It was never about Haiti. It’s easy to claim the opposite,
and I occasionally do in my more self-indulgent moments because it fits the
narrative, but in those moments I’m a liar. It was never about Haiti. It was
about me.
Restless and again feeling the recurring itch of something
I’d not yet figured out how to scratch, Haiti unfolded herself one afternoon over a few beers at the East
Village Tavern, a local on the corner of 10th and C, Alphabet City,
Manhattan, NYC. Sitting at one of the outside tables enjoying the spring sun, I
was in discussion with Paddy, a close friend of mine who’d been in the
humanitarian and disaster game for a while, and had been on his way back to
England from Haiti until Iceland’s volcano decided to pick a fight with the
international airline industry and marooned him midway. He was crashing at mine
until flights resumed.
“Now’s your chance mate. You’ve been wanting to do this for
years.” He was right of course, and I knew it. Twenty eight years old, recently
single, uncommitted to a job or family, and able to cash in shares I earned as
an early web startup employee, I was in the perfect position to shift. Knowing
very little about Haiti outside of the fact that it was one of the poorest
countries in the world and had recently been flattened by an earthquake, she
fit the bill nicely for an aspiring would-be humanitarian / writer looking for
an appropriately “legit” place to cut his teeth. At Paddy’s advice I contacted
All Hands Volunteers (then known as Hands On Disaster Response), a volunteer
organization doing work on the ground in Leogane, the city at the epicenter of
the quake, and committed to being with them until the end of their project
(then planned through 2010). Upon acceptance, and with Paddy back in the UK, I began
the process of wrapping up my life in New York, condensing it down to a few
boxes stashed in the attic of a family friend in New Jersey, and the two bags
I’d be hauling with me to JFK en route to Port-au-Prince. On July 1st,
2010, I left.
Prior to landing at Toussaint Louverture International
Airport, I had felt confident in my worldliness. Self-assured by equal parts
ego and personal history (born abroad, well-traveled) I knew Haiti would be
something different, but didn’t expect it to surprise me. I grossly
overestimated myself. Head against the window of the dilapidated Jeep that
slowly wove through the labyrinth that is Haiti’s capital, I was silent, camera
in hand but largely unused, watching a very different version of life unfold in
dusty, loud, morbidly fascinating real-time. Amputees hobbled on ill-fitted
crutches, knocking on car windows. Two feet away from the belches and growls of
the highway, a woman sat on the curb bathing a naked infant in a dented metal
washbin half-full of tepid water. Behind her, their small USAID-branded tarp
shelter, one of countless lined single file along the narrow divide between
opposing lanes, shimmered in the exhaust fumes. UN soldiers in light blue
helmets sat knee to knee in the back of white canvas-covered trucks, automatic
rifles on their laps. Everywhere countless flattened buildings and piles of
rubble and twisted rebar. I was captured, that drive from Port-au-Prince to
Leogane, and made clear of two things: this was unlike any place I’d ever
known, and, despite what I might have believed before, I was as susceptible as
any to the shocking rush of poverty porn.
Leogane is a rural city, with a dense urban center and a sprawling periphery. It has a distinct smell to it - a heavy, nauseating, sweet
thickness that bubbles up from the viscous black run-off emptying out of
numerous kleren distilleries, where sugar cane is turned into Haiti’s
equivalent of moonshine, for which Leogane is famous. Goats and dogs with bad
legs scurry between street vendors who stack greasy piles of fried chicken,
pork and beef on metal trays covered with plastic sheets to keep the flies off,
but do little against the dust. A few gas stations with attached food marts
function as the city’s only real “supermarkets”, one of which, Chou Chou, is
popular with the international community given it has air conditioning.
Situated on the northern coast of Haiti’s southwest peninsula, roughly twenty
miles west of the capital, Leogane was closest to the center of the quake when
it struck in January 2010, leveling most of the city and killing tens of
thousands of people. A mass grave outside the cemetery is the final resting
place for many of them. At night, the city can be eerie - powerless and dark
except for the headbeams of cars and motorcycles, and the faint glow of
vendors’ oil lamps. After eleven, it’s virtually empty, the uneven streets laid
bare and reflecting the moon from large, seemingly permanent puddles. It is
rumored that vodou is particularly potent here, and the midnight hour is host to
those things best left alone – lugarou (werewolves), hougan (vodou priests) and
their bodyslaves, the zombies. Few locals dare risk an encounter.
