by Paul Farmer
Choosing where to live
From Limbe in the north to Cavaillon in the south, rural Haitians as well as city dwellers showed great attachment to their districts and neighborhoods. First and foremost, social ties are strong and many prefer to remain in their community whatever the obstacles. Focus group facilitators sought to understand the other incentives for people to stay in their current location, relocate, or move back to where they lived before the earthquake.
In the wake of the earthquake, thousands of people left their place of residence and moved into camps across the capital. Up to an estimated six hundred thousand initially returned to their regions of origin. Most people in the regions have relatives or friends who lived in the capital at the time of the earthquake, so people empathized with the victims and wanted to assist. But the effect of displacement weighed on host families and communities. Families often do not have the necessary capacity and space. Expanded households put pressure on limited resources, especially food. Suggestions as to how to meet these challenges varied among the focus groups: some wanted more food aid directed to the regions, while others called for an effort by the state to register and support the displaced, and even to help them relocate permanently outside Port-au-Prince.
“Pou nou ka gran moun tèt nou”/So we can be independent The Haitians we spoke to, including city-dwellers, stressed agricultural production as a top priority. Agriculture—perhaps more than any other sector—is considered essential to the country’s wealth, and the prevailing sentiment is that the peasantry has always been neglected. Invariably, interlocutors made concrete demands for training, equipment, seeds, easier access to credit, and the introduction of modern agricultural techniques. Agriculture is also seen as a key source of employment: Many people said they would rather work on the land than seek informal jobs in the towns, from selling second-hand clothing in the streets to the “cash for work” menial jobs available since the quake .
All agreed that the country can and should become self-sufficient in food. During a focus group discussion in the city of Petionville, a man, raising the issue of assistance after the quake, noted: Pou nou granmoun tèt nou, fok nou ka bay tèt nou manje, kidonk si y ap ede nou tout bon fok yo envèsti nan agrikilti peyi a. “For us to be independent adults, we must be able to feed ourselves; so if they really want to help us, they need to invest in agriculture.”
A crisis of confidence
We encountered a concern that the reconstruction may not adequately target and reach its intended beneficiaries. There was a general appeal for trustworthy authorities who would manage aid responsibly.
Discussions also revealed a deep and historic skepticism about the effectiveness of the state itself, its capability to articulate a vision and to bring about positive change. These perceptions of a state and a government absent or missing in action have replaced those that we encountered as journalists in the late eighties of a state viewed as predatory and oppressive.
Repeated demands were made for a responsible state. The general recognition was that public institutions, particularly the local government system, must be strengthened. Haitians insisted that the state should improve its capacity to respond to people’s needs, which requires an administration staffed with competent civil servants. In some focus groups in the south, the inefficiency of the Haitian administration has created a distrust of the government and an identity crisis among Haitians. Focus group participants in the north (in Cap Haitien, Limbe, Milo, and Grande Riviere du Nord) demanded a strong state that could effectively regulate the administration of the country.
During the two other crises that followed the earthquake this past year—the cholera outbreak and Hurricane Tomas—the government has tried to project an image of a caring and responsible state working through local authorities. How have the views we encountered last March changed? Our next focus groups, forming after more than a year of repeated crisis and the election of a new president and a new parliament, will certainly give us additional insights on the voiceless views of the state’s responsibilities and their expectations of the new government.
What aid?
In our exchanges on aid, the general conclusion was that responsible aid must reinforce Haiti’s sovereignty. The overall purpose of reconstruction should be to enable the country to progress while avoiding aid dependency. Unsurprisingly, Haitians do not see their future as passive recipients of foreign aid. Several groups emphasized Haitian involvement in the reconstruction.
