On Kindness

Lewis (fellow doctoral student and researcher recently returned to Haiti) brought to my attention that in my efforts to keep this blog impersonal that I tend not to write some of the really amazing things have happened here. The focus on the social level rather than the personal level leads to me omitting beautiful moments. Let me recount the small story of my birthday. It was my fourth day in Port-au-Prince and I was starting to hang around the camp more. Darly was showing me around and left me with his brother James and some friends at Twenty's tent, where people regularly kick it in the shade of the porch he constructed. That was the first time I met Billy or Twenty, both of whom have become friends and intermediaries in for my research. We all started talking, and Billy told me about the frustrations of being a college student who couldn't afford to go back to school because of all that he lost in the quake. No jobs, no vision of the future. Sometimes in camp people don't find the means to eat everyday. During our conversation, it came out that that day was my birthday. Really? Today's your birthday? Congratulations! What do you want? You want some cookies? What kind of soda to you want? I was soon handed a cold bottle of soda and people feted the first day of a new year of my life. I tried to pay for it, but they were having none of it. Minutes before we were discuss the frustrations of poverty and feeling of hunger, and yet even with nothing they found a gift to give to a stranger. I was warmed and astonished by this small act of generosity. That soda I think is the best birthday present I have ever received. A few weeks later, I am still warmed but not longer astonished. People with so little grasp the importance of sharing. I have entered a stranger's house for just a few minutes and already the matron had begun cooking me a small bit to eat. In the house where I am living with Sandra, I am regularly humbled by the grace of her hospitality and selflessness. I have definitely learned a thing or two about acts of kindness from Haiti. I just hope when I go back to the States I will know how to to justice to that knowledge through action and not just through recounting little stories like this one. I hope it infiltrates me.

Photos

On the off chance that people read this blog who aren't my facebook friends, here is a link to my "Bonjou Blan" photo album:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2023025&id=9701372&l=84598a3095

We Will Have Our Backs to the Sea

Last night I saw another face of Haiti, the really filthy rich one. I have to say, I feel a bit dirty spending time with the enemy, but I'm here to try to understand Haiti and that means all sides of it. After watching a new friend of mine sing jazz on the patio of a Petionville club, we headed up the mountain in someone's enormous white pickup truck, to a techno festival. Basically as close to a rave as you can get in Haiti. First of all, I am amazed I made there in the first place. The guy who drove Kenya and I there took these mountain roads at 80 miles an hour. I buckled my seat belt and relaxed my body, preparing myself to survive in case we hurled off the mountain. (A thing about Port-au-Prince: poor people live in the centre-ville, on the low lands. Petionville looks down over Port-au-Prince from the mountains, and even wealthier people live in mansions in the hills above the city. Basically, elevation=wealth). When we finally rolled up, alive, I was surprised by all the light skinned people with popped collars and stiletto heels. Are these all foreigners, I asked? No, these are the mulatres, the mixed race people of Haiti that have controlled wealth since the time of independence. These are all Haitians? Really? Again, I fell into the cliche of thinking that being Haitian meant being dark. Anyway, yes, nice cars, expensive tickets, swank drinks, a DJ from Miami. Luckily for me some guys here think pretty girls shouldn't have to pay for anything. Not really my scene too much, and I asked one of the people I was with if they were happy there, with the beat of the music shaking bones. No, not really, he said. Why are you here? Because it's another world, he said. Because its not down there. This place had absolutely nothing in common with the women selling mangos and hairbrushes on the sidewalk. There were no thin children with distended stomachs and outstretched hands. Women dressed like hookers and men wore pointy shoes. Lights flashed, drinks were spilled. That drink cost 250 gourdes, (about 6 American dollars), the same that my friends in the camp make in a day at a Cash for Work program. Who are all these people? They are young Haitian elite, educated in America, run businesses and drive SUVs. I met a young man who works for the electoral committee, another who owns several apartment buildings. I finally see what people having been telling me, the money and light skin are inextricable here, for reasons that are both immediate and centuries old. Amazingly, I made it home too, again preparing for death in a white pickup truck. I ended up having to slap the fucker who drove me home in order to get out of the car. Apparently when men buy you drinks they think they are buying you.

