A city returned.

New York, I've missed you, and your mad, manic, beautiful energy. Let's dance, shall we?

2010 - 2014

I started writing here in 2010. Before that I wrote somewhere else, on another blog, now private, years before. Before that I started in a little black-covered journal bought for me in Berkeley when I was 8. I remember writing about a trip to the beach with my mother and my brother. These collections seem to act as chapters in my life.

This chapter is over. And while I would have thought there'd be something akin to a nuanced exit, a proud bow, a poignant retrospective, there isn't, just like there wasn't before. I don't know what exactly awakens the knowledge that it's time to close doors and move on, but I'm there, and there's no poetry in it. I have no more words. I've written many. I'm ready to stop for a while and see where I find myself. This blog started in June 2010 in New York, days before I landed in Port-au-Prince. It carried through to London in late 2012 - an extension of Haiti not only for what it inspired in me, but also for something found there. And then it came to find me here - Los Angeles, late 2013. That was unexpected.

Shortly after the start of this year - 2014 - I sent my last Western Union wire to Haiti - payment for exams to get Jenny through her fourth year of high school, the final obligation to a promise made. Sending her the text with the confirmation number felt different than the times before. It was something like turning the final page. Haiti is in the past. London is in the past. I'm soon returning to New York - a city unlike any other in which I see possibilities not possible before. There's closure in the circuity.

To say I've been changed between the time I started this blog and this point at which I end it simplifies the truth of it. I am the same person, and I'm not at all. I stop writing now for a reason. It's time to take account. There's so much familiar in me, and so much foreign. I am more grounded in who I am, even as I test my footing.

Thanks to all of you I've come to know throughout the experience of this mad leap of faith. There are too many to name, but I count myself bettered for having had the chance to cross paths. I wanted to find something. You helped unearth much of it. Mesi anpil. I feel closer to who I want to be for all of what this has been.

A Christmas present to myself.

I went out and bought a journal a few days ago, not to keep my own thoughts in, but rather, to take note of the thoughts of others that speak to me. I like the idea of having something with me that, when those moments in life come a creepin' and the intellect or the soul are curious or seek nourishment, all I need do is open it, flip a few pages, and read.

But, as I well know after the experience of having so many countless things of mine misplaced, forgotten or stolen over the course of my bouncing around, anything physical can be lost. So I'm going to create a digital copy. Tumblr does the job well:

qz / selections

Here's to hoping I get a kick out of this when I look back years from now and see what still speaks to me, and what at one time did.

A year ago at this time I was reading Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. There were a few quotes from it that resonated, but two, now, remain. One for lessons already learned, one for lessons learning:

"I never told her that - what her affectionate and unconditional acceptance meant to me. So much, too much, of the good that I felt in those years of exile was locked in the prison cell of my heart: those tall walls of fear; that small, barred window of hope; that hard bed of shame. I do speak out now. I know now that when the loving, honest moment comes it should be seized, and spoken, because it may never come again. And unvoiced, unmoving, unlived in the things we declare from heart to heart, those true and real feelings wither and crumble in the remembering hand that tried too late to reach for them."

"What characterizes the human race more, Karla once asked me, cruelty, or the capacity to feel shame for it? I thought the question acutely clever then, when I first heard it, but I'm lonelier and wiser now, and I know it isn't cruelty or shame that characterizes the human race. It's forgiveness that makes us what we are. Without forgiveness, our species would've annihilated itself in endless retributions. Without forgiveness, there would be no history. Without that hope, there would be no art, for every work of art is in some way an act of forgiveness. Without that dream, there would be no love, for every act of love is in some way a promise to forgive. We live on because we can love, and we love because we can forgive."

Happy holidays to all.

The life ideal.

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.” - Louise Erdrich

Beautiful quote, it resonates. There are moments in my life when I acknowledge that my idealism creates the foundation for suffering. In some respects, that idealism is both my greatest strength and greatest weakness. And yet even in those moments when the suffering surfaces I've always refused to forsake the idealism that is responsible for it, because I know what sits on the other side, and I trust that it is there that I find my happiness, my redemption, my truth, and myself.

Disaster response catastrophizing - a solid point made.

In respects to the panel / post yesterday, I found this recent Time article by John Crowley an interesting read:

Stop Catastrophizing Relief Efforts in the Philippines

He makes a good point in respects to security and the effect that media reports can have on the willingness of aid agencies to deploy their people into a potential dangerous or predatory environment. Traditional media outlets lean heavy toward fear and sensationalism and I support any efforts to paint a picture that reflects what is actually going on rather than highlighting certain choice bits aimed at maximizing consumer attention (Oh my god! That is horrible!).

