Mar
25
Our First Day in Haiti
After less than a day in Haiti, it’s already clear what many of the obstacles are to establishing a successful business or series of businesses here.
For one thing, the combination of heat and humidity is oppressive, even at night, especially when there is no breeze, and nowhere to retreat to that is air-conditioned. It’s not that people can’t live this way — clearly they do, and after a day or so seem to take it for granted, like most of the other adverse conditions — but it is not conducive to the kind of focus that most of us are accustomed to associating with work in, e.g., northern New Jersey. (And if this is the standard condition in the compound, it’s hard to imagine what it must be like in the tent cities that still house more than half of the million-and-a-half people left homeless and with nowhere else in the country to go after the January 2010 earthquake.)
The weather reports, by the way, are wholly deceptive. According to WeatherUnderground, for example, the current temperature (at 10 p.m.) in Port-au-Prince is reported to be 81° F, and while they say “feels like 84°” this isn’t the half of it. It is supposed to go down to 63° tonight, with a chance of rain, and while I’ve felt a few welcome drops going outside to the composting toilet, this does not in any way alleviate the discomfort, especially when you have to go from an airless tent to an equally-airless room inside the main building at the compound in order to get electricity and access to the internet.
For another, the world outside the compound, while not at all dangerous in the sense that people usually mean this, is barely navigable. When you arrive at the airport you encounter a crush of people seeking to help you with your belongings, your transportation, your communications, and with lightening your money belt. More often than not, the people you expect to meet you at the airport are not there, and there is a confusing mob of variously uniformed and nonuniformed men (for they are all men) pulling at you, speaking in an urgent and inseparable tangle of English, French, and Kreyol, smiling and implying that they have only your best interests at heart (and will shield you from the depredations of others if you will only allow them to do so).
In our case this was complicated by the fact that we had not fully confirmed our accommodations ahead of time, and were thus unable to list an address in Haiti on the entry form, leading to a lengthy negotiation at the immigration office. At one point, since I indicated that we were to be met by not only one but two separate groups, who would provide us with this address, I was sent out, without passport or luggage, to look for them and return with the information, while my two companions stayed behind. At this point I was adopted by someone who identified himself as an official cab driver, and who led me outside and up and down a long covered walkway filled with people seemingly waiting for several times more people than can possible have disembarked from our aircraft. After several fruitless searches, I returned empty-handed, to find that one of my colleagues had saved the day by finding an address for the Grassroots United compound (even though we were far from sure that we wanted to stay there).
By this time, most of the passengers had cleared out, but it was not at all clear where our baggage had ended up, and I only succeeded in finding mine by asking for help and feeling obliged to contribute $5 to the person assisting me. Since we had a fair amount of luggage, Matt went off to rent a luggage cart, which held only a part of it, and we were then surrounded by more than a dozen people, pushing and pulling to get us out of the customs area. Conscious that we did not know where we were going, and had no means of communication, I halted the parade and asked for help getting some local cell phones for us, which took another half hour or so, and about $80 US (cash only), to get two Voila phones programmed with a substantial number of minutes, along with the instructions on how to use them, keep them charged, etc. I then realized that I had packed the numbers I needed to call, and after a brief conference with my fellow-travellers and our retinue of hangers-on we agreed to take our chances and have the friendly taxi driver (who failed to shield us from the others, and charged us twice what we should have paid) take us to the GRU compound.
What then ensued, before we could take off, was a melée in which each man demanded a few dollars, until we had dispensed more than another $30 or so in singles. We then took off down what seemed a busy street, and then almost immediately turned off onto what seemed a barely passable side-street, of a sort I hadn’t seen since childhood, with huge water-filled craters and muddy edges, and yet was also quite busy, with trucks and cars that could barely get by each other. I could not imagine that we were going the right way, yet in barely a few minutes we were at the metal gates of the compound, which sported the logos of Kleiwerks as well as Grassroots United, with the driver negotiating to get in.
