In the Danger Zone

by Stefan Gates

  'Certainly. And what you don't understand probably is that you were vibrating at the speed or the frequency of the world. The world and you became one.'

  I have absolutely no idea what this man's talking about.

  'Why did you have to castrate the goat while it was still alive? That seems a bit unnecessary.'

  'We had to remove the goat's arrogance so that he could go to God in humility.'

  'What's the significance of a goat being sacrificed; why does that have to be done?'

  'Of course everything was symbolically represented. By eating those leaves, he agreed to be part of the world, part of the universe. I'm sure that tomorrow morning you will call me over the phone to tell me, Max, I do feel fantastic'

  That night I sleep deep and long but have horrible, violent dreams with me as the perpetrator.

  The next morning I call Max but he doesn't answer the phone. Perhaps that's the way it should be: I'm left to deal with my own feelings of guilt, and I've promised that I'll call my wife in the morning to reassure her that I haven't gone over to the dark side. I'll have to explain all this without Max's help. Needless to say she's unimpressed by my description of last night's antics, but she's relieved that I'm not murmuring incantations to her.

  'Poor bloody goat,' she says.

  Burying Liberal Guilt . . . Again

  We hop into another of those WFP 4x4s to visit a poor and vulnerable area called Chauffard where they run a food distribution programme. We arrive just in time for a food handout run by the local priest, Father Estiven. The assembled crowd is almost exclusively female, and each person has arrived holding sacks to pick up rice, flour, beans, oil and salt. I speak to a couple of the women who tell me that they have travelled three, four and even six hours to get here. Their journey back will be even longer, laden with up to 50 kg of food that they carry on their heads. I try to carry one woman's bag, and I'm astonished at how painful it is. The weight puts pressure on my brain, pushes through my neck and down my spine, giving me a headache, neckache and backache in one fell swoop. Perhaps that wasn't such a good idea. She tells me that she has a four-hour journey ahead of her.

  I ask Father Estiven if people here think that the rest of the world has a moral responsibility to help the hungry and he replies, 'Instead of giving us food, teach us to grow it, because if we learn how to produce we won't be dependent and our stomachs won't depend on food aid.'

  A woman called Estelle asks if we'd like to taste the WFP rations and takes me to her hut for lunch. We are soon joined by a small crowd of her extended family and neighbours who quickly whip themselves into a frenzy of anti-US rhetoric, even as they use a large can of oil with 'USAid' stamped on the side. 'They ruined our rice farming, they ruined our pig farming and our chicken farming.'

  Haiti used to have a strong poultry industry, hatching 6 million eggs a year and buying thousands of tonnes of locally produced corn. However, Aristide's deal with the international community to slash tariffs opened the doors to US chicken imports and the market was swiftly taken over by 'dark' chicken parts that Americans are less eager to buy. US companies sell around $ 17 million a year of poultry here but 10,000 Haitian jobs have been lost.

  The WFP driver says that we have to leave – the weather is beginning to turn and if it rains, his vehicle won't be able to make it back along the treacherous roads. I quickly taste the WFP porridge and it's surprisingly good. Estelle has mixed it with condensed milk and sugar so that her 18-month old twins will eat it. I say a hurried thank you and get on my way back to the car, but Father Estiven is waiting there for me and won't let me go without eating lunch with him. Despite my protests, he forces me to eat a meal of meat, vegetables and rice. His flock really need it more than I do, but I persevere because the women have all left for their villages and for Father Estiven it's a point of honour for me to eat with him. As I have discovered so often over the past months, sometimes it's best to bury your liberal guilt and accept someone's hospitality.

  The Artibonite Valley

  I head to the Artibonite valley, one of Haiti's few fertile, productive regions, to visit some rice farmers. When the slaves rebelled against the French plantation owners in 1791 and founded modern Haiti, many of them turned to rice farming to provide a living, and for quite a while they did pretty well too, producing a nutritious and deeply flavoured rice. Then it all went wrong.

