Americans: A rant on shorts and cameras

            There are reasons why Americans get stereotyped they way we do, and a whole Land Rover full of them pulled up to the foundation this afternoon.

            Two men, three women, all in t-shirts, cargo shorts, bucket hats (except for one woman in a visor), sunglasses, sturdy sneakers, and white tube socks. It’s like they were wearing a uniform. Three of the five also had huge cameras, which they did not lower once for the entire time they were there. In the first 10 minutes, they took more pictures than I’ve taken in 3 weeks.

            They ended up being some sweet folks from Wichita, Kansas who support a health clinic in a village around the corner. It sounds like they’re doing good work—(if you are good Christian people with charitable intentions but no clue about the developing world, giving money directly to rural doctors is probably one of the best ways not to screw it up)—but man, they make a laughable first impression.

            I’m not really sure why, but the shorts in particular get to me. PSA to all Americans: shorts do not keep you cool. If they did, people who live in hot places would wear them. Almost universally they do not. They wear long, light, loose pants and skirts, because that is what keeps you cool and protects you from the sun and bugs and the prickly plants along the paths. Shorts are also not appropriate for nearly any workplace, from offices to construction sites, so wearing them indicates that you are not working or serving in any official capacity—you are just here for fun. Shorts are appropriate for children because they grow so fast, and for playing sports, and that is it. Shorts do not even make sense to wear when it’s hot in in the US, (seriously, when have you ever been wearing pants in the summer and though “Damn, my shins are sweaty”? Never, that’s when), but I will concede their use as a quirk of fashion and culture, which operate outside the bounds of rationality. But in Haiti, there is no excuse. Wearing shorts while white just marks you out as an American and opens you up to snarky know-it-all criticism from people like me.

            In a quasi-related incident, one of my co-workers pointed out to me that I don't often wear sunglasses while we were trekking through peanut fields the other day. I acknowledged that that is correct, because I usually wear a hat and wearing both is overkill. He thought about this for a minute and said, "Hmm. Americans usually wear sunglasses though." I laughed, because he had actually hit upon the real reason I don't usually wear sunglasses--because they make you look distant, aloof and American. When I'm standing in farmer's field for no obvious reason, unable to connect verbally or professionally, I want him at least to be able to see my eyes.

            The other thing that weirds me out is the automatic presumption that it’s okay to take a million pictures everywhere you go. If you’re at a known tourist destination or in a spot of obvious natural beauty, fine, point-and-shoot to your heart’s content. But when you roll up on someone’s turf and start taking pictures of everything just because you’ve never seen it before, that is weird and impolite. If a bunch of people, clearly from out of town, came to the strip mall where you sell insurance in Wichita and started taking pictures of everything, would that feel normal to you? Are you in the habit of taking pictures of strangers in your hometown? No, you are not. If you see a photo-worthy stranger who is not obviously a performance artist, you ask them before taking their picture.

The same rules apply when you travel, and they apply doubly when you travel to poor places. Not everyone is going to appreciate a well-fed white guy in shorts taking a picture of their mud-and-stick house. It’s tempting to take pictures of kids, because they love cameras and they beg you to as soon as they see you have a camera, but how do you think their mothers feel about you going home with a souvenir of their kids in ripped t-shirts and messy hair?

This is not to say that all poor people are or should be ashamed of they look. Many of them are happy to be in your pictures—once you ask permission and maybe explain why you want the photo (“I love the color you house is painted. Can I take a picture?”). They just don’t want to be gawked at, like any other human being going about their normal business.

This is part of the reason that I never have many good pictures when I travel. It’s not because I don’t see cool or interesting stuff—I do, all the time. But my idea of “cool and interesting” is another person’s idea of “that thing I do on Tuesdays,” so I like to ask permission first to be on the safe side. Sometimes I can’t find a way to do that, so I miss the chance. Sometimes I can’t remember how to say it in Creole, despite my best efforts to memorize the phrase. Also, I tend to see the best stuff when I’m on a moving vehicle and I can’t get to my camera in time. My travel photo albums tend to be heavy on landscapes and short on people, even though it’s the people that are truly worth remembering.

For instance, I really wish I had a picture of those Kansans today.

           

Boring but perhaps necessary background info

            The foundation I am working for is trying to help farmers in the North of Haiti increase their income. As it stands, it is dismally difficult for farmers to eke out anything more than a subsistence livelihood. Haiti has some of the lowest agricultural productivity out there, due to just about every reason you can think of. The farms are tiny (like, Rooke family back yard size), there is little to no mechanization, not much land is irrigated, the soil fertility is poor, etc. Seeds and fertilizer can be hard to find at the right growing seasons, and even if they’re available, farmers often can’t get credit to buy them. Even the idea of “the right growing season” is sketchy, since there has been little agricultural research in Haiti. Farmers do what their fathers taught them and what everyone else does, rather than what any science has proven to be the most effective and efficient way to prepare, plant, harvest, and process. Add in extreme weather and erosion, exacerbated by climate change, and you have a tidy little uphill battle for yourself.