The base I called home for a year and a half, Belval Plaza,
was an unfinished music venue - large, open, and one of the few buildings
relatively undamaged during the earthquake. That summer hundreds of
international volunteers passed through, mostly American but from many other
parts of the world as well. At the height of volunteer interest, 140 of us
shared Belval. I opted to live on the roof in a small yellow tent, as opposed
to setting up shop in one of the bunks underneath. Regardless, privacy wasn’t a
particularly viable option, and there was something compelling in that. This
was something entirely new – bucket showers and broken toilets and the constant
purr of a generator keeping everything lit until it went silent at 10PM. It
wouldn’t be an unfair statement to say it had as much in common with a Third
World summer camp as it did with an aid organization’s headquarters. Most
volunteers came for a month or so, with a core group of staff and volunteers in
it for the long haul. I fell into the second category, first as a volunteer,
and later, as staff. As might be expected from a place charged with young, unleashed
energy, it had a certain hedonism to it. There was a lot of drinking, dancing,
laughing. There was a lot of sex. It felt good. Central to the place were the
local volunteers - young, mostly male Haitians that came to the base every
morning, worked alongside us during the day, and partied with us in the
evening. Joe’s Bar, attached to Belval Plaza on one side, was a melting pot of
foreigners and locals, booze, and music pumped through semi-blown speakers.
The work we did was varied, but focused primarily on
unskilled, labor-intensive jobs that untrained volunteers, many with no
international aid background (myself included), could do. Clearing rubble from
plots so that families could begin to rebuild was a primary focus, as it fell
low on the agendas of the “real NGOs”, and we took pride in that, and earned
the respect of the community. The majority of volunteers spent their days
destroying and clearing collapsed homes by hand – sledgehammers, pickaxes,
shovels, wheelbarrows – as most of the heavy machinery brought into the country
was assigned to Port-au-Prince. We worked hard in Haiti, and Haiti worked us
hard in return. Many of us lost substantial weight, and earned new scars. The
local volunteers would laugh early and often as just-arrived foreigners wilted
after two swings of a sledgehammer in the summer heat. Some of us got laid out
with malaria, and dengue, and cholera. Much later, one of us would die.
My first months in Haiti were lived unquestioned. I made
friends, I explored the country, I fell in love and drank and danced and swam
the Caribbean and made a fool of myself in any interaction with the locals
because I could not speak Kreyol and had no background in French, the country’s
original colonial language upon which Kreyol is based. It was, in many
respects, the happiest period of my life. It was also the period during which,
in August 2010, I met James Fortil. A
young man near my age who had come to Leogane from Gonaives, James worked with
All Hands as a local volunteer in 2008 on another project in Haiti, and was
returning to do the same again. Possessing a basic knowledge of English but
stronger in Spanish (a language I also speak) given the few years he’d spent in
the neighboring Dominican Republic, James and I bridged the communication gap,
and he became my first true Haitian friend. In doing so, the process of a
deeper, more personal understanding into the nature of Haiti and her people
began, and so too the unraveling of my honeymoon with the country, with the
work, with the people, and ultimately, with myself.
The process was a slow one. It came gradually, in those rare
moments of silent contemplation, which given the nature of the base, and the
constant attention that came from the locals upon leaving it, was hard to find.
It came in drunken half-remembered conversations with James at the local
watering hole (dubbed Little Venice given it sat on a drainage ditch), in
which, tongue loosened by the alcohol, he would expose some of the fears and
doubts he had about his future. It came in starting to feel disconnected from
many of the newer volunteers, focusing most of my attentions on the
long-termers, or, occasionally, on a pretty short-termer that made tent time
more enjoyable. Mostly, it came from the gradual fading of the rush of being where
I was. When the sensational transitions into the normal, and the normal is
every day there, and you in it, you cannot help but begin to see things through
a different lens. The rose-tinted glasses begin to slip. This was not a process
unique to me. The discussions we had about Haiti were of two entirely different
qualities depending on who was having them: the newer internationals fresh with
excitement and seeing beauty in all things, and the long-termers engaging the
cynical side of their characters. In retrospect, it was so cliché as to be
embarrassing. In retrospect, many things.
I left Haiti in mid-January, after All Hands had decided to
extend the project into 2011, not expecting to return. A plane ticket purchased
for me from someone in London needed to be followed up on, and upon my arrival
back to New York from the UK, I hopped a plane to California and three months
in Los Angeles being with family and handling obligations. It was a raw period,
the post-Haiti whiplash melding with a sense of uncertainty of what was to come
and a general distaste for the culture around me. I spent it working at a cheap
Vietnamese restaurant as equal parts server, cashier, dishwasher, and social
media consultant, a throwback to my previous career in Silicon Valley. I wrote
letters, and enjoyed time with my brother and his dog, and my close friend
Mike. I had an entirely deplorable relationship with a taken woman, and I
didn’t care. I researched implementing a project similar to the one I helped
run in Haiti in Nicaragua, an unrealistic idea born of some last-minute bonding
between three friends in Leogane that fell apart as soon as we left Haiti. More
than anything, I struggled with the feeling that I had failed to accomplish
what I had set out to accomplish by going to Haiti to begin with. I wasn’t
entirely sure what that was, only that I’d left before it had the chance to
happen. So, when Paddy wrote me in May 2011 to let me know that All Hands had
asked him to come back to the project and reboot the program that I was
involved with before, and asked me to do it with him, I went.
