Haiti: The Aftermath

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Haiti: The Aftermath

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Living the Faith

Part of a Haitian saying goes something like this; "If Haiti needs it, Missionaries will bring it." Whether or not Haitians needed western religion, is a debate beyond this blog. Nonetheless, Missionaries came, in all flavors and colors; Catholics, Baptists, Adventist, Methodists.
In a country 80 per cent Catholic, it's fair to say Rome and the Pope won the battle for souls. However, each religious perspective that traveled to Haiti left a major impression in a country where 110 percent of the population practice Voodoo to some extent.
Given my wonderful mother in-law is a retired Methodist minister from a family of traveling Texas padres, and that Gresham UMC has followed these exploits while being my family's comfort network, I thought I tell a Methodist story of a church and a school Haitian style.
The Church, "Eglise (Church) Methodiste, is a small 10-year-old cinder block structure with a bare slab concrete floor and tin roof sits just off Highway #1 north of L'Arcahaie. Inside, this small gritty church, which before the 12 Jan 10 earthquake doubled as a school for about 15 kids, is a simple wooden alter painted white with plastic flowers, and bare wooden benches. However, its walls are now cracked, and there are gaps in its roof now tristed due to Haiti's January catastrophe. No murals adorning walls, absent a large cross, without colorful cloths, bibles, or organs. However, as the church caretaker Madam Gustav Zanor explained, their congregation church is alive with praise and song each Sunday as about 50 members travel many miles on foot or burro from surrounding valleys and hills to join their visiting minister from Port au Prince.
"There maybe is not much here; we have very little," said Madam Zanor in her native Creole. But after the briefest of pauses, she added, "Nous avons Dieu" - "We have God."

A little further to the south also on Highway #1 is Ecole (school) Methodiste De Thomas.
Home to about 80 students (down from a pre-quake number of over 120), the school serves kids from kindergarten thru eighth grade. In Haiti, often times, people must walk a simple dirt path and pass thru a protective iron gate to reach their destination. Ecole Methodiste De Thomas, whose building also houses a church, is no different. There are no parking lots or playgrounds here. Just a place to tie off your donkey and outhouse, all of which is adjacent to a lush green grove of bananas, plantains, and coconuts.
In Haiti, school, which is mandatory until grade six, is not public or free as tuition costs between one and two thousand dollars US depending on grade in a country where the minimum daily wage is about 40 Goude ($5 US). Moreover, girls, usually with colorful ribbons in their hair, and boys must wear uniforms.
Although not toppled, this concrete building first built in 1978 with a second story added for a church in 1992, received major damage during the January earthquake. Support columns are crumbled and walls are cracked, so much so that classes are now held outside for fear of being inside.
As such, the lower school level remains empty of all unused chairs desks and chalkboards, clutter, dust and fear.
"Our biggest problem right now, like everybody, is money" to fix the school and church, said Director Lazarre Pierre Decilien thru an interpreter. "But what we need most are the small things like pencils, notebooks and uniforms."

Where will it all end?

Driving around Port au Prince, walking its neighborhoods, dining with locals, you can't help but wonder where life is headed in a post-earthquake Haiti.

Haiti is a land of extremes, offering cool rugged mountains spotted with lush green pines and palms, baked white sand beaches greeting turquoise ocean, embracing gracious people saying hello in Creole behind gleaming eyes and wide smiles. Even in Haiti's much maligned urban areas an oasis of gardens and stately homes can be found.

However even during its pre-earthquake days, Haiti was offered by her fouled capital city Port au Prince as shrouded in gritty smog and floating atop the lung choking stench of human and animal waste. People lived atop each other in ramshackle huts of sticks and tin surrounded by piles of smouldering mounds of raw garbage. Open sewers in which children play and pigs forage are wash basins and drinking fountains. Imagine, three million people living in an area the size of small cities like Gresham, OR or Brockton, MA.

Add to its being the catastrophic January 12 earthquake. Streets and displacement camps are over run by gangs that prey of the young, feeble and female. Medical care and medicine is scarce. There is little law, less governance and no political will fcr change only to maintain the status quo.

Survivors of the quake, with lives shattered, remain surrounded by toppled buildings, rubble filled streets, broken families, the homeless, destitute, and orphans. There are few jobs in a land where minimum pay if $5 per day. The rich get richer off the misery of fellow Haitians while the poor; well they just continue to be poor.

Last week there were organized protests. This week, there is a call for strikes.

There is a saying and attitude in Haiti that goes something like this: If it needs to be fixed, Missionaries will come to fix it; If something is needed, Missionaries will come and give it; If it needs to be built, Missionaries will come and build it. Missionaries, in the present vernacular, pretty much means anyone or any group bearing aid; the US, UN, NGO's and even traditional Church Groups. Haiti has become a child of the world.