The demands are clear: The benefits of international aid must be shared equitably. The reconstruction of Haiti should also draw on Haitian resources and competencies. When I asked Nirline, a facilitators from ATD Quart Monde, what struck her the most from the discussions in the slum of Grande Ravine, she quoted a young man with no formal schooling speaking of what he would like to do in the future. He said confidently: Rebuild the national palace. Nou wé Palé Nasyonal kraze. M ta renmen se pas engenye etrange ki ta rekonstwi l. M ta renmen ke se engenye Ayisyen ki ta jwenn travay sa a pou le yap gade sa, yo ta di se Ayisyen ki te rekonstwi l. “We saw the National Palace destroyed. I would like to see Haitian engineers rebuild it, not foreign engineers, so we can look at the Palace proudly in the future and say that Haitians built the National Palace.” Many voices called for reconstruction to be designed to deliberately strengthen the capacities of Haitian civil servants, engineers, and other technical professions.
In Duchity, in the Grande Anse Department, many participants underlined the negative effect of aid on the production of small farmers. “Why can’t the donors buy food from us and distribute that food to the affected regions?” one asked.
One key word came back over and over: respect. Haitians seek respect from the donors for those they are helping. Assistance, one focus group concluded, should be a joint decision between donors and aid recipients.
Solidarity
When the focus groups met, more than two months after the January 12 earthquake, Haitians were still suffering from the psychological effect of the tragedy. The vast majority of people, even those outside the most affected areas of Miragoâne, Jacmel, and Port-au-Prince, suffered from post-traumatic symptoms such as stress, anxiety, and sleeplessness. Stress and anxiety were still evident a year after the quake, when, on January 12, 2011, several ceremonies and memorial gatherings marked the somber anniversary.
At the time we gathered our focus groups, three months after the quake, fear of another disaster was widespread. Many of those not physically affected by the quake continued to grieve for friends and relatives killed, particularly when bodies remained under rubble, and for those wounded or made homeless. This stress was compounded by feelings of frustration among the unemployed and a sense of pressure on local services caused by so many displaced people.
Adding to the stress generated by the catastrophe were concerns about its social and economic effects. In several departments, focus groups commented on the economic downturn that had coincided with the arrival of those fleeing the capital. Focus groups cited a general increase in prices, especially for basic goods, and the loss of remittances from relatives who used to live and work in the capital. They also mentioned an adverse effect on the madan sara who are key actors in the marketing system for agricultural products, after the country’s main market—the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area—was disrupted.
Various focus groups reported that anxiety was heightened by security concerns. Residents in the metropolitan area reported an increase in robberies and assaults. They also expressed their fear of a return of prisoners who escaped from the national penitentiary and of renewed gang activities in their neighborhood. A year later, these fears have been exacerbated by a worsening security climate.
In these dire circumstances, the remarkable resilience shown by the focus group participants impressed many facilitators. Haitians have an obvious determination to come to terms with last January’s devastation and to reconstruct their own lives. Many spoke of a profound sense of gratitude for havi
ng survived, and people of all beliefs have seen their religious faith strengthened.
In addition, many people reported a sense of renewed solidarity among Haitians. Participants proudly cited examples of young people rescuing victims from collapsed buildings with their bare hands or women sharing the little they had with other survivors.
The focus group participants also expressed a strong sense of attachment to their community and a desire to stick together, no matter what. In the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area in particular, where thousands have lost their homes and possessions, our discussions underlined the extent to which residents are attached to their own particular neighborhoods.
Despite the trauma and the losses, hope was alive even among the displaced.
Dreaming of a new country…
An overwhelming majority of participants believe that Haiti can change for the better, but they insisted that this transformation implies a change of mentality at all levels of society. They envisage a complete transformation in the way individuals and institutions act, through a new awakening, fostering a greater sense of civic responsibility and a new sense of unity.
They stressed the need to overcome social divisions and to join forces for a common purpose. In a Port-au-Prince focus group, one woman protested against existing inequalities in accessing education: Pitit boujwa ak gran nèg yo al lekol e genyen yon metye, men pitit malere se pafwa yal lekòl e yo pa menm ka rantre nan inivèsite. “The children of the bourgeois go to school and have a profession; the children of the poor seldom get to go to school and never get a chance to go to the university.”
