Sunday, October 31, 2010

Homeless and Handicapped in Cite Soleil

In the aftermath of the earthquake, doctors amputated thousands of limbs as a quick-fix procedure that would prevent infection. You see handicapped people everywhere these days in Port-au-Prince: an infant with one leg using a walker to stand for the first time on the edge of a soccer field; a legless man in a wheelchair cruising alongside the traffic on Delmas, going 20 miles an hour, swerving out of the way of rubble. Getting around Port-au-Prince on two legs was hard enough before the earthquake, before the buildings spilled out on to the street. So many limps, so many ghost limbs: uncomfortable reminders of the cost of survival. But some people have being dealing with handicaps in Haiti long before the quake. The other day Stan and I arrived in a Cite Soleil camp to interview a contact I had made a few weeks before. The camp, as it turns out, is run by a local association of the handicapped and the elderly and tries to cater to their specific needs. We interviewed Kevin, a thoughtful young man of 28 with a deformed arm who identified himself as the coordinator for Solidartie des Handicapes Moteur, a neighborhood organization that has been helping the handicapped since 1996. It was founded in reply to discriminatory treatment people with special needs were receiving in the neighborhood: verbal abuse, sexual abuse, general disregard of their human rights. I imagine social exclusion of handicapped folks happens in every culture, and Kevin gave an example of a man (now the president of the association) who was so afraid of how people treated him that he hardly ever left his family's house. In addition, the materials needed by the handicapped in Haiti are sorely lacking. What few wheelchairs are available are designed for limited indoor hospital use and absolutely inadequate for getting around a city like Port-au-Prince. They break too easily to ever be passed on to others. Canes and crutches are also in short supply. Solidartie des Handicapes Moteur (SOHAMO)worked to find materials like this, they helped the sick and elderly pay for prescriptions, and they even were running a small mirco-credit program when the earthquake struck. The organizations resources were destroyed, but a sense of solidarity among the members remained, and two weeks after the wake the leaders established a camp so that the elderly and the handicapped could help look after one another. There are over 300 people who live there. It's difficult but the camp tries to accommodate special needs: it is built on a cement lot and the tents are laid out to allow wheelchairs to pass easily between them. Kevin said that any group who wants to offer them aid or relief has to meet with them first to make sure that the services are accessible: for example, the showers come with seats for those who cannot stand.

The earthquake, Kevin said, is changing the way Haitians look at the handicapped. Everyone knows someone who lost a limb or was permanent disabled after the quake. It could be their children, their parents, their friends. So they have more patience now, he said, and they show more respect. The earthquake has also created a space of revindication: the demands of the handicapped are heard much more loudly, and it is time for the state to assume more responsibility for this portion of the population. Although Kevin says the earthquake brought nothing good for him personally, for the Haitian handicapped, this moment of tragedy might transform into a opportunity.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Let's Talk About Cholera

The bad news: as I'm sure anyone who reads this blog knows by now, thousands of people have come down with cholera in the Artibonite, about 50 miles north of Port-au-Prince. There have been about 300 deaths so far, all inhabitants of that region. The rumor mill has it that the UN might be responsible for the outbreak: the Nepalese base is located in St. Marc near the Artibonite region. In September there was a cholera outbreak in Nepal, so if there was a Nepali troop rotation recently, its possible (probable?) one way or another their waste made it into the Artibonite river, and into people's drinking water. Nothing has been confirmed, but its all over the radio and television here. The deaths in the north are tragic and tragically unnecessary (of all the things Haitians already had to worry about, at least they didn't have cholera), but this has the potential to become a disaster of major proportions if cases start appearing in Port-au-Prince, with several million people densely packed together in camps and slums. Whether or not this develops into a major epidemic, the cholera bacteria is now present in the Haitian water supply and will probably be a risk for people for many years to come. Even the DR is feeling the consequences, as tourists are reluctant to visit the island. So much for my mother coming to visit me for Christmas.

The mildly good news: So far there have been cases in Port-au-Prince, but they are all people who came from the Artibonite to the capital to seek care. So far, to the best of my knowledge, no one has contracted the illness in Port-au-Prince. Haitians and the international community alike are mobilized to educated people all around the country about water sanitation and to distribute water treatment tablets. Today I saw a van with speakers driving through the city announcing the wonders of hand washing and water treatments. Critics have been decrying the NGO world, saying they blew it (one particularly salient and well-written example can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/38nay48). The absence of a post-earthquake epidemic was the one success that the international community could claim, and now they've f-ed that up too. Putting aside the UN (they should really feel ashamed), I think it is too early to judge whether or not the development world has blown this or not. The introduction of the bacteria happened, there is nothing that can be done about that now, but really how treatment and prevention is really going to be what decides whether or not the NGO world here is legit or just a racket and a charade.