Haiti, as he mentions, is a good example. I remember vivid media reports with (warning - graphic) photos of bloodstained bodies gunned down in the streets of Port-au-Prince (source: LA Times) and the general feeling that the country was an utter dystopia. That was not at all what I found when I went there. True, I arrived six months after the earthquake, once the initial panic had passed, but having spoken to foreigners who were there during the disaster and monitoring international media reports on it, they told me the violence and chaos being depicted were entirely overblown.

This is deplorable and should be called out. Balance in reporting is important, which is to say, if security is compromised and violence is happening, it is right to bring attention to it. But to focus on it in such a way as to make it seem more widespread than it is, or at the expense of highlighting the other side of what happens in any disaster - people coming together to help each other - does a disservice to all involved, and if it deters quick deployment of aid, can result in more lives lost.

That said, I still believe that it isn't wrong to call out aspects of response that seem to be repeating - delays, a lack of preparedness, etc. As I said during yesterday's BBC panel, there was time for both the Philippine government and international responders to better prepare for this storm. Unlike an earthquake, there is a lead-up. I read in news reports that gasoline shortages are widespread, power is out in critical locations (hospitals), and equipment to clear roads of debris are not available. These are logistical square ones, and while I am not on the ground and therefore cannot know exactly what the realities are, it seems to me that having ready-to-go gas reserves, generators, and equipment that reflect the potential scope of the disaster should be a given. I understand contextual sensitivity is key. Haiti pre-earthquake could never be expected to effectively handle the scope of its disaster, there simply weren't enough dumptrucks, excavators and bulldozers in the entire country to do the job that needed doing. But in the case of the Philippines, I don't know if the same holds true - it is a country intimately acquainted with all manners of natural disasters - but even if it does, the prep time allowed by a hurricane could have been used to rally international support and preparation so as to avoid or minimize very predictable post-disaster problems. Again, I'm hesitant to condemn outright a situation I am very far removed from so I am the first to admit I could be missing something important with this critique, but there is frustration over repeating lessons that do not seem to be learned, or, if they are, are being learned slowly, and incorporated in often sub-par ways.

The bit I of the article I found the most important, however, was the point made at the end:

"When journalists focus on looting and slow aid delivery, they miss the point. Information is aid. Their reports are part of weaving the fabric of a global Filipino community back together after a typhoon tore through their hometowns. By showing communities coming together, journalists can amplify the dynamics that save lives.

It is time to look at how effectively international organizations are supporting a normally well-oiled (but now struggling) domestic response capacity, not how international aid shipments are arriving late. It is time to ask why the cellular networks are not back and running, so that the diaspora can reunite with family and send money via mobile banking. It is time to make a request of financial institutions like Western Union to reduce their surcharges on sending money to the Philippines.

When the crisis abates, it will also be time to ask if this operation is a first peek at the future of disaster response: when international aid gets criticized not for being late, but for needing to do more to help capable local responders, companies and communities get stuff done."

Preach! Not only does this point clearly highlight the essential element of local people working to solve their own problems - a cause close to my heart - but it also shifts the focus. I've often felt that the spotlight in disasters - be they natural or man-made (war, terrorism) tends to paint local people as somewhat powerless - victims - and international aspiring do-gooders as their rescuers. This is built into the very lexicon of aid work - I've never cared for the term "beneficiary". To be fair, this isn't entirely false - international aid workers, search and rescue teams and their supporting donors do help people and save lives - but it creates a massive blindspot when it fails to accurately show how local people are not simply victims, but indeed their own rescuers, and they are that before the internationals arrive and will continue to be after the internationals leave. Supporting local actors and the systems and opportunities that allow them - the people that will remain - to do the best they can do for themselves, both via media reporting and international programming, should take front and center in any aid response. It is the local context and the people living in it that is ultimately the true determinant of whether lasting normalcy will return following any catastrophe. The international community certainly plays a valuable role, but to focus the spotlight primarily on its successes and failures - which subtly suggests that the end result ultimately rides on its shoulders - is misleading and does a great disservice to those both most affected by disaster, and most invested in recovering from it.

- - -

Update - read this:

Jonathan Katz - What We Shouldn't Be Doing in the Wake of Typhoon Yolanda

Jonathan is a journalist who was on the ground when the earthquake hit Port-au-Prince and after having heard him give a talk in London this year, I agree with a lot of how he looks at things.

BBC panel on aid and the Philippine disaster response.

Thank you to the BBC and the World Have Your Say team for giving me a chance to chime in on some past work done, what's going on now in the Philippines, and the larger world of humanitarian aid.

