Nigel Fisher, Deputy Special Representative for the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, describes the ongoing reconstruction effort in quake-ravaged Haiti.

The small island nation is marking the second anniversary of the earthquake that devastated so many lives there.

Ceremonies were held at mass graves to remember the 300,00 dead.

And church services were held across Haiti to give new hope to the living.

About one and a half million Haitians were left homeless by the quake.

Many are still living in tents as construction proceeds at a painfully slow pace.

The BBC’s Laura Trevelyan is in the capital Port-au-Prince, a city that continues to bear the quake’s scars.

Esline Belcombe, 25, lives in Corail Camp with her daughter (aged two), her mother, and a nephew. (Photo: Oxfam/Flickr)

Haitians are still battling to rebuild their lives and their homes two years after the devastating earthquake that killed 300,000 people.

Historian Laurent Dubois has just returned from Haiti. He’s also the author of the just released book Haiti: The Aftershocks of History. On today’s show Dubois explains to host Marco Werman how Haiti’s turbulent past continues to resonate in its politics today.

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The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Marco Werman: Historian Laurent Dubois has just returned from Haiti and he sees cause for optimism.

Laurent Dubois: This is a country that made an incredible transformation at its founding by overthrowing slavery, and there’s no reason that we can’t expect maybe a new moment of change in the future.

Werman: Dubois teaches at Duke University and he has a new book out called Haiti: The Aftershocks of History. In it, Dubois focuses on key moments in Haitian history that as he says reverberate today.

Dubois: A lot of the thinking always goes back to Haiti’s founding as a nation founded by slave revolutionaries in a world that was quite hostile to that victory and that overthrow of slavery. So there’s a great deal of attention to that. Haitians are also very aware in a way Americans are less so of the impact of the US occupation and of the US role in their country in the 20th century.

Werman: I’m sorry to jump in, but let’s return to that time. US Marines occupied Haiti for about two decades starting about 1915, and as you explained, that’s when many of our current images of Haiti got embossed in our American minds. How did that happen and how does it resonate today?

Dubois: Well, this is a long occupation. The US was very involved in Haiti. I mean it really directly ran and governed Haiti for two decades. And at the time a lot of images were produced of Haiti through marine memoirs. This is actually the time when the first Zombie films were made with direct reference to Haiti became kind of a mainstay of our culture. So we had a kind of set of stereotypes that grew up about Haiti and at the same time, curiously most of Americans are not aware that we were in Haiti for that time. So we kind of inherited stereotypes and cultural stereotypes without much historical knowledge. And that’s one of the things I try to rectify in the book so that we get a better sense of what that history meant for Haiti.

Werman: One thing you go into on the chapter on the US occupation in the early 20th century was this idea of using a really nascent military techniques against Haitians, aerial bombardment. That was just really surprising. Tell me about that.

Dubois: Yeah, it’s one of the first places, probably not the first place, but one of the first places the US uses aerial bombardment against the insurgent groups who are known as the Cockos, who were rebelling against the US in the countryside. And it’s a story that really isn’t much told in the United States, but again, resides very strongly in Haitian memory because of course, it was a particularly new and terrifying form of combat. So I think knowing those sorts of things is important because it gives us a sense of how historical memory might shape the present.

Werman: Now, you write about how at the time many African American leaders didn’t oppose the occupation. Booker T. Washington celebrated the occupation of Haiti as the only way to civilize Haitians. W. E. B. Du Bois said the occupation was beneficial. Why?

Dubois: Well, the African-American relationship with Haiti has been complicated and vexed in many ways, but I think partly it’s that there are these images of Haiti that are hard for people to escape. There was a sense of a need for racial uplift both inside the country and that could be applied to Haiti. And so it is important I think for us to realize how ambiguous and complicated these perspectives are in our own country.

Werman: You know, in the meantime I’m just wondering how do those stereotypes from the US occupation and now other stereotypes that have been piled on, you know, the basket case country, how do you unhook those? How do you make them less potent?

