylor days.

Applied Studies
Oerke attributes his success in humanitarianism to poetry, and he became interested in poetry at Baylor. “It was really my birthplace, intellectually speaking,” he said.

During his academic career, he has studied at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and at the Freie Universität in Berlin on a Fulbright scholarship, but he reserved his highest praise for Baylor’s academic community.

“I’ve visited many universities, but I must say the most exciting professors I have ever met were at Baylor,” said Oerke, who developed relationships with prominent professors like Charles G. Smith and Ralph Lynn.

He took a break between his undergraduate studies and graduate school to volunteer for the Korean War. Before he was shipped out, however, the war ended, and he was sent to Germany. “So instead of going to the war, I spent a year playing football,” Oerke said with a laugh.

His experiences in the Army did not slow his academic career. He came back to the U.S. and began seriously pursuing poetry in graduate school, even publishing a poem in the New Yorker. As a graduate student, he gathered a following of student poets.

“I always heard about this charismatic character named Andrew Oerke,” said James Allsup ’59, a fellow English major. When he was a junior at Baylor, in the fall of 1958, Allsup met Oerke. Oerke mentored Allsup during his last two years at Baylor, and the two developed a friendship that they have maintained to this day.

Allsup described Oerke as having a certain “mellifluous” characteristic then—and now. “He was very given to poetry readings,” said Allsup, who in 2007 invited Oerke to give a reading at the University of Texas at Brownsville, where Allsup taught. “He was enchanting,” Allsup said.

This isn’t the only time Oerke has been asked to give a poetry reading. After winning a literature award from the United Nations Society of Writers in 2003, he also delivered readings of several of his poems at a U.N. assembly. Some of those poems were published in his most recent books, San Miguel De Allende and The African Stiltdancer.

After college, Oerke’s love of poetry took him to St. Andrew’s Presbyterian College in North Carolina, where he served as poet in residence. He’d already been published several times in the New Yorker, Poetry, and Mademoiselle, yet he began to itch to do something more.

“I looked at my poetry and I thought, ‘I don’t know if I am telling the truth or not because I haven’t experienced this stuff,’” Oerke said. “So I resigned and joined the Peace Corps, and off I went to Africa to live in the world and see if my words matched reality.”

Perhaps it was an unorthodox choice for a successful poet, but Oerke viewed it as necessary. “He wanted to flesh out his art,” Allsup said. Fleshing out his art meant living in Africa and the Caribbean. It meant uprooting his life to volunteer. And while in the Peace Corps, he came to a pivotal understanding. “I realized poetry is not just words on a page,” he said. “It’s a way of living and perceiving and relating to other people. It’s communicating to people in a meaningful and imaginative way.”

Keep the Peace
In 1967, Oerke joined the Peace Corps as a staff member. His preference was to serve as a field volunteer, but the Corps was not taking volunteers with families, and he had a wife and child. Oerke started as a desk officer—a liaison between the Peace Corps headquarters in Washington, D.C., and his assigned countries of Tanzania and Uganda. He then transferred to Malawi during the late 1960s and early 1970s and gradually moved up the ranks, becoming deputy director and then country director. For his last assignment, the Peace Corps sent him to Jamaica as a country director.

So what does a Peace Corps director do? His primary objectives were to oversee volunteers and meet the needs of the host country’s citizens. His first practical step was learning to communicate.

“He learned more of the language than any other Peace Corps director I have ever known,” said Allison, a volunteer in Malawi under Oerke in the late 1960s. Allison coordinated language plans for incoming volunteers, and he was impressed with Oerke’s ability to integrate into the Malawian culture.

Oerke explained that most country directors live in the city surrounded by American and European diplomats. “But I went to Africa to meet Africans,” he said. So Oerke moved his wife and three kids from two miles outside Blantyre, the largest city in Malawi, to Ndirande Village. “Pretty soon my son Jared was speaking Chichewa and had organized his own soccer team,” he said.

In Malawi, Oerke said he wanted to work on community development—a term he defines as helping one small village at a time by providing medicine and education and stimulating the agriculture and economy. “Andrew was very supportive. The whole idea was that we were in this together as staff and volunteers,” Allison said. “But in the end, we wanted good relations with the Malawians and to help them be healthier and live longer.”

Oerke desired to stay beyond his term, but the Peace Corps required him to return to the United States in 1971 after fulfilling the five-year limit for staff. He learned valuable lessons from his humanitarian efforts. “He got introduced through the Peace Corps to doing community development internationally, and the guy just keeps doing it,” Allison said.

Haiti Then
In 1976, Oerke became president of Partnership for Productivity (PfP), a Quaker-sponsored program in overseas economic development. Founded in 1969 by David H. Scull, PfP provided capital for loans or investments and advised small business ventures in African countries.

When Oerke came on board, however, he described the organization as “running out of gas.” But he refueled it, securing a proposal from United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a government agency committed to expanding democracy and improving the developing world. Through this proposal, he implemented a successful program in Kakamega, Kenya, and began replicating that program and setting up branches of PfP in other countries.

One such country was Haiti, where he established a branch of PfP in Port-au-Prince in 1977. After training a Haitian staff, his organization began working in microfinance, a foreign aid model that was practically unheard of in those days. “It was very new,” Oerke said.

Microfinance may not be a term used in everyday American conversation, but Dr. Stephen Gardner, professor and chair of economics and director of the McBride Center for International Business at Baylor, said microfinance became an established practice for foreign aid programs in the 1980s. Gardner described microfinance as micro-lending.