Philippines: Analysis of an Aid Mission

Sometimes I feel like I come off as an aid skeptic - and most certainly I can be critical - but if nothing else I hope it is understood that I care about getting this stuff right, and ultimately support any effort by people and organizations genuinely interested in helping other people in need, and willing to shine an inquisitive light on themselves in the process of doing so. To echo what I wrote when trying to make sense of my two years in Haiti, "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."

Right then, back to the job hunt. Any amazing LA organizations out there hiring? Let's do this!

Closing the circle.

Leaving for Haiti was a leap of faith taken in an effort to better know myself and chase the dream of a more authentic life. It was taken on my own terms. It got me half way.

I left London September 10th. I write this now just awake, in a newly purchased bed tucked into the corner of my brother's living room in a one bedroom apartment in Los Angeles. September 10th I woke next to the woman I love as she hummed one of our favorite songs. It was a beautiful morning. My heart was full. My heart is full.

This is a leap of faith taken on terms not my own. I trust with it, I go the rest of the way.

Born of and returned to that deepest appreciation for it existing, and my having known it. Thank you.

Haiti: A Retrospective

Written November 2012.

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 10^th 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 1^st, 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 30^th. 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.

And so it was for us. And, based on the feedback from numerous aid workers who read the piece, so it was for countless others who’ve dedicated time to the work. The story I’ve told thus far is unique only insomuch as it is my own, but the results of my experiences are not unique. On the contrary, they are shared by countless people from numerous varied backgrounds who have all had the experience of trying to “help” in the form of international humanitarianism, and realized how difficult that actually is to do.

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 1^st, 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 16^th, 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.

This is beautiful.

Personal windows like this humble me. Incredibly beautiful, and brave.

The Battle We Didn't Choose

I leave London on Wednesday to return to California for a month. It's needed. It has been almost two years since I've seen my family. These last two years have been big ones. I want to share them.

Belval Plaza's final days.

I was clicking through some Facebook photos friends had posted from the Haiti days and found this one, which was particularly poignant for some reason. It's the roof of Belval Plaza, my home for a year and a half, in mid-to-late December 2011. All of us had broken down our tents and most had already gone, returning to wherever we came from, and leaving behind the pallets, cinderblocks, and hacked-together furniture that we used to keep ourselves dry and as comfortable as possible.

Interviews, writings, and updates.

I don't think I ever actually posted the NPR interview I was asked to give in response to my blog post back in April of last year, but they asked me at the start of this year to do a quick follow-up. Thanks to Tinbete, Neal and the rest of the "Talk of the Nation" team for giving me the chance to share some thoughts. Links:

NPR's Talk of the Nation - Closing The Circle: Memorable Stories of 2012 (Jan. 2nd, 2013)

NPR's Talk of the Nation - Aid Worker Leaves Haiti With A Sour Taste (May 10th, 2012)

Not many updates recently, but life is good. School is inspiring and keeps me busy, and while landing in London was a rough transition, I'm feeling more and more at home in this city, and more appreciative of it. I could see myself potentially staying put for a bit if I can find a job here post-graduation that can make good use of my talents, and inspires and challenges me. As much as I love academia, it is something of a solo process, and I love team dynamic and working toward a common goal. In that, a future career excites me. We shall see.

I have managed to write the "follow-up" piece to the April 2012 blog post that some people have asked me to write, but as it was requested by a magazine, it is still being edited. Once that's finished up and finalized, I'll post it. It by no means attempts to capture all of what the Haiti experience was for me, but it does probe deeper than anything I've written to date.

2013 then. Hello there.

In the debate on the ills and goods of aid...

...let us not forget something important:

“The international aid community has a tendency to colonize, and this tendency is no less apparent in its moral debates where all too often it has shown signs of making all the moral problems of the world its own. In debates about humanitarian ethics, this has sometimes meant that relief agencies and their critics have tended to overstate the moral burden on humanitarianism – perhaps because it is easier to accuse a relief agency than a warlord these days. But it should never be forgotten that relief agencies are always responding to the violence of others. The difficult moral choices faced by relief agencies usually come about as a result of the immoral choices already made by political leaders and other individuals and groups. In most situations, relief agencies inherit an already uneven moral playing-field. It would therefore be morally negligent if excessive agonizing by or about relief agencies (the groaning of the white man and his burden) shouted out the accusations of blame which should be put squarely where they are most obviously due: with the killers, the rapists, the dispossessors and their political leaders who initiate and sustain the policies of excessive and unjust violence in today’s wars and genocides.”

