Haiti After the Earthquake (25 page)

Holmes identified a number of perennial challenges facing humanitarian groups—from poor coordination to the gaps in the delivery pipeline. For a top UN official to express such disappointment was news only because it was leaked. But how could he avoid drawing such conclusions after visiting the camps? Some of those working in Haiti took umbrage that a senior official had said their work wasn't good enough. But the Haitians were even more vocal and forthright in their complaints: this work
wasn't
good enough by any stretch of the imagination. A walk through the camps was all it took to reach this same conclusion. Some working in the cluster system were selfaware enough to make mocking t-shirts. A few weeks after the quake, I saw one young humanitarian in Léogâne sporting a shirt with “I survived the shelter cluster” printed on the front. If the leak helped spark a self-critical dialogue among the many aid purveyors in and outside Port-au-Prince, it was surely helpful.

At the time the memo was leaked, OCHA estimated that 40 percent of displaced persons in Haiti were still without any form of transitional shelter. That meant at least four hundred thousand people, and perhaps many more, still lacked a safe and dry place to sleep over a month after the earthquake in spite of the massive humanitarian presence. Press articles published during this spike in aid critiques pointed to the airport bottleneck—more than one thousand relief planes were backlogged—and to stories of containers full of supplies detained in ports and customs areas by extortionary fees or simple incompetence. It was not the brightest moment in the history of humanitarian aid, which already had a long and checkered history.

Much more could be (and was) said about the imperfections of the aid machinery and about the sorry history of development and humanitarian aid in Haiti before and after the quake. But Holmes's memo did not solve the problems in the camps; no memo or declaration or editorial could. Camp conditions improved at a snail's pace, and reports of gender-based violence increased.

At night, it was easy to see why the camps were fetid: girls and women, especially, were afraid to walk to the latrines because they'd heard stories of others being raped there. Such stories surfaced even in camps that had organized women's patrols with fluorescent t-shirts and whistles to accompany girls to the latrines. (We'd helped set this up in one camp.) Why didn't this system work? All we got in response to that question were shrugs. Some humanitarians also suffered from a sort of attention-deficit disorder. One NGO installed lights in a settlement only to take them away again when their tour of duty was up. A study conducted by Louise Ivers and her senior aide, Kim Cullen (another quake survivor), found that, three months after the quake, in Parc Jean-Marie Vincent, more than 40 percent of camp dwellers thought camp conditions were too dangerous for children and women to get water at night. Another 7.4 percent reported having already been attacked.
³
This camp was, by comparison to most others, well-managed.

The settlements continued to grow during the summer months, and so too did the social pathologies. Didi made her first trip to post-quake Haiti in the summer, and spoke with women and girls who had been abused in the camps and also with a Zanmi Lasante social
worker there. She posted the following, linking the lack of basic sanitation to gender-based violence seen at all the camps:

It was clear by the start of the rainy season that the problems in the camps, including the lack of safe and affordable housing, would not be addressed effectively in the short term. Groups with long-term commitments to Haiti would be stuck working on behalf of those sequestered in the camps, and their responsibilities would increase as short-term relief groups prepared to leave (even as the camps continued to grow in size and number). I thought of an experience I'd had in 2008 when visiting a dusty refugee camp in a rural district of Malawi not far from where we were building a hospital. Although that camp had dwindled in size, we'd been asked to help rehabilitate its clinic. I ran into a couple of young people, who were surprised when I greeted them in their native language, Kinyarwanda. They'd been living there, they said, since the Rwandan genocide—which had occurred fourteen years before.

 

 

 

T
wo months after the quake,
Haiti was still struggling to transition from disaster relief to reconstruction. There were still many acute needs: injured and sick people needing medical attention, children without food and water, families living in burgeoning tent cities who needed safer shelter. As in February, many of us split our time between assisting with direct relief and trying to resume whatever it was we were doing when the quake hit.

As we struggled to recapture a sense of normalcy, continuing tragedies kept pulling us back to the making of grim lists. Most such tragedies occurred in Haiti, but no one was really spared. One of our hardest working members of the Office of the Special Envoy, Aaron Charlop-Powers, lost his mother (whom I'd known as a Partners In Health supporter) in a bike accident in New York on March 17. Everyone in the UN offices stopped work and tried to let Aaron and his grieving family know that we were there with them. But, as with Haiti, it seemed too little and too late.

President Clinton and his staff were gearing up for the March 31 donors' conference. I wouldn't have to speak at the conference,
which was a relief for reasons ranging from stage fright to epistemological anxiety (how could we be sure about the numbers?). As his deputy, I would be responsible for questions about medicine and health, but could refer questions about other aspects of recovery to the Special Envoy himself. Clinton wasn't shy about discussing any of Haiti's dilemmas, including structural problems with deep historical roots; nor did he mince words about our country's role in worsening Haiti's plight, unwittingly or otherwise. A few weeks after my Senate testimony, the former president was in the same room giving his. He offered a brave mea culpa about the role of U.S. food imports in undermining Haitian agriculture. He could have blamed the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 or ecological decline or the inferior productivity of Haitian farmers, or any old thing, as politicians often do. But here is what he said to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 10:

This sort of candor meant a lot to me and to many others; it helped start a conversation about needed reforms to the machinery of foreign assistance and global trade.