It's important to recognize that its not only the international community that is taking action. The responsibility for public health is also taken up by the Haitian government, community groups, and media outlets. The television and radio have been talking about cholera and prevention all weekend, the Ministry of Health is also mobilized and investigating the situation. Although in all fairness the Ministry of Health is probably inextricably tied to UN health organizations. But we must be on guard from thinking that this is solely the responsibility of the international world and ignoring the efforts, however constricted, of Haitians from helping each other. The expectation that Haitians can't take care of themselves is one of the modern day manifestations of colonial racism which is unfortunately still present in the development world today. Even if the reality is that Haitians need the NGOs for many of their most basic services like health care, we should never abandon the belief that Haiti should be taking care of itself.

Sunday, October 17, 2010

Addendum: Or How My Job Could Be Better

In my last post, I attempted to articulate a sort of mission statement, to describe why I am here and what I hope to accomplish. Two or three days ago, as I wound down a nearly two hour interview with a vodou priest, he asked me why I was doing this, and when I told him, he asked me if there were others working with me. No, I said, it's just me. You are not enough, he said. I know, I replied. And he is absolutely right, for so many reasons. First of all, I sometimes feel overwhelmed by my goal of 200 interviews, but ultimately, two hundred stories are nothing if you are trying, in a way, to take a snap-shot of a collective trauma. Five hundred, a thousand, maybe those could be a significant sample. To do that I would have to be able to enlist other researchers to go out in the field along side me. Of course, what are the future researchers of my imagined audience going to do with a thousand interviews? Two hundred interviews, making probably a hundred and fifty hours of audio, is already an overwhelming body of work to sort through. Somehow in the coming months I will find the means to transcribe all of this, and eventually get it translated into English so that the interviews can be accessible to the most people possible.

Also, I'm not Haitian so my sense of nuances in the Creole language is poor, and there are myriad culture references that are inevitably lost on me. In my dream world, I find the funding to buy more audio recorders (or...video!) and develop this project future with a team of three or five Haitian researchers, who would actually be the ones conducting the interviews. I learn a great deal from the contributions of my Haitian translator and co., whose personal investment in my project helps me learn themes Haitians themselves think important to document. The questions they think to ask are the ones that probably matter most. These teams would go out into the field while I dedicate my energies to transcribing, developing the database, re-listening to the interviews and summarizing them to make them more easily searchable to others. Maybe I would build a website so that people could access them from anywhere, not from the privileged location of a New York or Haitian archive.

I wonder sometimes if its a delusion to think that anyone else will ever listen to these or care about them? I don't think so, but it all depends on how I can make them accessible to others.

Friday, October 15, 2010

Why I Love My Job

It comes and goes, but at the end of today's work I was filled with the sense that the Haiti Oral History Project is very important. It helps that my Haitian translator, Stan, is into to it and is becoming more of a collaborator than a mere translator. The fact that Haitians themselves see value in my work is deeply validating, because ultimately, as Stan said, the preservation of earthquake memories will be much more important for them than for the handful of international academics. Over the course of my interviews, more than one person has told me that I am the first outsider who has been curious about their lives and their perspective on the earthquake. Obviously that fills me with a great sense of pride, but the Project is much bigger than just human-to-human connection.

I have respect for people who are fighting to protect the human rights of Haitians, to guarantee them shelter and health care. But that is not the only work here to be done. These people have seen and lived through terrible things, and now they are in the process of reconstituting lives for themselves from what remains. They are subjects of the crude social and economic experimentation of Reconstruction. For most, the lives they find themselves living are not the lives they want. And yet they are going forward, one way or another, often in spite of institutions that are supposed to be helping them. Let me be clear that moving forward does not mean moving on up. You might ask yourself when you hear news of Haiti, how can people live that way? I assure you that Haitians in the camps are asking themselves the same thing. The experience of the earthquake and the disappointments that followed are being absorbed into generation that will someday be gone. The Haitians who survived are the last ones that who know the world before everything fell down. They are the last generation who can tell you from personal experience how drastically things have changed. The new lives that they build will shape where Haiti will go next. In order to understand Haiti's future, we need the people who have memory of all three worlds: before, during, and after. Ordinary people's stories have incredible value because of the intimate way they present the historical moment and because they have insight into how humanity survives even in circumstances meant to destroy or ignore it. The Haiti Oral History Project is an effort to document and preserve the thoughts and memories of some of these people because without them, the most intimate meanings of the earthquake will be lost.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Interviews in Canape Vert

Certain areas in Canape Verte are completely devastated. House after house flattened up the entire hillside, some sliding into the houses beneath them. Knowing this was a particularly affected neighborhood, I decided yesterday to go check it out and see if my translator and I couldn't talk to some of the folks still living there. Here and there people had rebuilt shelters on the site of their destroyed house. Several sites were being cleaned up, the crushed homes being broken down into rocks and dust and carried away, leaving the surface of the earth empty and open. In one interview, we interviewed a woman while sitting on a porch overlooking the remains of the house as a young man broke apart cement and sorted through the rubble. They are cleaning it for me, she said. That house had almost killed her. She had been trapped, unconscious, for three days in the ruins of her kitchen. All her children are alive though, and she is grateful to be alive too. She thinks about the earthquake constantly, she said. She doesn't feel well. She slowly turned away from us turning the course of the interview until she wasn't facing us at all. I put away the recorder. We walked on.