My return trip to Haiti was of an entirely different nature
than the first. The drive through Port-au-Prince held no shock, and there was
evidence of progress being made. The highway divide shelters where I’d seen the
woman bathing the infant were gone, but many other thrown together tent cities
remained, now tattered and sagging under a year and a half of sun, wind and
rain. It had been a long time since the earthquake. Stepping back into the base
revealed a place with a different character, where more complicated programs
were being designed and implemented by an increasingly veteran and capable
team, of which I was a more integral part having moved from volunteer to staff.
My mandate – running the field operations of a program helping to provide clean
water to families at risk for cholera through the construction and distribution
of biosand water filters – was multi-faceted and nuanced, and far more
demanding. I worked more directly with local people, including a large local
staff hired and managed by Paddy and myself. Near every night found the two of
us on the roof outside his tent, smoking Comme Il Faut’s, Haiti’s local brand,
reviewing what we’d done, and what we had yet to do. In short, if my first
seven months in Haiti were an experiment in voluntourism, this was an
experiment in real aid work. It proved to be a double-edged sword.
-
“Fucking hell.” Paddy’s just come back from a walk to go get
some sodas. It’s a five minute endeavor, but now, thirteen months after we both
returned to Haiti to run our program, five minutes can feel much, much longer.
“I’m done. I’m fucking done.” He is too. We both are. The way we express it
varies from day to day as we go about trying to wrap up everything – the last
two international All Hands staff still in the country – but there is no
denying we have to go. Beyond the fatigue, which has become chronic, lies the
deeper problem: an ever-growing disillusion with the country, and with what we
set out here to do, and, on paper anyway, succeeded in doing. “Every god damn
time…” It’s another story of a very common experience for us now: an open
hostility toward us, from strangers, for the simple fact that we are blans
(Haiti’s term for foreigners). In this particular instance, a few guys demanded
that Paddy give them his sodas, and his money, because “that’s what you’re
supposed to do.” When he refused them, they took it personally, and vocally,
and in crowds there is always tension. We’ve been lucky insofar as we’ve never
been direct victims of physical aggression, but the undercurrent is always
there. Shouts from strangers - “Hey, fuck you!” - come often now. They didn’t
before, or maybe we just never noticed them. Becoming conversationally fluent
in Kreyol has been both a blessing and a curse. The children are excusable when
they shout at us, and tend to laugh and scatter should Paddy and I ever decide
to confront them to ask them where they’d learned such phrases, but the young
men are something else. There are moments where violence seems just there. For
the first time in my life there is a certain desire to be a part of it should
it come to the surface. Elements of my character have fundamentally changed.
The evidence sometimes surprises me. There is a self-destructiveness, a
recklessness, that wasn’t there before.
We’ve left Belval Plaza by now, having first moved to a
private home with a small core staff of internationals once the volunteer side
of the project ended in December 2011, and then moved again to another base run
by an organization All Hands has had a long history with and who agreed to
house the very few of us still in the country. By the end of April, only the staff
for our program remain – myself, Paddy, Billy, a young man from Oklahoma who
has been overseeing the production side of things for six months and proven to
be an invaluable part of the team, and a selected group of our local employees.
Before too long, Billy returns Stateside, and it’s the two of us. We’ve come a
long way in many respects, creating and implementing a program that has drawn
attention of larger NGOs and the UN, and resulted in partnerships with some of
them to extend our scope into other communities. We’ve found a local NGO to
hand over our program to once All Hands officially ends all activity in Haiti
on June 30th. We’ve far exceeded our original mandate, and been
praised as having done something very few higher ups within the organization
thought was within our capacity. Our
local team, with a few exceptions, have shown incredible talent and commitment
to the work, and have become far more than employees. Indeed, many of them I’ve
come to count as close friends. And yet, ours was not a feeling of success.
A few months earlier, in April, after a late night
conversation at the house with Paddy and Alejandro, our boss and one of us who
had been in Haiti the longest, I retired to my bedroom, swerving from the rum,
and wrote an entry on my blog. It was an entry I’d tried to write numerous
times before, and couldn’t, but in that moment the combination of the
conversation, the booze, and the determination to put into words whatever came,
damned if they be damning, resulted in a piece that resonated with aid workers
and was shared across the aid blogosphere. It was, in effect, my attempt at
trying to come clean with myself about what, in fact, this entire experience
had been. It was rambling, disjointed, and somewhat incoherent, putting forth
far more questions than answers, and, in that, a very authentic representation
of myself at the time. In it, I highlighted six things that Haiti had taught
me:
- Good intentions aren’t enough.
- Rose-colored glasses are bullshit.