It turned out that we had not fully communicated our arrival time, so no one had come looking for us, and the other group was unaccountably missing as well, so it was just as well that we had escaped to what was a fully enclosed and guarded area, with a mixture of Enlish-speaking Haitians and volunteers from a half-dozen countries and groups, a center of myriad comings and goings, miscellaneous half-finished project activities, English and Kreyol classes, and a variety of strange-looking buildings, shipping containers, tents of all shapes and sizes, makeshift benches and tables, and many people working on laptops and updating their Facebook pages. Immediately upon entering the compound we were required to wash our hands and step on a disinfectant mat to help prevent the spread of cholera.
In short, this entire experience was full of exactly the sort of daunting series of encounters that would discourage anyone from thinking of bringing a real business operation to Haiti, with the expectation of anything like a normal mode of sales or manufacturing or shipping or even communications activity.
This is not to say that the compound itself is not a major accomplishment, in the midst of the rubble, the crowds of hangers-on, the overcharging cabbies, etc. It was, and is, and deserves another piece entirely to itself, since it houses multiple successful experiments in creating functional buildings, composting toilets, bucket showers, beginning vegetable gardens, mango and other fruit trees, multi-storey container buildings, interesting characters, and meaningful conversations. We were also able to call home, pull down several hundred emails, get a thorough orientation to the rules of volunteer life in the compound, and even confirm a meeting for the next day with the key cultural, economic development and USAID officials at the US Embassy.
But none of this alters the fact that almost all of the factors of reliability, transparency, trustworthiness, and so on that are the essential foundation for sustainable economic activity (let alone tourism) are either missing or seriously compromised. The two problems that people most often worry about, violence and corruption, were nowhere to be seen. But the absence of a viable business culture was immediately apparent, and the damage done by decades of aid, occupation, dictatorship, miseducation, religious do-gooderism, and crushing debt, as well as the devastation of the earthquake, are everywhere. Anyone wanting to really contribute to the sustainable redevelopment of Haiti clearly has to adjust their sights and their expectations, seek to achieve quite modest outcomes, and be willing to engage for the long term.
Nothing is simple in Haiti today, and nothing will be simple even after the counting of the ballots and the selection of a new government, which will likely leave some groups as deeply dismayed as they have been by the largely ineffectual responses of the Préval government, the international aid organizations, the interim reconstruction administration, and the international donor community, which has failed to provide even a fraction of what was promised, and have seemingly used much of that in ways that have made little or no difference to the everyday lives of the Haitian people.
This is not to say that nothing has been done. Certainly it is an accomplishment to get even half of the internally displaced persons resettled (if indeed that has been done); to control the cholera outbreak to the point where deaths and new cases are diminishing rather than increasing; and to conduct an election of any kind without widespread unrest.
But the atmosphere of hope, of a genuine rupture with the past, of the possibility of a new economic miracle, that was present in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, has clearly been squandered, just as the spirit of globally shared grief was dissipated by the Bush administration after 9/11, and the mobilization of the American people for the realization of meaningful societal and ecological change was fumbled by the Obama administration. The modern era is replete with these lost opportunities, and it’s not clear whether humanity can actually summon the will to remake its relationship to the planet, to other species, and to its own destiny that will avoid a head-on collision with the consequences of its ignorance, its acquisitiveness, and its lack of caring and understanding are already bringing upon us.
In Haiti this outcome is already tragically evident, and increasingly overwhelming. As Emmanuelle Deryce has written, in a piece we hope to publish here shortly, the earthquake changed everything — and nothing.
What we need to recognize is that — with all of our resources, our technology, and our global interconnection — that unless we can remake Haiti, and restore its promise, and address the legitimate needs of the Haitian people, we are surely witnessing the most likely outcome of our own future as a species. It doesn’t need a nuclear holocaust to cause an unprecedented mass extinction: we are already witnessing it. The signs of ecosystem collapse are everywhere, just more visible in Haiti. And the inadequacy our response is just as apparent. We can restore and regenerate and sustain this astonishingly beautiful, diverse, and miraculously vibrant blue planet. But we’d better get going on a much wider scale before it is too late.