Elsie

Gene and I worked in the pit all day yesterday; we made good progress.
     Last night we ate dinner at a small Creole restaurant on Rue Delmas. Gene and Jan invited a friend, Elsie, from their time in Haiti years ago, 1998-2002. The woman is a Haitian who moved to the U.S. as a 19 year old when her dad emigrated. She worked in the banking industry in Manhattan for over 20 years before moving back to Haiti to start a missionary school. Her nonprofit educates and feeds the poorest children, those whose families squat in the ravine, the least desirable place to live. Some of her students have gone on to attend Harvard and become surgeons.
      Creole food is usually simple to order because there often are not a lot of choices, and made even simpler because they are often out of popular items. You choose a meat: I had beef, Gene had goat, Jan chicken, Elsie fish. You can choose if you want it fried or broiled. You almost always get rice and beans with it, and fried plantain. My beef was very lean, spiced, cut in chunks and fried.
      Today we are taking a day off, driving up the mountain to visit Fort Jacque, well beyond the Baptist Mission.
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The NGO Problem

Fair Warning. I get a little tedious here. I have been reading and thinking a lot about Haiti since I got here, and I would like to express some of my thoughts.

     Bill Clinton said recently that Haiti has more NGOs per capita than any country in the world. It is easy to visualize this as a benign flow of aid uniformly and greatly benefitting the populace. To do so would be a naive misconception of the truth and a grave error. While individual NGOs have educated children, built clinics, drilled wells, performed countless livesaving surgeries and saved tens of thousands of lives through vaccination  programs, they have accomplished little detectable change in the country as a whole. Both poverty and malnutrition rates have remained stable over the last 30 years while the NGO build-out was occurring.  While only about 450 NGOs are registered with the Haitian government, there are in fact around 10,000 here. In spite of many efforts to assess the number and quality of NGOs in Haiti, no one knows for sure how many there are, where they all are, how honest they are or how duplicative they are. At best, NGOs are a bit self-serving; they do things to keep money rolling in and employees well-paid; at worst they are rife with corruption, stealing not only from well-meaning donors but also from the intended recipients.

Not unexpectedly, the Haiti government has a budget problem. Seventy percent of the workforce operates in the "shadow" economy and so is untaxable.  Collectively, the NGOs have a much larger budget than the federal government, and most of their activity is also untaxable. There is no solution: the government is desperate for funds for the earthquake cleanup and so turns to the few things it can tax. Ships loading and unloading, for instance. Haiti has the highest wharfage fees in the world, so high that companies that wish to start factories refuse or can't afford to bring in their machine parts and other supplies. President-elect Michel Martelly has a difficult task if he is going to bring Haiti into the 21st Century, and one of his tasks will be to bring order and focus to Haiti's collection of NGOs, evicting some and redeploying others to underserved areas.

Trouble in IT

Today was not a very productive day. We have had server problems, flakey LAN cables, and potentially a bad switch. In addition, HughesNet, our satellite ISP seems not to be delivering the bandwidth that MAF is paying for. And the mosquitos were very hungry today.
A selection of left-over photos today:

No one knows exactly what this is all about. It is on a side street about a block from the guest house

This is the painting you can sort of see through the gates.???

Port au Prince has a number of these buses which are called Obamas. They were to have been delivered four years ago, but for some bureaucratic reason were held up. After Obama was elected, they were delivered, thus the name.

A closeup of beads like those Miquette was wearing. The pinker beads are pieces of sea shells. The others are the beads that the children make. If you can imagine a slice of a cereal box, say Wheaties, being ten inches long, and one half inch on one end tapering to a point on the other. This is dipped into a type of glue then tightly rolled from the fat end to the point. It is covered with a clear shellac when it is dry. Voila! A bead!

Travel Day

We left at 7:00 this morning to get to the airport, where we met Dieucon, who was our driver for the day. Our objective was to go to the houses of 5 different individuals who had gotten earthquake relief grants from MAF. We traveled through a warren of narrow roads into densely populated neighborhoods of very small dwellings often housing a shocking number of individuals. One of the grant recipients has ten children under the age of 18, and he lost his job soon after the earthquake. They all live in a three room house. Four if you count a 4 X 8 kitchen. Traffic was expectedly chaotic, loud and dirty, and the roads very narrow and often all but impassable. All in all, a fascinating day. We ate a late lunch at a restored sugar plantation about 15 minutes from the airport, and are now back at the IT office writing up the stories and sorting photos.