Hugo Slim - Doing The Right Thing: Relief Agencies, Moral Dilemmas and Moral Responsibility in Political Emergencies and War (1997)

Damn good point. Spend days on end reading about the ills of irresponsible aid can get a fella aspiring to work in the field (or one related to it) somewhat down, but every now and again you read something that highlights the other, equally important side of things.

The Whiplash

People who've been at this longer than I have told me it'd come. They told me to be patient with myself, to recognize the effects, to understand the process, to keep perspective and push on, even if it meant faking it for a while. I trusted what they told me but I didn't really ever quite believe it. The whiplash, perhaps one of the most highlighted aspects of the international humanitarian experience, is well documented, but I can be stubborn in my moments, allowing myself the think that maybe I'm different. I'm not.

It's the unseen approach that's the trickiest bit. There's really no way to know. Like that unexpected burst of manic, overwhelming energy that flattened the city I called home for two years, the whiplash just hits. I've gotten in the habit of trying to avoid it through movement. A body in motion seems harder to knock down. Maybe that's completely wrong.

I'm walking down the street, fast, boots echoing off the pavement. I've been doing a lot of this recently. Blisters on my feet. Bandaids on my pinky toes. It's dark and crisp, and I can see my breath when I exhale. I'm wearing a lot of clothing, but the cooling sweat under it makes it cold. My iPod is in, set to repeat my "Rollin' in the Deep" playlist. There are no Adele songs on it. I'm thinking I'd like to be drinking right now. Bottle of red or a few cans of beer? Red would keep me warmer, but the beer's cheaper. I go for the beer. They tell me you can drink on the streets of London. No problems yet, so I suppose I believe them.

I walk in a direction with no destination but proximity. I know there's no point to it, but I do it anyway. I walk along the south bank of the Thames, past the London Eye and the OXO Tower and the Tate Modern. I like the look of the Millennium Bridge and tell myself I need to walk that too. I do, a few days later. I continue down into the darkened shadows of Southwark Cathedral and Borough Market, one my favorite places in the city, and linger there, indulging a few memories. I finish the beer, find a trash can, and keep moving. I'm headed south, closer now, and cross the street.

The pub has a little window at the top, connected to what I imagine might be a little room. The window was open a few days ago, but it's closed now. Through the larger streetside windows I can see there are a handful of people left inside, but they're just lingering, easing down the final sips. I'm tempted to stop and study them, but I don't. It is cold. I don't stop walking. It's something akin to morbid curiosity that brought me here, or maybe just a deep loneliness, and now it's time to go.

I'm down a side street, doubling back in the direction I came, headed back to the river, moving west this time. It's all in reverse: Borough Market, Southwark Cathedral, The Tate Modern and the Millennium Bridge, the OXO Tower. I almost make it to Waterloo Bridge before what I've been trying to stay ahead of catches up. I sit on a bench under a tree, feel the wet through my jeans because it's raining now, and it comes. I'm quiet about it, not that anyone's around to hear. I can't even hear myself for the headphones. It doesn't last long, a few minutes, and then I'm still. The moisture is collecting on the edge of my beanie, which I keep pulling as low as I can. My nose is running, and I taste salt. I'm cold, but the release leaves me feeling peaceful. I'm OK with just sitting here for a while.

Big Ben looks pretty big. I walk under it a few nights later. It is big. Not New York City big, but this is London. It doesn't need to be that big. I think that this city is beautiful at night. I feel like I could love it, and at the same time want to fast forward through it all. I ask myself questions that are impossible for me to answer, and feel OK in my unknowing. I'm off balance, but collected, and it's time to move again.

It's slow now, the boots don't make much noise, a light scuffing along the ground. I keep the playlist going. I'm on Waterloo Bridge, looking at Somerset House, and next to it my university. I feel incredibly lucky to be there. I take my time in the middle of the span, looking down at the water. It moves faster than I would have thought.

Underneath the city it's warmer, and I've caught one of the final trains headed north to Manor House. Coming up again I can see it's rained here too. Harder, by the looks of it. My boots splash along the sidewalk. I hope the off license is open. I want a few more cans, and I like the German Shepherd puppy that lives behind the counter. It's not. I consider getting a kebab, mostly because I know I should probably eat something, but I'm not hungry, and I don't.

The temporary roommates have given me a key so I don't have to wake them. I let myself in. A few blinking lights illuminate the place, but it's silent. Opening the fridge I see an open bottle of white. I know I shouldn't but I pour half of it into a glass, and head up the stairs to the room I sleep in. I try and be quiet when I put the mattress on the ground. There's a little sleeping bag too, but I'm too big for it. I fold the pillow over itself in the silence and tuck my arm under it, the ringing in my ears amplifying and the wet of my beanie on my face as I put my head down. In the morning I can see my boots are water stained and have dirtied the sheet, but they've kept my feet warm through the night. I take a shower. It's really hot, and I like that. I use someone's shampoo. Some bandaids fall off. I flush them down the toilet, and put on new ones.

