On the privilege of leaving Haiti: A conversation with my father
Posted: May 12, 2010 Filed under: haiti 6 Comments »This conversation took place on my third day in Haiti. After staying with my family for two nights, my father drove me through PetionVille to the Hotel Oloffson where I stayed for the next three nights so I could meet other journalists and explore the city by myself.
The premise of this conversation: He just told me he wants to leave the country and live on another island.
(Note, French and Creole are his primary languages.)
Recorded April 6, 2010.
[Recorder on]
Me: Why would you want to live on another island?
Dad: Because I think another island is better, is organized, there are organizations, there are other… I can not fight anymore. I don’t want to fight anymore.
Favorite journalism movie quote ever
Posted: April 22, 2010 Filed under: Movies, Thinkers | Tags: Badass bitches, Blood Diamond, Jennifer Connelly 4 Comments »Jennifer Connelly, Blood Diamond:
“Do you think I’m exploiting his grief? You’re right. It’s shit. It’s like one of those infomercials. Little black babies with swollen bellies and flies in their eyes. I’ve got in here dead mothers, I’ve got severed limbs, but it’s nothing new. It might be enough make someone cry if they read it, maybe even write a check. But its not going to be enough to make it stop. I’m sick of writing about victims, but it’s all I can fucking do. Because I need facts, I need names, I need dates, I need pictures, I need bank accounts. People back home wouldn’t buy a ring if they knew it cost someone else their hand. I can’t write that story until I get facts that can be verified, which is to say, until I find someone who will go on record. So if that is not you, and you’re not really going to help me and we’re not really going to screw, then why don’t you get the fuck out of my face and let me do my work?”
h/t: honesttoblog
Back in the U.S.
Posted: April 20, 2010 Filed under: haiti, Musings | Tags: reflections Leave a comment »Flying in over Miami from Haiti was an odd experience. I had a window seat and entertained myself for the beginning of the flight by studying the terrain of Haiti: the dense, chaotic communities of Port-au-Prince with houses practically built on top of each other, and the rugged deforested mountains sprinkled ever-so-sparsely with houses and farming plots. I could just make out some areas where whole neighborhoods had collapsed down mountainsides like fallen dominoes.
When the pilot instructed us over the PA system to prepare for landing, I pulled up the window cover and was taken aback by the sights below: Perfectly straight rows of McMansions with aquamarine pools, massive hotels, order, wealth, functionality. All things that are rarely, if ever, present in Haiti. The contrast was alarming; the perfection, disturbing. I looked up at the two Haitian men sitting in the row in front of me, staring out the window as well. I wondered what their lives had been like, and what a person would think experiencing the United States after living their entire lives in Haiti. I imagined that person was me, even though I’d only spent two weeks there, and that I was seeing things in perspective for the first time looking down at Miami, realizing how bad things actually were in Haiti. There are so many problems there, problems of so large a scope they seem impossible to fix. But when you live there, it’s just life. It’s just the way things are.
Impossible though they may seem for fix or even help, I’m still going to try, through my little humanitarian project.
Looking back on my time in Haiti, it all feels like a dream now. A very strange dream. And you were there and you were there and you…
Foreign aid presence in Haiti
Posted: April 14, 2010 Filed under: haiti | Tags: Doctors Without Borders, foreign aid, international relief efforts, Partners in Health, UNICEF, USAID 1 Comment »Yesterday I tweeted something that people seemed to find very interesting:
23:36: Orgs I have seen all over Haiti: Partners in Health, Doctors Without Borders, Unicef, USAID. Orgs I have seen none of: Red Cross, Yele Haiti
23:37: And I have been looking. And I have been *around* — walking, driving, in tap taps, on motorbikes, etc..
With the capacious amount of donations directed towards Haiti relief and rebuilding efforts in the immediate aftermath of the quake, lots of which was made possible by technologies that enabled individuals to donate via text message, everyone seems to be wondering: Is my money going where it was intended? Is it making tangible differences in the quality of life of Haitians who were injured or displaced by the earthquake?
So I’ve been keeping my eyes open for organizational efforts over the past 10 days that I’ve been in Haiti.
Of the donated tarps I’ve seen that people are using as walls and roofs on the make-shift shelters they’ve built on the sidewalk and streets outside their crumbled homes, many bear the USAID logo. All over Haiti, every day, you see teams of people wearing bright yellow shirts, rolling wheelbarrows full of rubble away from buildings, picking up trash, and laying the foundations for new buildings. These people are part of the “Cash for Work” program, which is a part of OTI (Organization of Transitional Incentives) and DAI (Development Alternatives Inc.), orgs that were hired by USAID to clean up government properties like schools and community centers. These people make between $8 and $9 a day, depending on the exchange rate.