The days continue to get warmer; daytime temps are in the high 90's and it rarely gets below 80 at night. No rain for the last 3 days. Dottie has lots of ceiling fans, but no air conditioning.

Jean Claude, his wife and 7 of their 10 children.

Their kitchen consists of a small charcoal brazier and some pots and pans. They have no refrigeration. Not one of the houses that I have visited has running water; they walk to a well or water distribution point and carry the water back.

A view of roofs near their house. There are dozens of dwellings in this photo.

One of the families lived in a tent after the earthquake, and felt fortunate when they were able to build this more secure dwelling.

Traffic that we encountered.

Rice

Haiti used to be a net exporter of rice. In a loan restructuring deal in 1995 Aristide was forced to accept the conditions of the IMF and open its markets to international trade. Subsequently, the U.S.  flooded the country with cheap state-subsidized rice and drove the agricultural workers off the farms and into the city. Seed stocks disappeared. When Haiti became food-dependent, the price of rice went up, and the peasants had no money to buy the rice. Some part of Haiti's intractable problems of poverty and malnutrition can be attributed to this. Incidentally, only 2% of international aid is invested in agriculture.

Hotel Montana

The Hotel Montana in the town of Petionville above Port au Prince was a popular hangout for diplomats, journalists, NGO workers and UN personnel. It had a terrace with a lovely view of the city and waterfront, a large swimming pool, a popular bar and a 5-star hotel. When it collapsed, over 200 guests and workers died under the debris. It received a lot of news coverage because of the number of dignitaries and organizational leaders who were trapped alive in the rubble. One man was rescued after four days, but rescue efforts continued for more than a week. Indeed, some criticism was leveled at the rescuers for expending so much effort and resources there when thousands of Haitians were trapped and dying in more modest circumstances.

Gene, Jan and I drove up to the Montana on Saturday. We viewed the horrible damage, but enjoyed the view from the original terrace and the cool mountain breezes, and had a beer at the rebuilt bar to celebrate a good week of work.

It was a long day of work today; 9 hours in the mosquito den. After some stressful network fireworks, we walked away pleased with our work.

Most of the hotel collapsed; this part slid.

This tanker is parked about in the middle of the hotel footprint.

Having a beer on the terrace.

Electricity

Electricity in Haiti is 110 volts, 60 cycle, similar to that in the U.S. To say that Port au Prince has rolling blackouts would be to put a very favorable face on the situation. The electricity may go out for a few hours, many hours, a day or more. It would be quite rare to have uninterrupted electricity for two days in a row. To cope with the situation, most houses have large generators, banks of lead acid batteries and an inverter. Here at Dottie's guest house, the generator happens to be right outside my window. When everything works as it should, the changeover from one to the other is seamless. The generators run only periodically as needed, so that often one does not know which power source is being used. At night however, there are no street lights when the power is out. 

Haitian chickens are ubiquitous; free range chickens live in the ravines, and it seems as though most houses keep a few. These are not well-behaved chickens; whereas roosters crow in the U.S. at daybreak, Haitian roosters crow all night long, loud raucous crowings that are answered by other roosters in a virtual crow slam. I at first attributed it to the intermittent street lights; when the lights would come at 2:00 a.m., the roosters would be confused and think it daybreak. But I have now come to believe that they are just genetic freaks that crow all night just to keep me awake.

Pastor Karl, his wife Ann, Gene and Jan, and I drove up the mountain to the Baptist Haiti Mission for Easter dinner. It was a potluck affair in a lovely setting on the high, cool side of the mountain.

A bank of batteries.

The rogue rooster who lives on the edge of the ravine next to the guest house.

Pastor Karl's Land Cruiser. This vehicle is identical to UN and many NGO vehicles. There are thousands of them in Haiti. The black assembly on the right front fender is an elevated air intake; the V-8 diesel can travel in water up to the windows. That intake is also useful in dusty environments to draw cleaner air into the engine.

Dessert today

The view from the Baptist Haiti Mission