- The white savior industrial complex is real, demonstrated daily by feel good aid programs that probably don’t work, or feel good causes like Kony 2012 that generate plenty of buzz but don’t add up to much when people are actually supposed to do something.
- You can’t help people who don’t want to help themselves.
- True altruism is an incredibly rare thing.
- Little victories must be celebrated if you want to protect yourself from the crippling effects of the larger failure.
The truth is, my time in Haiti is less a story of events
than it is of an ever-changing process of feeling. From the initial shock and
fascination to a sense of euphoria and unquestioned purpose that began to give
way under questions based on deeper observation and ultimately led to a state
of confused, proud, exhausted uncertainty in most everything, Haiti broke me
down. It also humanized me, which is, by definition, painful, because it
requires you to bear witness to the suffering of others. In hindsight, it is
also what I realized I had set out to try and find to begin with. There is
something deeply humbling about coming face to face with your own powerlessness
in the presence of such overwhelming depravity, and that takes many forms. It
became routine in Haiti to watch friends and professional acquaintances change
because of Haiti’s influence: some had an emotional collapse, others a slow
burn-out, others a deep and cynical disconnect, and others still a seemingly
endless, almost unreasonable positivity. Most left the country in much the same
way I did: confused, raw, and utterly exhausted.
A natural human instinct when faced with something deemed to
be wrong or broken is to try and understand why so as to be able to make it
right or fix it. In the context of a place like Haiti, whose problems are so
deep-rooted and multi-faceted as to be almost incomprehensible, this drive toward
understanding is circuitous, contradictory, and ultimately, self-reflective,
and that’s where the crisis happens. To be an aid worker in Haiti for any
substantial length of time results in realizing the sad but unavoidable fact
that aid in Haiti is broken, and that, as an aid worker, you are both a cause
of the problem and a part of its would-be solution. The contradictions can be
torturous in that they become personal: a heartfelt thank you from a woman who
no longer fears cholera juxtaposed against the question of why she has to drink
from a river to begin with. Was it wrong to give her a filter? Is that just
playing into the dependency of the country, cutting people off at the knees
when they might otherwise find a way to stand? I found myself asking questions
like these often, the answers elusive and not entirely convincing.
This much I can say: I helped people in Haiti, in the
immediate sense of the word. If properly cared for, the filters we provided
rural families in areas that had little or no access to potable water will keep
them safe from cholera and other waterborne diseases for many years. The jobs
we created for our local staff kept them fed and housed, and for some of them,
kept their children in school. The slabs we cleared were often reclaimed, and
new homes built on them. But, in the long view, I have a hard time believing I
accomplished anything akin to real change, because I was part of a system
designed to combat the symptoms of Haiti’s illness, not the root causes. That
isn’t entirely the fault of aid. In many respects, I’ve come to believe that
aid can truly ever just be a band-aid for people in desperate and
optionless situations. Terms like “development” and “sustainability” and
“capacity building” are central to the aid lexicon, but for me come summer
2012, they rang hollow, because such terms imply an inherent independent
capability that is fundamentally contradictory to the notion that “we”, the
outsiders, can provide that. “We” cannot fix Haiti, and to think as much is a
nod to the Western ego. Only Haiti can fix Haiti. But to simply accept that as
an excuse to wipe our hands clean of the whole thing and bid Haiti best of luck
is wrong, because “we” are not blameless in Haiti’s miseries. Far from it.
Teju Cole, a Nigerian-American writer, sparked interest in
March of this year when he tweeted about the so-called “white savior industrial complex”. He wrote, “The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning,
founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening… The
White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big
emotional experience that validates privilege.” His statements resonated with
me, and helped me realize that I had played right into it. This was an experience
first and foremost about me: my desire to scratch an itch, my feeling of
exceptionalism for coming to do the work, my stories, my sense of purpose. And
yet, interestingly and perhaps in counter to Mr. Cole’s statements, I’ve come
to realize that that’s not a wrong thing. Indeed, self-realization, which is
what Haiti was my attempt at finding, is the gateway to happiness, and being
truly engaged in living. And for many aid workers, trying to help people is
their method of self-realization. That is a good thing. I’ll take an aid worker
over a politician ten times out of ten. It isn’t the aid workers supporting the
brutal policies Mr. Cole correctly brings to light.
