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Grace

7 Feb 2010

I have woken up many mornings from dreams about temporary building methods to protect people in the camps from rain and flood for the next eight months. They have involved various configurations of materials to deal with different sets of issues, like heat, condensation, and theft, in addition to rain and flood. In my dreams I'm important enough to make these things happen.

The most vivid dream was about tarps flung high and attached into a collective roof. When I woke from it, I was struck by the heartbreaking feeling I have been locked in struggle with for the last couple weeks:

How long will people live in the parks and the dusty roads? If their downtown houses are on contested property, they don't have title because the title is under the rubble, there is no income to rebuild right now, and most construction will have to wait until the end of the rainy season in November anyway - will the people of Petionville and other camp host communities tolerate sheets and sticks that grow into corrugated zinc-roofed shacks in their public parks for a year? For longer?

When will the host communities change from the post-disaster outpouring of cross-class sympathy to the long-term approach to homelessness of blaming the people, pushing them about, trying to hide them under the rug, or exploiting them?

Will president René Préval stay in office and continue to avoid leading his country, or will we see a new president in the middle of this thing? And will the next president respond to land claims disputes like Aristide - "If you're poor, build where you want and it is yours" - or like the Duvalier family - "If you build there I will have it torn down. If you talk shit, the macoutes will get ya."

Politics matters, especially in the midst of great need. With my heart bruised, I tried to understand the siege of Haiti. I watched the food pile up on the runways and inside guarded compounds and the grocery stores be restocked, but the people without money to buy could only look at the food. And the prices kept going up. It wasn't unpreparedness like FEMA's late arrival after Katrina - this is what the United Nations does! They're supposed to be good at it! It didn't appear to be an attempt at reoccupation by the United States - with 10,000 non-governmental organizations, Haiti is already occupied by a civilian force, and has UN MiNUSTAH troops occupying to boot.

I think the siege was occasioned by touchy superpowers without working cellphones, hobbled by bureaucracy, trying to avoid international incidents which could cost somebody their job, and allowed to persist due to René Préval's vacuum of leadership. None of the big players could distribute food until they were all able to sit down and make a plan - or have a plan made for them by an acknowledged leader like Préval. But where to sit when communications are unreliable and the United States 82nd Airborne soldiers need to work through their command structure to leave the base and participate in the meetings at the UN compound?

To come through all this and then to have nowhere to go where people will have you is more chilling to me than the rainy season's effect on the newly homeless, more chilling than the threat of landslides and flash floods, more chilling than the siege occasioned by the vacuum of leadership, more chilling than the closed schools, canceled elections, death toll, or mass amputations.

When dealing with the governments, the UN occupation force, or the occupying NGOs, you get to fill out a lot of paperwork, wait a lot, and stand in line a lot. You get used to a landscape of walls, razor wire, blancs with guns in cammies, boonie hats, and shades. You learn how to bathe in the street, how to pass the time and keep your mind off of your pain or your hunger or your worry or any of it. Then the powers that be come around with more paperwork, you fill it out, and you wait some more.

Homelessness on this scale is a new thing, and being without a home is new to displaced people in the camps. In the United States, similarly, most homeless people have been out for less than six months, which is part of why so many homeless people freeze to death every winter in Washington, DC - there's a learning curve on homeless survival, and for most people when the winter hits, it is their first.

While there might be many hard lessons in survival ahead, the camps are not made up of isolated individuals. The lack of government action under Préval was preceded by other distant and unaccountable governments. The camps are clean because the people keep them clean. School teachers have set up makeshift schools in their camps. Whole neighborhoods walked up from downtown together and still live where they stopped to rest; there are few strangers in the camps. Most communities are accustomed to handling their own safety, security, justice, dispute resolution, and resource distribution problems. Each camp is a small commonwealth of tens of thousands of the newly homeless, with much less public drinking and drug use than any homeless camp I ever lived in.

But neglected camps become slums, then slums are torn down and people have to live among strangers, and the children are no longer safe at all. The long-term question about the camps is not about how to temporarily prolong the life of this hungry child, it is about how to support the continued unity of the families and neighborhoods that are threatened by the disaster recovery effort.

Good research and plenty of experience show that intact neighborhoods and families means less orphans and street children, less thieves, less murder, less rape, less violence against women, higher rates of child survival. Intact neighborhoods and families means less alcohol use, less arson, less drug trafficking, less kidnapping. Intact neighborhoods and families means less depression, less traumatic stress, less hunger, less loneliness, less fear, less elder abuse and abandonment. Intact neighborhoods and families means less loss of tradition, history, pride, self-respect, and self-knowledge.

There is also a terrible struggle ahead for the businesspeople and professionals among the Haitian nationals slapped down by the shuddering earth. It is necessary for the professionals to find opportunities in the new Haiti, where they can make a good enough salary to afford the new price of things and be able to invest in property, banks, and stocks and bonds, develop their technical expertise, and support the foundation of a Haitian national economy.

If Haitian professionals cannot honestly make enough because internationals monopolize the employment opportunities either as volunteers or as paid professionals, then Haitian professionals have to continue to do unpaid work, work as day-to-day wage laborers with their value estimated on the basis of their Kreyol language ability not their skills, for instance, as primary care doctors, or they are forced to immigrate to the United States or France or Canada to gain the respect in their field that they deserve.

Haitian businesspeople need the opportunity to develop businesses that lead the country into the future, and not be trapped by the NGO occupation into continued unpaid work and dead ends, or being only intermediaries for the extraction of raw resources, the sales of finished products, or the promotion of entertainment.

Even with a foundation of available salaries and opportunities, should those impediments be somehow overcome, it still remains for professionals and businesspeople to hear Frantz Fanon's charge (in "The Pitfalls of National Consciousness"), put the technical expertise they have snatched from the donor countries in the service of the people, and be creative enough to do a new and uniquely Haitian thing, growing again from the roots of black liberty Toussaint L'Ouverture talked about.

What does it take for professionals to be capable of rationalizing such popular action after more than two hundred years under the crushing boot of neocolonialism? Where will the people live to maintain intact families and communities? I wish I knew. More, I wish the people, the professionals, and the businesspeople of that beacon of freedom called Haiti knew.

Page last updated: Friday, March 5, 2010, 6:58 PM HT