More than a year after Haiti’s devastating earthquake, 800,000 Haitians still living in tents pin their hopes on a former singer’s ability to set a course for change. Last week, Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council announced that Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly had won the country’s presidential election runoff and the responsibility to lead the nation as it continues to recover from the catastrophe. Martelly declared that the people have charged him with a mandate to change their lives.
I spoke to Martelly over the phone a few months after visiting Haiti last summer.
"Haitians have to come together," he said, "and put Haiti first, before themselves."
Martelly likened the country’s divisions to the perpetually changing design of the Haitian flag, which past leaders have altered upon taking power to mark their authority. He talked of building one Haiti rather than multiple, disparate ones. Haiti has a history of social division dating back to slavery at the hands of French colonists to modern schisms between poverty-stricken masses and political elites. Now, the people pin their hopes on the president-elect and his ability to lead all Haitians, regardless of class, out of the country’s current state.
With the first post-disaster administration set to take office, well-meaning outsiders must allow Haitians to build whatever new Haiti eventually emerges. Since former slaves won Haiti’s independence in 1804, outsiders have been intervening in every way and for every reason imaginable, usurping Haitian self-determination in the process. “The international community’s lack of understanding of this environment,” one Haitian told me, “leads to the detriment of the country and tarnishes its reputation in the eyes of the Haitian people.” The Haitian government must now be allowed to fill gaps that international aid has been filling since long before last year’s earthquake.
While in Haiti, Martelly’s wife described to me how on holidays her family would often put together a few hundred care packages of meals, toys and toiletries and deliver them to certain Port-au-Prince neighborhoods. She talked about how important it is to her that, during distributions, she speak to and touch every person who receives a package. As a Haitian, even if a well-off one, she understands the plights of her countrymen. Distributions by her organization, Fondation Rose et Blanc, are much different from typical ones done by international organizations, where bags of food are thrown from the backs of trucks to a turbulent throng, hardly a human - or humane - interaction.
Haitians know their own challenges and will ultimately have to be the ones who overcome them. They will live in the new Haiti that emerges long after UN advisers have flown home. Empowering them to rebuild means putting resources into their hands, not having one commission approve every reconstruction project, which is the current plan. The trickle-down efforts of international organizations and aid agencies take a long time to reach the masses, and it's easy for well-intentioned outsiders to misjudge what people on the ground need. A bubble-up approach that affords Haitians the freedom and means to choose how to overcome their own obstacles will help much more than trickle-down efforts from the top.
Two Haitian pastors who help run a community center in Port-au-Prince told me last June that many people in tent cities were itching to return to their small businesses. But they didn't have access to the $50 they needed to restart their barbershop or restaurant and start cutting hair or cooking again. By now, however, small-scale solutions, like the oft-mentioned “alternative bank” Fonkoze, have helped many people directly. The organization has spent 95 percent of the more than $10 million it received in the year following the earthquake, with most funding going directly into Haitians’ hands. As a comparison, the UN recently announced that 68 percent of the roughly $2 billion pledged by international donors for 2010 has been disbursed, although not necessarily spent.
The commission that approves reconstruction projects submitted by international organizations and private companies has sifted through and approved many proposals. It will take much longer to decide how to spend the $10 billion pledged by the international community over the next 10 years. The choke-point created by having one commission approve every proposal conjures images of the point where I crossed the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, a two-lane gravel road congested for kilometers with cars, mini-buses and 18-wheelers.
Certain large-scale projects may warrant the use of such a commission, but Haitians needn’t be wholly dependent upon its rebuilding approach. Other resources, like Fonkoze, can create opportunities for Haitians to climb out of post-quake chasms themselves without having to wait on the long arm of a United Nations to reach down and lift them up.
Perhaps in the absence of a thousand Fonkozes there are no clear alternatives to the commission. But there is a clear alternative to infantilizing Haitians by co-opting their right to determine their own paths to reconstruction. There’s a difference between helping people help themselves and usurping control in the name of aid.
While in Haiti I stayed just north of Port-au-Prince for a few nights, at the compound of an international NGO. The facility was ringed in chain link that was topped with barbed wire. There were many white people milling about. It didn’t feel like America, but it didn’t really feel like Haiti, either.
As with many compounds that house American expats, a private security detail protected the facility. I talked with a few of the guards over the course of the days I spent there. One morning I spoke to a guard named Jean-Louis as he sat balancing his shotgun across his lap. I asked him what he thought of the Americans who routinely came through the NGO compound to do projects like construction work and medical missions. They visited Haiti, exactly as I was, for a week at a time. “I think it's good that they come here to help,” he told me, “but I don't get to meet many of them since very few of them speak French or Creole.”
I thought of Jean-Louis when reading a recent Slate piece that asked whether foreign aid keeps Haiti poor. The article quoted a Haitian journalist saying, “I'm working with a lot of sophisticated people but who have absolutely no notions of what this country is about. I work at the UN, and every day I have to go to meetings. I'm the only Haitian there, and I have to tell them, 'Your perception is not right.' I feel that it is a lost battle.”
But Haitians have not lost their battle. In the midst of their fight against displacement, cholera and another impending Hurricane season, they’ve elected a new leader and moved one step closer to building a new Haiti. We should let them set their own course of reconstruction, because most of us can't read the map.