  I've had some help making contact with the villagers from a man who owns land in the valley, but allows tenant farmers to grow rice there. Before arriving in the Artibonite, we stop off at his small tumbledown shack of four rooms on the seafront – it's meagre, but a palace compared to most homes around here. Edouard must be somewhere between 70 and 80 years old, a marvellous raconteur whose family have managed to keep hold of their land and resist governments and gangsters alike through popular support from the tenant farmers.

  'My mother was the best whore in Haiti,' he tells me. 'She was very good, but also very expensive.' I splutter into my coffee. 'That's nice.' Edouard regales me with tales of the brutality of the dictators he's seen come and go, and his family's struggles to survive, then sends me off to the village with his son and a present for his tenants.

  The valley is enormous – a vast plain flanked by hills, full of good soil (it's so flat here that soil erosion is less of a problem) and clearly well irrigated by the Artibonite River that runs through it. There's a lot of rice growing here, so the situation can't be too bad. As I approach the village there's no one to be seen in the fields, so I drive straight into the centre to find a hundred or so people crowded around a few benches, and I wander through to take a look. They are in the middle of a cockfight. Two bloodied birds hack away at each other in a flurry of feathers until the owner of the loser steps in and drags away his bird. I ask him what he'll do with it now and he tells me, I'm going to put him in a pot and eat him.'

  'Is he no good any more?'

  'No, he's finished.'

  Edouard's son drops off a vast keg of moonshine as a gift to the village – it must hold around 80 litres, and they are over the moon. I meet Maye, an energetic and opinionated tenant farmer who also seems to be the head of the village. He tells me that the moonshine is for tonight, and I feel an involuntary wince of pain. Am I going to wake up with the mother of all hangovers tomorrow morning? I push it to the back of my mind.

  Maye shows me around the fields and tells me that until 20 years ago the Artibonite valley produced almost enough rice to feed the entire country. It had become one of Haiti's few success stories, but back in the '80s the IMF and World Bank demanded that Haiti drop its import tariffs on rice in exchange for loans. 'Why is the imported rice so much cheaper?'

  'It's because the import tariff is low. If it were higher, less rice from America would come in.' In 1994 Haiti's tariffs on rice imports fell from 35 per cent to 3 per cent. Maye says 'The problem is that we can't compete with imported rice.'

  The trouble is not that US rice (with a glorious ear for irony, the Haitians call it Miami Rice) is better or that American farmers are more efficient, but that they are heavily subsidized by the government. On a rice crop that cost $1.8 billion to grow, they received a subsidy of $1.3 billion, so they can sell their rice very cheaply, much cheaper than the Haitians can grow theirs. In the '80s nearly all the rice consumed in Haiti was grown here, but now rice production has halved and imports, mainly from the USA, have increased 50-fold. The deal is widely seen as a stitch-up perpetrated by Aristide as part of a pay-off to the USA for returning him to power.

  American food exporters rightly point out that their imports have helped to lower prices for poor Haitians, but that belies the truth of the situation. By flooding the market with cheap rice a devastating economic cycle has been started: the local farmers will be put out of business because their rice is no longer competitively priced. They will become impoverished and will no longer be able to afford to plant their fields, creating unemployment and a reversion to subsistence farming where the farmers pro
duce only as much as they eat. The lack of work in the countryside creates more poverty, less ability to buy produce and eventually farming will collapse. Cheap rice has made the country poorer than it was with more expensive rice. On the other hand, the 200,000 tonnes of rice imported to Haiti every year make it the USA's fourth-largest market.

  The parallels with Mexico are painfully clear: the removal of trade barriers opens up a poorer country's market to the US, and this is swiftly followed by the dumping of cheap, subsidized American food. There's a brief period of joy at the low-priced commodity, followed by a fracturing or even collapse of local farming. The World Bank and IMF have been accused of rampant, insensitive belief in globalization and free markets, and whether or not it's their intention, poorer countries have suffered whilst the USA has gained. It has been pointed out that countries such as the USA, the UK, Japan and South Korea might offer unrestricted trade now, but they achieved industrialization only whilst they were heavily protected markets. Forcing Mexico and Haiti to remove their trade barriers before they are fully developed (in Haiti's case, woefully underdeveloped) can be hugely destructive.

