Fixing Haiti

A personal account of an American journalist who thought he’d seen it all—until he visited Haiti last october.

By Randall Frame

Source: Powerhouse

I shake my head upon thinking about how I ended up on this muddy road—if one could even call it a road—on the outskirts of Haiti’s capital city in the dark of night. The moon, though not quite full, is more than enough to light my path. But when it hides behind the clouds, I have no choice but to stop, for only a few scattered stars and a handful of campfires that dot the hillsides surrounding Port-au-Prince prevent total blackness. ( the town of Goanive (Haiti) after tropical storm Jeanne (AP)

What a difference a week makes. Seven days previously I’d been sitting in the comfort

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of the living room of my four-bedroom home in suburban Pittsburgh, anticipating what promised to be an interesting trip—my first—to a country distinguished mainly by its status as the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere. I was part of a team of journalists and business leaders invited by a charitable organization to witness Haiti’s poverty, injustice, lawlessness—some would say its hopelessness—from up close.

Friends who had been to the so-called Third World had warned me that I would be changed, perhaps even disoriented, unable to fend off the emotional and psychological effects of culture shock. I humored them, outwardly acknowledging the accuracy of their predictions. But inwardly, I shook my head. I was, after all, a reporter—a professional who, while not denying his humanity, had been trained to maintain his distance, his objectivity. The truth is that as I examined the itinerary, my biggest concern was whether the return flight would get me home in time to watch my beloved Pittsburgh Steelers play on Sunday night.

For the first four days at least, my assessment of how my emotions would handle Haiti proved on target. This is not to say the experience was easy. It was not. I won’t soon forget the images of skinny dogs and even skinnier people ravaging the same garbage heaps looking for potentially edible scraps. Of naked children who lived in rudimentary tin shacks, whose toys were limited to rocks and whose back yards consisted of mud two inches deep, sometimes more after a heavy rain. Of long lines of people waiting patiently for nothing more than a bowl of rice and beans and a cup of clean water. Elderly looking men and women curled up along the roadsides, sleeping on the hard ground, bony arms their only pillow. Medical clinics that resembled American hospitals of a century or more ago. Crying children with nobody running to meet them.

But this was not a time for emotion. This was a time for problem solving. As a typically pragmatic American, my whole orientation toward what I was witnessing and learning was geared toward how to “fix it.” And I was not alone. Each night when our delegation returned to the hotel to process the day’s events, the discussion quickly turned to fixing Haiti.

To do so would not be easy, we acknowledged. Education seemed a logical place to start. After all, how can a country get anywhere if nearly half its adult population can neither read nor write? But we can’t expect children (or adults) to learn on empty stomachs. And no one can afford the luxury of going to school if finding enough food to make it through the day is virtually a full-time job.

So how can we fix this food problem? Arable land is scarce as a result of deforestation and soil erosion. Some people in the countryside are able to grow fruits, vegetables, and grains. But the road system is so obsolete that by the time they get their goods to market, they are spoiled. Maybe building infrastructures is answer. Then again, what would it matter if people could successfully transport their products if no one has any money to buy them? And nobody has any money because there are no jobs. We’d visited one charitable organization whose goal was to keep Haitian teenagers out of trouble by teaching them carpentry. But our host acknowledged that his ministry’s main purpose was to give these young people some small measure of self-respect. Few, if any, of them would ever be able to find work period, let alone as carpenters.

Building Haiti’s economy—maybe that was the place to start. But it seemed no matter where we started, we kept returning to keeping people alive and healthy. And they can’t grow their own food—or raise chickens or become dairy farmers—when they have no land and no possibility of ever owning land, most of which is possessed by a relative handful of the country’s elite who, by Haiti’s standards, are quite wealthy. All of this is not even to mention political and justice systems rife with bias and corruption and a health care “system” that is inaccessible to the overwhelming majority....