Suffice to say, what the fuck was I doing there? That place was so contrary to my values, to my project. But maybe it's something I just don't want to see. It hurts to witness such flamboyant excess in a place where people don't have regular access to potable water, but who am I to judge? If we had been in Miami and not Port-au-Prince, that place would have been more or less normal. And it's not like the US is a bastion of economic equality. Excess like that isn't thought of as excess in the United States, who am I to judge people who can afford it to have a little bit of a metropolitan life? I guess what made me so uncomfortable is that I doubt there is any dialogue or mutual understanding between these people inhaling cocaine and dancing till dawn and my friends in camp. The people in the hills hate the people in the city, and the people in the city hate the people in the hills. All I know is that if a second revolution comes while i'm here (an unlikely occurrence) I know which side I will be fighting on if they'll have me and our backs will be to the sea.

6/25/10

There has been a pregnant wind blowing through the streets for the past few days. It builds up during the days, slapping the tents and stirring dust. Last night it was vicious. Makes me feel like a hurricane is coming. I've never been in a hurricane before. What would happen to all those tents? Two night ago I was invited to play poker with my friend at the Associate Press and his buddies, a sunburned group of UN employees, diplomats, US military personal, and reporters. Since I lost all my money almost immediately, I profited to drink beer and pick the brains of the people around me. It's refreshing to speak English, to use nuance and make jokes. Ah...language. I inquired about the subject of my last post: what Haitians with ideas can do to get international support for their own projects. One person responded that the big dilemma for the NGO world was whether they wanted to include Haitians in the rebuilding process or whether they actually wanted to get things done. Incorporating Haitians is hard, he said, because Haitians will say they are qualified to do just about anything if there is the potential to get a job. Another contributed more helpfully that the practices of letter-writing, soliciting, project planning that are necessary to attract attention and money to a certain project just aren't that well known. Crashed on the couch, took advantage of running water and microwaves. The next morning one of the AP reporters drove me home, but on the way we stopped around so he could get footage for a piece he is putting together on the reconstruction effort. Trying to find signs of reconstruction was hard. A few places here and there we saw work teams shoveling rubble or building scaffolding. But really, nothing. There was a group of French police officers who had set up some kind of blockade in the street, maybe a check point. Can you imagine what would happen if French police officers showed up in New York City uninvited and started setting up check points? That would be a serious international crisis. But here in Haiti... But it's not like people don't notice that their national sovereignty is in crisis. There is graffiti everywhere crying for the end of the "occupation". There is the idea circulating here that the reason the international community is so interested in taking control of the reconstruction effort is because Haiti is rich in unexploited deposits of oil and minerals. The US is trying to make sure they control the Caribbean basin so that when oil in the Middle East is used up, they can move into their own "backyard". Might explain the occupation of Puerto Rico, the anxiety about Cuba. This idea was put out, if I'm not mistaken, by Hugo Chavez shortly after the quake (he also proposed that the US had an earthquake machine and caused the thing in the first place) A lot of people are talking about this, especially in light of the recent discoveries in Afghanistan. Pretty suspicious, that was. But when I mentioned this to the AP dudes, they just burst out laughing. Haiti is nothing but a rock. The only thing the international communtity wants from this place is to contain the problem. Oh yeah, I also met a Haitian dude with skin as white as mine. Not all Haitians are black, did you know? There's a fairly large Lebanese and Syrian population here. They control a lot of the economy but don't really integrate into culture or politics. Also, all those international community folks come here and make babies! This guy in particular seemed to be unhappy about the situation, other Haitians considered him a 'blan' even though he's lived here his whole life, and people abroad refuse to accept him as Haitian because he doesn't fit into their idea of what a Haitian is. Since independence, the Haitian constitution has legally defined all Haitians, regardless of color, as "noir". So at least in theory, to be black is a kind of nationality rather than skin color. Although many Haitians themselves conflate the catagories. The word "neg" (black) is used like we would use "dude". In the culture the generic person is black even if that doesn't reflect the real make-up of the population.

