Not Everyone is Waiting for the Money

The island of La Gonave, like most of the Caribbean islands, used to be a pirate hang out. During the Revolution, General Leclerc asked Napoleon to give him the island as a reward for all is hard work trying to restore slavery to the island, that is, before he died of yellow fever. The island even had an American king for a few years the 1920's during the US Marine occupation. I spent the past week there, trekking around, talking about water scarcity and community organization and learning the art of Haitian cooking (hint: oil and tomato paste). Its a quiet, mountainous place, and the thick verdure in certain dark ravines gives you a hint of what the Haiti must been like back before Europeans laid claim to the land. Dusty uneven paths hug the mountain side as they stretch between thin fields of corn, and banana trees. Every mile or two a group of people are hanging out in the shade around a woman's basket of merchandise (always the same things), listening to the music on the radio. The island, which is a department of Haiti, has traditionally been neglected by the state and aid-organizations alike. It's not connected to the mainland, has only one town of any size, and is the home of maybe 30,000 people. La Gonave's state of neglect has not really changed since the earthquake, since the island did not suffer major destruction. But it's problems, especially access to water, are significant. According to a friend, institutional neglect has lead to a greater level of self-sufficiency among the islands communities. One of the communities I spent time in was based around a pastor's home up in the mountains. In 2000 a community organization called AJPDG (which translates into english as Young Peasant Association for the Development of Lagonav), based out of the pastor's home, established what they called the 12 Big Dreams, or goals that they wanted to realize in their area that are primarily based around education: free schooling in kreyol where students will have access to (potable) water, food, and where teachers will secure adequate pay. Sounds like goals certain places in America should be aspiring towards. In the past ten years this organization moved towards realizing many of its goals, without any sustained help from outside organizations. It was a pretty beautiful place. Apparently the way they fund their operations is by something along the lines of 'guerilla capitalism'. The schools run by their organizations have gardens where they teach the children about plants and farming, and the staples grown in these gardens is saved until well after harvest when food prices are high, when it is sold at community stores for a profit. The money is then reinvested into the organization to fund its further development. It's true that you don't come across sustainable community-based organizations like this everyday in Haiti, but AJPDG could be a excellent model for how Haitian communities can help themselves without relying on tenuous injections of outside financing or 'expertise'. Of course, AJPDG certainly benefits from the occasional presence of a mobile clinic or the gift of seeds for next season's crop. But what's important is that people doing the organizing are from the community, and can be held responsible for it's functioning over the long term, unlike programs that are set up by most foreign NGOs and do-gooder types. They are also the direct manifestations of the community's self-determination: they decided what they needed, it wasn't imposed on them. If more communities were able to organize like this one, its possible that the shameful tragedies of America's (and the world's) withheld aid could be mitigated somewhat.

Maybe that's an unfair comparison, since the communities on La Gonave were not shattered in the way that Port-au-Prince was. It's just refreshing to see a group of people getting things done instead of adhering to the mentality of dependence which can be so damning.

Port-au-Prince matters, certainly, but I think Haiti is still a profoundly rural society. Which means that the despite the earthquake, the fundamental problems of soil exhaustion, deforestation, erosion that plague La Gonave are still the key to understanding Haiti's predicament, even though they lack the shock value of a city turned to dust and uncountable deaths and never-found bodies. (Of course, these problems are magnified by the American economic imperialism that has driven many farmers out of business.) Is the earthquake primarily an urban problem? I'm certain the circulation of goods and produce was seriously disturbed by the earthquake. Also, the influx of food-aid seriously undermined the efforts of small-time farmers for a while, but now that most of that has been pulled, or never delivered, that might have normalized too. It's important to remember that the destructiveness of the earthquake is only a sign of Haiti's institutional weaknesses, not a primary cause of it. There are deeper, bigger problems that we might forget to address if we are only think about rubble removal and housing. Not to imply that those aren't important, but when and if those problems are even resolved, the long term problems of La Gonave and elsewhere in rural Haiti will have been continuing, unabated, and perhaps even exasperated.

