Konbit Pou Ayiti

Reed Lindsay, The Observer, original online here

January 24, 2010: As the tremors and the NGOs recede, Haitians continue the fight against colonialism that their ancestors began 220 years ago

Nearly two weeks have passed since an earthquake devastated Haiti, and the journalists are beginning to leave. Nearly all the bodies have been collected, the aftershocks are weaker and the rubble is being cleared from major landmarks. The obvious stories have already been done, and for most of my colleagues, things are becoming monotonous.           

I’ve seen this happen before: the hurricane that devastated Gonaives in September 2008, the food crisis in April of that year, the armed rebellion that led to former President Jean-Bertrand’s removal by US troops. When catastrophe strikes, Haiti is swarmed by journalists from around the world, who are often accompanied by foreign troops, aid workers, diplomats and celebrities. But the world can only take so much tragedy, and Haiti is soon forgotten, and is usually lucky to appear in a news brief, until the next crisis.

The other day I was briefly stuck behind one of Haiti’s colorfully painted buses usually adorned with inspiring slogans and Bible excerpts. This one was uncharacteristically morbid: “Life is not only roses, it is sometimes dark.” Life has never seemed darker in Haiti. Around 100,000 are dead, many thousands maimed, hundreds of thousands homeless, families shattered, livelihoods destroyed. Food, water and medicine are finally starting to arrive, but the demand continues to overwhelm the aid. The long-term outlook in Haiti was never rosy, but now it is bleaker than ever.

“Our house is destroyed and we don’t know were we will live,” said Sharline Darius, an intense 22-year-old accounting student sleeping on the street with her mother, sister and brother in the sprawling dusty suburb slum Kafou. “School is closed. The university fell down. Time keeps passing and I don’t know what we will do to eat, or drink. The future in this country is uncertain.”

The street Sharline used to live on is covered in rubble, and to get to her house you have to scramble over cinderblocks and squeeze between a van smashed by a fallen wall, and a displaced icebox. Like many houses in this neighborhood, the ground floor of Sharline’s house collapsed, bringing the second floor to the street level. Sharline’s uncle was killed. She was luckier than many of her neighbors. Down the street, Johnson Batelme crouched in the alleyway, using a thick electrical cable attached to a wire hook to try to scoop out his belongings from a crack in the collapsed wall of what was once his home. The 30-year-old computer technician lost his three-month old son hours after his house collapsed. “I could have saved him if I had had some help,” he said. “But I had no tools and nobody was there to help me.” Batelme hooked a rolled-up bed sheet from the cinderblocks and pulled it into the alleyway. “My child of three months, I loved him so much. This is my worst problem. The other problem is that we are homeless. We have nothing. There is no th ing left. My daughter is suffering. I have nothing to give her.”

Tragedy was never hard for journalists to find in Haiti, although in ordinary times, it could take some groundwork to root out the quintessentially tragic story. Now, it’s impossible to avoid. Heartbreak is everywhere.

During the five years I lived in Port-au-Prince, the question would often be raised in conversations as to whether there was any hope for Haiti. The answer, for many foreigner journalists I ran into, UN bureaucrats and aid workers visiting or living in the country, was resoundingly negative. Haiti was too poor, too deforested, too far behind the rest of the world. Its people were too corrupt, disorganized, duplicitous, opportunistic. In my darker moments, I too would fall into this pessimistic perspective, but fortunately it would not last. Eventually, I would witness an act of unsolicited kindness or solidarity or perseverance or dignity, and I would be reminded of the spirit and strength that I had come to admire so much in the Haitian people.

On Friday, I visited a large refugee camp not far from the airport. Nobody in the community had had any contact with international organizations with the exception of the Red Cross. The only aid the camp had received was a distribution of high-energy biscuits and a donation of 350 tarps that covered about 10 percent of the families.

Near the entrance to the refugee camp, was a tall young man standing over a water-dispensing hose. He was gently berating a group of women who were squabbling over their order in the line to fill their buckets with water. He told me he had spent several hours in the line making sure people waited their turn and fights did not break out. As I walked down the corridors between the tents, one of which already had a street name (handwritten on a piece of wood nailed to a stick stuck into the dirt), I ran into another man handing out chocolates to young children. He had helped form a committee that was hoping to distribute aid and provide other services to the people living in the camp. A group of people was discussing strategies for providing security and preventing theft. A young woman was putting together a census, going from tent to tent with a notebook, talking to families and writing their details down. Three children were flying kites made of plastic bags and sticks, with big smiles on their faces.
When the journalists are almost all gone, when the international aid business returns to its day-to-day normalcy, when the marines leave, when the peacekeeping mission packs up or changes its name, life will go on in Haiti, and Haitians will continue the struggle their ancestors began 220 years ago.
And the major players in Haiti – the United States, France and Canada, the United Nations, the major financial institutions and international NGOs, the Haitian government and elite – will likely continue to “help Haiti” in complete oblivion to this struggle. These players are already discussing plans to move the refugees into larger camps where tents could eventually be replaced by houses. But most people at the refugee camps, even leaders, know nothing about these discussions. As is almost always the case in Haiti, the poor have little or no representation in these high-level meetings.

The exclusion of the Haitian poor from the decisions that affect them explains why the most recent pre-earthquake international efforts to help Haiti were focused on increasing the number of maquiladoras, where businesses pay negligible taxes and Haitians make subsistence wages, if they are lucky. It explains why most international aid is spent on NGO bureaucracies and what relatively little money gets to the Haitian people creates dependencies instead of self-sufficiency. It explains why a United Nations peacekeeping mission considered a success in New York and Washington is reviled in Haiti. It explains why the future for Sharline Darius and hundreds of thousands of others Haitians is so uncertain.