I next left Haiti with Claire Pierre and Garry Conille for a March 15 conference in the Dominican Republic. This was yet another meeting about a meeting, but one in which the broad outlines of the upcoming pledging conference were to come into view. Flying from Haiti into the more developed Dominican Republic was always startling, but the differences—economic, ecological, infrastructural—between
these two countries, sharing a single landmass and once inhabited by a single people, had never been more jarring than after the quake. The border visibly instantiated the divergence between the two countries' fates: where the Haitian side was stripped bare of trees after decades of unchecked deforestation for charcoal production, the Dominican side retained a healthy forest cover. (I'd recently learned that bakeries, laundromats, and household cooking fires were three of the largest consumers of charcoal in Haiti.) Infrastructure and construction quality were noticeably more robust after crossing the border. One could not help but wonder how much less damage there would have been—and how many fewer lives lost—had the earthquake struck a few hundred miles east (though no one would ever wish such a fate upon any country or people).

The three-day meeting in Santo Domingo aimed to help the Haitian government develop its national reconstruction plan and to coordinate donor activity leading up to the March 31 conference in New York. This meeting was, after Montréal, the second public step in the process of aligning the goodwill of the international community to help rebuild Haiti and one of the last steps before a more scripted agenda was set for New York. Without much to contribute, I listened and watched, often disquieted, as foreign ministers, international organization representatives, and disaster relief experts improvised in what often felt like political theater. Different players—some powerful, some less so—tried to get a word in edgewise, taking turns sitting and standing in a dance that seemed to reassert an unspoken hierarchy of power and prestige. The more interesting conversations occurred
dans les coulisses
—“in the hallways”—where it was possible to be frank and find those who were deeply committed to Haiti.

Some participants had experience rebuilding cities and regions after disasters natural and unnatural. Most relevant, perhaps, were the teams who'd worked in Indonesia after the 2004 tsunami as part of the Multi Donor Fund for Aceh and Nias (two of the hardest-hit provinces). They shared experience of disaster-resistant construction, resettlement of refugees, and the resolution of property disputes—all challenges Haiti was already facing and ones that would only grow in importance on the long road to reconstruction.

A number of Haitians expressed—not impolitely—doubts about the relevance of such examples and overly prescriptive advice. Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said,
dans les coulisses
, “Look, I don't want my country to look like the Dominican Republic or Indonesia or some other place. We're searching for a genuinely Haitian way of rebuilding.” Haitians from “civil society” were already grumbling that they weren't getting much of a say in the recovery process. But they'd been invited to Santo Domingo, which is more than most of our patients in central Haiti could say. We hoped, of course, that Michèle Montas's testimony (based on the Voices of the Voiceless project) would help fill this gap at the March 31 donors' conference, which by the end of the Santo Domingo meeting had been titled, “Towards a New Future for Haiti.”

Attendance at the preparatory meetings—in Montréal and Santo Domingo—suggested that significant commitments would be made. It did not mean, however, that all promises would be kept, nor did it mean that resources would be deployed fairly or wisely. The New York convocation was slated to be much larger than the previous meetings, drawing representatives from an estimated 150 member states and international institutions. It remained to be seen whether having so many participants would mean much to the people cobbling a life together in Port-au-Prince, but it would have been worse than cynical not to give it a try.

Past experience tempered naïve optimism. Meetings like these were common coin after natural disasters. We'd witnessed the flimsiness of aid promises since the Washington, D.C., International Donors' Conference in April of 2009, a meeting to generate support after the 2008 storms rocked Haiti, leaving Gonaïves under water and causing billions of dollars worth of damages.
²
During that meeting, labeled “A New Paradigm,” Ban Ki-moon and others spoke of a “new juncture” and pledged long-term support for Haiti. (Some of the new was redolent of the old, including the idea of turning Haiti into the “Taiwan of the Caribbean.”
³
) In any case, not enough came of the financial pledges made in Washington: of $402 million promised for the Haitian government's Economic Recovery Program, only about $61 million, or 15 percent of the pledges, was disbursed.
⁴
And,
to risk repetition, of the money that did reach Haiti, little went to the public sector.
⁵
(Isnʹt the government an important player when trying to rebuild a country or prepare for future storms?) Donor conferences, it seemed, needed to be “built back better,” too.

Jean-Max Bellerive was slated to introduce the Action Plan for National Recovery and Development of Haiti, which drew on the Post Disaster Needs Assessment launched in Montréal. The action plan and the needs assessment were drafted by the government of Haiti in collaboration with foreign technical assistance (a clutch of consultants, some working pro bono and others seconded from various agencies); they sought to lay out a vision for reconstruction and identify funding gaps. These documents drew on a wellspring of development and recovery initiatives proposed by previous Haitian governments after upheavals (such as the 2004 coup) and disasters (such as the 2008 hurricanes).
⁶
The new action plan introduced a number of schemes to build back better, from political restructuring to massive housing plans to scaling up an ambitious education agenda. There was a profusion of plans, but little in the way of implementation.