            The foundation is doing a bunch of stuff to try to intervene. The core activity is a loan program, enabling the farmers to get the credit and inputs they need in order to plant when they want (or really, when the foundation tells them it’s a good time). The foundation supplies seeds and tree saplings that are known to give higher yields or produce high-value fruit. They have a technical team that follows up with the farmers all season to teach them better cultivation techniques and give them advice when problems crop up. After the harvest, the farmers pay back the loans with their products. And then the next season starts, and they do it all over again.

            The foundation is doing a lot of research to determine what are the best seed varieties for the local area, and what is the most productive way to cultivate them. They are planning to have their own seed production facility, in order to reduce the reliance on outside suppliers, and to operate a corn and rice mill, so the farmers can sell directly to the mill and retain the value that would otherwise go to middlemen.  They are also doing a lot with compost, to try to recycle crop waste that is otherwise burned and to help increase the soil fertility without chemical fertilizers.

            Obviously I fit right in here, with my years of experience with agriculture and my advanced degree in soil science and my deep love of high-value tree crops like mangoes and avocadoes.

The office

 So what am I doing, exactly?

            If you had told me five years ago that I’d be spending this summer in Haiti, that would not have seemed farfetched to me. If you told me that I’d be going in order to set up information system to inform evidence-based, data-driven, results-focused management decision-making—at that, my English-major-with-a-vague-interest-in-the-whole-world self would have raised an eyebrow. Probably the most disorienting experience I’ve had so far is when my boss introduced me to someone as “our data person.”

            To the initiated, I am setting up the foundation’s Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) system. To the lay reader, this means that I am helping them to make sure their program is on track and to see if they are having the impact that they’re hoping to have. I will help crystalize the logic of their program (if we give the farmers better seeds, they will grow more and make more money), determine what they need to measure, (how many farmers they give seeds to, do the farmers plant them correctly, how much corn do they grow), and how and when they measure it (at the start of the program, survey the farmers to see what their houses are made of; 5 years later, survey them again to see if they’ve been able to upgrade). The idea is that if they have reliable information about all this stuff, they can change and adapt the program in order to get the best results.

If this does not sound exciting to you, I’m not even going to try to convince you otherwise. M&E is super boring to explain. Just take my word for it that, for me, this is an engaging, creative project, and (hopefully) it will help the foundation do their work better. (And, as a white chick who hates teaching, can’t speak Creole, can’t administer a vaccine, can’t build anything, and can’t raise money, it’s one of the very few ways I can be helpful in Haiti, or any other developing country).

My day-to-day is of limited interest, since it mostly consists of sitting at a laptop revising the same documents over and over and over again. But I am learning a lot about farmers and farming, which is interesting. About which more later.

Andeyò

            After my first 24 hours in Haiti, we left Port-au-Prince and headed “andeyò,” outside the city to the countryside. It’s about a five hour ride from Port to our location near Milot. We followed the coast as far as Gonaïves, then turned east and headed over the mountains.

            The ride showed just how different parts of Haiti are from one another. Just outside of Port-au-Prince, the Plaine de Cul de Sac rises up into low mountains, which are all but bald due to deforestation. One author I read called this area a “scalded savanna of white shale at the foot of a denuded mountain” (Beverly Bell, Fault Lines). There is no shade, no water, no vegetation, no industry. There are a lot of earthquake victims, who have been resettled into tin and concrete houses. Now that they are no longer “displaced,” the government has washed its hands of any responsibility for them. Another writer, Amy Wilentz, claims that 100,000 people now live here--enough to crack the list of Haiti's ten largest cities.

            Going north, the highway is studded with busy, dusty towns that reminded me of Senegal. The road is far enough inland that you can’t see the ocean, which is a shame. I haven’t seen the ocean since I flew in, even though I’ve never been more than hour’s drive away from it. For an island nation, Haiti seems turned in on itself. The places I’ve been so far might as well be in the middle of a large continent.

            Where we crossed the mountains, the scenery is lush and gorgeous. The road clings to the sides of the slopes and looks out over stunning views of peaks and valleys. It was raining as we drove through, and the runoff flowed down in bright red muddy streams along the sides of the road. Everything else was green, green, green. While the areas outside Port-au-Prince look about as well suited to farming as a sandbox, the north looks like you could drop a mango pit on the ground one day and have a 30-foot tree the next morning.