Not Even a Hurricane

We've all known for some time that tents in Haiti that house hundreds of thousands of people were not going to cut it when the storms came. People say in passing, ah yes, things are bad now, and when the hurricanes comes,it will be even worse. The storms are coming, and things are even worse. On Friday there was a freak thirty minute storm with high speed winds blasted Port-au-Prince and killed at least six people. At least in one case, a tree fell on a tent, crushing a two children inside. Thousands of tents were blown apart, exposing people's fragile sense of normality to the elements. This wasn't even a hurricane! In the camp where I hang out, the tarps that made the roof of Twenty's tent were ripped off and the rain poured in over everything. It's great and all that this month the Haitian government is putting together a housing expo to show off possible model houses, but that maybe should have been done six months ago because right now peoples lives are on the line and there is nowhere for them to go. This is an absolutely unacceptable situation that has, somehow, become acceptable. People have begun to adjust to it. Hundreds of thousands of people squatting throughout the region in shabby houses made of plastic sheeting and tin is totally normal. Intolerably hot during the day, prone to flooding, and easily blown away in the winds, totally normal. It has been said that Haitians are very 'resilient' and 'adaptable', but as soon as this situation became tolerable Haitian leaders responsible for finding a solution were released from the pressure of 'NOW'. I want to believe this place is a time bomb about to explode with collective outrage, with people demanding basic human rights, but as far as I can tell, it's not. Some people say people are much to worried about meeting their day to day needs to concern themselves with social change. Others say people lost too much or too many in the earthquake, they are still in mourning. People will share their grievances with you when you ask, and the list is long. "Mwen blige akseptel": I'm obliged to accept it. You hear that phrase over and over. Maybe it's a reflection of the role of the church that encourages resignation and the patinent bearing of suffering. On tap-taps you see expressions like "The future is with God". The future may be with god but it's made by men and women. Are they obliged to wait for their homes to be destroyed in the next gust of wind? Are they obliged to wait for the hurricane that might crush their family as the huddle together to wait out the storm?

It's frustrating to see the intolerable become tolerable, but that might be because the Haitians know that the answer to those questions might be yes.

Voyage to the East Side of the Island

The first thing you notice flying over the east side of the island is the trees. I knew this already, I had looked at Hispanola on Google maps, I had seen the legendary line of foliage that divides east from west. But I wasn't entirely prepared for what the surviving jungle represented: the Dominican Republic has a more-or-less functioning state, a mildly healthy economy, a middle class. There are not women on every street corner selling produce in baskets, because many of them are inside, working at their jobs. Streets are paved, businesses have signs that light up at night. There are sushi restaurants for gods sake! Sushi! There were plenty of Haitians there, riding around on bicycles selling coconut juice or hawking paintings of cheerful tropical scenes on tourist strips. Haitians come to the DR for work, either cutting cane in the fields or working the informal economy. Haiti invaded the DR twice in the past two hundred years, at one point controlling the area for over twenty years. This has created a fair amount of resentment, and the supposed 'fathers of the Dominican Republic' on their bills are the men who liberated the country from evil Haitian rule. I got talked into buying a painting of a boat by a Haitian who claimed he lost eight family members in the earthquake. I feel like I am probably the only person to buy a trashy Haitian painting in the DR only to bring it back to Haiti. I felt bad for the guy. There is so much anti-Haitian racism in the DR, he said, I hate it here.

Santo Domingo's claim to fame is having the first everything in the New World. First colony, first church, first hospital, first fortress, first university etc. We're talking like 1490's, early 1500's. I got accidentally got picked up by a stray tour guide one morning who took me around the Zona Colonial and we peeked our faces into windows, looking at original this and original that. But when Santo Domingo is not trying to be original, it's trying to be New York. They recently installed a small subway system, New York style yellow cabs have begun to appear, and every other restaurant or laundry mat is named after the big apple. And of course, the Yankee's hats.

The ostensible reason for the trip, beyond learning to dance merengue and eating fresh seafood on the beach, was to go for Yom Kippur. There are only two synagogues on the island, both of which are in the Dominican Republic. Apparently in the Santo Domingo synagogue, the local rabbi had left some months ago, so a American ex-pat had been asked to lead the services. He is a modern orthodox Jew and he said he would lead under the condition that a divider would be put up to divide the men and the women of the congregation. The local Jewish community (also mostly ex-pats of various stripes but some Dominicans too) was not to happy about this but they figured they had to compromise when they had no one else to lead the service. In addition to that, the Yom Kippur service was led by a visiting Chabad Jew from Israel. So I found myself atoning for my sins and the sins of others at an orthodox Israeli service on a tropical island in the Caribbean. Dear Jewish God: May I never cease to be amazed by the confluences of cultural forces in the world. I gave fasting a try on Saturday, since I had never done it before, and let me tell you, walking around all day in wet heat not eating or drinking water leaves you feeling very very sorry for the things you've done. So sorry that I said screw it, I'm not even jewish, and drank a bottle of water. But even with this confrontation with my physical limits, my forays into the DR and into Judaism led me to a very interesting weekend.

