Being in Haïti without being in Haïti

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Being in Haiti without being in Haiti

Feb 12th 2009 | Online extra

Gonaives | Labadee | Port au Prince

Gonaives
TRAFFIC creeps down a dusty avenue. Gonaives looks like a poor city, with a steady flow of pedestrians walking along the edges of the road, but it does not immediately seem destroyed. Then we turn a corner and find a wall of dirt halfway up the street. The bulldozers and dump trucks have cleaned the thoroughfares, and the efforts of thousands, with shovels, have begun on the smaller streets. But the empire of dirt persists. It looms over our heads and we scramble up the edge, looking now down at nearby rooftops and then around the nearest corner, where this cracked tube, like an engorged elemental boa constrictor, continues into the distance.
I remember grappling with the idea of infinity when I was a boy. What, I asked my father, was infinity plus one? I learned a bit of math since then, but imagining quantities that remain fundamentally unchanged, no matter how much you add to or subtract from them, remains difficult. So it seems today in Gonaives. An alphabet soup of aid organisations, not to mention the Haitian government, are here clearing out dirt. But now matter how much they cart off to fields outside the city, it seems as if the same amount remains for them to tackle. When four storms in a row rained on Haiti at the end of last summer, they first saturated the soil and then swept it down the sides of mountains and into the city and into the houses of the city. Five hundred people died, and the rest found their city filled with dirt.

APAfter the storm

Gonaives is Haiti's fourth-largest city, and has a population of some 300,000. It sits in a flood plain, surrounded by mountains that have been almost completely stripped of trees. This means that every few years, when hurricanes hit Haiti, they release torrents of mud into the city. Months later, it has dried out. Many have dug their houses out, piling the dirt, with no place else to put it, in the street, adding to the mound's height. I find myself throwing away metaphor after metaphor—it seems like something transported from myth or dream into the waking world.
“Things are really not good,” is how Watson St Louis's remarks are translated for me. He's in the midst of getting his friend, a mostly-deaf carpenter, to fix a broken door. They are indeed not good, and I can't manage to comprehend how not good. When the storms came in September, Mr St Louis says, he and 96 of his neighbours crammed onto the roof of the one two-storey house in the neighbourhood. (I can see the rooftop in the middle distance, and it is not large.)
Now, nearly four months later, only one of his four children has returned to school. Though he is himself a schoolteacher, he lacks the money to pay the school fees for his other children—public schooling is, to say the least, minimal. There are dozens, hundreds, thousands of people nearby with similar stories. All the secular miracles performed here—Doctors Without Borders, for instance, built a hospital in an empty warehouse in ten days—seem to make little tangible difference.
At the time of my visit, a number of aid organisations are in the process of packing their bags: the immediate emergency has passed, and their remit does not cover rebuilding. Many of them, having last worked in Gonaives in 2004 when Hurricane Jeanne provoked a comparable torrent of mud, fear they'll be back all too soon. There is idle talk of moving the city. Everyone seems to know that there will never be money around to do this. We're not in Dubai, after all, but it at least has the air of a notional solution. One person after another in positions of authority and expertise tell me that not enough is being done. The international community doubled its donations in response to the storms, to $800m, in 2008. After Jeanne in 2004, a lot of the reconstruction funds were lost to corruption, and, as the effects of last year's storms show, not nearly enough was done.

Labadee
THE juxtaposition reminds you Florida is just a few hundred miles away. There it is, outsized and gleaming, moored offshore and looking straight at you: a cruise ship. We are 30 minutes by car from Cap Haitien, Haiti's second-largest city. This beach, Labadee (technically “Labadee®”, a bowdlerised renaming of a nearby village, Labadie), is off-limits to anyone not employed by or vacationing with Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, which rents it from the Haitian government. And when the vacationers are ferried ashore from the ship, they are not permitted to leave Labadee: the cruise company's insurance company won't cover it.
Worlds might collide here, were they not held carefully apart by liability insurance and tall fences. Within the fences, everything, from water to vegetables to hamburgers, is brought ashore from the ships. Though it contributes to the local economy, it would do so far more were it not so isolated. Critics characterise it as a sort of apartheid, where predominantly white tourists flock to be waited on by predominantly black Haitians, who are barred except in serving capacities.