            That said, I didn’t see signs of farms, like fields or terraces. This was odd to me, because the mountains are surprisingly populated. There are houses all along the road, and lots of people all around the houses. I’m not really sure how they make a living there, or how they sustain their communities. I didn’t see any shops, schools or clinics, or even any areas of greater density that could be called towns. There must have been more I couldn’t see from my seat in the truck.

Eventually we crept down from the hills and into Milot. The foundation folks dropped me off at Paroisse Saint Yves, my home for the summer. I met Fr. Gaby, the priest of the parish. He is originally from Cap-Haïtien, a coastal city nearby, but lived in Boston for almost 10 years. One of the first things he said when he found out where I was from was, “You Massachusetts people sure do love your sports.” 

On the rectory porch

He’s a friendly guy, and the rectory is a comfortable place (solar electricity, running water, and internet when the stars line up). There’s a short corridor of dorm rooms, all empty at the moment except for me. The place is anything but lonely though. Also on the parish compound is a big church, obviously, which is almost constantly in use for prayers, masses and choir practices. There is also a playground, which is always full of kids, and lots of animals, including three adorable puppies in addition to the usual chickens and goats. The rectory will fill up in June, when a contingent of veterinary students are coming down to hold a livestock clinic, and more interns are coming to work at the foundation.

Market day at the DR border

            On Friday, I was invited to go with the boss and one of the country directors to the Dominican Republic. The foundation needed a truck battery, a lawn mower and some other equipment which is hard to find and/or very expensive in Haiti. With the border only about an hour and a half away, it can be a lot easier to make a day trip out of the country when you need this kind of stuff.

            We left at 6 am and drove east through some nondescript towns. In one, the streets were lined with tall sacks of charcoal, Haiti’s leading source of energy and deforestation (and possibly employment). We passed Caracol, a new industrial park funded by aid dollars and a pet Clinton project which has largely failed to prosper, and the University Roi Henri Christophe, a gift from the Dominican Republic that looks very out of place in the middle of an empty field. Finally we made it to Ouanaminthe, the border town that faces its Dominican twin, Dajabón, across the river. We arrived a little bit before 8, along with seemingly the rest of northeastern Haiti.

            Mondays and Fridays are market days, where anyone is allowed to cross into Dajabón on foot without a passport. Thousands of Haitians cross over to the market on the Dominican side with wheelbarrows, motos outfitted with trailers, or giant head loads full of Haitian goods to sell. At the end of the day, they return with the same wheelbarrows and bundles full of Dominican goods, which they sell in Haiti before the next market day. Rinse, repeat.

            If you’re on foot, getting across is as simple as strolling over the bridge with the rest of the crowd. If you’re in a truck it’s a different story.  Your vehicle needs special permission and insurance to enter, your passengers all need to have their passports stamped on both the Haitian and Dominican sides, your goods will draw the attention of customs, and bits of money will fly out of your wallet every step of the way. In hindsight, market day was probably not the best day for us to try to run this errand.

            The boss and the director knew the steps we had to go through, but none of the places we needed to go were clearly marked. Rolling down the windows and asking the walkers was a recipe for conflicting instructions, until an "expediter" sensed our confusion in the crowd (or just saw a pickup truck with a couple of white people in the front). Sporting a bold “I Love America” t-shirt, this guy cleared a pathway for our truck to creep through, found us a parking spot, escorted us through the various offices we needed to present ourselves at, and translated with the Dominican border guards for us once we got across the bridge. His whole job is a racket that could be eliminated with some clear signage, but we were happy to kick a little his way just to feel like we had someone with us who knew what was going on. The whole process us took us probably 2 hours, and probably would have taken even longer if we were on our own.

            Once we were properly in the DR, we had about another 2-hour drive to our destination in Santiago. Short as it was by road trip standards, it was enough to get a very good sense of the difference between Haiti and the DR. Haiti does not feel so different from Africa; the DR feels like Puerto Rico, or even parts of the American Southwest (with the addition of a lot of bored-looking soldiers at military checkpoints). The ethnic differences between the Haitians and Dominicans are very clear, as are the 65 ranks on the Human Development Index which separate them (the DR, at #96, is ranked higher than China and the world average. Haiti, at #161, is tied with Uganda). The DR has rice fields and plantain orchards just like Haiti, but they are larger, more mechanized, and removed from residential areas.  There’s no need for 4-wheel drive on city streets, and even remote towns have electricity. Santiago has Subway, Burger King, and TGIFridays. It was hard to believe we were on the same island.