Election Malaise

People all throughout this city are just waiting for something to change. However, its not the elections they are waiting for. On a small scale, some communities can address their own needs: clear a field of garbage to lay a garden, organize sports camps and schools. But on a fundamental and structural level this place is stagnating, and at this distance (both subjective and temporal) it doesn't seem like the November elections give anyone reason to get excited. Politics leave people pretty apathetic. That's a fairly natural reaction considering the assassinations, shootings, and disappearances that seemed to accompany the political activity of any kind from the 1950's till the early 2000s. Speaking out, organizing, attending a radical church, or even voting in national elections has historically led to massacres (usually at the hands or sanctioned by the Army or the secret militia of Tonton Macoute). So unless there is a reason to get excited, like Wyclef for example, its not really worth getting involved. Safer not to know and not to care.

Another part of the problem is that both sides of the great struggle of the recent era -Duvalierism and Aristide- are rather of washed out. Although you can't run as either as either of those groups officially (the first is in bad taste and the second is illegal), the political players on the scene now have roots in one or the other or both. The language that defined this struggle is still the language of politics today, although now it seems hollow, signifying nothing. Duvalierism is right-wing dictatorship, state control, order, noirism. A lot of people have been looking fondly upon the Duvalier years, which ended in 87, since the earthquake. You see lots of 'Bon Retour Jean Francois Duvalier' graffettied around town. The logic under a dictatorship at least shit would get Ladone. Aristides party, Lavalas, is the party of "the people", purporting to challenge American economic imperialism and make the amelioration of material conditions for the poor a top priority. Aristide made a name for himself as a supporter of liberation theology and daring and outspoke critic of oppression and violence during the junta that followed the Duvaliers. Through his preachings, considered radical by church and state, he gained a massive popular following that only grew the more times they tried to assassinate him. Though not a skilled politician, he was president for seven months in before being removed in a CIA backed coup in 1991. He was reinstated in 1994 with strict conditions, including the enforcement of neo-liberal political measures. He was president until 1996, then reelected again in 2001, but removed in another CIA backed coup (under Bill Clinton, who is now practically the Resident-General of Haiti), and has been in exile ever since. He party Lavalas was banned from elections, but many of the present day politicians cut their teeth in Lavalas (for example, the current president Preval served as Aristides prime minister).

All the major candidates in the current elections made their careers through involvement or accordance with one or another of these 'parties', or both. The fact that Alexis was a former prime minister, or Manigat was a first lady, none of these are actually endorsements. The fact that Manigat's husband worked for Duvalier and came into office in a discredited election and then was promptly duped out of the office and into exile, that's not really a glowing recommendation, is it? The fact that Preval was formerly involved in Lavalas means nothing about his contemporary political agenda. He's certainly not particularly worried about ameliorating the material conditions of the poor. The idea and the network of Lavalas might have meant something once, but it doesn't anymore.

The point is that the ideas that motivated both Duvalierism and Lavalas rouse little enthusiasm today, but another political language has yet to develop to take their place. People are still fighting the same old battles, thinking in the same old diachomy, and yet the realities of the world have moved on. I'm not saying that violent dictatorship is a thing of the past, or that addressing social inequality directly is passe, but rather the Haitian people aren't animated by the same ideas anymore, and politics has yet to catch up. The celebration of Aristides birthday, which has in the past brought out thousands of people, saw a demonstration of three hundred or so this year. Its possible that people too preoccupied with meeting their most basic necessities to get involved, but I don't think that's all of it. There's no lack of political conversation or engagement in Haiti, its just that people don't see themselves or a future they want reflected in anyone running. They just see more of the same old shit. The miserably low voting turn outs don't reflect only a lack of interest. They also reflect the deliberate rejection of a system that most people recognize as a charade. What Duvalierism and Aristides movement have in common is the charismatic leader. At the center of each is a magnetic personality that is able to mobilize thousands. They each came into power bring the promise of something new. The personalities in the up-coming elections are viewed as stale and compromised. That was the appeal of Wyclef: he was an outsider (less compromised), already filthy rich (less inclined to steal), and he mobilized people. Granted, his political platform was a over hashed pile of cliches, but the idea of him got people, especially young people, to want to get involved. The presidential debates this weekend were a joke. But this country doesn't seem to run on political platforms, it runs on political personalities, both of which are absent.