Marie-Ange's shack is perched tenuously on the hillside, a small shelter amid a field of rubble and twisted rebar. She pushed aside the blue curtain when we approached and stood on the threshold while we explained what had brought us there. We were standing, she said, on the site of her old house, the house where she had been conceived and lived until January 12 2010, when the house above her house fell off its foundations and came crashing into her house, causing it to collapse. She took us out back and lo and behold there was the neighbors house lurching nonsensically, violently, downhill. The roof curved forward over the floors beneath it and reached nearly to the ground. It still stinks sometimes, she said. She and her family had been in the house at the time, but luckily they had made it to the front room when the above house fell, since that was the only part of the old house that didn't fall. Marie-Ange was five months pregnant with her first child on January 12th. That day she started to bleed, and on January 14th she had a miscarriage since they were unable to find a doctor. She spent a month and a half in the nearby camp, ill from the failed pregnancy, before returning the site of her house. In the meantime the rubble had been cleared from the site for her by a young men of the local soccer team. For the past ten years she had sponsored them, making food for them and washing their uniforms, and they wanted to do something kind for her. After the earthquake the survivors of the neighborhood had organized themselves and established a committee that sought out aid distributions and divided it peacefully among themselves. The foreigners are the only ones doing anything for us, she said. Well, God too. I asked her if her relationship with God had changed since the earthquake. "He's farther away now," she said.

I asked her what makes her happy these days, how she finds comfort when she is sad. She said all she really wants is another child. Her friends have children, her younger sister has children, all she really wants is to be able to have a child.The miscarriage was complicated though, and she doesn't know if it will be possible. She knows it is a gift from God, and isn't for her to decide, but she is waiting everyday with hope.

Everything has changed. It's a whole new world, she said.

Saturday, October 2, 2010

A Geography of Trauma

"Do you want to see the house?" We were driving up towards Petionville as the mid-afternoon rains started to mist the windshield. We drove past rows of painting that are mounted on the side of the road. In one, a the Marron Inconnu pulls the Haitian flag out of the crumpled National Palace; in another, dust settles on a post-earthquake destruction landscape. "Uh, sure. Why not?" I shrugged. I always wonder what they do with the paintings when it rains. Do they just leave them there? We turned off the main road, parked the car and got out. At the top of the driveway, he stopped. "This is where I stood in my boxers and called to report that there had been an earthquake." We continued down through the mist towards a small piece of land freckled with garbage, rubble, and few dumpsters. "And this was my house." I looked out over the emptiness. There was nothing there, but he spread out his arms. "Here's where the desk was, this where the wall fell down." Then he walked a few steps to the left."Over here, the kitchen. Here are where the stairs would have been, and here" he said, taking a few more steps and pointing to the sky, "was where my room was. I was sitting on my bed, right..about... here." He planted himself on the spot, defiantly alive and full of sadness.

The tour went on. I stood in the mist, kicking pieces of the kitchen floor and standing on top of a pile of rocks that used to form the walls. There were some shoes, a crushed video tape. "The landlords are happy. They've been wanting to tear this place down for years. They probably called America and asked for the earthquake just to get us out," he joked. He pointed to a flattened patch in the gray slum on the hillside and said that was where the church had been. "I knew it was bad because when I ran out, the neighborhood behind me was completely gone." We walked back up the drive way to the nearby hotel, which had stayed open after the quake despite that in certain parts the ceiling was elegantly cascading onto the floor. That's where he stayed for the weeks following the quake, sleeping in flowerbeds, writing reports, and feeling the terror of the first time with every aftershock that rolled through. As he told me his story, play by play, peppered with "This was where I was when...", I started to feel that I was full of ghosts. It's one thing to know that it happened, to know it was terrifying and that people were dying all around, for days. It's another to be standing on the spot with someone who points out the various places in eyesight that he saw people die. As witness to his rising anxiety, to the uneasy way he eyes the cracks in the walls, I was scoping out breadth and magnitude of that horrible moment with my heart. Standing there amid the ruins of his home, his loss of innocence could not be abstracted. It was on the ground all around him, beneath our feet. There is no good reason he survived, and he knows this.

I have known ruins. Despite the earthquake, the ruins of Port-au-Prince are still living. In fact, they maybe aren't ruins at all. They don't have the luxury of being ruins because they are still needed spaces. There is no where else for people to go, and so they live on top of, in front of, and even inside the spilled city. They are also soaked in living memory. Nearly every single fallen building is someone's profound loss of innocence, a place that full of someone's worst memories. With all these buildings taken together, we could compose a geography of collective trauma.