  We visit one of Maye's fields and I try my hand at harvesting the rice. It's hot and sticky, and as we race to create the biggest pile of rice, Maye takes the piss out of me for my scythe work. I ask if he thinks his kids will grow up to be rice farmers. He tells me, 'If they have the opportunity, I don't think they'll ever do this job.' He explains that the one small upside of the Haitian domestic market was a subsidy on fertilizer, but that also disappeared in 2004, making a 45-kg bag cost up to $35, double the price a year ago. He now can't afford fertilizer, and his rice harvest is going to plummet.

  In the middle of the village we beat the rice grains off the grass, much to the amusement of Maye's neighbours. Half an hour of harvesting has produced about three bowls of rice.

  Maye adds another view of the US rice imports that surprises me: 'If our rice is worthless, it feels like our culture is worthless as well and I feel discouraged about working. You get less back than you spend.'

  We return to the village and Maye invites me to eat with his family. His wife Sylvie has prepared a meal of dried fish served, unsurprisingly, with rice. But Haitian dinner etiquette means that she does more than just cook the meal. She also feeds it to him. I am astounded. Sylvie tells me, 'He's my husband, that's why I feed him.'

  'But can't he do it himself?'

  'I work hard all day long, it's only fair that she is working too, by putting the food in my mouth.'

  I find this bizarre, intensely intimate and even a little Oedipal for my liking. The absolute subjection makes it a private, almost sexual scene of tenderness, and I feel as if I shouldn't be here.

  Sylvie asks if my wife feeds me at home, and I laugh. 'Who's going to feed me seeing as my wife isn't here?' and quick as a flash, Sylvie's sister starts spooning food into my mouth. It's really weird. It's such an intimate gesture that if it was my wife doing this, it would feel unbearably erotic. I tell Maye that I'm going to insist that my wife feeds me from now on and he nods sagely.

  That evening the village throws a voodoo party in honour of my visit and that fearsome-looking barrel of moonshine is opened. A few guys bring out their drums and the whole village, children and babies alike, crams into a small wooden shelter to celebrate. Everyone sings and dances, always with a couple of villagers leading the singing. Maye warns me, 'He's singing to the spirits using ancient voodoo. Pretty soon, you may become possessed.'

  It appears that this won't be a goat-castrating, blood-splashing animist incantation evening, but more of a piss-up, a knees-up and a sing-along. The most vigorous singing of the evening is reserved for a song about the people who live in the next village along – apparently they're a bunch of thieving bastards, and they smell.

  Maye insists I look after his bottle of moonshine, telling me that 'Drinking really seems to help contact the spirits.'

  'I'll bet it does,' I reply, and almost instantly the moonshine hits me like a train. It tastes like petrol and works like a cerebral turbo-booster. Before I know it, I've got my hands in the air like I just don't care, and I'm dancing my pants off. In fact I've never danced so well in my life and I get a turn around the room dancing with every one of the village's big mammas. Even Callum and Mario get to shake their funky thangs. I have a wild time chatting and dancing with Maye and his wife and I eventually crawl back to the baking hot mud hut that Maye has put us up in at some shocking hour in the morning. Although the moonshine has stripped away most of my brain, I retain enough residual moral fibre to turn down the head drummer's kind offer of his beautiful younger sister to keep me warm.

  In the morning, the mud hut is a fug of sweat, still as hot as a sauna and I am covered in a thick crust of perspiration, moonshine and mosquitoes. My hangover puts me at the far extremes of mortal existence; it's like someone has been using a steam pressure washer to pump a mixture of pig excrement and masonry nails through a hole punched in my forehead.

  I stumble out of the hut in search of somewhere to go to the toilet and almost fall over Maye, who is slumped outside the hut looking as though someone's been using a steam pressure washer to pump a mixture of pig excrement and masonry nails through a hole punched in his forehead. This makes me feel a whole heap better and we collapse in painful laughter.

  Tiny pigs scuttle around the village, and Maye says that they are another symbol of the USA ruining the country's ability to feed itself. In 1982, the USA had become so concerned at the prevalence of African swine fever that it convinced the Haitian government to slaughter all the indigenous Creole pigs in the country, plunging many families into more abject poverty than they were already experiencing. Small farmers claimed that they weren't compensated properly for their pigs and were forced to mortgage their land and, even worse, many people were so desperate that they cut down trees to sell as charcoal, destroying potential future income and intensifying desertification in one fell swoop.