That said, aid and aid workers could benefit from some
serious self-reflection. Too often in Haiti I saw badly designed and executed
projects that could do more harm than good. Abandoned, over-flowing latrines
exposed people living in camps to the threat of disease long after the NGO that
built them had left the country, never having a plan for what to do with the
waste. Leogane is susceptible to flooding, exacerbating the problem further. At
a meeting held at UN OCHA (United Nations Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs), a woman representing a major NGO arrived late and with
only one purpose: to find out where she could distribute over a million
Aquatabs (water treatment tablets). When told that the World Health
Organization had recommended that distributions of Aquatabs be halted given
they could have negative health effects if used for too long, she defiantly
made it clear that, one way or another, she was distributing her supply, her
donors demanded it. Is it realistic to expect that a system dependent on and
answerable to donors to continue to exist can ever realistically put the needs
of those it is attempting to help above all else? It can work, but only if
donors let capable aid agencies do what they are designed to do, because many
donors don’t get their fingernails dirty, and do not understand the realities
on the ground. Indeed, many donors don’t seem to care about the intricacies at
all, acting much like the woman who came to our base representing a donor and
asked only to be taken to “where the poor kids are” so she could take photos
with them for a newsletter before driving back to Port-au-Prince and flying
home. NGOs and the many talented and specialized employees they employ should
not have to dance to the beat of the donor drum.
However, NGOs themselves should know their limitations, and
question their motives. Haiti has a nickname – The Republic of NGOs – and
spending any time in the country makes it painfully clear how appropriate that
nickname is. Everywhere are branded vehicles: UNICEF, Red Cross, Caritas, CARE,
UNDP, USAID, MSF. The list goes on (and on, and on, and on). And yet,
historically, more keep coming. Why? Is there really the need for yet another
organization working to give clean water, or provide medical care, or support
education? Probably not. Haiti is a small country. You’d be hard pressed to
find places NGOs aren’t. Is it not wiser to identify those NGOs already
engrained in the communities and proving to be effective and legitimate in the
eyes of the people they are aiming to help, and support them to expand their
scope rather then set up shop alongside them and potentially disrupt their
work? It’s a matter of priorities. Often times, it seems NGOs, like their
donors, put themselves before their purpose. It is a competition born of the
feeling of a “right” to be able to help.
Another result of so many players is that aid can often
overlap, with communities receiving different and often counterproductive
“solutions”. It was frustrating to return to areas we’d given filters to months
prior to find many not being used and being told that it was easier to just use
the Aquatabs that were now being distributed weekly by another NGO (our friend
from the UN meeting perhaps?) who hadn’t bothered to find out, or didn’t care,
that an existing solution was in place. To state that aid can be wasteful and
redundant is a gross understatement. Furthermore, many NGOs seem happy to
arrive in the country with outside, pre-determined solutions that may not be
culturally viable, or that are implemented incorrectly. Too few bother to
design solutions born of local knowledge. Building blocks made of compacted
plastic and Styrofoam waste (of which there is plenty in Haiti) sound like an
excellent idea, as long as people are willing to live in homes made from trash.
Many aren’t, and that has nothing to do with the technology, and everything to
do with culture.
Indeed, if I could go back and change my own program, I
would only have done it to begin with if given the go-ahead to set up a
satellite program in a very rural, inaccessible community with far greater
need. The simple truth is, most people in Leogane don’t need biosand filters.
For every community we found where people were drinking from rivers, we found
twenty more that had access to reliable, relatively safe hand-pumps. By the
time our program ended, some of those river communities had received new hand
pumps themselves. It isn’t to say that people didn’t benefit from our work, but
the impact could have been greater if focused where people had few if any safe
options. Aid for aid’s sake is tempting, because aid feels good, and is easy to
defend, but it defeats the purpose.
It doesn’t end with aid though. To suggest it alone is the
cause and continuation of Haiti’s problems is to make a blanket statement that
is, in no uncertain terms, wrong. To put it bluntly, Haiti and her people have
a large role to play in their own misery. This is a controversial suggestion
within the context of humanitarianism, which often paints people as victims and
powerless and therefore faultless (which is both untrue and deeply
disrespectful), but without people empowering themselves through recognition of
their own role to play in their lives, the flaunted ideals of development and
sustainability are entirely meaningless. What began to take shape for me as I
spent month after month in the field - in communities, in homes, in churches
and local committee meetings – is that many local people (but not all) had
seemingly little interest in actively working to improve their situations. This
isn’t a Haitian characteristic, it is a human characteristic, but in a place of
such exposed failings, it was hard to swallow. A deep and troubling societal
ill made itself known to me as my Kreyol improved and I could better understand
conversations between myself (and my team) and local people, and between local
people themselves. It revealed a mindset that began eroding my ability and
desire to want to continue to try and help, a mindset that asked, “Why help
myself when I know someone else will do it for me?” Aid has become so embedded
in Haitian society that it has created a monster: dependence expressed as
expectance. It is everywhere. It is the reason the men took offense when Paddy
refused to give them his sodas and his money. It is the reason kazaks (local
community leaders) would shortcut most every meeting with me and ask straight
out, “OK, but what are you going to give us?” or in their more shameless
moments, “OK, but what are you to give me?”