grassroots movements need access to funding

I don't want these open letters to be like the news that rolls into my inbox everyday: "reconstruction stalling" "disease widespread" "orphan dead after failed surgery". I recognize that so far I have tended to focus on the more depressing aspects of Haiti, is a material condition, but it is not a state of mind (corruption, however, might be a different matter). Joy can poverty can inhabit the same moment. So can generosity and poverty. What is amazing about Haiti is that in spite of the state, life goes on. Some people might call Haiti a "non-functioning society" but how can that be possible when society keeps functioning despite the state? Yes, the state might be absent, or even predatory, but that doesn't prevent people from waking up, chatting with friends, cooking, making love, watching TV, visiting family. There is no state sponsored public transportation system, so people have created on for themselves. What I am most impressed by, and which I do not see being talked about elsewhere, are the Haitians that are taking the initiative to address their the problems Haiti faces without the support of the government, the UN, or any of the 4,000 NGOs that work here. I've had conversations with a woman, Gerola, who tells me about her fifteen-year old daughter who organized a school shortly after the earthquake, teaching reading, writing, math, and dance to the local kids in her neighborhood. She was doing it everyday until her classes resumed, now she does it once a week on the weekend. Gerola also, even before the earthquake, was writing a play about sexuality to educated adolescents about safe sex, abstinence, birth control and fidelity. The project got postphoned with the quake, but now with so many kids living homeless in the streets she sees an even more pressing need for that kind of information. Two days ago I met Franz, a young psychologist who had created a mental health program that operates in nine different camps around Port-au-Prince. He trains people in the camp to be able to respond to the emotional needs of people still dealing with trauma, and once a week they go around to the camps doing workshops and therapy groups. Unfortunately, Franz has being paying for his program out of pocket and next week is the last week he can afford to do it. Gerola too worries about how long they can keep the school up without some funding, since they try to provide some kind of food or snacks for the kids, all sixty of them. There are thousands of international organizations represented in Haiti, that are here trying to help. Yet Haitians themselves who have brilliant projects in mind don't have any idea how to access international support or funding. Well-meaning people come here from abroad with ideas about what Haiti needs, impose these projects, and then they may or may not stay around to see if it worked, to be responsible for its upkeep. Yet while there is a certain good in that, it would be much more productive for society if funding was made available for Haitian organized and Haitian run projects. Haitians and foreigners alike accuses Haitians of not being capable of leading themselves (and maybe the political class is corrupted to the point where this has truth) but who is giving grassroots Haitians a chance? The whitewashed wall of NGOs and UN soldiers seems impenetrable. And people like Franz and Gerola don't feel like they would be taken seriously even if they tried to approach them. Gerola told me I would have more luck getting funding for my project than she would have for hers, just because the color of my skin would give me access to circles she could never go.

What I Do Here

You might wonder what exactly I am doing here in Haiti. I conceived of this project a few weeks after the January 12th earthquake. When I first learned of the earthquake I felt the impulse go to Haiti right then and help dig people out of rubble and bring water to those with none. Luckily for all, my friends made it clear that as a grad student, not a doctor, I would have very little to offer to those with lost houses, lost relatives, broken limbs. In such a disastrous situation, I would probably have need to be cared for more than I could have cared for anyone else. But after reflecting for awhile, I concluded that being a historian did not make me totally useless. It seemed to me Haiti future(s) were going to be shaped in the crucible of the earthquake and its aftermath, that whatever was coming in these next years would only make sense it light of this particular present moment. But of course, what you read in the newspapers and in UN press announcements doesn't seem like it could be real. That's because it's not. Most mainstream media sources, in my opinion, are paying more attention to what the audience whats to hear and read about Haiti than what is actually happening on the ground. I decided that I can try to create non-institutional documentation of this present moment so that researchers in the future can have alternative voices and opinions about the earthquake and reconstruction. By trekking around Port-au-Prince with a notebook and a tape recorder, I am creating what I hope will become an archived collection of interviews with all kinds of Haitians about their thoughts on the earthquake, conditions of living in Port-au-Prince, the international occupation of Haiti, and what is being done to move this country forward.