I’ve seen lots of tents and outposts that are clearly marked as UNICEF areas, especially in the downtown areas where the population is the most dense. I passed one location where two huge UNICEF tents were pitched outside a partially-collapsed building, and Alain and I stopped to ask one of the UNICEF personal (clearly designated by the t-shirt he was wearing), what they were doing there. He said the building was a primary school, and the tents were serving as temporary classrooms:
Walking through the middle of the tent city that formed on the grass of the central park in PetionVille where the sidewalks are lined with vendors selling Haitian paintings, the flaps on the latrines — which somebody had to dig out— bear the red Medicales Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders) logo. I have also seen several MSF stations, as well as stations for Partners in Health, set back from the roads and the chaos, where people can go to receive medical treatment.
Last Wednesday, Alain and I decided to hike up a steep hill in Port-au-Prince, through a residential area where people were living in floor-less huts with walls of sheet metal, to the ruins of Hotel Castel. On the way back down, we ran into people from Doctors Without Borders delivering three 1,000 gallon containers: Two full of water and one empty one to be used as a waste receptacle.
They literally are doctors without borders. Nothing gets in their way. We spoke with those two employees for a while about what they were doing and they said they faced a number of technological obstacles, but they found creative solutions around them because they can only work with what they have.
On the converse side, organizations that I have not detected anywhere throughout my journies are the Red Cross and Yele Haiti, Wyclef Jean’s organization. These were perhaps the organizations that I heard the most about in the U.S. before I came here, and they have collected quite a substantial amount of donations. I didn’t really think about it until I read the blog post, “Where’s the American Red Cross in Haiti?” shared with me by Emma Jacobs, my counterpart at Haiti Rewired. (Note: I would be especially critical of/disregard complete the anti-vax scare stuff at the bottom…)
This is not to say that those organizations are not present here and are not contributing. Perhaps they don’t focus as much on branding on the resources that they are providing or the uniforms their employees wear, or perhaps I have simply been in different areas than where their efforts are focused. But I know who I have seen here contributing to the relief and rebuilding efforts, and who I will be donating to in the future.
Peace keeping WIN
Posted: April 13, 2010 Filed under: haiti, WIN | Tags: motorbike lifts, peace Leave a comment »
That’s how I roll.
Photo: Alain Armand
Peace keeping FAIL
Posted: April 13, 2010 Filed under: FAIL | Tags: "peace keeping", MINUSTAH, UN, United Nations 2 Comments »If you’re on a “peace keeping” mission, is it absolutely necessary to travel with your finger on the trigger of your gun, pointed at traffic at all times?
That’s the light blue signature hat of the United Nations MINUSTAH, a controversial presence in Haiti.
Transportaion in Haiti
Posted: April 13, 2010 Filed under: haiti | Tags: tap taps 1 Comment »I’ve been talking about riding in tap taps lately, but I realize this might be an abstract concept for those who have never been to Haiti. Allow me to illustrate:
A tap tap is the primary mode of public transportation in Haiti. They are essentially pick-up trucks that have been made safe (ish) for transporting passengers in the back by installing an open-backed top and benches along each side. It costs about 5 gourdes (approximately 12 cents) to ride about a half a mile. Sometimes you can just jump in one that passes by if you wave the driver down and there’s room. Other times There are locations throughout Haiti where you can catch the tap taps en masse.
They are not very comfortable, but they get you where you need to go! When you get in and sit down, the driver will accelerate, and then slam on the breaks to pack everyone in towards the cab. They will also tend to depart before everyone is seated. The first time I rode one, a 65 year old woman was in the process of boarding when the tap tap lurched forward. Everyone riding, myself included, reached out to grab her so she wouldn’t tumble out the back. Last night we had to ride tap taps back from the beach because our truck broke down, and a dude literally fell off the back of one because it was too crowded. If the seats are at capacity, people will jump on and just hold onto the top of it.
Nearing the end of the trip, the driver will come to the back with a basket and collect the money from all the passengers.
“What’s to stop people from just jumping out and running when they get there?” I asked my traveling buddy Alain yesterday.
“Getting their asses kicked.”
That’s the Haitian transportation system. Somebody would make a killing starting a cab business here.
For more on tap taps, check out this post by Alain Armand: Economics of Tap Tap driver.