It became personal after I left Haiti the first time, with people I considered
friends making up stories about sick mothers or car accidents to try and get me
to send money. It was hard to find myself questioning someone professing to be
in true and dire need - it isn’t in my character - but it was something I did
more and more as time passed.
Is that dependence and expectance the result of decades of
poorly executed aid work? A strong case could be made that it is, but to me,
the cause is far less important than the effect, and pointing fingers is an
exercise in self-defensive futility. Ultimately, accountability for a life
comes from those doing the living, and until more local people take it upon
themselves to make the effort needed to truly begin to grow and expand their
own capacities, to shed the label of “beneficiary” and reclaim the rightful
title of “human being”, imperfect and troublesome as that title is, then Haiti
will never rise, and many international actors will never treat Haiti as
anything more than broken. Haitians know this, with some often expressing more
frustration with their own people than with aid workers or the aid system.
During an interview I did for NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” about the experience
of being an aid worker in Haiti, Jean Claude, a Haitian psychotherapist living
in the States who frequently returned to Haiti, expressed this frustration
pretty clearly: “I find it to be consistent all across the country, that a lot
of my fellow Haitians are more interested in asking for a dollar instead of
working for that dollar." To suggest such a thing as a non-Haitian, however,
is prickly. Many of the most hostile comments I got in response to the blog
entry where I first placed some accountability on Haitians themselves were from
Haitians, some of them from Leogane and professing to know me, and who called
me a spoiled white idiot, a faggot, and a racist. Is it possible that I’m being
insensitive and grossly oversimplifying a problem I may not truly understand
given I am neither Haitian nor a veteran aid worker? Most certainly. Is
resorting to calling me a racist or faggot an act of deflection aimed at
avoiding deeper, uncomfortable self-reflection? Probably.
It wasn’t uncommon in conversations had amongst aid workers
in Haiti that the best thing to do would be to just leave the country all
together. All of us. The entire system. No more aid. No more programs, no more
financial support, no more imports. Just let Haiti figure itself out. It is
hard to deny the attractiveness of the proposal given its simplicity, and its
allowing all of us to just wash our hands of the place with a resigned (or is
that relieved?) sigh of, “Well, we tried.” It’s also a completely terrible
idea. If all aid were to leave Haiti, many countless people would die. The
country simply cannot support itself in its present state. Haiti’s government
is ineffectual at best, and predatory at worst. Haiti’s security infrastructure
is ill-equipped to handle violence without the support of MINUSTAH, the UN’s
peacekeeping mission in the country. Haiti’s natural environment is severely
compromised, with deforestation and top-soil run-off making bountiful,
productive farming that can support Haiti’s booming population an
impossibility. And yet, I’ve been guilty of throwing out the “Fuck it.”
solution myself, the result of frustration trumping compassion.
The other reason it would be wrong to pull all aid from
Haiti is because Haiti isn’t and has never been a country free to try and
advance itself without the tampering of outside players. Us. Since overthrowing
French colonial rule, resulting in the first black-led republic in the world
born of the first truly successful slave rebellion, Haitians have been
continuously undermined and kept down by the West – the United States and
France in particular. Saddled with a crushing debt by the French in the early
1800s, imposed to remedy the loss of France’s men and colony, it was a sum
Haiti could never hope to pay if it also hoped to care for its own people and
strengthen its state capacity. It is also absurd to demand a people that had
enriched France beyond measure (Haiti was their most profitable colony, and
their most brutal) should have to pay for the privilege of ending their own
subjugation. However, that wasn’t the dominant view at the time, and the debt
imposed by France laid the foundation for the gross underdevelopment in the
country today.
The United States occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, under
the banner of restoring peace after a series of violent coups, but actually
working to maintain US economic domination over the country as well as replace
its existing Constitution, which forbid foreign ownership of Haitian land.
Haiti’s two most famous and destructive dictators – Francois Duvalier and his
son Jean-Claude – were grudgingly propped up by the US as a political counter
to Cuba’s Castro and the feared spread of communism. In 1990, Jean-Bertrand
Artistide, a Haitian priest raised in poverty, became the first democratically
elected president in Haiti’s history, winning by a large majority. In 1991 he
was forced into exile as a result of a military coup with ties to the Bush
presidency, who feared the ramifications of a populist president working in
opposition to the traditional elites that had ruled Haiti. Again in 2000,
Aristide was reelected, and again, in 2004, overthrown in a coup with ties to
the then second Bush presidency.