“Narrowly, it’s giving out these very small loans, a few dollars sometimes, to low-income people to allow them to run some kind of business,” he said.

Gardner explained that in the United States, if a person puts together a business plan, the possibility of a bank giving them a commercial loan is very high. “But the basic problem is that in developing countries, you tend to have underdeveloped financial institutions,” he said. Gardner explained that in countries like Kenya, Malawi, and Haiti, loans from banks to lower-income citizens are not possible. Because these countries don’t have a well-organized credit system, he said, international aid organizations like PfP practice micro-lending to fill this gap.

Oerke counted his involvement in early microfinance as a huge achievement. He said one of the things that contributed to his success was solid methodology. In Haiti, he used a method he’d pioneered in Kenya with PfP, which he calls “The Kitchen Sink” because it incorporates a variety of techniques. Oerke used a peer-pressure, community-based system in which the applicant’s neighbor won’t get a loan if the applicant defaults. This arrangement puts pressure on the applicant and requires the community to depend on each other to perpetuate the system.

But Oerke took this system a step further and added collateral—a component not used at that time by microfinance programs such as the Grameen Bank, a Nobel Prize-winning community bank developed by Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh in the late 1970s. “We made the system reliable,” Oerke said of his “Kitchen Sink” method.

He worked in Haiti until the late 1980s, when he turned his attention to environmental issues and joined the non-governmental organization GCEEF, later becoming its CEO.

Looking back on his work in PfP, Oerke again referred to poetry as the key to his success. He said many organizations come to developing countries and try the only solutions they know: Western ideas and methods. But he was able to think outside the box, and poetry enabled him to do that.

Oerke characterizes Western methods as prose. “Prose is descriptive and deductive; it’s limited by language. But poetry transcends itself,” he explained. “As Emerson said, ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.’ In poetry, you don’t have to be little-minded.”

For Oerke, being “little-minded” meant being only Western-minded. Applying a poet’s point of view, he was able to develop a microfinance system that worked outside of Western ideology, and he’s trying it again.

Haiti Now
With his current foundation, Oerke returned last year to his work in Haiti at the request of an old friend from PfP. “He’s in the thick of it. He doesn’t have to do community development, but I think it’s in his marrow and his bones,” Allison said.

Oerke got to work, setting up a small office in Port-au-Prince to run a microfinance program. He, Allison, and Anitra Thorhaug, president of GCEEF, also began writing a preventive-medicine grant proposal for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for Haiti, Peru, and Guatemala.

“I went to Haiti ten times last year,” Oerke said. During his time in Haiti, he became involved in the work of Dr. Christian Sanon, a prominent Haitian doctor. “We got to know each other, and I found out about his dream of building a hospital and training facility there,” he said. But before Oerke could develop his microfinance program or help Dr. Sanon garner funds for a new hospital, the earthquake struck on January 12, 2010, and destroyed Oerke’s office and Sanon’s clinic.

“I put a lot of my personal finances into Haiti, and everything crashed,” he said. So he switched his focus from long-term microfinance goals in Haiti to helping Sanon’s non-governmental organization, ROME-Haiti, in relief efforts

Working from Miami, Oerke heard about the horrible damage, but he said it really hit home after visiting the country. “It’s devastated,” he said. “The roads have big fissures in them, and poorly built houses have collapsed.”
According to Oerke, the first step in understanding what Haiti needs is to understand its condition. “Poor people live in a subsistence economic system,” he explained. “These people are working seven days a week just to stay alive.”

The Western economy relies on competition because Western citizens have links to capital. But in developing countries, people don’t have access to cash flow.

“If there’s a missing link, the economic chain grinds to a halt,” Oerke said.

So, how does he propose to provide the missing links?

A Generative Plan
Broadly, in order to rebuild Haiti’s economic and social structure, Oerke suggested a fusion of international donors with volunteer effort and local support. “The best way to get development done is for the international agencies to get on the ground and work with the local organizations, and also work with small, inventive organizations in the States,” he explained. “So they understand each other and they create together—teach each other how to do it.”

As a part of one of these inventive organizations in the U.S., Oerke will do his part to rebuild social structure by using microfinance. But this time, he said, he has a new model. He wants to use what he calls “the three-legged stool” model that combines microfinance, microenterprise, and improved technology.

When asked to elaborate on the “legs,” Oerke said he will use microfinance to provide Haitian citizens with access to credit. But after giving out loans to start or support businesses, he will then help owners run their businesses efficiently and connect those businesses to others. He calls this microenterprise. And the only way to keep so many enterprises afloat is through improved technology. Oerke wants to strengthen the producer-to-market connection by teaching better agricultural, construction, and retail practices. He also plans to link up Haitian enterprises with the international flow of capital.

“There are people who are interested in investing in poor people, and I believe it’s now possible to generate a three- to five-percent return on their investments, which would be better than what they would get from a bank,” Oerke said.

He calls this plan a generative model because as time passes the community will generate a profit surplus that it can use to support itself instead of always being sustained by outside donors. To gain support, Oerke spoke at the Sustainable Haiti conference, held March 17-19 in Miami.

Time will tell whether or not the generative model will succeed, but Oerke said he’s not worried. When asked about his greatest accomplishment, his voice softened and he said, “I think it’s that I have been able to fail. My greatest accomplishment was trying to understand what life’s all about and transmitting it through poetry and action. I couldn’t do this unless I was willing to fail.”

Claire Moncla, a junior from Spring majoring in professional writing, is an editorial assistant for the Baylor Line. For more information on the Greater Caribbean Energy and Environment Foundation, go to gceef.org.