            We went to an everything store to rival any Target and a hardware store to rival any Lowes, struggling through our errands with the dozen words of Spanish we had between the three of us and pulling many U-turns on the busy boulevards named after military heroes and historical dates. Still, the shopping took much less time than the driving, and we were on our way back to Haiti after just a couple of hours.

            The return journey was a race against the clock, since we were told the border closes at 5. We sped back to Dajabón, happy that the soldiers at the military check points were too hot and uninterested to bother stopping us. We wasted valuable minutes getting lost in Dajabón, agonizingly close to the border. We made it to Dominican immigration with only 20 minutes to spare. One of the immigration officials chose this moment to take an agonizingly long cigarette break while our passports sat in a heap at an unmanned counter. Once she returned and painstakingly hand-wrote recipts for everyone in line, we hopped back in the truck and inched our way though the returning crowed as quickly as possible. If Haitian immigration was closed by the time we got there, and Dominican immigration was closed by the time we turned back, we’d be stuck sleeping in the truck in the no-man’s-parking-lot between the two.

            But no! Haitian immigration was still manned when we got there, and a few minutes later we were triumphantly on our way back to Milot. (A later look at my Haiti guidebook said the border closes at 6, not 5, but I’ll keep that to myself so as not to rob the others of the sense of epic accomplishment in getting across in 20 minutes.)

            We passed by a few customs checkpoints on the way back through Haiti, which had lines of large trucks waiting to get through. The trucks were piled precariously high with sacks of food, goods, and the people who had just purchased them, with their wheelbarrows tied to the outsides like a weird metal wreath. I'm so bummed I didn't get a picture, because those trucks were feats of engineering. Those vehicles would be stopped and made to pay taxes and “taxes” if they were carrying anything good. Our one lawnmower didn’t pique anyone’s attention, and we had an uneventful twilight drive back home.

            As far as road trips go, this one would only be interesting to people like me, killing a work day in a new environment, or people watchers fascinated by the chaos at the border. I was therefore surprised to find myself traveling the same route, between Milot and Santiago, when I read The Farming of Bones over the weekend. The book is a novel by Edwidge Danticat, which follows the story of a woman from Cap Haitien working as servant in a Dominican house in the 1930s. An early scene takes place at a Dajabón market day. I was surprised to know they were happening so long ago, since I had assumed they were the product of some free trade policy from the 80s or 90s.

            Things got more disturbing the more I read and learned about the relationship between Haiti and the DR. Many Haitians had fled across the border during the American occupation of Haiti (1914-1934), exacerbating long-standing tensions between the neighboring countries. In 1937, the Dominican dictator Trujillo ordered the massacre of all Haitians in the border region.  In an echo of the Biblical "Shibboleth" story, Haitians and dark-skinned Dominicans were captured and made to say the word "perejil" in Spanish ("parsley"). Creole speakers can't roll the "r" or pronounce the "j" correctly. Anyone with an accented pronunciation was slaughtered. 20,000 people were killed in what many call a forgotten genocide. The towns I had passed through featured as the settings for mass killings, and bodies were dumped in the river between Ouanaminthe and Dajabón. It’s still called the Massacre River today.

            Haiti, especially the north, is saturated with history. Already I've wondered many times whether the people who populated these places now know what happened there in the past. I've heard opposing things--that Haitians are deeply knowledgeable and proud of their history, and that they are largely uninformed and preoccupied with the present. In this case, I wonder how many of the hectic market day traders remember the ghosts under the bridge as they cross over it.

Port-au-Prince

I flew to Haiti on a half-empty plane. Apparently Port-au-Prince is not an in-demand destination on Monday mornings, which makes for a quiet, comfortable flight. Pro tip for anyone looking for hassle-free travel to the Caribbean.

            At the airport (one runway and one small building for immigration and baggage claim), the foundation’s driver picked up my boss and I in a very sturdy pickup truck and took us to our hotel. The boss had some meetings in the city, so we were staying the night before leaving for Milot the next day.

            I spent most of the rest of the day watching Port-au-Prince pass by from the back seat of an air conditioned four-wheel drive vehicle, fitting neatly into the stereotype of the foreign NGO worker in Haiti. All I can say in my defense is that at least I flew coach and the vehicle didn’t have “UN” painted on the side. Hopefully the rest of my stay will redeem me for that first day.

            In defense of the NGO workers, I will say that I fully understand why they all ride in SUVs. The AC is a luxury, but the sport utility is a necessity. Imagine a city as hilly and steep as San Francisco. Now remove all traffic lights and street signs. Now ratchet up the population density and add a million goats. Now remove all the asphalt and add deep gullies in every street. Welcome to Port-au-Prince. Driving here is a lot more like mountain climbing than city cruising. The streets would chew up and spit out a Honda Accord within minutes. 

