Lazy Hatians

It is easy, as a visitor to Haiti, to wonder (though only to yourself; never out loud, except to other visitors when you hope no one is listening who speaks english) why the Hatians don't do more for their country, themselves...There seems to be a lot of standing around and complaining about the state of things, or more often a dull acceptance of the way things are, finding joy in the little things and letting the big picture be what it is: crumbling infrastructure, garbage everywhere, choking exhaust, eroding hillsides...

It is easy to think they are lazy, unmotivated, unintelligent, because they don't seem to get up every day, rool up their sleeves, and set towork to make the country clean and beautiful. It's easy, because you, the visitor, don't live there. You don't live with the reality that doesn't have a return ticket home, that lives, and has lived for years, with corrupt officials, druglords, drough, flood, fire, inflation, and without electricity or potable water.

It's easy because you take for granted that taking on a swaling project at 2.00 in the afternoon on a sweltering Thursday you can swing a pickaxe for half an hour, or an hour; weild a shovel, then walk across the street and take the second shower in a three-shower day; change into clothes that were washed in a machine, with water that came to your house on its own, not on your head.



In Haiti, every movement you make expends energy, energy youmay not have if you didn't eat breakfast. Even if you have the energy, moving at all means sweating, and getting dirty; dodging crazy top-top drivers - If you want to maintain some semblance of dignity and order, it makes sense to draw the line close to self; to take care of one's own appearance and let the rest be what it will be.

Surviving in Haiti, from what I can determine from my second very short visit, is about endurance. It's about saving your energy for what may be coming, tomorrow, or the next day, or the next; it's about taking care of what you have to do. Beyond that, any action seems futile, in a nightmarish version of the tragedy of the commons.

How can that change? My guess would be only by rebuilding from the bottom up, through community-based organizations that reduce the spatial and social unit of action to some reasonable and comprehensible scale. The need for large-scale planning is obvious, but it will never be effective (except temporarily, at the end of the barrel of a gun) unless the government is seen as legitimate. And the legitimacy of the government will likely not come through a single national election. Do people know their neighbors? Is there a sense of common purpose? I don't know the culture well enough to say. What I am sure of is that it is lacking in my own culture, and my own life. The mentality of solipsism is the same, it's just the wrapping paper that's different.

L'Union Fait La Force

("Unity Makes us Strong")

Thursday. Dust rising through the early afternoon heat, dumptrucks honking that the crossroads where the pavement ends. On the highway, the only north-south road, the local merchants cut trenches or build speed bumps to slow the traffic: keep down the dust, and allow passer-by to see the things for sale on both sides of the bridge. Moped taxis gather, their young male drivers chatting casually in a cluster just off the pavement, clean shoes and new jeans, waiting for a passing top-top to trop off someone heading somewhere along the dirt roads or paths that wind away from the bridge along the river, its canals, through the flood plain that was nearly leveled by the flood that swept through less than a year ago.

When I go for a walk, everyone calls out "Blanc!", and everywhere there are signs of what happened: Walls tilted over, foundations with topcoat slab floors scattered across the open spaces of sand, gravel, and river cobble, where houses and trees and people once stood. The trees largely survived, like the people that climbed them; bananas are sending up new shoots through the thick mud left behind. And the people, too, are springing up again, building houses in the exact same places.

Yesterday, we walked to a dry, chalky hill, covered sparsely with cactus and thorny shrubs, and looked out across the plain to the mountains beyond where the water and mud originated. Do those who live here understand the relation between this abused hill, where even goats are hard pressed to find forage, and what happened to their homes? I wonder if I do. From that height, it was hard to see the damage, mango trees and coconut palms, banana and mapou and breadfruit hiding under their leaves the residue of what was erased, holding on with their roots to what they have left. Bodies float, at least until they sink, so none are left here; they all went out to sea or were put to rest on land in the weeks after.

There is a congeniality among the people here, perhaps different than among the city dwellers. But it doesn't seem to translate into collective action. FEnce posts are being set no more than 10meters from the river, apparently to enclose as private what is now a well-used (albiet in no way planned or constructed) road, forcing that need even closer to the river, which shows no sign of having its steep banks replanted or otherwise stabilized.

At the school where I spend the morning taking measurements, the pump which is shared by the surrounding population has been dug out just enough to make a basin of dirty water underneath, which fills up throughout the day with the water that missed the mouths of the bottles that kids put underneath. The pump's opening is at least 5cm diameter, while the soda bottles are maybe 2cm; when a kid uses it alone, water runs out before they can run from the pump handle to the spout. By midday, the space between the fresh water sand the puddle with grease and dust and garbage floating on top is hardly enough to get a bottle between; a little girl trying dunks her bottle accidentally under the surface, sucking in a few ml of the top scum. She looks inside, and decides that it is still ok; tipps it back to take a drink, before scurrying back to her classroom. Does she know yet about germ theory, that there are things that can effect us that we cannot see?

There are 24 political parties listed in the CIA factbook on Haiti; only three are in a formal coalition. The people by the river are angry because the rainy season has started again, and the reconstruction is not finished. They stand around and complain about what the government isn't doing to help.