Schadenfreude
Posted: April 12, 2010 Filed under: FML, haiti | Tags: bleh 2 Comments »There is a fungus eating away the flesh on the bottom of where my toes connect to my feet. Every time I take a step, the skin splits. All day at the beach today, sand has been getting in the cuts, followed by salt water. On the way home, our truck blew a tire. Then we got it fixed, then the tire blew again. So we walked, me in flip flops, down the highway until an overcrowded tap tap picked us up. We transferred to another tap tap, then a bus, then another tap tap, in the rain. The final ride wouldn’t drop us off in front of the house, so we got out to walk. And let me tell you, one place you do not want to walk when you have open fungal cuts on your feet and are wearing flip flops, is in the rain-flooded streets of Haiti. I have never missed New York City cabs so much.
Bellvue Country Club [before and after]
Posted: April 11, 2010 Filed under: haiti | Tags: A damn shame 1 Comment »
Bellvue - June, 2009
Bellvue - April 2010
Baby steps
Posted: April 11, 2010 Filed under: Adventuring, haiti | Tags: Adventuring Leave a comment »The day I arrived here, I saw some places the earthquake had destroyed on the route back from the airport, and was in awe. Today, on day 7 of my trip, it is all just Haiti — the scenery, the usual.
The next day, I asked my dad to drive me around PetionVille, the area about 10 miles to the east of Port-au-Prince proper, to see more. I took a bunch of pictures out the window of my dad’s Ford F250, getting slightly frustrated when my shots didn’t turn out because the car was moving too fast and the shutter speed on my Nikon point-and-shoot was too slow. When my dad stopped at one of the properties he manages, I told my sister I wanted to get out and walk around to get better pictures.
“You wanna walk around… out there?”
“Yeah, I can’t see anything from the car.”
“Sis, this is Haiti.”
“Other people walk around.” And it was true. Thousands of people lined the streets every time we drove anywhere, walking from point A to point B, selling things, hanging out.
“Yeah, but not people with your skin color, and blonde hair, and your economic status.”
Oh the way home I pointed out the window at a guy and said to my sister: “Look, that guy’s white and he’s walking around.” She just gave me a smug look of “ah huh,”
like OK American. But in a loving way.
The next day, Wednesday, my dad took me to downtown Port-au-Prince to check in at the Oloffson Hotel. My mom thought it would be a good idea to stay there, as it’s a common destination for journalists and other foreigners. When we arrived, Alain Armand was waiting for me. I came accross him one day on Twitter, when he sent out a message that said something like “Going to Haiti, need recording equipment to get the untold stories.” So I checked him out and found his YouTube video of a segment about him on MSNBC, decided he was legit, and emailed my editors at Wired. “Hey, just stumbled accross this Tweet. Can we get this guy a flip cam or something?” And Wired they are. They hooked it up.
Alain and I chatted for a while and he said, “OK, it’s going to get dark soon, do you wanna go get some footage?”
“You mean… walk around? Out there?”
He laughed at me. I was scared but excited at the prospect. I didn’t think it would be so bad but my family never walked around. My sister will barely even cross the street to go to the convenience store, and there’s an armed guard sitting outside it 24/7.
So we walked around the block, taking pictures and talking. We peeked in at a place where a bunch of computers were set up outside. Old school PCs like the one I used for my very first computer when I was 8. I thought this was amazing. “Will you ask them what they’re doing?” I asked Alain, who speaks fluent Creole. So we went in the gate, past the tent they had set up to sleep in, and found out that they were conducting computing classes.
They were really nice, happy to talk with us. Haitians have smiles that can light up entire buildings. Too bad we rarely see pictures of them smiling in the American media, only pictures of them suffering.
Alain and I continued walking, me gawking at the collapsed residential buildings all around, but not gawking too hard. I saw a woman pissing on the sidewalk, and was mildly shocked but immediately turned away like I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, continuing the conversation. The roads we were walking down were literally lined with tents, where people slept at night in front of their crumbled properties. Suddenly, the picture became clear of why rain was such a terrible problem for displaced Haitians, both with respect to public health and just because people have to sleep in wet tents, which sounds pretty miserable.
When we got to the last leg of our journey, about to turn the corner to complete the circuit back to the Oloffson, he said “let’s walk up one more block over that way.”
“Listen,” I said. “This is the first time I’ve ever walked around the block here. Baby steps.” He accepted this and went home, and I spent the rest of the night wrestling with the hotel’s shitty Internet connection and battling mosquitoes in my sleep.
The next day we went hiking up mountains and through the heart of downtown Port-au-Prince. And the next day we hitch-hiked from my dad’s house in PetionVille to the tent city that’s set up where PVC, a formerly fancy pants country club, used to operate. Its golf course now serves as the home to over 50,000 refugees.
Consider this To Be Continued… I have to get ready because my family is taking me to the beach today!