            We shared the road with motorcycle taxis and tap taps, which are brightly painted busses or pickup trucks modified with plywood benches. They are all overflowing with people. It’s not uncommon to see a moto taxi with a child perched in front of the driver and two more people carrying bulky loads balanced behind him.  The people look very nonchalant about this and about clinging on to the back of a tap tap, but it’s a distinctly uncomfortable and dangerous way to travel. NGOs have responded to this by banning their employees from riding motos and tap taps (though their energies would probably be better spent finding a way to help fix the roads).

            The first meeting we had that afternoon was a little ways out of town at an agricultural foundation on the Plaine de Cul de Sac. They do stuff like soil testing and crop research. This place was originally the headquarters of a USAID project called WINNER. I couldn’t believe it when we pulled up—I had briefly researched this project and a few others for one of my final papers this semester. I had broken into gales of inappropriate laughter in the silent library as I read through projects with ridiculous acronym titles like WINNER, CHAMP, and HI-FIVE.

            WINNER turned out to be a bit of a loser after all. As with most of its projects, USAID had contracted WINNER out to an inside-the-beltway development consulting firm. The Government Accountability Office audited the project midway through, found that it was being grossly mismanaged, and shut it down 18 months early. (This will probably keep the firm out of Haiti for a little while, but it is unlikely to hurt its chances of winning other USAID contacts. That’s 1% of your tax dollars hard at work, folks.)

            The project was briefly turned over to the Haitian government before being turned into a private organization with no source of funding. My boss is pushing them to find a project he can partner with them on, so they might be able to get a grant. While Haitians have a long and proud tradition of grassroots organizing, many struggle to express that organization in the management jargon and rigid timelines of western donors. We’ll see what happens with these guys.

            We returned to the city and had dinner that night with a guy working for the US government. He was staying at a classy business hotel near the airport, new since the earthquake. We had dinner by the pool, because the USG forbids him from going anywhere besides the hotel, a restaurant around the corner, and the offices where his meetings are scheduled. His per diem covered a three-course meal for each of us (thanks again, American taxpayers). My boss told stories of top-down Haiti development dysfunction and failure all night, which was kind of depressing to listen to. Hopefully our foundation will have better luck with a small-scale, close-to-the-ground approach

           

Pétionville

            The next morning, we left for a meeting with a geo-information organization. They make stuff like satellite maps. My boss is trying to pull together the data to do accurate soil mapping of the northern region where we work (which should be easily available from the Ministry of Agriculture here, but isn’t). These guys should be able to help him out.

            After the meeting, we ran a few errands in the neighborhood, which is called Pétionville. We hit up a bakery, a very well-stocked supermarket full of American and European brands, and the unmarked house of a certain madam who makes famously excellent kibbe. (Kibbe is a Middle Eastern food made from ground beef coated in bulgur flour and then fried. You can find it, rather unexpectedly, in many developing countries because of the broad Lebanese and Syrian diasporas).

Pétionville is an upscale area in Port-au-Prince where most NGO headquarters, fancy hotels and nice restaurants are located. It used to be a quiet and breezy place, but after the earthquake and the influx of foreign personnel, it became crowded and noisy in a much more typical Port fashion. Still, you can definitely see the difference between Pétionville and other parts of the city. All the streets are quite noticeably paved.

Jalousie - Photo: Mark Condren, http://www.independent.ie/world-news/americas/haiti-special-report-just-where-did-the-money-go-30010699.html

            Pétionville is on the side of hill, facing another hill just across from it, aptly named "Jalousie." On that other hill, hundreds if not thousands of hastily built concrete houses have steadily crept up the slope (which has to be at least 30 degrees). Many earthquake victims who lost their homes now live in these houses, which look barely able to withstand a stiff gust of wind, let alone a hurricane or another earthquake. New housing in Port-au-Prince was supposed to be resistant to earthquakes and hurricanes, but that has clearly been regarded as a suggestion rather than a rule. A concrete house is a giant step up from a tarp propped on poles in numerous ways, but those who moved from the tent camps were simply relocated from an active disaster area to a disaster area waiting to happen.

In an attempt to make these look like a nice place to live, the government paid for a large bloc of the houses to be painted cheerful Caribbean colors. (This had the added benefit of beautifying the view for the large 5-star business hotel across the way at the top of Pétionville hill.) The far greater number of unpainted homes all around the painted ones shows how quickly this area has grown. It’s all together unnerving to look at.