My father kept watch over a seedling Leucaena tree in the courtyard. The tree species had been one of his standard recommendations for soil conservation projects because the leguminous branches, rich in protein, could be cut and carried for animal fodder, while the roots added nitrogen to the soil. In one month, he watched the tree grow two feet. In a year’s time, it would be high enough to offer thin shade. Nothing, it seemed, not drought or deforestation, not even earthquakes, could deplete the vitality buried in Haiti’s soil.
And yet, as my parents listened to the stories of their coworkers, they felt increasingly uneasy that Haitians were seldom the first to be promoted to new responsibilities. The foreign staff, who knew how to write grants and present funding packages to donors, seemed disincentivized to work themselves out of a job. It was clear that when this latest crisis was over, the NGO would simply move on to the next disaster. The locals, however qualified, would once again be out of work.
Philanthropic endeavors seen from up close do not always yield a sense of accomplishment. Like countless others, my parents had been eager to rush in and help, but only from a distance does altruism appear entirely noble. My mother’s assignment was to plot GPS coordinates into Google Maps to update the shifting locations of tent cities; my father joined a team delivering tarps and supplies—although his first assignment was to listen, for hours at a stretch, to an angry Haitian pastor who was livid at the disrespectful foreign aid workers who, in his estimation, persistently ignored the insights of those they were supposed to help.
My father nodded and asked questions. He did not minimize the pastor’s outrage. After they’d spent three hours in plastic chairs in the humid courtyard, the pastor shook my father’s hand and invited him over for a meal. I was amazed when I heard the story—my quick-tempered father, a mediator?
He shrugged and grinned sheepishly. —I listened.
* * *
My mother, tasked with outfitting a second office to accommodate the growing influx of volunteers, was assigned a leased air-conditioned car and sent to a furniture warehouse in Pétionville, an affluent suburb perched above the chaos of greater Port-au-Prince, with a budget of ten thousand dollars. She was dismayed, however, to discover that only imported desks, chairs, and beds were for sale. My mother argued that it would be far better to support the small-scale local artisans whose hand-hewn furniture, painstakingly carved from Haitian oak and mahogany, lined the highway from Cap-Haïtien to the capital.
The salesman explained, curtly, that the roads were still being cleared; Haitian-made furniture would be impossible to deliver on time. He directed her instead to a shipment that had just arrived from Brazil. My mother was offended. Funds had been donated in good faith by people around the world to help Haitians recover from the earthquake; it should be given to local woodworkers, not to an export business. How else could the Haitian economy hope to recover? The salesman lifted disinterested eyebrows.
Feeling trapped and irritated, my mother sank into the plush backseat of the SUV as the hired driver navigated the potholes on their way back to the NGO headquarters. She would have preferred to take a tap tap or a motorcycle taxi, but it was against the organization’s policy for foreign volunteers to use public transportation; too much liability. My mother watched through tinted windows as pedestrians stepped irritably aside to let the relief vehicle bump past in a cloud of dust.
The frustrations felt nearly endless, yet when my father visited the tent cities, he was often struck by the dignity and composure of the community leaders. The displaced refugees had lost almost everything, yet sophisticated systems of self-governance had emerged to ensure that no one was overlooked. Volunteer keepers of the peace patrolled the alleys, and teachers whose schools had been reduced to rubble organized youth activities without books or a classroom.
There were stories of rape and theft as well—the flimsy tarps offered little protection—but my father shook his head at the foreign reporters and medical workers who entered the camps surrounded by heavily armed soldiers, as if braced for riots and looting. It was the standard caricature of Haiti: ungovernable, impoverished, forever poised on the brink of violence.
Perched in the passenger seat of the NGO delivery truck, my father listened as Haitian DJs peppered the airwaves with political commentary. Haiti, with its ten thousand registered aid organizations, was lampooned as the Republic of NGOs. Using the bleak misery of the situation for comic fodder, mock ministers pretended to advise Préval, the president of Haiti, to declare war on the U.S.—for if the Americans invaded, then the earthquake would be their problem. The man pretending to be Préval protested glumly: It will never work; with our luck, we’d win.
This got a laugh from the driver, swerving around the piles of rubble to deliver tarps that could barely keep out the pounding rain.
* * *
By the end of my parents’ four-week term of service with the NGO, they had begun to chafe against the constraints of bureaucracy. The UN high command had decided that no more tarps would be distributed; it was time to move on to transitional shelters, even though the rainy season was about to start and it would take months before any of the promised shelters were viable, giving the existing tarps plenty of time to fray and deteriorate.
Once the UN shut down the warehouses, it took my father’s distribution team an additional ten days to gather the supplies for which they had already handed out color-coded tickets.
On the day of their last delivery, the driver pulled into a dead-end alley and unlatched the back of the truck, but once the load had been distributed and it was explained that no more tarps would be forthcoming, the residents were angry. A local pastor tried to defuse the situation, but the crowd refused to disperse. A commanding young Haitian journalist named Lionne, on staff with the NGO, climbed up on the bumper to plead with the frustrated residents but she, too, was shouted down. The truck was trapped, unable to leave.