I'm outside and headed south again, back to the city. It's sunny. It feels like it could be a good day. People ride bikes past me, and I'm moving fast, my boots hammering the sidewalk, one hand rolling through the playlists, the other jammed into the pocket with my phone in it, hoping it will vibrate.

Day XX - Restart: London

London. I’m here. Two years ago nearly to the day I had a feeling I would find my way to this city eventually, and it’s happened. I’m sitting in my friend Briony’s room in her flat north of city center, listening to Dug G, a Haitian rapper, and waiting. Waiting for a phone call from a friend, yes, but also waiting to see what’s going to come. This is the first time since leaving New York for Haiti on July 1^st, 2010 that I know I won’t be needing to pack up again and shove off once more. London is home, at least for the next year, but perhaps longer. This year is only transitional if I choose it to be. My roots could eventually be English. Knowing that, knowing that this is where I stabilize, leaves me waiting for the post-Haiti fallout that hasn’t happened yet. Yes, I left Haiti at the end of July, nearly two months ago now, but in that time I’ve bounced from New York to Madrid to SE Asia and back to Madrid before landing at Gatwick last Tuesday, which is simply to say I’ve had no real chance to just be still and see what happens.

Not that I’m all that still here. I’ve got a lot of things to do before my course at King’s kicks off on the 24^th, my 31^st birthday as it happens. If it plays out as I hope, I’ll be getting a flat with two friends from Haiti, one of whom was there for just about as long as I was. That will be great. We’re pretty tight, and she’ll be someone I know will understand when the conversations inevitably drift back to the Caribbean, and the last two years. We’re very different in many ways – she inspires me and makes me realize that I’ve a long way yet to go – but we have Haiti in common, and have a tendency toward making one another crack up. It’ll be good.

People have been asking me to write something akin to a follow-up to the unexpectedly popular entry that I posted back in April of this year. I’ve thought about how I’d like to do that, and the simple truth is I haven’t followed that entry up because I don’t know quite what else to say. This isn’t that follow-up entry.  What resonated with people about the original entry isn’t my highlighting of Haiti’s problems, or my description of my work there, but rather my coming clean about my experience. I’m no expert on Haiti, and while I know quite a bit about a very specific technology that I worked with there (biosand filters), and about a community (Leogane), and I can speak to what it is like to live there, I’m not an aid expert by any means. Haiti was my jumping into the deep end – my attempt at challenging myself to see if the humanitarian world is something I can both do and been fulfilled by in doing. It was my Step 1. I’m just getting started. I’ve made the decision to remain committed to the field, hence my pursuing a degree in conflict, security & development for the next year, but I’d be very hesitant to ever try and write as if I know something fundamentally true or real about Haiti that many others before me know better and can probably explain in much better detail. I don’t want to provide a weak second voice if there are so many powerful primary voices already in the discussion. Two years, even though it is longer than most internationals spend in the country, is still just scratching the surface when compared to truly committed humanitarians that have decided to make Haiti part of, or the entirety of, their life’s work. Their answers are the ones that should be listened to.

So no, don’t ask me to give answers. I don’t have that many, and the ones I do have will just be simplified versions of what much more capable people have already said. I won’t give you answers. But I will try and give you a continued glimpse into what my experiences in Haiti have done in me: how they’ve changed me, how they linger in me now that I’m not in Haiti any longer, and how they might manifest themselves in my life going forward. I’ve no doubt that the academic challenge coming my way in just over a week, in which I’ll be taking a much more rigorous intellectual look at elements of development, and at conflict, an area I’m particularly interested in (even though it was not work I was involved with in Haiti), will bring out questions. I’ve also people here in London that I shared the Haiti experience with. And, my ties to Haiti are not severed completely. I am still working to make sure Jenny gets through high school, and I do stay in touch with my friends there. Which is simply to say there are things in my life that will keep me connected.

I can feel it right now, as I sit in this chair staring at my laptop - that unknown something, the cumulative effect of that beautiful, devastating, and even absurd experience. It is so big. The energy in me is palpable. And yet, the result, at least for now, is silence. It’s thinking. It’s stillness. It’s sleeping. A lot of sleeping. It’s internal conversations that go in circles and don’t quite come away with anything. Not yet. It’s big, and it’s led to my choice to commit myself in ways I’ve not done ever in my life prior. And yet, it’s just beginning. It’s over, but it’s just started. That’s what I have to offer right now. It’s not much, yet, but it’s growing.

