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.