  But hold on! A new breed of pigs was imported, although unlike the resilient little Creole pigs, which were well-adapted to Haiti's rugged terrain and sparse vegetation, the new US pigs required clean water (80 per cent of people don't have clean water in Haiti, let alone their animals), imported feed at around $90 per year (when average income was $130) and veterinary costs. The pigs themselves had to be bought for around $50. The programme was an utter failure . . . except, perhaps for the US pig farmers who exported them. Incidentally, a new variety of pig has now been developed in association with French agronomists, so there is a glimmer of hope on the porcine front.

  We eat a little breakfast of rice and small river fish in full view of the entire village who gather round to laugh at my shabby state. Maye and Sylvie chat about children, food and the future and I make a series of bad balloon animals for the village kids. I get fed again by Sylvie's sister, and this time I get into the swing of it, despite the fact that I haven't really done anything to deserve such a privilege. I have become attached to Maye and his family in the short time I've known them, and these few days in the countryside are another reminder that despite the fact that our lives are so wildly different, we are very much alike. In another world, I could see myself wasting away many an evening chatting to Maye over a pint in my local pub. I'm very sad when it's time to say goodbye. I will probably never meet Maye again, and I will miss him.

  • • • • •

  I head out of the Artibonite valley and stop off in a nearby town for lunch. The owner of a food shack points at a pot of sludgy green matter and tells me, 'It's got crab, meat and a local leaf.' Her little restaurant is packed, and she says that selling food is one of the few ways of making money in Haiti. 'It's helped me raise three children on my own and send them to school in Port-au-Prince. I bought my house without a husband, I worked and bought some land and the restaurant. But everybody uses Miami Rice now. Before you could get our local varieties, Shayla and Malangusa. They don't have those any more.'

  On the
way back to Port-au Prince I get a good view of the desperate state of the countryside. Before I arrived I had read that Haiti has suffered 98 per cent deforestation, but I didn't really appreciate it. Not only are there hardly any trees to be seen, but the soil is almost nonexistent, eroded by the lack of vegetation to bind it to the hills. Instead of earth, the fields are almost entirely made up of small rocks, with a light scattering of soil in between them. I've heard the term 'soil erosion' used around the world, but it's always been something of an abstract concept, and rarely so visible to the eye. This land is shockingly bad, and I can't see how anyone can scratch a living from it.

  I pass a flood-channel that looks like a huge river of stones. When the rain falls around here it rips downhill, unhindered by trees or bushes and strips the fields of any remaining soil and rocks. In some places a few terraces have been attempted, but they look pretty halfhearted, and must take a disproportionate amount of work when the fields are likely to produce so little. The soil heads south towards the sea and the rocks are left as this extraordinary wave, a symbol of ecological folly.

  A Glimmer of Hope

  I keep thinking that each new place we go to must be a bit better – surely it can't be worse. Inevitably it is. Cap Haitien is like Port-au-Prince but with less infrastructure, although it does have a fair few remnants of beautiful French colonial architecture. It sits on another soupy swamp of water and excrement.

  I visit a school on the outskirts of one of Cap Haitien's slums to see the WFP's school feeding programme. It's made up of three small buildings bisected by an open sewer, and is absolutely crammed – a school that in the UK would cater for maybe 80 children has 1,000 kids who attend in two shifts – 500 in the morning, and the other 500 in the afternoon.

  In Haiti, as in so many other poor countries, desperate parents prefer kids to work selling and hustling to add to the family income. Many kids therefore don't get to go to school, so they lack the skills to get employment when they grow up, and so the cycle of poverty continues. The WFP has a successful programme of school feeding whereby kids all receive a free meal at school, which eases the burden on their families. It seems to work very well and because the WFP isn't distributing free food into the market, it doesn't disrupt local economies. And the kids get something of an education. I visit a class and the teacher invites me to sing them something in English. I try teaching them to sing 'Think I'll Go and Dig Worms', but they are completely baffled, so I get them to count to ten instead. It's a wild success.