Participants felt the need to build a different country, less divided, where people are more equal. A participant in another Port-au-Prince focus group noted: Depi tranbleman de tèa, tout moun siniste ke l te rich ke l te póv. Mwen ta renmen lè nap rebati peyi a, ke tout moun fè yon sèl san divizyon. “Since the earthquake, we are all homeless, whether rich or poor. I would like to see the country rebuilt as one, without divisions.”
One outcome of our collective quest to listen to the voices of those who are never heard was an uplifting sense of hope in the future. This was best put by a young woman in Port-au-Prince: Menm si peyi a kraze li pap mouri. “Even if the country has been destroyed, it will not die.” The discussions in the Central Plateau—in Hinche, Papaye, Tomassique, and Cerca la Source—were animated and concluded with the participants declaring: Haiti pap kraze. “Haiti will not be destroyed.” One positive side of the earthquake, according to the residents of Rue Alexandre, Bas-peu-de-chose, in Port-au-Prince, is that, today, solidarity, respect, and tolerance have become the “cements of communities everywhere,” in the quake-affected neighborhood as they are in the peyi andeyò. Another positive aspect of the quake underlined by many of the focus groups is that they were finally being consulted on the future of their country.
All recognize that rebuilding Haiti will be long and difficult, but we Haitians are more used to marathons than sprints. Through coups d’état, hurricanes, and earthquakes, we have been rebuilding Haiti, seemingly from scratch, for two hundred years.
GOUDOU GOUDOU
NANCY DORSINVILLE
On January 12, 2010, I traveled from New York to Port-au-Prince to attend a series of meetings. It was to be a twenty-four-hour, event-packed, whirlwind trip. Gessie Bellerive, Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive’s sister, kindly came to the airport to have coffee with me as I waited for my luggage. Our mothers had been friends, in a different era. We now managed to intersect in the line of duty. Although it was to be a one-day trip, I had brought a full set of luggage. One always brings luggage when traveling to Haiti. Even before the earthquake, toiletries and other basic drugstore supplies were commodities much appreciated by family and friends. I always packed a generous array of them in my suitcases.
Everything was normal in Port-au-Prince City, or the Big Mango, as we like to say, comparing it to the Big Apple. On Wednesday, I was to return to the UN with the prime minister, who on Thursday was scheduled to address the International Financial Institutions (IFI) to follow up on the pledges they had made at a donors’ conference in Washington, D.C., just months earlier, where “Haiti is open for business” had been the resounding mantra. For the first time in a long time, Haiti had a balanced budget, and things seemed promising for our impoverished country.
Eight of us from the UN were in the salon diplomatique (diplomatic lounge) at the airport in Port-au-Prince that day: two of my colleagues from the UN Office of the Special Envoy to Haiti were with me, and five Chinese peacekeepers from MINUSTAH (UN peacekeeping force in Haiti). The prime minister’s sister, having worked at the UN in Geneva for many years, was reminiscing with my two co-workers. Meanwhile, I was mesmerized by my fellow travelers, the newly arrived peacekeepers from the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, who were being picked up by their counterparts already stationed in Haiti. I watched them greet each other with delight: They displayed a kind of synchronicity of movement that could have been choreographed. One of them had brought flowers, which she handed to the newcomers in an elegant, reverential manner. I later learned that the Chinese peacekeepers lived in a base where they cultivated a garden, and wondered if they had grown the welcoming bouquet.
Upon arriving in Port-au-Prince, I immediately went to a Global Fund meeting on AIDS, TB, and malaria. The meeting, concerning the future of the Global Fund’s sponsorship of Haiti’s national AIDS program, was critically important. Haiti’s health officials were all present, from the health minister, along with his chief of staff and director general, to the head of the Haitian National Red Cross, the representative of the World Health Organization in Haiti, the operations director for Partners In Health, and the founding director of GHESKIO, the Haiti-based, leading research institute of the Caribbean region. Essentially, the entire cadre of high-level health officials in the country was in attendance. Generally, this type of meeting is held at the Montana Hotel, one of the best-known hotels in the country. But this time, the meeting was held at the Global Fund’s CCM (Country Coordinating Mechanism) headquarters in Delmas 83, a suburb of Port-au-Prince.