The history is long, and this is not the place (nor am I the
person) to attempt to make sense of it all, other than to say something I
believe is of critical importance: Haiti is a mess largely because powerful
players have a vested interest in keeping it a mess. The brutal policies Teju
Cole highlighted in his series of tweets are real, imposed both within the
country by predatory elites, and from outside the country by those with
something to gain. Given this, is it not entirely wrong to suggest Haiti just
needs to “figure it out”, as if the abandonment of aid in the country would
also free it from other, more malevolent outside influences? For me, it became
a dilemma, one in which I often asked myself if it wouldn’t be better to focus
my attentions not on Haiti, but on the US - my own country - and work to combat
the policies and actions created within it that have terrible implications for
people in other parts of the world. If aid truly is just a band-aid, and root
causes cannot be addressed through aid, isn’t continuing to focus on it rather
than on the source tantamount to acknowledging the ultimate futility of the
whole process? Is being an awakened aid worker who stays in aid anyway a
betrayal of the morals and ideologies that we profess to be central to who we
are and why we do what we do? Again, many questions, few answers.
-
Paddy left Haiti July 1st, 2012. What I imagined
to be a powerful closing moment at the airport between two close friends who
had together gone through one of the most defining experiences in our lives was
anything but. A quick nod, a heft of his bag, and he was gone. In some ways, it
was perfect. No words necessary. Three weeks later, after a short consulting
gig with a larger NGO, I followed him – the final one of us to go. It was a
rushed exit, the result of a last minute itinerary change so that I could get
to New York and sort out visa issues in preparation for the coming academic
year in London. There were many people I did not get to say goodbye to. There
were many last minute phone calls. Standing outside the office in
Port-au-Prince during my final hours in the country, talking on the phone to my
now ex-employees, and my local friends, was both painful and deeply rewarding.
I placed faith in what they told me – that they respected me, and were grateful
for the chance to create what we created together. That they were proud of the
work they accomplished. That they were going to miss me, and demanded I return
to visit, that I’d have a place to stay. There was as much laughter as there
was sadness. It meant something.
The most difficult call to make was entirely one-sided - me
talking to a voice mail service, saying my goodbyes to Wadson, a young man from
a very poor background, a father and a husband, who had volunteered to help us
when we brought filters to his community, and proved to be incredibly dedicated
and capable. It was with deep disappointment that, months later, I had to fire
him from the part-time position created specifically for him because I
discovered he was lying about having done the work we expected him to do. He
left the base in tears, and I hadn’t spoken to him in since. But, in those
closing moments of Haiti, I realized Wadson was, in many respects, a perfect
representation of the greater Haiti experience – promising, capable, and
flawed. In saying my goodbye to him, I was saying my goodbye to all of it: the
beauty turned ugly, the euphoria turned disillusion, the certainty turned
doubt. In telling Wadson that, regardless of his mistake, I valued him and what
he did to help our team, and that he should be proud of that, and remember it,
I was as much talking to myself as I was to him. He remained in my thoughts as
I stepped into the plane and, head once again against a window, watched
Port-au-Prince as it shrank away.
-
It has been almost four months since I left Haiti. In that
time I’ve bounced from the Americas to Europe to Asia and finally settled in
London, where I’m now pursuing a Master’s degree. To say it has been one of the
most challenging periods in my life would not be an overstatement. Haiti
succeeded in doing what I hoped it might do: break me down, leaving me unsure
of many things I took as certain before I went. It humanized me, and set in
motion my push toward self-realization. It isn’t a process I’ve yet completed.
Pieces of myself are exposed that were not before, but remain silent on how
they want to be put back together.
Since arriving in London in mid-September, I’ve spent most
of my time alone. It isn’t that I don’t want to be with people, it’s that I
don’t really remember how to be with people. Conversations can feel awkward,
and are largely avoided. A close friend of mine who spent a year in Haiti and
left shortly after I did to return home to Portland wrote me recently sharing
that she feels as if she’s forgotten how to make friends. She talked about the
combination of ADD, anxiety and reality distortion that overwhelmed her when
she first went post-Haiti clothes shopping at a Nordstrom. She had to leave the
store. This is an experience we share – my first visit to a Primark to buy a
few cold weather items resulted in my walking out empty-handed within minutes to
simply escape the place. A Friday night out to Shoreditch, one of London’s
trendier neighborhoods, found me standing in total discomfort in the middle of
a packed bar as people whirled around me, drinking and laughing and loud. “You
OK hun?” the friend I was with asked. I didn’t have to explain. I met her in
Haiti in 2010, and she’d done work in Ghana before that. We ended up in a quiet
place, at a table for two.
The result of so much time alone is obvious: an internal
dialogue unlike any I’ve had before. Every day I spend hours in silent conversation
with myself. Unlike the first month after I left Haiti, where I thought very
little of the country, I now reflect on it constantly. On the contradictions,
on the work, on the people I know there and care about, of their present and
their future. Some days I get out of my head and call Jenny, a whipsmart
eighteen year old who’s family I was very close to, and smile when she tells me
that she’s first in her class and recently been elected class president. When I
first met her she was sixteen and working outside Belval Plaza trying to sell
cheap tourist trinkets to the volunteers. She wasn’t in school. She tells me
Hurricane Sandy hit Leogane pretty badly, but that she and Ornela and Madam
Michelle, her little sister and her mom, are fine. She tells me she misses me,
and to come and visit her. I know I will, but don’t know when. I talk to James
on Facebook, now back in Gonaives. He tells me it’s tough. He’s out of work.
