The multicolor brochures don’t mention, for example, the 95% increase in crime in a single year or the drug abuse that plagues its population, over 10% of which has used illegal substances. That’s why one woman started a new foundation dedicated to bringing hope by making one-on-one connections over a book that changed her life.
One Woman Decides to Address the Scourge of Drugs in Aruba
Carmelita Haynes grew up living the reality behind those statistics in San Nicolas, an impoverished barrio that squats out of the view of sightseeing buses and luxury hotels. She and her 14 siblings lived a hardscrabble life, battling on the streets with other kids while coping with poverty and dysfunction at home. Sometimes making do with makeshift plywood instead of glass windows and studying by candlelight in the absence of electricity, Carmelita—the subject of a Scientology.tv Voices for Humanity episode—ultimately clung to a truth her father taught her at an early age: education will set you free.
The lesson did not at first resonate with young Carmelita—“I was not an easy child,” she admits—but her father insisted that, above all, his children must excel. That was anything but easy for children with two strikes against them already. “We had to go to the school that was for the poor kids,” Carmelita said, “and it was always a challenge as a child to make sure that you didn’t look poor—number one—and that anything you did, you did better than the others.”
The more she learned of the problems plaguing her island, the more broken lives she saw, the more her resolve to help Aruba deepened.
There were more challenges ahead: Carmelita’s family lost their home and everything in it in a fire when she was in elementary school. But in high school, she lost more than that when her parents broke up. It was then she was faced with a heartbreaking choice: drop out of school and go with her mother to another town where her destiny would dead-end or stay and complete her education. Taking her father’s words to heart, she decided not to follow in the footsteps of so many of her friends—drop out and get the only well-paying job available to those with no other qualifications: selling drugs.
Carmelita finished high school determined to make something of herself. “My goal was to make sure that children who are in the situation where I was get the same opportunity as anyone else,” she decided. Graduating teachers college, Carmelita got work at a local school where, in addition to teaching, she led extracurricular activities.
Those after-school pursuits—coaching and umpiring baseball and softball—led to more community-centered work, and the young woman became a trusted and familiar figure in the neighborhoods of her village, so much so that she was asked to run for public office. She did, and won handily.
Using Education to Mend Broken Lives in a Broken Nation
As a teacher, she had learned that you can educate a child through the sixth grade, but they still don’t know who they are. Then, as a member of parliament for 11 years, she gained new perspective on the cancer she had watched destroy the youth of her country: the Caribbean corridor had become a hub for drug trafficking—from South and Central America into the US and the Netherlands. And with drugs come gangs, violence and death.
The more she learned of the problems plaguing her island, the more broken lives she saw, the more her resolve to help Aruba deepened, but there was no apparent solution. With all her years of community and government activism, she still had no answers to questions like: What drove people to make these wrong choices that they knew were wrong to begin with? And why was it often so hard to help those caught in the web of crime and immorality? “You try to tell them that you have to get on track—you have to organize your life. But most people, when they’re in trouble, they don’t want to hear that.”
“When I believe in something that is good, I go all out.”
Then a friend introduced her to a booklet, The Way to Happiness: A Common Sense Guide to Better Living. With her nephew, Carmelita watched a series of videos covering the precepts in the book—precepts like “Flourish and Prosper,” “Be Worthy of Trust” and “Take Care of Yourself.” Her nephew turned to her and said: “Aunty, I think you should have these videos in school because some of the kids in school should see this.”
Carmelita knew she’d found what she was looking for. Her passion for helping her people had already, by then, given rise to her H.O.P.Ex. Foundation. “The H.O.P.Ex. Foundation is ‘Help Our People Excel.’ The Way to Happiness gave you 21 precepts where you can help people get more happiness. When you’re happy, you excel. I just put the two together and it just clicked.”
The Way to Happiness Transforms Aruba
“When I believe in something that is good, I go all out,” Carmelita said. Recruiting family and friends, she began distributing copies of the booklet throughout the island—to individuals, to schools, to the players on the girls’ Little League softball team she had organized. “When you’re poor, when you don’t have anything, when you have a drug addict as a dad, when you have been beaten every day, you’re sad every day. So you have to get yourself strong to get a little bit of happiness in this life or else you’ll get lost,” she says.
In just a few years of distributing the booklet, Carmelita has succeeded in reaching 100% of her island’s population with The Way to Happiness, and the result has been remarkable: Aruba’s crime rate dropped by nearly 50%, prompting the country’s third Prime Minister, Mike Eman, to praise Carmelita’s work. “Many of the cornerstones of what forms a good citizen of our society have been promoted by Carmelita through her devotion to serve the Aruban community, and with that determination of bringing about change, she has touched the hearts of many people in Aruba. So the contribution of having such a booklet in every household of Aruba, which Carmelita has devoted a lot of time to, is very, very important.”
“Once you read the book, something remains in here,” Carmelita says, pointing to her head. “You start to think… The Way to Happiness all along the line tells you: ‘Help someone else.’ So my main purpose for starting this movement on our island is that the moral values return in all their glory and the book come[s] alive in their mind.”
“I’m a very hardheaded girl,” she says. “If I have to tell you something, I tell you something.”
Carmelita Haynes had something to tell her people, and with the help of one booklet—The Way to Happiness—she delivered her message.
