Still in Camps

Even though it's been more than two years since the earthquake, there are still a half a million people here living in displacement camps. This Washington Post article describes the situation better than I can. With Other Worlds, Alexis is working alongside Haitian organizations that are trying to push for much-needed public housing as one solution. I just take the pictures. The last one of these ran on the front page of the Post on Monday:

 

Tourista!

Possibly the best new character to appear in this year's kanaval, a mockery of the role of the UN's MINUSTAH soldiers in Haiti:

Reimagining Cité Soleil as a GARDEN

On what used to be an acre of trash, amazing friends over at Pax Christi in Cité Soleil have imagined this wonderful project (Haiti's largest urban vegetable garden, planted by children) into being:

It's called the Tap Tap Garden. See here the press release from Bochika, the organization that, along with SOIL (who also put composting toilets on the site), helped make this happen with the support of MCC and others. Be inspired. Really.

The bus awaits...

to take me to kanaval!

Ok, so it's not really waiting. In fact, after I hop on a motorcycle taxi to get down to Portail Légoane, I'll have to find a bus going to Jacmel. I'll purchase a ticket and sit on the bus until it seems full, then sit some more until it's absolutely packed (and there's a goat, or at least a chicken, poking me in the thigh). Finally, after a four-or-so-hour trip that traverses the mountains, I'll arrive in Jacmel.

Ben is already there, working on a story. We'll be staying at a friend's house in Jacmel until Monday, though we hope to escape to the beach for a bit, too. Carnival celebrations are well underway there (as here), but Sunday is the big parade. Street theater, pumping music, elaborate and fantastical costumes, perhaps a wee bit of rum...  I'd better go pack my best dancing shoes!

By the way, do you think my mask will get crushed on the bus?

Better use of UNDP funding?

My sister recently forwarded us the most amazing e-mail (scroll down). "Two Million and Five Hundred Thousand British Pounds" is almost 4 million dollars. That's more than the UN Development Program (UNDP) will spend in 2012 on environmental mitigation in Haiti (the country now labeled as the world's most vulnerable to climate change). It's more than they plan to spend on disaster risk reduction, when we've just been informed that we're at risk of 'powerful' earthquakes. It's a fifth of what UNDP spends annually in Haiti on their joint "Rule of Law" program with MINUSTAH (the controversial military occupation that's been in Haiti with full legal impunity since 2004), while the justice system seems about to let "Baby Doc" Duvalier get away with murder, torture and other human rights abuses carried out during his brutal 15-year dictatorship. 

If they would just give us the money for our "economy growth and personal development"... well, imagine the possibilities! Of course, we would have to spend 20% to develop a part of our community. Taco stand in Nerettes, anyone?

~

Dear Sir/Madam,

This is to notify you that you have been chosen through your e-mail address By the Board of trustees of the above International (Charity & Human Developmental) Organization, as one of the final recipients to receive a Cash Grant/Donation for your economy growth and personal development for the year 2012. Based on the random selection of internet Web Pages and millions of Supermarket cash invoices worldwide your e-mail was selected among the beneficiaries to receive the sum of  £2,500,000.00 (Two Million and Five Hundred Thousand British Pounds) as developmental aid from the UN Foundation. Beneficiaries have been chosen from every UN Member Nation from all continents. You are required to expeditiously Contact the Executive Secretary of The Donations Department with the details below for documentation and processing of the release of your cash aid, Please Endeavour to quote your Qualification numbers (UNF/FBF-816-1119 G-900-94) in all discussions.

Forward this email to the Executive Secretary:
Mr Richard Daniels

E-mail: undp.grantn@w.cn

Note that at least 20% of the awarded Grant funds should be used by you (The Recipient) to develop a part of your community.

On behalf of the Board,
Yours faithfully,
UNDP- Mr. Burr Carrie

Boozy Weekend

Though we're usually beer drinkers, this past weekend involved an unusual amount of hooch. On Saturday, following a hike in Kenscoff with the lovely SF,

(that's water in Ben's canteen, I swear)

and the foraging of nasturtium seeds for pickling,

we warmed and numbed ourselves for the long taptap ride down with 20-gourdes worth of pineapple-infused kleren (100 proof sugarcane liquor that will make your eyeballs pop out).

Our options included kleren infused with sour barbados cherries, pineapple, sitwon (key lime), saffron, the aphrodesiac bwa cochon (literally pig wood, or in English science-speak, Sterculiaceae), and a bitter herb that I can pronounce but not spell. 