Camp Ground News

I've dropped by the camp a few times now. I turn off the dust filled street and pass through the gate, waving to women who crouch in the shade of the trees. I pass the tables of men and boys playing domino along the path (this is a new development)and onto the dirt soccer field. It's pretty nice now, with the lines drawn with white rubble and netted goals on either end. There's a tournament going on this month, with individuals from the camp putting together teams from the whole neighborhood. Matches every afternoon at 4. A few hundred people show up. The winning team gets a goat.

Beautiful Sabine is pregnant again. She's a few months along, maybe she just found out or just decided to tell me. She wants a son. She has asked me to be the godmother of her baby. I love Sabine. One afternoon a few weeks ago I was crying in the camp in the mist of some disaster, and she took my head in her hands and stroked strands of hair out of my face. She insisted on walking me home, and when we passed by a hot dog vendor she took out a few crumpled bills and bought us sausages with hot sauce. I ate it gratefully, and I have to say that hot dog, given to me with sympathy by a girl living with her two kids in a tarp shack was the best tasting street food I have ever had the pleasure of eating, and I hate hot dogs. I have agreed to be the godmother to her child. I'm sure I'm getting in over my head here, but I wade willingly into the unknown.

There was a warm welcome for me when I first navigated my way to Twenty's tent through the labyrinth of tarps, ditches, and patches of corn. Rosemead was there, along with Twenty's model-esque girlfriend Kitt and some of their friends. They turned up the the music on their new speakers when I arrived, broke out some rum, and we caught up with each other's news. How was America? You've gotten fat! You missed Twenty's show, but that's okay, there'll be another one. Your mom is well? She let you come here again? No new aid distributions have come. Keep in mind that this is all happening in Kreyol, a language I can control liked a three year old. But hey, who says you need language to be friends? I can hardly ever understand Twenty, but then I just look at Rosemead, his sister, and she patiently repeats whatever he says slowly, more simply, and I laugh and nod. Bon bagay. Every afternoon these kids set up a table at the soccer game and sell rum, beer, cigarettes spaghetti and fritay. They definitely know how to make the most of a little. I sit with them at the games, occasionally putting away bottles and passing out plates of food, all the while admiring the players as they kick theatrically above their heads and headbutt the ball back and forth across the field. When I wander off Twenty shouts out after me, wants to know where I am going, wants to make sure I am safe.

I came back to Haiti with a digital camera for Kevins, my twelve year old photographer sidekick (thanks josh!! he loves it!!). Last time I was here I would give him my camera for days at a time. Most of the photos he takes are of him and his friends looking various shades of badass in different locations around the neighborhood, but some of his photos are of life in the camp. I have to say that they are so much more insightful than any photo I could take of this place. People aren't posing for him. They aren't suspicious of him, and so his photos are small windows into the vie privee of camp life. He catches graceful moments of painful boredom : a man lounging on sheets of metal with his head in the lap of a lover; a red-haired and pot-bellied baby causally chewing on cardboard; women carrying water. People all throughout this city are just waiting for something to change.

