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.