London. You’ve been a long time coming.

Day 0: Ovwa Ayiti (Anko)

Monday, July 23rd I left Haiti and landed in NYC, where I've been since. I have things I still want to write, but there's no time for that yet. Just walking around this vast, familiar yet somewhat alien city that I used to call my home has made it clear to me I've much more to process before I'll have the slightest inkling of what the experience in Haiti has been for me.

I left Haiti on Day 417 of my return trip. Combined with the 201 days of my first trip, I spent 21 months in the country. Along with the process of being with my mother as she slowly lost her life to cancer, they were unquestionably the most defining, challenging, and beautiful months of my life.

More to come, of that I'm sure.

Day 326: Questions & (No) Answers (The Aid Bitchslap)

"It's going to take a while before I can even make sense of all of this." I'm talking to Paddy as we make our way down a dark street in Leogane, dodging motos and trying to avoid the mud. "It won't happen here. It won't happen until I've left." He nods. He feels the same. Our time in Haiti isn't over yet, we've both got a few months left, but we're feeling the end now, and we're feeling what it took to get here. We're tired, and confused, and frustrated. We're excited. We're proud. We're trying not to pass quick judgements, and we realize how hard that is to do.

Project Leogane is nearly over. Tomorrow marks the final week. April 27th work ends. April 28th we have the farewell party. April 30th the lease on our house is up, and people make their way to whatever is next. In my case, making my way isn't too tricky, as I'll be moving in to the base of my friend Jason, along with Paddy and Billy, where we'll work for the next two months finishing up our obligations to GOAL and the partnership we have with them. We'll also be mentoring our handover partner, the Haitian-American organization FHED (Foundation  for Humanitarian Education & Development), who will be continuing our biosand filter program once we leave. Billy stays until the end of May. Paddy leaves the end of June. Alejandro and Diana will stay until May 15th to support our transition. I will stay until the end of July. I wasn't the first to arrive here with All Hands, but I'll be the last to go.

I know Haiti isn't yet done for me, but the nature of how I've lived and worked here since July 2010 has changed many times, and this perhaps marks the most distinct change. Project Leogane, and All Hands Volunteers, my organization and identity in Haiti, is nearly over. The skeleton crew staying is very much that. We'll no longer be part of the group. We'll be the entirety of it. I've no problems with that. If I'm honest, I'm excited to see how it will play out, but it does get me thinking. Of what, I'm not so sure, or more accurately, I'm not so sure I can yet explain it in any coherent way. Too many things. So many things. Only through a total disconnect will I have the distance and time needed to sift through all of this, and I'll have that before too long, but I still feel the urge to try and write about it, to mark it down in some way, although all recent attempts at doing so result in deleted entries, rambling and uncertain sentences that frustrated me but accurately reflect where my head is at these days. I honestly don't know what to make of this place and this experience.

I do know this. I'm ready to go. Haiti, while still powerful in her effect on me, is beginning to leave a sour taste in my mouth. Going out into the monotonous, seemingly unchanging landscape of Leogane, which some of us have now taken to jokingly referring to as "post-apocalyptic", is something I try and avoid unless in a state of mind sufficient enough to match whatever absurdity is going to come at me. My patience is near gone. I still feel for people. The empathy is there, but it's become something different than it was before.

"Fuck you!" The shouts come pretty regularly these days, sometimes from kids, sometimes from adults, always directed at us for no other reason than the fact we are foreigners, that we are blans. I don't know the people shouting. Sometimes we shout back, other times we shake our heads at the stupidity, sometimes we laugh, other times we stop the car, get out, and watch the guilty children run away, or the guilty adults eye us up. A few days ago it's a group of guys playing football in the middle of the street. "Fuck you!" We pull over, not because of the comment, but because we're at the chicken stand we were headed toward to buy some food. My patience is worn thin. We get out of the car a few paces from where the guys are. "Masisi! Masisi!" They're calling us faggots. Really? Really? I don't even know you. Fuck this. I hammer back at them. "You think we're faggots? Is that what you think? I think you're a bunch of uneducated, ignorant idiots. Instead of playing football in the street and telling blans you don't know to go fuck themselves, why don't you go to school? You're young men. You're not kids. Do something with your lives." I want to keep going. I want to tell them they are pathetic. I want to tell them that you shouldn't tell someone to go fuck themselves one day then come groveling to them the next asking for a job or money or food or a house. I want to tell them they are the problem with this fucked up country. I want to, but I don't, because I know, despite the anger, that while they are ignorant, and they do deserve to get called on their shit, they don't deserve to be shamed for their condition. Most people just play the hand they're dealt. Few opt to really try and change their hand, let alone the deck. That's not Haitian. That's human. Haiti just happens to deal a pretty shit hand to most. I'd be a fool to place the entirety of the blame on them. They're not the cause. They're part of the effect.

