HELPING HAITI
A personal essay about a trip to two small towns in remote Haiti where a group in my own community is working on substantial projects in educational and medical development. Along the way I explore, among other things, the challenges to recovery in Haiti and the complicated question of foreign visitors (myself included) coming to take on charitable works in a country struggling to rebuild.
Published June 2012
by Christopher Hebert
For a long time now, particularly since the 2010 earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince and left as many as three hundred thousand dead, Haiti has existed in the imaginations of most outsiders as a land defined by tragedy, a place reduced to an accumulation of acute problems for which there seem to be few plausible solutions. We tend to focus—and not entirely without reason—on the seemingly intractable poverty, the social and economic inequality, the political instability, and the environmental degradation.
It’s in part because of some of these problems, and in part because of a personal attachment I feel for the country, that I’ve come here for the first time, on a nine-day trip in late December and early January 2012.
I arrive in Port-au-Prince on Thursday, December 29, 2011, one of ten members of group sent by the Haiti Outreach Program, an organization sponsored by the Sacred Heart Cathedral in Knoxville, Tennessee. In 1999, Sacred Heart was paired with the parish of St. Michel in Boucan-Carré in the Diocese of Hinche, a remote area in the Central Plateau region of Haiti. The material results of this partnership can be seen in a number of substantial projects in Boucan-Carré, including a hospital, a microfinance bank, a primary school, and now a high school. In an effort to expand their projects beyond Boucan-Carré, the Haiti Outreach Program is in the process of building a health clinic and a guest house in the even more remote mountain village of Bouli.
It is the projects in Bouli that bring us here now. We are an eclectic mix of Sacred Heart parishioners and clergy, students, and me, a non-parishioner and novelist. We will spend one day in Port-au-Prince, five days in Boucan-Carré, and three in Bouli.
Even two years after the quake, you don’t have to search long to find signs of the damage it wrought; you don’t even have to get off the plane. Although the Toussaint Louverture International Airport was only a minor casualty compared to many other structures in Port-au-Prince, it nevertheless lost its control tower and sustained damage to its international passenger terminal. Large parts of it are still under construction. The route through immigration and customs temporarily involves a detour by bus to a nearby warehouse.
Gray dominates the landscape. The vibrant palate familiar to the tropics is here partly hidden beneath a cloudy film. Not just in the tent camps, but throughout the city: roads, buildings of bare cinderblock and cement, rubble. Even the trees in Port-au-Prince are a grayish green, their leaves coated in dust. It is the dry season, and the rubble and all the tearing down and rebuilding has turned the air chalky.
The damage is breathtaking, and I mean this not just metaphorically. Pedestrians on the crowded roadside routinely pass under hunks of concrete dangling like clusters of bananas. Lining the tightly packed roads are houses with foundations so badly damaged by the quake that the scrambled blocks look like untenable games of Jenga. It seems even a slight breeze could bring it all down.
I find myself holding my breath until we’ve passed.
For our first night in Haiti, the only one we’ll spend in Port-au-Prince, we’re staying at a guest house on Delmas 33, not far from the airport. Once we get settled in, we spend time together as a group, getting to know one another and going over our itinerary. There’s a large deck on the roof with a good view of the street below. It’s generally considered unsafe for foreigners to be out in Port-au-Prince at night, and we got here too late in the day to do any exploring. For now, we must content ourselves with what we can see and hear from this perch. Especially hear. There’s been a constant clamor since the moment we arrived. Music mostly, and not the distant strains of passing car stereos: loud, thumping, pounding beats that mortar us from all sides.
Most of the members of our group have never met until today. By way of introduction, we take turns talking about our personal reasons for being here. The majority of the others have come knowing little about Haiti. A lot of them have traveled extensively abroad and are drawn toward charitable works. They came to Haiti because that’s where Sacred Heart has focused its efforts. They want to do what they can to help.
When it’s my turn to talk, I fumble.
“I’ve spent the last eight years studying Haiti,” I say. “I’ve written a book loosely based on events here over the last several decades.”
Suddenly the noise all around us seems to melt away. I don’t know where to go from here. I realize I started at the end, rather than at the beginning. I’d like to try again, but how do I condense those eight years into something that makes sense?
Instead I try to explain that in the process of writing and researching the book, I’ve become attached to Haiti and to its people and culture and history. But that feels inadequate too. More than anything else, I realize, I’m here because I want to give something concrete back.
But in Haiti, even so simple an impulse as this become complicated. It’s estimated that there are more than three thousand non-governmental organizations working in Haiti. The country reportedly has the largest concentration of such groups, per capita, in the world, a distinction that has led to Haiti being known in the development community as “the Republic of NGOs.” Of late, more and more observers have been calling into question what these groups are actually accomplishing, and whether it’s appropriate for foreign organizations to play such an outsized role in shaping the affairs of a sovereign nation.
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At around ten o’clock, we call it a night; the music hasn’t stopped, but we have an early start in the morning.
As I’m getting into bed a few minutes later, I notice the music has suddenly gotten even louder. It’s mostly Haitian kompa, a modern electronic form of traditional meringue, a beat-heavy, up-tempo dance music. I put in my earplugs, and they shave off a decibel or two, not enough to make a difference. A pillow over my head does nothing at all.
As I lie here in the dark, trying to sleep, the din swells; singing and shouting weave into the mix. Every once in a while the music softens ever so slightly, and I’m able to nod off for a minute or two. But then someone cranks the volume back up again.
I keep expecting that at some point the music will have to stop. But it doesn’t. Hours and hours and hours pass.
Sleep is impossible. So instead I lie and I listen.
One consequence of thinking of Haiti as a republic of NGOs is that it encourages us to perceive of the place as merely a cause or a project or a laboratory for NGOs seeking to test the latest approaches to sustainable development. But the story of Haiti is more complicated than what we hear in the news. This has never been a country of passive victims. Despite its overwhelming problems, Haiti is still a place filled with real people living real lives.
Tonight, the story of these lives begins with the music. And the music doesn’t end until the room starts to brighten at the first light of dawn. That’s when the roosters take over. But after the music, the roosters are like a tranquilizer. I sleep for an hour, maybe two.
And then, at 6:30 in the morning, what finally wakes me up for good is a very different kind of sound: there is a rally going on somewhere in the city. There is a voice screaming into a bullhorn, and a crowd of people are shouting for justice.