From ship to shore and no furtherAP

But it is something more subtle than this. It is, like those bits of Saudi Arabia where women are allowed to drive, a no-man's land. It's not America, but it sure isn't Haiti either. For many years, Royal Caribbean advertised it as Labadee, Hispaniola, downplaying the fact that they were renting a beach in a third-world country for a bargain. It's the only tourist trap, as such, in the country; in their advertising literature, the cruise line describes it as “Royal Caribbean's private paradise.”
“It's impossible to choose just one thing that's special about Labadee®”, gushes Royal Caribbean's website. Put, for a minute, to one side the absurdity of their attempt to spuriously trademark a misspelling of a place name, and let us just say that it is very possible to choose just one thing that is special about Labadee®: it is the only place in Haiti with large-scale mass tourism and the money that brings in. The cruise line, under an agreement that expires in 2050, pays $10 to the Haitian government for each passenger who comes ashore (some half a million a year). This is important money for the government, which still gets most of its budget from foreign aid. The resort also employs some 500 people, and the nearby village of Labadie, where many of them live, is the most prosperous I've seen in Haiti.
This is not to say it seems well-off by international standards. There is no plumbing, and it cannot be reached by road (one gets there either by walking or taking a short ride in a launch across the bay). The fields behind the village are strewn with garbage. But you can somehow sense the optimism that jobs bring. It is not a listless place, and if tourists came here they might spend some money and gain a grain of understanding.
Getting the local economy going is a good thing, but you've got to be pretty insensate not to pick up on the uneasiness of it all. “Capture the true spirit of Labadee®” says the website. The recommended spirit-capturing technique urged by Royal Caribbean's website is to drink a “Labaduzee”, the cruise line's signature frozen drink. The website says the drink is “out of this world”. The same could be said, far more literally, of Labadee itself.
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Port au Prince
THE United Nations' headquarters in Port au Prince is in the Hotel Christopher, which retains its name, though it is of course no longer a hotel. It now seems to be just an oddly designed office building, but the fact the overseers of the 9000 soldiers and police who keep the peace in Haiti are based in what used to be temporary lodging reveals something about how the UN wants to be seen here. This humility extends to nomenclature. The top UN official, in effect a viceroy of sorts, is the Special Representative of the Secretary General, as if he were indeed just a personal emissary and not a considerably more powerful figure.
Naive though it may seem, there is something about the UN that, despite its many flaws, I still find appealing. It's not their friendliness, though they are that. And I have no illusions about the organisation's flaws—send the UN one letter asking for something, an aid worker in Gonaives told me, and all you'll get is two more letters asking for clarification.

Keeping the peaceAFP

Haitian friends express various resentments about the UN's presence, and they have a point. The bureaucracy is both hermetic and insular, slow-moving in its bulk, at times heavy-handed in its armour. As with any large group of soldiers, there has been the occasional transgression. It in many ways resembles exactly what it denies being: an army of occupation. But it is precisely the sort of idealistic occupation the Bush administration pretended it had in Iraq: a coalition of the willing, in the best sense of the word. There are Indians and Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Chinese, Turks, Brazilians, Argentineans and Chileans. It is not the ex-colonial powers, or mercantile interests holding sway, but something genuine, and, at the end of the day, rather noble.
Of course their presence is not entirely disinterested. The Chinese are pleased to be playing a role in the Western Hemisphere, and the UN money for the troops is not negligible for any of the poorer militaries. But I have not found the self-serving motive to be the primary one for the troops I've met.
One of the press liaison officers, who I now count as a friend, is a colonel in the Croatian army, scarcely a decade after civil war tore his country apart. The few Americans in the military part of the mission, on secondment from their own military, carry no air of exceptionalism.
There is an infections aura of goodwill about the peacekeepers, for here they are doing exactly that. When a national army announces that its intentions are purely peaceful, the heavy whiff of euphemism hangs in the air. But when this is done under the auspices of the UN, it has a certain sincerity. General Carlos Alberto Dos Santos Cruz, the Brazilian who commands all the UN military forces in Haiti sums up the effort thus: “Obviously it's not enough,” he says, “but it is what is possible.”