On Sunday, we used the hose from a discarded water filter to siphon 5-gallons of ginger honey mead into smaller containers for a second round of fermenting.

Turns out, this process is considerable when it involves scouring the city for affordable demijon (or, carboys, the kind of big bottles with narrow necks pictured on Ben's knee). They're usually sold on the street as antiques. Finally, we found a friendly, half-drunk kleren vendor who sold us empty bottles (with their original labels) for a reasonable price. "Antiques," indeed! That, my friends, is a label for worm medicine:

After being carefully scrubbed and siphoned, our bottles of mead are happily bubbling away. (We didn't find enough carboys, so we used some wine bottles, too. We also didn't have enough airlocks. Instead, we stuck balloons over the mouth of each bottle, to slowly let out air without contamination. It looks like a party on our kitchen counter.)

Obama Beach Hotel: there and back again

There's a short-cut out to Route National One, a dusty paved track that cuts along the edge of Cité Soleil, past the landfill at Troutier and past Zoranj, where expensive pre-fab houses have sat empty since a farcical housing expo last year. Once a hotspot for hijackings, UN soldiers patrol here with regularity. The left turn onto the "highway" is now marked by a new, under-construction sewage treatment facility.

I find the stretch of road from here to Arcahaie endlessly fascinating. The road runs along the coast, through desert dotted with the bright blue tarps of displacement settlements. (This blue, also the hallmark color of the new telecommunications giant Natcom, is a discernible part of post-earthquake Haiti's color scheme). The road winds through Titanyan, with its sulfur springs and the area recently re-named Saint Christopher (as if re-naming a place erases its history), body-dumping grounds for presidents and gangs, and of earthquake and cholera victims. Now, Titanyan is covered with a patchwork of stones marking out plots claimed by landless people from Port-au-Prince.

Randomly, the desert contains a sports complex here, a satellite university campus or orphanage there, a few industrial parks, a village of colored houses built by Food for the Poor and the mission compounds of Samaritans Purse and Mission of Hope. Other unidentifiable and out-of-place buildings sprout up among the cactus, weird mirage-like oases surrounded by green and flowering trees. 

The next sizeable town after Titanyan is Cabaret, formerly Duvalierville, a failed development project built by Papa Doc Duvalier in 1962. Saturday is market day in Cabaret and the road is lined with market women selling used clothes and goods brought down from the mountains - vegetables, handwoven rope, mats and baskets. Ben has to squeeze our motorcycle between a stake body truck overloaded with plantains and second-hand yellow school buses, then narrowly avoids hitting an errant goat.

The community of Ti-Sous is on the Côte des Arcadins (the name of this stretch of coastline) after Archaie, after the cemetery and the watermelon stands (where you can buy watermelon almost all year-round), but before the long string of beach resorts: Kalico, Wahoo, Moulin-sou-Mer, Indigo.

You can't possibly miss the turn to get where we're headed. "Obama Beach Hotel" is emblazoned loudly on a white sign with a giant arrow pointing across the street, and then again on cement posts on either side of the gravel road leading down to the beach.  

Obama Beach Hotel is on a cove of pebbled beach with absolutely crystal-clear water and the dying remnants of a coral reef. It's cheaper and simpler than the resorts to the north (though still overpriced, as all hotels in Haiti tend to be) and even though it's Saturday, we're among the only guests. Fine by us - we get pick of the best beach chairs for reading, countless games of backgammon and to watch the sun set over La Gonâve.

On Sundays, the tranquil hotel transforms into a beach party. By 10:00 AM the place is swarming with a significant portion of the UN's Brazilian battalion, in speedos, with BBQ grills, coolers and speakers in tow. So, following breakfast and coffee overlooking the sea, we head back down the coast.

Back again through Archaie and Cabaret, into the desert past the missions, the industrial parks...

Two Years after the Earthquake in Haiti, “Housing Is Our Battle”

On the second anniversary of the Haiti earthquake, a protestor's sign reads, "If there is land for factories, there should be land for housing." [Photo by Ben]

By Alexis Erkert

January 19, 2012

Remember, you are marching today for those who couldn’t be here,
To say to them, “We haven’t forgotten. We’ll never forget.”
And to say to those that are still here,
We will take a stand for the rebuilding of Haiti.
                - Right to Housing Collective, January 12, 2012

On the morning of January 12, 2012, a group of women, children and men wound their way through the city wearing white, the Haitian color for mourning. Part memorial, they deposited wreaths of flowers on sites that had become mass graves during the 2010 earthquake, and part protest, they carried a banner that read “Two years later: Enough is enough.” They alternated between singing a funeral dirge and chanting, “We need houses to live in!”