We get the chicken and drive away. One of the guys mimics punching us. I enjoy the five second fantasy of laying them all out in the street, although I know that will never come to pass. I'm not a fighter. We laugh it off, but not really. "This fucking place..." Every day. We allow ourselves some ignorance of our own, mocking the wannabe gangster culture the men in the street all had on display. "Oh you're a gangster are you? You're hardcore? You can't even get food. So hardcore. So gangster." We laugh, hard. I know the comment is off-color, but I also know I'm doing it to release. I'm aware when I'm allowing myself to mock a situation that shouldn't be mocked, when I'm engaging something I'm actually against. I'm aware that I'm doing it more and more these days. I'm aware that, at the end of the day, I do it because it helps mask the underlying frustration and sense of overwhelm and guilt that comes with being a foreigner in Haiti.

We come home, tell some housemates about it. They tell us how people started throwing rocks at one of our roommates as he was getting a dance lesson on the roof from a local Haitian girl. They had to come inside and continue the lesson out of reach of the rocks. I get a phone call. My friend Jenny, a Haitian girl I'm close to and care for a lot, tells me her grandmother has died. Paddy and I go to visit her and her mother and sisters to offer our condolences. While I'm sitting with Jenny and her older sister Katia, Paddy is talking to their mother, Madam Michelle. It was her mother that has just passed away. We stay for twenty minutes then say goodbye.

"Fucking hell..." We're in the car, Paddy looks tired. "What's up man?" I ask him. "Madam Michelle was asking me for everything - my bed, my table, my mattress, anything I can give her once All Hands leaves." I can see the frustration in his face. "Your mother just died. For fuck's sake can you stop for just one minute and grieve?" It is endless. Today, here in my room, I hear a knock. Ornela, Madam Michelle's youngest daughter, Jenny's little sister, is at the door. "Qwen? Qwen?" "Hold on a sec sweetie." I open the door and she's there. We talk for a bit. She asks me a question. "Qwen, can you buy a painting from my mom? We need money to go to Jeremie." Jeremie is where their grandmother lived. She's talking about the funeral. My heart melts, but I've learned a long time ago that I have to draw a line. "I'm sorry sweetie, I don't have money for that right now." I hate myself for even saying it, but I know I've done a lot to help her family. Jenny is back in school because of me and some of my friends and family I reached out to. Seeing her finish high school is a personal goal of mine. I have to keep that in my sights and put blinders on for everything else. A week ago Jenny called me, she tells me Katia is really sick, that she has to go to the hospital. She asks me if I can pay for it. My heart hurts again, but I repeat the line I've learned to live by. "Sorry Jenny, I don't have money for that right now." "OK Qwen. It's OK." Jenny, eighteen and whip smart, knows me pretty well. She's been on the receiving end of my anger when she tries to push the boundaries of my charity. She's heard my rants on Haiti and the culture of dependence and expectance. She also knows I really care for her and her family. Still, the requests don't stop. They won't stop until I leave. Even then they won't stop. Facebook chat post-Haiti often involves requests for money from people I know here.

Some things I have become clear on as a result of Haiti: 

1. Good intentions aren't enough. 

2. Rose-colored glasses are bullshit. 

3. 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.

4. You can't help people who don't want to help themselves.

5. True altruism is an incredibly rare thing. (See #3)

6. Little victories must be celebrated if you want to protect yourself from the crippling effects of the larger failure.

I came to Haiti very much guilty of believing good intentions were enough, and I certainly had the rose-colored glasses. I knew a bit about the idea of the white savior industrial complex, but didn't know enough to realize I was playing right into it. I believed people inherently do want to improve their lot, and will work hard to see that happen. I also believed myself to be a fairly altruistic person. I'm not so sure about that any more. And while I never came here thinking I could "save Haiti" (an incredibly egotistical idea to begin with), I also didn't realize the importance of allowing yourself to truly appreciate the small things before the big things break you down.

