Apr
5
Day Three: A New Life
[Some of this is reconstructed from handwritten notes and from memory.
Beginning with Day 3, I had trouble keeping up with the stream of events, and fell asleep before I was able to get it all recorded; and at the end of the fourth day the charging mechanism in my MacBook failed, taking with it the possibility not only of continuing my blogging but also of my correcting any errors from the day before. This seemed to me potentially serious, for I may have reported something publicly that was meant to be stated only privately, the attribution of which could harm the standing or reputation of a friend. I hope that this is not the case, but having written something and posted it publicly I was at this point unable to change it, and it stood without qualification for more than a week.
This is something that has gotten me into trouble before. Speaking the truth can be an extremely powerful thing, especially when that truth contradicts some official statement or position. “Heads may roll,” as the expression has it. Often the way to silence critics is to remove them from their jobs, or, less metaphorically, to terminate their lives. This is a deep conundrum — do we speak out, at whatever cost to ourselves or to others; or do we conceal or shade the truth in order to be allowed to speak another day? Looking back over what I wrote I did not think it possible to change anything, though I would do so in a moment if I thought it would hurt anyone we met along the way: people at all levels were extremely open with us, and while nothing was stated confidentially and I was openly taking notes, it is often better to use discretion in reporting the views of others. It’s one thing to take a stand for oneself — thirty years ago I gave up the best-paying job I had ever had for expressing my opposition to nuclear energy, which I would certainly do again today — but can I fairly make that judgement for someone else? While I often wonder whether what I or others have to say makes any difference in this era of media overload and mass distraction, the impulse of every institution to silence its critics is evidence of the power of words.]
On the third day we rose early and headed over to the “local” airport (actually just an extension of the main one, with shorter runways for domestic flights), a ten-minute walk from the Grassroots United property, dodging the huge puddles and crossing a busy boulevard, next to which it seemed a woman was trying to wash clothes in a ditch or open sewer. People moving about everywhere, though it was still early, everyone bent on a task however minuscule or implausible, manning a roadside stand with hair products, hawking cell phones or DVDs, etc.
Worth pausing to reflect on this for a moment. While the “unemployment rate” in Haiti stands officially at around 70%, this obscures the reality that people everywhere are hard at work, moving rubble, rebuilding shattered homes block by concrete block, fixing vehicles or recovering parts from ones that can no longer be repaired, etc. Haitians are not an idle people, but are indeed an extraordinarily resilient one, unwilling to give up in the face of natural or manmade disasters. Similarly, we had been told that less than 20% of the rubble had been removed; in most of the areas we saw, however, the roads had been cleared, the foundations of buildings restored, and some level of reconstruction begun. Traffic swarmed everywhere as it does in the overcrowded cities of developing countries around the world; if a third of the reported 3 million people living in Port au Prince had indeed left the city, this was not evident in the throngs heading out to work, to school, and to business. To be sure, dust and diesel fumes choked us all; but life — unstoppable — has returned.
This was clear even though at this point we had seen only a sliver of the city, which quickly spreads out from the port and the downtown to climb the steep hills above them, occupying every ledge, ravine, and crevasse available. Any areas deemed unbuildable before are now filled with squatters or tent cities. At some there will need to be a major resettlement process, and a restoration of clear titles to parcels of land.
But now I’m getting ahead of myself. On that third morning we brought our luggage into the local terminal, and worked through the complications to get into the two-engine propeller plane for Cap Haitien — a half-hour flight, but invariably two to three hours to take care of “contingencies.” In this case we were among the first to board, and sat right behind the pilots, where we watched them check over the equipment and hold things up for another half-hour, in the sweltering heat, while mechanics replaced the batteries. Finally we were aloft and headed for Cap, where we were met by several young people from the group Nouvelle Vie, whose completion celebration we had come to participate in.
Though I had no clear idea of the conditions in other parts of the country I knew that Cap Haitien had not been affected by the quake, and I was not prepared for the state of distress that was evident as we drove from the airport through the town to our host’s temporary headquarters. What was once “the Paris of the Caribbean” is now, like much of the rest of Haiti, choked with traffic, drowning in dust and diesel smoke, roads blasted to pieces as if they had been in a war zone. Only the waterfront was deserted, rotting hulks in the water a hundred feet or so off the shore, with a few boys pleading for a dollar.
We were driven to the project headquarters, a building rented with the help of USAID funds, where we met with Uma Viswanathan, Nouvelle Vie’s visionary project director in Haiti. I had first met Uma nearly a year ago, at the first Sustainable Haiti Conference, when she wrote me the following:
The Nouvelle Vie Youth Corps is a network of 100 Haitian young adults trained to create agents of change within Haitian communities. The Youth Corps empowers individuals to manage their trauma, stress, doubts, and fear, and trains them to develop agricultural and economic opportunities from local, available resources.
You can check out our video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yrhOK7fEms.
[More to follow…]