But even the billions of aid money flowing into the Western Hemisphere's poorest country isn't received without protest as calls of ABA OKIPASYON (Down with the Occupation in reference to the UN armed presence) have sprung up throughout Port au Prince. Apparently, there is a price for Haiti's history and culture of co-dependency.

With the mandate for elections this fall, political graffiti dots the urban landscape with spray can painted calls of ABA PREVAL, Creole for "Down with Preval", Haiti's current President. Others tag walls with Bon Retour JC Claude Duvalier calling for the return of the brutal former Haitian President Baby Doc Duvalier. The same is written as a return of former priest turned president Jean-Bertrand Aristide is hoped for. Both were forced from office and currently live in exile, Duvalier in France, Aristide in South Africa.

Apparently when one is unable to see hope in the future, they look to a past made desirable by the passage of time.

So just where do you think life headed in a post-earthquake Haiti;

A Land of Contradictions

It was one of the most surreal moments of my time in Haiti. It appeared after yet another day traveling a teeth-jarring, bone rattling contorted rock and red dirt mountain-side road, this day to Parque La Visite. After being bounced and tossed within our SUV for a couple of hours, my driver Patrick and I decide to siesta in the Village of Furcy. Here we stop for a roadside snack, Fritailles, made street-side from boiled and fried pork (Griot), plantains, and spicy cabbage. So very good!

Adding to our rain forest adventure, in the midst of our wonderful meal, the rains came in a torrent. People scurried for cover, street merchants covered their goods, pigs (soon to be supper) rolled in the mud. Then, in the midst of our third-world afternoon rain, he appeared; nameless, old rich "Homme Blanc" in the middle of Black Haiti riding a $3,000 Trek mountain bike dressed in $500 in cycling regalia, all wet and muddied, not a care in the world.

What old, rich "Homme Blanc" illustrated so smartly, was the contradiction that is Haiti.

Beyond the squalor that is Port au Prince and over the hills of shanty towns that is urban Haiti, lays an untapped treasure of natural wonder; mountains reaching into clouds, valleys dipping below sea level. This is not the denuded Haiti so ofter spoken of, it is the Haiti of tall pines, tropical flowers, lush greenery, crops of coffee, tobacco, mango's, and bananas along with terraced farms of corn, yams, watermelons, and peppers.

There is a sweet scent of flowers in the air here, not the smog and fumes from the city below. This is where single-file traffic is slowed by donkeys and cattle, not by overflowing Tap Taps and buses driving six across on a two lane road.

This is a Haiti of hidden wealth, chalets, sport and adventure camps for all but Haitians. However, this is a land begging for eco-visitors to hike its trails, ride its single-track paths, and paddle is rivers to the ocean. It is a Haiti far removed from its urban dead zones alive bio-diversity and the welcoming smiles of its neighbors.

Although atop a mountain's peak the tranquil, turquoise shoreline of Jacmel can be seen, all one needs do is turn about to see the KAOS that is Port au Prince. How unfortunate, save for the fortunate few, that all that is Haiti is tainted by that which is Port au Prince.

Haiti - The Aftermath Six Months Later

These are the numbers:

250,000 men, women, and children dead;
More than 500,00 injured, over 1-million homeless;
In excess of seven million people impacted nationwide;
To date $1.34-billion spent by the US, $3-billion world-wide.

Six months after the 12 January 2010 earthquake, Haitians have buried most of their dead but their homes remain in ruinous heaps and nearly two million people live in tattered tents and tarp shelters among open sewers in gang-controled camps where women and children suffer.

The Government is inept and the ruling elite look to control all that is Haitian. The US, the UN, NGO's, and those on missions all work for a common cause but don't always work together.

And it is the Haitian people who suffer; it is the Haitian people who are angry, it is the Haitian people whose smiles have dimmed, whose eyes have turned to a steely stare. People have lost faith in promises made with hollow words.

While medals are given in self reward, I bare witness that Haiti's children remain hungry, homeless and without hope.

Behind its Mountainous Curtain

Haiti, Day IX: To fully appreciate Haiti, one must reach beyond the carnage of Port au Prince traveling beyond Morne de’l Hospital and Morne Saint Laurent along National Highway #3. This weekend’s travels took me thru towns like Niva and Meye, delivered me to Peligre Hydro-electric Dam, and returned my to the chaos known as Port au Prince by way of Port de’ Saint Marc along National Highway #1. It was a drive over steep cultivated mountains, across flowing brown rivers full of children bathing, thru lush green valley’s where farmers grow rice, corn, banana, and breadfruit, and along a shoreline of white sand and turquoise water. If it were not Haiti, it just might be paradise.