I still believe in helping people. I still believe my heart is in the right place. But I question myself more these days, and question what I'm doing and how I'm doing it. I question whether the work I've done here will really even make any difference. Is it even working? We'll know that as we conduct final follow-ups over the next two months, now that production and installations are nearly finished. I'm wary though. Every biosand filter I've ever seen in Haiti that was not one of ours was broken and unused. Just today I went to get a sandwich and found four or five of them in front of the sandwich shop, all in various stages of malrepair, waiting to be turned to rubble and probably used to patch holes in the street. The problem is we're giving people a "solution". They tell us they want it, but it's not of their own design. And yes, while I have spoken to families we've given filters to and heard from them they are getting sick less, and they no longer fear cholera, I also know of families that never used the filter to begin with, and only wanted to be in the program because their 100 gourdes contribution got them both the filter and a new Culligan bottle, which is worth 250 gourdes. Is that our mistake? Probably. Is there an easy work around to it? Not that I can think of. Asking for a contribution of more than 250 gourdes will guarantee that truly poor families will not be able to get a filter, and not providing a Culligan bottle (or any other safe water storage container) will result in families using open buckets instead, which we've tested and know 95% of the time result in re-contaminated water. It's a small problem in the grand scheme of things, but it demonstrates the complexity of trying to "help" people.

If I were to do it all again, I wouldn't design a solution. It isn't my place to do that. What I'd do is try and be a useful resource for a group of people or a community that have a much better understanding of their problems than I do, and want to work together toward finding solutions. I wouldn't come in as the guy with the answer. I'd come in as the guy willing to try and help them in any way possible as they find their own answer, and act as the bridge between that answer, and the money and resources needed to make it happen. 

Or, perhaps if I really wanted to help, I wouldn't ever come to Haiti to begin with. I'd keep my fight at home in the United States, rallying people to try and build awareness that places like Haiti suffer because of policies benefitting our government, our corporations, and ultimately, ourselves. Policies created by our politicians, sometimes with our consent (the Iraq War) and sometimes as a result of special interests (the Supreme Court's campaign finance reform ruling), result in massive problems for other people in the world. Sometimes I wonder if that truly ever can be remedied. 

Nature has a distinct element to it that is both brutal and undeniable: to be alive means to take care of you and yours before all else. There are rare exceptions to that rule, but they are just that - rare exceptions. The lioness doesn't feel guilt when she brings down the days-old gazelle, despite knowing the gazelle could never hope to challenge her. Is it the same for us? We may all be part of the same species, but we've always cordoned ourselves off in distinct groups, be it religious, racial, or geopolitical, and time and again worked to improve our groups at the expense of other groups. We are not a peaceful species. We are not enlightened beings. And history has shown time and again that, like the lioness, we show no remorse or mercy when faced with a weaker opponent. I sometimes wonder what the Taino people, Haiti's original inhabitants, were like. I'll never be able to know. They were raped, murdered and enslaved to extinction at the hands of the Spanish. There are no more Tainos in the world. 

Is it naive to believe we can ever change this part of being human? I've often wondered this. If we ever had a chance at change, now would be the beginning of it. The internet and advancements in communication and transportation have made the world a much smaller place. I'd like to think that will lead to a greater mutual understanding of the fact that we are all, indeed, human. It might, or it might not. I often think we will have to evolve to the point that the idea of religion is cast aside, that the idea of nation is cast aside, that the way we define ourselves (white, black, Christian, Muslim, American, Haitian) have to be abandoned. Without first accomplishing that, we will always have a way to cordon ourselves off from others, to group up, and to grow to believe that our group is the most important group. Those groups must be broken for us to advance.

It makes me think of something a friend of mine who works in Rwanda told me recently. She told me that the majority of Rwandan children today do not know if they are Tutsi or Hutu. Their parents do not tell them. She told me that it is illegal to ask someone if they are Tutsi or Hutu. She told me that all forms of personal identification no longer have the words "Tutsi" or "Hutu" on them. She also told me Rwanda is one of the more progressive and advanced countries she's visited in Africa. That came at an incredibly high cost, but maybe that's what it takes. The EU, flawed though it is, and in and of itself a group, was born out of the desire for integration that was the result of two devastating wars that killed entire generations of Europe's people. I'd like to think we can learn enough from our history to be able to continue that process of integration without the prerequisite of mass suffering, but maybe that is indeed a prerequisite. If so, there's certainly suffering enough to go around. The world's groups are still devouring each other. The question is, if we do not feel we are affected by it, do we care enough to try and stop it? And, the skeptic in me asks, if we do care enough to try and stop it, why? What do we stand to gain? #5 - true altruism is an incredibly rare thing.

Indeed, a lot of questions, not a lot of answers, and a fair amount of pondering. If nothing else, Haiti has given me that, and that, ultimately, is a good thing. An engaged thinker is a humbled thinker. I do not yet claim to be either, but I aspire to be both.

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Note - thank you to Shotgun Shack for cross-posting this over at her blog. Check it out here.