Haitian social movements have reclaimed douze janvye, January 12, as a symbol of moving forward. Two years later, 520,000[i] continue to live in appalling conditions in displacement camps. And so, on January 11 and 12, thousands of Haitians – peasant farmers, activists, and displacement camp residents – took to the streets to denounce the situation in tent camps and the forced evictions of residents, and to call on the Haitian government to undertake land reform, provide public housing, and protect women's rights.

Although political and social divisions have long fissured Haitian movements, organizations from across historic divides are demanding many of the same things. One clear, common emphasis is the immediate need for land and housing for the displaced.

Excerpts from declarations and speeches on or around January 12, all with a focus on the right to housing, follow.

From a joint press conference of the International Lawyers’ Office (BAI) and residents of Camp Mariani, denouncing the threat of illegal forced eviction by the landowner in complicity with the local government:

We raise our voices to denounce with all of our might, before the national and international community, the threat of forced eviction, and arbitrary and illegal acts of violence being carried out against us by the major. We can’t take the pressure anymore. We ask all the institutions involved (the president, the government, the mayor, NGOs assisting displaced people, human rights organizations, etc.) to press, press our case, to take this issue into consideration so that the government and mayor sign a moratorium to block the aggression against people living in this camp, to plan what should be done with regards to displaced people, to respect the rights that we have as people. As Article 22 of this country’s constitution and Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declare, “All people have the right to housing.”

From a speech given by Marie Frantz Joachim of Haitian Women’s Solidarity (SOFA), on behalf of the National Coordination of Women’s Organizations (KONAP), composed of a wide variety of feminist organizations, during the January 12, 2012 memorial march:

Out of respect for the battle our ancestors carried out, we too undertake the struggle to force our leaders to take responsibility for… the people living under tents. The housing problem is a structural problem and demands a structural response. Displaced Haitians cannot continue to live in the chicken cages that are being constructed for them. Haitians should be living in dignity…  And so we say, “This is our battle: the right for people to live in adequate housing.” And we ask that everyone in the social movement, all organizations, come together so that we can clearly, collectively, respond.

From the Eye-to-Eye Platform (Platfòm Je nan Je), a 12-member grouping that includes four of Haiti’s largest peasant associations, in a declaration to the Haitian Parliament following a march attended by thousands of protestors: 

The Eye-to-Eye Platform supports people from all four corners of the country by submitting the following demands and recommendations to the government:

• Remove people from under tents as quickly as possible; but that doesn’t mean to send them back to pre-existing slums or to the shantytowns created after the earthquake;
• The government must implement a disaster risk management plan to identify safe construction sites, with land for farming set apart from land for housing;
• The government must create and implement a housing policy, with urban planning and zoning; In this plan we must clearly see what needs to be done in both urban and rural areas; This plan needs to designate responsibility for land and housing to state institutions;
• Guarantee the security of displaced people, especially in the places to which they are being relocated…

From the report by the National Human Rights Defense Network (RNDDH), one of Haiti's most prominent human rights organizations: Advocacy for the Situation of January 10, 2010 Earthquake Victims:

Recommendations of RNDDH to the relevant institutions:

• Plan an effective re-location strategy with the participation of displaced people;
• Develop a public housing policy with the involvement of the Haitian government's own Public Enterprise for the Promotion of Social Housing (EPPLS);
• Strengthen state institutions necessary to effectively control the situation in camps and relocation sites;
• Insist that all actors involved in rebuilding the country adopt a human rights-based approach to everything that they do.

From a speech by Colette Lespinasse and Reyneld Sanon of the Right-to-Housing Collective, made up of 30-some Haitian organizations, grassroots groups and displacement camp associations.

We, organizations of survivors living in internally displaced persons [IDP] camps, as well as social and grassroots organizations, state:

• The government must define a land use policy for the country;
• The Parliament must draft and vote on a law to guarantee the right to housing;
• The government must look for and acquire land though expropriation [eminent domain] so that there is sufficient space to respond to the housing needs of the population;
• Women, children and the disabled, and the population in general must participate in decision-making regarding housing;
• All neighborhoods should be places where people can live in dignity and security

We resolve to remain mobilized in the struggle to change our society and our government. We resolve to regain the sovereignty of our country to construct a society in which we can enjoy guaranteed access to housing and all our fundamental rights.