Smackdown in Cite Soleil

Yesterday afternoon, as I was driving past Cite Soleil with journalist friends, I witnessed something that puts Haitian resentment towards the international presence here into perspective. As our car approached the intersection in front of the Commissariat (police station), a police and UN caravan emerged from the slum and pulled in front of us, with a large group of people running along side them. They looked more agitated and curious than upset. There was a man sprawled out in the bed of the police pick-up truck, obviously they had made an arrest in the slum. Chilean UN soldiers with flak jackets and guns took pictures of the scene with point and shoot cameras. As the trucks rolled into the Commissarat the crowd followed right up to the gates, until the UN soldiers started shouting and pushing them back across the street to let the traffic (us) pass through. We pulled forward slowly, doors locked and windows open, trying to figure out what was going on. Apparently we caught the attention of an intoxicated young man weaving towards us, small plastic cup of clarin in hand. He was shouting something and indicated to us to stop. I eyed the door lock uneasily as he sidled up to the car, but someone in the car said he was shouting that he was glad the press was there documenting this. A second later there was a Chilean UN solider at his elbow, shouting at him (in Spanish, most likely...) to back off from the car. He pulled at the guy, and when he kept pushing towards us the UN officer smacked the young man hard across the face. I gasped, the man doubled over slightly and brought his hand to his face, and the UN officer stalked off. We rolled forward a bit more and then came to a stop. The drunk man came up to the driver's side window, this time animated and angry. We were aghast that the UN soldier smacked him thinking that he was doing us a favor. He was like "you saw that? you saw that!?" and we replied something to the effect of "oh dude we totally saw that, that was so uncalled for i'm sorry that sucks." A crowd gathered around the car, listening to the conversation between the drunk man and the journalists. They wanted to know if we would write a story about this, show the world how Haitians are treated. It's no small surprise that some Haitians feel so degraded by the international presence that is basically running the country right now. They feel like they aren't respected or valued, just treated like poor dark garbage. They're opinions aren't listened to, their right to housing a joke, and in this case even their physical person is abused. I know a slap in the face is rather mild as far as physical violence goes, but it makes me think about what must happen when the threat is worse and there are no witnesses. Also, when violence like that is sanctioned, violence used by one foreigner to protect another group of foreigners from the inconvenience of having to engage with Haitians, it upholds the idea that the current occupation is just one more generation of oppressors in a long line of oppressors that can be traced back through the US occupation to the days of slavery, when blacks could only speak to whites with permission.

The cup of clarin had fallen out of his hand at some point, and in a few minutes the man had calmed down slightly and started to explain to us what had happened. Apparently that morning gang wars in the neighborhood had broken out into open fire, and several people were dead. Presumably, the arrested man was affiliated with one or another of the gangs. Did the police or the UN fire any of the shots, we asked. The crowd talked amongst itself, then decided that no, they had not. But the violence is really the NGO's fault, they explained. While they are not the ones pulling out guns, they aren't distributing the food equally among the different parts of the city, and this is causing group tensions to escalate to the point of violence. I wonder if the violence was an attempt to secure food resources, or if it was a expression of jealously and vengeance. You could argue easily against the logic that blames the NGOs for gang violence, but this is a place where the basic necessities of life are so hard to come by, given only by charity and sometimes taken by violence. I can see how easily those two forces can become interconnected in the eyes of the people who live at the whim of both.

The Comeback

After a four week hiatus in America, the Haiti Oral History Project is getting up and running again. I was so conflicted about returning. I will admit (as I did, often and loudly) that I dreaded going back. To put it mildly, Haiti is a very challenging place that tested me in ways I wasn't aware of and I sometimes failed. But I had already put the wheels in motion for a return trip and those wheels kept turning regardless of what I thought. My professor pulled some strings, broke some rules, and gave me his confidence to come back and do something awesome. But what kind of poor life choices had I made that this opportunity awaits me in godforsaken Haiti? It'd be so much easier to read books and drink beer with my similarly minded friends in Brooklyn, talking shit about the professors we aspire to become. What had I done?

I imagined simply not going. But within an hour of my arrival, the anger and fear in me melted. Tap-taps had new paint jobs, the smell of fritay my mouth water. Graceful women wove through the cars with baskets of avocados balanced on their heads. I started asking the guy who picked up me what he thought about Wyclef. Oh yeah, I remembered, I'm obsessed with talking with folks about Haiti. What is Haiti? Why is it? It was nice to have a month where I could try to talk about something else, but let's be real, I didn't succeed. If I hadn't come back I would have still be wondering the same things, just from afar, while those who engage with me do so first with interest, and then later with kindness. Here there are people who can feed my curiosity, who are as fascinated as I am, if not more so. This is where I belong. So I rented a room in boarding house and moved back. I've met a few of the folks who live here, asked timid questions about where my room is and how stuff works. I have a bed, a closet, a mosquito net, a pile of books, a few photos. It was a redundant of me to take photos of Haiti to decorate my room in Haiti. There will be no (mental) escape.

Underneath ripples of thunder the soft voices of my housemates drift off their balcony and through my window. The electricity flickers on and off. Whatever this becomes will be entirely my own creation. I know that sounds like hubris yet whether or not it is true it is what I believe.

Wish me luck, my friends.