After a week in and around angry Port au Prince, it was refreshing to again experience a child’s beaming smile and twinkling eye and adults eagerly engaging in a Creole conversation with an English-speaking stranger. Relatively untouched by the 12 January earthquake, rural Haiti has not been soured by unfulfilled words promising reconstruction, only of countless unfulfilled words promising government reform.

Make no mistake, rural Haiti is still Haiti; roads are broken and unpaved, homes are shanties and shacks, the air is dusty, and transportation is often by burro. There is a quaint charm to rural Haiti, especially when compared to metropolitan Port au Prince. However, make no mistake, this is still Haiti racked by endemic poverty, historic corruption, and government inaction.

And, as if to reinforce the point, there was no mistaking the four armed checkpoints welcoming our return to Port au Prince.

Haiti, Day VIII: Someone asked: describe an average day in Haiti. Yesterday would serve that answer well:

Bad food, stomach ache, run to the head, mosquitoes, spiders, sharing a tent with four, little sleep, collapsing cot (usually at 4 am), hot / humid, smog, open sewers, sore throat, driving miles of dusty / bone-jarring dirt roads, ...cold showers, missing home and family, 14-hour work days, compassion overload. Then you realize for you it's temporary.See More

The First Week

Haiti, Day VI: During these past days, something has been amiss since my March / April visit to Haiti beyond an outrageous lack of recovery progress. It finally dawned on me today; the smiling faces of children are now etched in stoic pain and friendly synergy between adults and responders has turned to simmering anger....

Upon reflection, this has been true at each of the nearly 15 sites visited. I see hunger, I see thirst, I see homelessness, I see torn and tattered tents as shelter; all of which is beyond levels witnessed two months ago.

With more than $3-billion in humanitarian aid spent since the 12 January 2010 earthquake, how can this be? Will this ever change?

Haiti, Day V: A very long day; about 17 hours; spent this wonderful 95-degree humid Thursday visiting seven disposal sites, a school as well as a beach-front restaurant. I was a very long day. However, many times over we were reminded of what a land of contradictions Haiti is as we surveyed shore-line dumping in one area then walked atop trash-free white beach sand along aqua blue ocean. Go figure.
As for debris and rubble; less than one-percent of the 25-million cubic yards of Haiti's broken homes and buildings has been disposed of. That's enough junk to fill about 5 Superdomes from top to bottom.

Haiti, Day IV: Mosquitoes getting way too friendly; air is altogether way too smelly, the Haitian recovery is painfully too slow to go! However, life on this island nation continues unabated. Taps Taps drive full and crazy, street markets dance with energy, young boys stroll while little girls with ribbons in their hair skip hand-in-hand off to school.

Haiti, Day III: Still tending to mundane housekeeping duties like getting ID's, getting electronically connected and finding after-hours food!
Visited three former project sites and sad to say any progress realized two months ago has been lost. So here we are, trying to jump start the process yet again.
This photo reminds us why we are here; to remember those who perrished and to help those alive reclaim some of what was lost.

Portland's other presence in Haiti, Mercy Corp's! If you wanted to make a donation and know its doing good, contact Mercy Corps at:

http://www.mercycorps.org/countries/haiti

Haiti, Day –I UPDATE: Way to go American League Honors All Stars in winning the District II Little League tournament Championship against your Gresham National League rivals. You are an awesome group of young men who have done exceptionally well - you are all excellent players who did yourselves, your team, your families, and this Old Coach ... PROUD!!!

GLL AL Honors Red Sox ROCK!!!

Haiti, Day II: Spent day basically facilitating housekeeping items like securing an Embassy ID, finding a desk to work at, & getting plugged in to the computer system.
Left Embassy compound once for a meeting at the UN Base at airport. Again, not much has changed; lots of crumbled houses, debris, and homeless remain. One thing that has ...changes is a willingness among the many stakeholders to play well together in the Haitian sandbox.

Haiti, Day I: Left Portland International 0830 today, swapped planes in Dallas (saw the new Dallas Cowboy's Stadium as I landed) then off to Miami and a "Fly By" of the Deep Water Horizon Oil Rig and its many miles of oil-septic mess - actually saw where surface oil is being burned. Way to go BP!!!
Landed in Miami about 2300 (9 p.m. ...) Leaving for Port au Prince 1230 Sunday for up to a 30 day stay. Mission is to locate, evaluate, and recommend debris processing and disposal sites. My thought is an artificial reef!!!

Haiti, Day -I: After nearly two weeks on hold, I finally receive orders to Haiti; 1543 (3:43 pm) Friday - Report to Port au Prince Sunday, 27 June. Wouldn't you know - I leave the day before the AL Minor Honor Tournament begins for my wonderful team of 12. Go Figure???

Go AL Honor's Red Sox - You ROCK!!!