He’s thinking about going to the Dominican Republic again, or maybe Guadalupe.
He doesn’t feel he has many options in Haiti. I talk to Fatal, one of our best
employees, a family man in his thirties with two newborns (one biological, the
other adopted after being abandoned) who recently faced eviction because he
can’t find work. Many disaster response programs in Haiti are finishing, the
jobs going with them. The earthquake was a long time ago. I feel obligated to
help, but know it amounts to very little. Band aids, still.
And yet, band aids or not, something interesting is at play
now: my conviction for the work is growing, not diminishing. My dedication to
humanitarianism is strengthening, not weakening. My degree program, focused on
conflict and development, is, like Haiti, creating more questions than answers
in me, and yet inspires me for the fact that the answers are there to be found.
Despite the whiplash, and the discomfort it has brought, I have a growing trust
in the fact that I’ve aligned myself with something that is important,
imperfect, and needs to be done.
In those rare moments where I do talk to people about Haiti,
and the contradictions and frustrations and confusion that came of my time
there, a question I often get in response is why? Why do it at all, if it is so
broken? It’s the wrong question entirely.
The most powerful experience I had in Haiti happened in
October 2011, when a baby girl, orphaned, severely malnourished, and HIV
positive, was dropped off at an organization a friend of mine was working for.
Deemed too far gone by doctors and hospitals, the orphanage that had been
housing her had given up too, and didn’t want to waste their very limited
resources on her. Over the course of a few days, Miguerline, over a year old
but the size of an infant, was cared for by my friend with a dedication and
sweetness that was beautiful to watch. The little girl rallied at first, even
began eating semi-solid foods and managing a few giggles where before there
were moans, but it was not to last. On October 16th, in the late
hours of the evening, she died. It was a horrible death to bear witness to:
vomit and feces and rubber gloves to protect from the virus, needles and
backslapping, and the rhythmic moaning returned, and growing ever fainter. By
the time her jaw gave three short jerks before the final exhale, I was numb,
and set about trying to build a coffin from semi-rotting plywood so she would
not have to be returned to the orphanage in a suitcase, like the child before
her had been. We left her outside on the porch, the staff so accustomed to this
as to be almost indifferent. Miguerline was one more dead child in a country of
countless dead children.
The question isn’t why. The question is how. How can this be
allowed to happen? How can a little girl in a country but a stone’s throw away
from the world’s richest and most powerful nation be allowed to die like
that? That is wrong, and rationalizing
it doesn’t change that. Miguerline’s life was challenging, but her death could
have been avoided with basic nutrition and HIV medication. If Miguerline had
been American, she probably would have lived. Miguerline wasn’t a priority.
Somewhere else a judgment call was made about her life, by people who never
knew her, and she came up short.
And therein lies my reason for remaining committed. What
happened to Miguerline should not have happened. It happens all the time. The
world’s bottom billion suffer immeasurably so that the world’s top billion can
enjoy themselves. The system, as it stands now, is stacked so unforgivingly
against so many that to allow it to remain is to reject those qualities that
make us human beings. Do we really want to engage our small, crowded and ever
more connected world with the basest aspects of ourselves? Is that what we
aspire to? Do we accept the suffering of others? Do we accept the suffering of
others if it is within our power to try and end it? That’s it really. That’s all of it.
If your answer is no, than you’re no different than me, and I’m no different
than most, because I know that if asked that question, the vast majority of us
would respond with a collective and decisive no. It’s a no worth honoring. It’s
a no worth honoring despite the endless yeses that can be used to counter it.
Is aid largely broken? Yes. Is it designed to address
symptoms, not causes? Yes. Can it hurt and disempower the people it is trying
to help? Yes. Is it possible it needs to be redesigned from the ground up? Yes.
Is it tempting to write it off given the complexity of doing that? Yes. Should
we? No. No, we should not.
Paul Collier, a respected British economist, gave a talk in February
2008 in which he championed working to address the plight of the bottom
billion, with aid playing a key role. He closed it with self-deprecating humor,
highlighting a comment made about him that said he was not a charismatic man,
but his message was compelling. I couldn’t help but laugh, the meaning of his
quip not lost.
Aid is not charismatic. It can be to untrained eyes, but
under the feel-good exterior lies a much uglier core that, once revealed, makes
itself very hard to like, but even harder to walk away from. No, aid is not
charismatic, but it is compelling, because it represents a desire to manifest
the best of ourselves: a powerful, affirming, awakened engagement with one
another that comes from the marriage of human ingenuity to human compassion. In
a sea of questions, that is the anchor that might just lead to an answer.