My father, asked to intervene, said nothing as he slowly made his way along the line of men with fists folded across their chests. Women cursed and shouted from behind the cable. As he walked, my father stooped and picked up stones from the ground, placing one rock in each angry hand.
Then he stepped back, all eyes on him. With shaggy eyebrows raised, he announced: The pastor already told you that there are no more tarps. Lionne told you that there are no more tarps. Now I, the blan, am telling you that if you lost your ticket, you will not get a tarp. If you don’t like this news, you have rocks in your hands.
He stretched his empty arms wide. —So go ahead, you’re free to stone me.
A thickset man a few rows back pushed his way forward and lunged across the cable. He gripped my father’s shoulders in his powerful hands, then laughed and gave him a loud kiss on each cheek.
—Mon blan! he shouted, his arm around my father’s shoulders. —This blan is my man.
My father had trusted himself to the public justice of street theater, in which, for uncounted centuries, conflicts have been aired and grievances tried in Ayiti. The crowd broke apart laughing, the cable was lowered, and the half-empty truck revved its engine and rattled away.
Rebwazman
Gonaïves, 2010
BY THE TIME I met up with my parents in the north of Haiti, my mother’s voice wavered with weeks of accumulated exhaustion. They’d left Port-au-Prince for Gonaïves, where another old friend, Drew Kutschenreuter, had recruited their help on a soil conservation project coordinated by the U.N.’s Office of International Migration. Post-earthquake, sixty-five thousand refugees had relocated to the Artibonite, more than any other region in Haiti. The refugees were jobless, homeless, and vulnerable to the next hurricane—which might bury Gonaïves once again under a river of mud.
Drew’s shoulders were bent under the burden of all that remained to be done. Like my father, he had learned that deforestation was not a problem that could be solved overnight, but he could at least give work to refugees building terraces and replanting trees. Harried by gran
t deadlines, Drew slept, if he slept at all, on a cot in his office; he gave his room, in a house he shared with Cuban doctors on a humanitarian mission, to my parents. Every possible resource must be leveraged to finish projects while the funding was available. My father, swept up in the cause, slipped back seamlessly into crisis mode.
At Kaz Nav, where hundreds of laborers fanned out across the dry hillsides to build stone terraces that would slow the force of the rainwater, my father reported to Drew that although the craftsmanship of the terraces was impressive—masons with dusty hands and strong shoulders could eye the circumference of a rock and, with the tap of a hammer, set it expertly in place without mortar—even stone walls weakened over time and were costly to repair. Trees, on the other hand, only grew stronger as they spread out their roots.
My father’s preferred method for identifying the species most likely to survive in each new microclimate was to ask the eldest person in every village what trees they remembered from childhood. He seemed energized by the long hikes over dry hills to talk with farmers, and Drew, at my father’s suggestion, requisitioned vetivè and elephant grass—sourced from Zo’s gardens—and bwa blan seeds to help brace the stone walls against future collapse. But my father didn’t translate when my mother lost the thread of the conversation, and he didn’t stop for meals. He didn’t have time; there was too much to be done.
—We’re not a team as I’d hoped we would be, my mother confided when I flew into Cap-Haïtien to join them.
By four a.m. the next morning, we were up and packed, waiting on a concrete wall in Haut-Limbé for our ride to see the soil conservation projects in Gonaïves.
A farmer walked past singing hymns in the dark. My father explained that we’d be riding with Dr. Manno, who was driving down to Port-au-Prince to care for earthquake victims, but until the headlights swung down the dirt road and the driver turned his head to greet us as we squeezed into the back seat, I did not realize that I already knew Manno.
He nodded curtly. It seemed clear that he had not forgotten how I had tried to humiliate him when I was a teenager. I had not seen him in twenty years, not since he had placed himself at risk to escort my sisters and me from the compound in the midst of an evacuation. We had fled from danger. He was once again driving back to the epicenter of an earthquake.
As the vehicle climbed out of the Limbé Valley, I asked Dr. Manno about the work he was doing in Port-au-Prince. He had been driving down for weeks, sometimes with fellow medical professionals, sometimes with carpenters and masons to help rebuild damaged homes. He said that he had been amazed by the generosity of his neighbors in Haut-Limbé. Time and again, people with very little to spare had donated the only extra pair of shoes they owned.
He loved his country, he told me, and although he had lived in the United States for a time, he said that never again would he want to live in such a place.
—The life I saw was too busy, he diagnosed. —I didn’t see any patience. They can’t wait.
We rounded a corner and suddenly the mountains opened up beneath us, ringed in clouds. A lone fortress from the age of Henri Christophe rose from a ridgeline. I remembered hiking to the summit when I was a teenager, stunned into awe by such fierce beauty.
As we descended into the arid rain shadow of the Artibonite, Dr. Manno turned to the subject that we had both been avoiding.
—Here’s something I don’t understand, he put forth testily, lifting one hand from the steering wheel. —In other places, you see missionary kids playing with the nationals, but here, they create this separate space for themselves. I know missionary kids who separate themselves so completely that they don’t even speak the language.
I shifted uncomfortably.
