Two Weeks Later

I have already become accustomed again to all those things we take for granted here, like being able to drink safely from a tap.

Three days after I left Port au Prince, I came down with Dengue Fever, a mosquito-borne tropical disease. I have been sick for the last 10 days, just yesterday for the first time feeling as though I might be improving. The symptoms included fever, aching joints, headache, nausea and other digestive distress, and extreme lethargy.

Hotel Oloffson, Farewell

Hotel Oloffson is an old "gingerbread" mansion, built in the late 1800s by the then president of Haiti as a home. It has a long and rich history. It was converted into a military hospital by the U.S. Marines during the First World War. In 1935 it was converted into a Hotel and has been in operation since. It was bought by a man in 1995 who emphasized the theme of vodou in much of its decoration and embellishments.The hotel was the inspiration for the "Hotel Trianon", at the center of Graham Greene's novel "The Comedians" and the movie of the same name. Hundreds of famous people have stayed in the hotel, and many of them have written about it: Jackie O. and Ari, Mick Jagger, Liz Taylor, John Barrymore, Barry Goldwater, Lillian Hellman, Jimmy Buffett. It is set in the city on a steep hillside with a view of the ocean and port, surrounded by lush tropical gardens.

Gene and Jan took me here for lunch on my last day in Haiti. I leave for the airport in a few minutes for my flight home. 

Gene and Jan on the portico in front of a vodou icon representing King Christophe.

Christian religious iconography gets conflated with African animism in Vodou.

The spirit of the vodou dead

Haiti Projects, Farewell

Today is a project documentation day; we leave for the airport at seven. The first mile is over muddy, rutted, washed out roads before we reach some asphalt that is slightly better. We pass piles of garbage and refuse, and are never out of sight of mountains of earthquake rubble. The roads are congested with cars and trucks, taptaps large and small., and crowds of people going to work and school. Merchants are setting up their little stands and laying out their sheets upon which they place their wares: papayas, mangos, bananas, breadfruit, vegetables of every sort, live chickens, cut up chicken, hardware, shoes, shirts, almost anything you can buy in a store you can find here. Goats wander the streets, foraging for something to eat. Two men strain to move a two-wheeled cart piled high with bags of cement that they will deliver. Past tent cities large and small.

We reach the airport and must wait a bit. Dieucon, our driver is still making calls, arranging the day. It is no easy thing to find the projects we are to visit. Where we are going, streets are not named, and houses have no numbers. We will meet the first person at the water distribution station a kilometer above a ruined church they both know about  and she will lead us to her house. We drive. The roads get narrower and climbs. At the water distribution station we can go no further and spend minutes turning the car and finding a place to park it. Sixty seven year old Rose Marie greets us with a huge smile and leads us through passageways no wider than 3 feet that turn and turn again, open, then close, leading to an area with thousands of dwellings, one upon the other.

Her little house, newly rebuilt, has three unconnected concrete block support walls, with the rafters and interior walls made of wood. It is small, but seems sturdy and well built, with splashes of paint to brighten the scene. No one in this whole area has metered electricity, but she has a few light bulbs from a wire that goes off, who knows where and brings the intermittent electricity that this country knows. Like all of her neighbors, she has no running water, but needs to carry it from the distribution point which is often out of water. She lives with and supports her 97 year old mother, a daughter and several grandchildren. Her sister was killed in the quake.  This house is a vast improvement from the squalor and danger of the tent that she lived in for many months, and she is immensely grateful for the help she received in rebuilding.

We repeat this process three times today. Each story unique, heartrending, but in the end an uplifting story of human perseverance in the face of adversity

I leave Haiti tomorrow.

Travel Day

Today is another travel day to document recovery projects.

Jane just emailed to say the bin Laden was killed. Big news. I haven't sorted out yet how I feel about that. Not jubilant.

A Haitian bus. Very reminiscent of buses in Pakistan, but the orthography and symbolism are completely different. I suspect that the motivation is also different, but I can't know right now.

                                          

Similarly, a truck.

Fort Jacque

Haiti was first a Spanish colony, but in 1697 it was ceded to France. During the 18th Century, sugar plantations slowly began to spring up, and African slaves were brought to Haiti to do the backbreaking work of making sugar. Living conditions were so harsh that additional slaves were brought just to replace those who died. During the middle part of the 18th Century 10-15,000 slaves were brought each year as the plantations underwent a period of rapid expansion. By 1790, there were three quarters of a million slaves in Haiti. That year marked a turning point. Several incidents of extreme cruelty caused an uprising of slave anger, and the beginning of the French Revolution caused some slave leaders to believe that they were French citizens, and the black rebellion began. For 14 years the battles raged against the French armies, with the British sometimes with them and sometimes against them. In 1804, the first black republic in the world raised its flag.

To protect themselves from attack that year, 2 forts were built high in the mountains, one facing north to the Port au Prince basin, the other facing south to the ocean. The north-facing fort was named Fort Jacque, the other Fort Christophe. Yesterday Gene, Jan and I drove up the mountain through Petionville, past the Baptist Mission, to Fort Jacque. The mountain roads are narrow, congested and in spots very rough, but with breathtaking views around every corner. And Fort Jacque, an impregnable fortress with its own huge cistern, living quarters, armory, even an underground tunnel to the other fort a half mile away, was impressive in every way. It was manned for a number of years after it was built, but neither fort was ever needed to defend the country. After the visit to Fort Jacque, we went to the mountain village of Kenskoff, then to an overlook where we had a picnic. A lovely cool day after the heat and noise of the city.

Jan with a guide at a French cannon. There is a certain satisfying irony in the fact that there are cannon in the fort from all three colonial empires that were involved in Haiti: France, Spain and England.

The earthquake damaged some sections of the fort. It is not known when or if repairs will be made.

Terry at a British cannon.

Cool weather crops like cabbage do well at this elevation.

Our picnic far above Port au Prince.

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.