Three weeks in I can say with confidence that this is easy to say, and very hard to do. First of all, access "all kinds of Haitians" is a joke. I mostly hang out in one refugee camp close to my house where I have made some friends. What does that say about my the representativeness of my samples? While it is easy enough to get interviews with people, few people are willing or comfortable sharing their true perspectives with me. In regular conversation people are open and animated, but as soon as we are in "interview mode", answers to my questions become brisk, a few words or a single sentence. Or people say what they think they should say to a "blan" like me. For example, recentlye I saw people come to blows over aid distribution, but each time I ask if there is ever any conflicts between people in the camp, people say "no, never, we live together like brothers and sisters." Part of the problem, I know, is that Darly is often my translator, and he is one of the camp leaders. Thus people often makes comments about how the leaders of the camp do a great job keeping people safe and organized, or how Darly himself is personally to thank for their well being. While there might be a certain degree of truth to that, hjs presence definetely influences responses. I know they see things they won't talk about with me because I see them too. But my observations doing matter in the frame of an oral history project, it's all about the perspectives of the people I interview. I can't add a footnote to the interview transcription that reads "untruth". If I was an anthropologist I could do a whole schtick on the per formative aspects of the interview and the image of camp-life that people want to project for whatever reason. But I'm not. Of course maybe in the future the line between history and anthropology will have been worn thin.

The other problem I am realizing I face is that I never really chose what exactly I am here to find out. I can't document a whole society. I lack focus, or maybe am realizing I never had it to begin with. Since I am spending so much time in the refugee camp, I find myself trying to document the conditions of life there, and the local history of the camp. But I also am meeting dancers, poets, and artists, and want to have a series of conversations with them about the artistic community in this city. I am talking to Evangelicalists and Vodou priests about religion. And everyone has a story of the earthquake. In conversations among Haitians, "are you a victim?" follows shortly after "hi, what's your name, how are you?". I'm also interested in documenting the various ways people invoke history to explain the present situation: either they say nothing has changed, it's always been like this; or they blame or bless the Revolution; or if Duvalier was here things would be different; or the Holocaust is connected to the earthquake through roundabout ways. This is why I suspect I will be a shitty academic: I can't privilege one question over all the others that animate life, plant my flag and dig my little intellectual hole. I'm interested in everything.

Before I got here I thought society was a deck of cards and the earthquake was 52 card pick-up. I thought I could get here and document how everything was falling into place in new Haitian order. Document the variety of possibilities that were being shuffled through before the powers that be settled on one. But now I'm here and I realize that even though everything seems unstable and up in the air, this is in fact the new Haitian order. No one is going to come and remove the rumble. No one will be picking up these cards. Some people plan on staying in these tents for years. Aid money trickles in with bags of rice and malaria pills. But no one is going to build houses for these people, or factories for them to work in. No one is going to pave the roads to keep the rubble and dust from settling in the lungs. It's just like this now. On the socio-political level, things are pretty depressing. But on the individual level, life just goes on. I am in awe of the human resilience I encounter on a daily basis here. People here are so strong, especially the women. Guys mostly just sit around in the shade, listen to the radio and joke among themselves. Women on the other hand are constantly busy: are selling vegetables in the street, carrying gallons of water on their heats, cooking for the family, constantly washing clothes. That's really what I want to document. How in a place where the state does absolutely nothing for its people, people continue to do things for themselves.