From a presentation on housing in Camp Carradeux on January 12, 2012 by Olrich Jean Pierre of Noise Travels, News Spreads (Bri Kouri Nouvèl Gaye), an alternative media group doing advocacy and public education:

When we struggle for housing, we’re not just asking for houses. There are other services that should accompany housing. A house in an area where potable water isn’t available does not respect the right to housing. People need access to healthcare.  The battle for housing is not simply a battle for 4 square meters to live in. It’s a battle for public schools to educate our children so that they don’t have to go work in factories. It’s a battle to have access to healthcare when we’re sick.

We’re not just mobilizing to denounce the situation. No, the struggle before us is the struggle to pressure the government, to ask them, “Where are the houses that you’ve prepared for us?” And then to ask if there are toilets inside of them. Because we are a people with dignity. And with rights that need to be respected.

---

[i] HAITI Emergency Shelter and Camp Coordination Camp Management Cluster, Displacement Tracking Matrix V2.0 Update, November 30, 2011.

See Other Worlds’ recent article, Home: From Displacement Camps to Community in Haiti, for more detail on the right-to-housing movement in Haiti and how Haitian organizations are responding with advocacy and alternatives.

Copyleft Other Worlds. You may reprint this article in whole or in part.  Please credit any text or original research you use to Alexis Erkert and Other Worlds.

Anniversary Blues | By Edwidge Danticat

An excerpt from Edwidge Danticat's essay in the February 2012 issue of The Progressive

Anniversaries hurt. They brutalize the body. They pummel the spirit. Especially the anniversary of a catastrophe, where we are remembering the death not just of one or two people, but hundreds of thousands: 300,000 to be precise. Just when we thought our pain had subsided, it emerges again, it expands from a daily ache, which we hoped would one day disappear, to the throbbing agony we experienced at the moment that it seemed the world ended.

Two years ago in Haiti, the Earth opened, buildings collapsed, and people died. Armies descended, displaying military might worthy of a war zone. A flock of nongovernmental agencies came, too, growing from an estimated 10,000 to 16,000, making Haiti host to more nongovernmental organizations per capita than almost any other country in the world. Money was pledged by the world’s powers, great and small, $9.9 billion worth of promises, with less than half of that actually delivered.

Two years ago, I watched all this unfold from my home in Miami, mostly with an infant in my arms. Three weeks later, when I was finally able to travel to Haiti, my chest nearly exploded in spite of the pumping and bottling one must do when away from a nursing baby. During that first trip, seeing so many people—including friends and family members—sleeping on the streets, in the shadows of shattered houses, cramped next to each other in public places in makeshift tents, I dreaded the first rain.

Since then lots and lots of rain has fallen. Even a hurricane has blown through.

Two years worth of rain and sun has thinned out the tents. Wherever they could, people abandoned the pretense of temporary shelter and converted cloth and tarp to tin and wood, even where the land was not theirs. Some have been forcibly evicted. Gunmen have come in at night—some sent by private landowners, others by the state.

You will hear that the number of the displaced has been reduced in half since the earthquake, that it has shrunk from 1.5 million to 600,000, but you will not hear where the displaced have gone.

In a devastated city of mostly renters, where unemployment is at nearly 60 percent, the displaced have been accused of purposefully squatting in squalor, living in open spaces where the heat dehydrates babies, and women and girls are raped, supposedly just to catch the attention of nongovernmental organizations. As if they had mansions that they were neglecting, hidden food and water that was going to waste, schools for their children that they were hoping to trade up for a better one, as if they had anything but their dignity left intact.

Sometimes it can feel as though none of us is doing enough. That feeling, especially among those of us children of Haiti who are living in the diaspora, is the opposite of donor fatigue. It is sometimes hope and sometimes guilt. Hundreds of friends and family members rely on us. We finance homes, clinics, schools, weddings, and funerals, but there is always more to do for, and with, people who are eager to get a foothold themselves and do so proudly every day.

On this anniversary, while remembering the dead and celebrating those still living, I also want to recognize more than ever the marginalized members of Haitian society—people like my grandparents and their grandparents, poor, urban and rural, self-reliant and proud men and women who are the backbone of Haiti. Without their full inclusion and participation in the reconstruction of their country, Haiti will never fully succeed.

Originally published here.

January 12, 2012

Re-posted from January 12, 2011. Though another year has passed, I'm struck by how similar Haiti feels today. In brackets I've made changes that differentiate the situation today from one year ago.

[Two] years ago today, at 4:55 PM, we heard a deafening sound and our house started to shake violently. For the next 35 seconds, we struggled to stay standing as it seemed like the world was collapsing around us.