As the prime minister presided over a heated debate between the country’s leading health practitioners and policymakers, I began to feel the ground shaking and heard a cavernous noise engulfing the space. Given Haiti’s history, the authorities present, and the nature of the meeting, I thought that I was hearing the sounds of another coup d’état. Although there had been infrequent, low-grade, isolated tremors over the years, the last earthquake in Haiti was more than a hundred years ago and had long been erased from our collective memory.
When the walls cracked open and parts of the ceiling began to fall on us, people started leaving the room. I instinctively crouched under the table. As a child, the nuns of my grammar school ordered us to do just that when there were politically motivated explosions. Almost everyone else had cleared the room when an international representative bent down under the table and urged me to come out. I made my way out of the room, through the crumbling stairs and into the courtyard. Outside, for the first time, I heard someone say: “It’s an earthquake!” How could this be? I thought. This is Haiti!
We slowly moved from the courtyard to the street, where we had a better view of what we had escaped. The villa we had just occupied was leaning on one side; half of it, opposite where the meeting had been taking place, had fallen down. The large house next door had been flattened. Many of the health officials’ cars had been destroyed by falling electric poles.
The streets began to fill with people, most covered with dust from the rubble, and many calling out to God. Some were screaming that it was the end of the world. Huge numbers of cars had accumulated on the roads, but many people were on foot, desperate to get home to their families. Within minutes of the quake, Haitians were working at removing their neighbors and loved ones from under the debris. Others were trying to bring injured people to safety or to some kind of health care. I witnessed spectacular displays
of creativity; just about everything was used to carry the wounded: mattresses, planks of wood, doors that had been removed from their hinges, stretchers, bourettes, motorcycles, pickup trucks.
A storm raged inside my head: What is this? Where are these people coming from? Why are they covered in dust? Where are they going? I had been in Manhattan on 9/11, where the destruction had been contained. So in my mind, this earthquake, this foreign event that had occurred, was limited to one street or, at most, this neighborhood. I did not imagine that Port-au-Prince, our capital, had been destroyed, our cherished ministry of health and most of the other ministries along with it. A Durham University geophysics expert would subsequently assess the earthquake that shook Port-au-Prince and its surroundings to be “like thirty-five Hiroshima bomb explosions hitting Haiti at once.” But even before I heard that frightening comparison, my heart was being guided on the way of proceeding by the teachings of Father Pedro Arrupe, SJ, the medically trained Jesuit priest who tended to Hiroshima’s sick and dying.
As I stood there, trying to make sense of the inconceivable, Prime Minister Bellerive came over and asked if I would go with him. I told him that I would go to the General Hospital to help. Unaware of the damage to the airport or the extent of the devastation throughout the capital, I imagined that I could be useful at the outset and travel home within a few days. I understood, however, that as a public servant, the prime minister could no longer travel to a UN meeting the next day as originally planned.
Standing in the street with the astonished health team, I saw schoolchildren, their colorful uniforms stained with blood, carrying injured classmates on their backs. At times, several children worked together to carry one who, having lost use of a limb, could not negotiate the crowds. The traffic was growing. Drivers exchanged what little information they had been able to gather from word of mouth along the way: This street is blocked because all the houses are down; that street is off limits because electric poles fell on cars in the middle of the road; drivers are dead; that street is cracked open; people are trying to clear out that area. Everyone was outside, some holding packages containing the few belongings they were able to salvage. What would soon be dubbed psychose béton (psychosis, as in phobia or fear of concrete) took hold of the population. Thus began the massive exodus toward open spaces, which led to the proliferation across the capital of camps filled with destitute people.