Vodou afternoon

Ligba Albo is a unabashed Vodou priest. I visited him yesterday
afternoon, tape recorder in hand. He lives in a refugee camp about a
mile from Camp Trazeile. Before our conversation began he opened the
Bacardi bottle and offered libations to his ancestors at the threshold
of his tent. I did not have to pose a single question, since Ligba
already had in mind the things he wanted to say to me. I am speaking
on behalf of my ancestors, he said, for Dessalines, for Boukman,
Macandal, for those who fought with Vodou and with force to defeat
the French armies that had come to return us to slavery. His words
were thick with history. Slavery, revolution, magic. When the black
soldiers who fought against Napoleon's army grew tired, they invoked
magic that gave them new ferocity. Dessaline was chosen by the Gods to
lead Haiti to freedom, much like Barack Obama was chosen by the Gods
to lead America. These are very special men. Vodou is the roots of
the Haitian people, it is what gave them freedom, and what has stayed
with them since their ancestors were torn from Africa. Haiti is
Vodou. Yet Christians, those who share the religion of the
colonizers, attempt to suppress the expression of Vodou. Originally
the European colonists pushed Christianity on the slave population in
order to pacify them, give them a doctrine of servitude. Many
accepted. Under Francois Duvalier there was a state-led campaign
against Vodou that destroyed shrines and outlawed gatherings. While
now freedom of religion is protected by law, the reality is that more
and more Haitians are ashamed of Vodou and try to expel it from
themselves and their culture. Nowadays, practicing Christianity and
rejecting Vodou elevates you closer to the status of American and
European cultures. But according to Ligba and co., that's just a form
of false consciousness. Haitians are denying what they really are in
order to play at something that they are not. Yet the various
Christianities have deep deep root in Haiti. Many people here believe
that the earthquake was God's way of punishing Haiti for their sinful
ways, and has renewed the efforts to squash Vodou. I didn't get the
chance to ask Liga what he thought of the earthquake, why the gods
would do that. Maybe I will be lucky and there will be a next time.
But I do know that he thinks the only way Haiti can heal itself is
by returning to its roots, by reestablishing identity by seeking what
is truly Haitian and rejecting the ideologies imposed by those who
seek to oppress. There must be a returning to the roots.
What is Vodou, exactly, you may wonder. I'm not entirely sure
yet. A system of beliefs that sees gods and spirits in all things,
that believes in the feminine benevolence of the earth. In Vodou,
life and death are two truths that compose each other, and the lne
between them is smudged. Magic is very real, and exists on a daily
level. You can use magic to find a cell phone, to secure the
faithfulness of your lover, or to speak to the gods. The magic can be
either good or evil. He can cure or kill, depending. It doesn't take
very much. Even if in discourse, many Haitian are Christians, the
structure of their thoughts, their mentalite, shall we say, is
informed by Vodou. Or so I am told.
After about an hour, Ligba grew tired, and the conversation
slowed. He took the opportunity to sing a few songs of prayer for
me, that might help me remember Haiti after I am gone. They were songs
that invoked Africa, and asked his brothers to invoke it too. Before I
left he put a stone in my hand and stood over me, spraying me with the
a fine mist of scented water. My hair, my face, my shoulders. He took
the stone from me and sprayed my hands so that I might rub the water
on my arms, feet, and stomach. There was another libation poured to
the dead, the bottle passed around. The water evaporated from my
sweaty skin as I wove my way home between the merchants and the cars,
but a finely scented residue remained.
Haiti is a profoundly religious country, Hanging out in the camp,
I regularly listen to heated religious debates about the nature of
God, the meaning of the Bible, or the role of Christianity in Haiti.
People often ask me what church I go to. I stopped trying to explain
that I am not a believer, since that closes more doors than it opens.
Instead, I am Episcopalian, and I go to church on Christmas and
Easter. There are myriad sects here: Bapist, Catholic, Vodou,
Evangelical, Russian Orthodox, Jehovah's Witness. After the
earthquake even the scientologists came down here and opened up a
church. What the religion of money is going to do in Haiti is beyond
me. Yesterday I talked with a French journalist doing a piece of the
religions of Haiti. In his opinion, the scientologist are starting in
Haiti in order to get a foothold in the diaspora. He was very critical
of all the missionary groups that come down here to help, since they
ask people's souls in return. But its not just missionaries who want
something in return. There is oil here, did you know? Minerals and
precious metals too. I think that's why the US took such decisive
moves to secure control of the country after the quake. And NGOs often
led for profit operations despite themselves. Where is all that money,
people ask. The millions that people abroad assembled to help us?
Where is it? What sign has it left?