—The missionaries have their own school, their own church. Sometimes I think, Why do you come to work here? You come to help the people, and you love them so much that you won’t interact with them.
He shook his head, his laugh bitter. —It’s funny. They love Haiti so much, but they hate us.
I winced at his words. His anger, though it stung, needed to be heard. Too often the only stories we told ourselves—as missionaries, aid workers, philanthropists, and journalists—were the small but significant ways we had helped a country in need, failing to understand that pity was corrosive.
—When you face an enemy who is trying to destroy you, if you laugh, you make him feel bad, Manno explained.
—Who is the enemy now? I asked.
—The earthquake. We have to show the earthquake that it didn’t succeed in destroying us.
By the time he pulled over to let us out at a dusty village above Gonaïves, his frustration seemed to have ebbed. We shook hands. He did not linger; he had lives to save. I told him that I admired his dedication. He nodded with formal dignity and got back behind the wheel of the truck to resume the long, slow work of rebuilding his country, with or without the help of the foreigners whose intentions he had learned early to mistrust.
* * *
My mother and I had to walk quickly to keep pace with my father and the three Haitian agronomists who led us up to the soil conservation project at Ravine Zeppelin. At eight-thirty in the morning, the sun was already at its brutal full strength. Pink masses of bougainvillea blazed along the cactus hedges, and goats bleated on dry hills. School kids in green-and-white-checkered uniforms giggled as they fluttered past. —Hello! What ees your name?
As we crossed a wide, flat gully, a Haitian agwonòm named Geffrard, one of the leaders on the project, pointed out the foundation of a house that had been swept away in a previous flood. All that remained was an uneven square of pounded earth. Pale green stones, the bones of the mountain, glinted in the morning light.
Our sandals were black with ash as we climbed. A fire attributed to a malevolent spirit, a dyab, had blazed across the mountain the week before, destroying a month of work. Viewed from above on Google Earth, the remaining terraces looked like sutures on a wound.
A herd of goats wandered across the hills, kicking aside the loose dirt and trampling the fragile millet stalks. My father’s face was grim. Goats functioned as walking bank accounts for subsistence farmers, and my father pointed out with frustration that many of the locals who’d been hired to build the terraces were using their soil conservation income to buy more animals, which only put further strain on the already threatened ecosystem. And yet, because of the soil conservation project, farmers whose land was too dry to feed their families had not been forced to seek temporary work across the border in the Dominican Republic. The conundrum was an old one: Was the project doing more good than harm?
I asked two of the young Haitian agronomists, Sanon Elioth and Georges Ruysdael, what they thought of their country’s future—was it beyond help? The two had been studying agronomy in Port-au-Prince when the earthquake hit, and they had leaped to safety from the second floor of their university, only to watch friends crushed under falling cement blocks. Children at an elementary school across the street, trapped under the debris, had thrown pebbles to let their rescuers know that they were alive. But the university students could not reach them fast enough. They dug frantically with bare hands, but the next aftershock brought only silence.
What Sanon and Georges had lived through was unimaginable, and yet less than two months later, they had signed up to plant trees on a deforested mountain, logging long hours in the heat to prevent yet another catastrophe.
—I have hope for my country, twenty-eight-year-old Sanon insisted. He explained that he believed in reforestation, rebwazman, and in the soil that remained. It was for this reason that his life had been spared.
He pointed out tiny green seedlings, no more than two centimeters high, that had already begun to emerge after the first good rain. He assured me that in just one year we could stand in the shade of these same trees; of course it was possible for the ravines to be restored, for the forests to return.
My father, ever the critic, pointed out that possibility and reality were two very
different things. Successful reforestation would require that the goats didn’t trample the terraces or eat the tender seedlings, and that the hurricanes held off for another year.
As we hiked back down the mountain, my father admitted: I can’t save Haiti. I’m an old man from another country. Maybe they will.
My mother and I grabbed hands to keep from slipping down the eroded trail. My father and the agwonòms hurried ahead of us. There was work to be done. It was all I could do to keep up.
* * *
When I returned, one year later, Sanon Elioth had already lost his job with the NGO. The funding had run out. But he caught a tap tap from Port-au-Prince, and we hiked the sun-scorched trail through the bleached exposed bones of the mountain. We could find only one tree standing on the ridge above Ravine Zeppelin. The goats had eaten the rest.
The bwa blan seeds, however, which my father had insisted be planted at the base of the stone terraces in the Kaz Nav watershed, had already grown into saplings with glossy dark green leaves as high as my waist. The branches trembled as a wind blew down the mountains and stirred the dry soil.
Ebenezer Clinic
Haut-Limbé, 2010
TINY EBENEZER CLINIC in Haut-Limbé was already crowded with earthquake victims when Dr. Manno returned from his trip to the epicenter with yet another patient, a three-month-old baby named Kwensykaïra. Dr. Steve James, who had an appointment to see her later that morning, explained how Ebenezer Clinic, already in debt for eight thousand dollars’ worth of pharmaceuticals, had volunteered to treat all refugees from the earthquake free of charge—an astonishingly generous undertaking for such a small establishment.
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