Today, we mourn the hundreds of thousands that were killed in the earthquake, the millions displaced, the loss of massive amounts infrastructure, of schools and hospitals and government buildings. We mourn the ongoing tragedy of an inefficient response, mired in bureaucracy and corruption and exploitation. We mourn that [half a] million people are still living in tents, that foreign companies are benefiting more from reconstruction contracts than Haitians. We mourn that such a devastating disaster did little to uproot the social, economic and political structures that oppress the majority of Haitians.

The city feels as though it's wrapped in a shroud. This morning the streets are empty, but churches are overflowing with Haitians wearing white and black, the colors of mourning. The government is launching [their program to re-locate one of the city's largest displacement camps]. A ceremony is taking place [in Titanyan, the site of the earthquake's mass graves], masses being held at cathedrals around the city. We grieve.

We also celebrate. We celebrate life, our lives and the lives of the people around us that are active and engaged in trying to shape Haiti’s future. We celebrate a vision for how things could be different for this country. We celebrate what has been done, the rubble that has been moved, the houses that have been repaired, the small businesses that have been rebuilt. In the midst of the mourning, I can also hear people singing.

[And we protest. Haitian social movement are reclaiming douze janvye, January 12, as a symbol of moving forward. Yesterday and today, thousands of people have marched through Port-au-Prince, denouncing the situation in tent camps, and calling on the Haitian government to undertake land reform, provide public housing, and protect women's rights.]

Please pray for this country today. Pray that today Haiti will recapture the sense of solidarity that was so prevalent in those first weeks after the earthquake and, along with that, the energy to move forward towards healing and real, just and participative reconstruction.

2-Year Link Round Up

Memories are powerful. Today I opened a random Haiti article that popped up on my twitter feed and upon reading the first line ("Two years ago this Thursday, at least 150,000 people died one evening in Haiti"), promptly dissolved into tears.

Probably, Ben and I should have escaped to Kenscoff or the beach this week to ignore the anniversary buzz and nurture ourselves. Instead, I am torturing myself by reading every 2-year anniversary article, editorial and reflection that crosses my desk [meaning my lap, really] via google, twitter, facebook, email and the local newspaper. Believe me, there are a lot. Haiti-philes are usually prolific in their research and analysis; aid groups have a lot of explaining and defending to do; and the mainstream media is capitalizing on the anniversary as a time when more people are paying attention.  

A random assortment of things that I've read have stood out to me. 

For reality (& sobering statistics):
Haiti 2 years later: Half a million still in camps (Trenton Daniel, AP)  

Haiti: Seven Places Where the Earthquake Money Did and Did Not Go (Ramanauskas and Quigley)

Did you drink Soup? Strains on Solidarity in Haiti (Mark Schuller, Huffpost)

For overall depth of coverage: 
Haiti Experiences Progress, exasperation 2 years after quake (Jacqueline Charles, Miami Herald)

For passion:
Two Years Later, Where is the Outrage? (Let Haiti Live, Melinda Miles)

For contrast
Les Nanti's d'Haiti (Paolo Woods' photographs of Haitian elite in Le Monde)

For thought: 
A Stubborn Savior: Is Bill Clinton Haiti's Hope for Salvation? (Marc Hujer, Der Spiegel)   

For laughs:
It's Haiti Week over at the Cartoon Movement, a great collaborative of political cartoonists from around the world. Today's cartoon, Haiti: Paradigm Shift, was especially excellent.

An awkward translation from English into... English of the article I co-authored last week on grassroots housing alternatives:
http://world-disaster-news.com/new/haiti-earthquake/beverly-bell-home-from-displacement-camps-to-community-in-haiti

And for a truly bright spot in a week of mostly tragic, condemning news coverage:
Haiti Can be Rich Again (Laurent Dubois and Deborah Jenson, NYT op ed)

Smoke Signals

[I (Ben) have been working in the Dominican Republic for the past week and my bus trip back to Port-Au-Prince on Saturday (usually a 7-hour trip or so) took 22 hours. My bus arrived in the border town on the DR side, Jimani, around 3pm and most of the town was out in the street burning tires - trying to smoke signals to local politicians, perhaps? We couldn't drive through so we waited, but the border closes at 7pm. A few people left the bus on motorcycles to try and make it through the border, but they didn't make it either. One was held up but only had 30 pesos so he was let go, another couple got caught in some shooting between an angry driver and protesters and they hurried back, terrified. The bus parked in front of a police station and we all slept on the bus. Thankfully, there were restaurants nearby with food and plenty of Presidente.]