Dubois: Well, it’s a real challenge because they really are deeply embedded and whenever Haiti comes in the media you do find that these tropes are just kind of available and in some kind of unconscious space they just pop out. So I think we need more information. Obviously, many Haitian writers have tried to confront these. I begin the book with the story of a writer in the 1880s sort of trying to confront negative images of the country. The more information we have I think the better, but we also really need to insist that if we are going to be involved as we are in Haiti, that needs to start with some humility and some kind of recognition that we teach ourselves about the country as well.

Werman: What about Haitian history for you could really help move the country forward if that chapter of history were just better understood, either by Haitians or by the international community?

Dubois: Well, there’s a core idea in the book that I draw from a Haitian sociologist, Jean Casimir, which is that Haiti, rural Haiti anyway, is built around what he calls a counter-plantation system, a system that emerged on the part of slaves who wanted to reconstruct a world that resisted the plantation, but also resisted its return. So it’s built on individual autonomy, a lot of entrepreneurialism, on a kind of sense that to kind of be free also means to have economic independence. But it’s something that in many ways has often been under attack in Haiti rather than supported.

Werman: Let me just finally ask you this, Laurent, I mean there are numerous commemorations and memorials today in Port-au-Prince in Haiti, for the second anniversary of the earthquake. When you think about this anniversary what crosses your mind?

Dubois: The ways in which Haitian people have grappled with it and the way in which religious communities have grappled with it, and also the way in which social solidarity kind of dominated actually the response in Haiti I think is something to remember. I mean this is a society that suffered a massive disaster on a scale rarely seen, and yet the response was one of kind of social solidarity and working together. And that’s I think something to remember and remind ourselves when we hear maybe more negative or stereotypical visions of Haiti.

Werman: Laurent Dubois is a Duke University scholar of the French Caribbean. His latest book is Haiti: The Aftershocks of History. Laurent, thank you very much.

Dubois: Thanks a lot, Marco, I appreciate it.

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Comics Journalism Editor Matt Bors (Photo: Caroline Bins)

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Marco Werman: The first chapter of an online project to document life in Haiti since the earthquake two years ago was published today. It’s a piece of cartoon journalism by a team of Haitians and it’s edited by American cartoonist, Matt Bors. He teamed up with Haitian reporter Pharés Jerome and Haitian comic artist Chevelin Pierre. The first chapter is called “Tents Beyond Tents.” Bors says comics are the best way to tell Haiti’s story.

Matt Bors: If you look at Chevelin’s comics, you’re immediately put there. You’re not just reading a prose piece on the internet which I think is a lot more effective. Also, comics is very low-budget. I mean, one person can do it with a pen and a pad of paper. You don’t need to buy a bunch of equipment. You don’t need a team of editors and sound people working with you. It’s a highly effective way, I think, to get across a story, especially non-fiction stories and human stories. Comics for a long time has been associated with funny pages and super hero books, but what you’ve seen in the last few decades is comics getting more serious and more respected, and now, comics journalism is kind of the last frontier. You’ve had a lot of memoirs, a lot of non-fiction books and there’s a whole genre now of people who do journalism in comics form. You’re seeing a lot of it in the U.S., and there’s a lot of talented people doing it. So, I had the idea that a place that I was interested in which was Haiti, instead of me just popping in for a few weeks and doing a piece about it, that I really wanted to do something substantial and try to show people in the media how effective comics journalism can be and really get a Haitian perspective and do something substantial. So, we’re doing 75 pages of comics and it’s not just going to be on the anniversary. We’re going to have it running throughout the year to try to keep a spotlight on the country that is, for the most part, ignored unless a horrible tragedy is going on.

Werman: How deep is comics culture in Haiti and will Haitians be able to read this?

Bors: There aren’t a lot of cartoonists being published in Haiti. There are two main daily papers who do both have editorial cartoonists and put them on the front page unlike American newspapers, but there aren’t a lot of published cartoonists in Haiti. Getting Haitians to read this is one of our main goals, so we’re publishing in French and Creole. Today it’s only up in English but the translations for French and Creole will be online within a few weeks, and then we hope to have it published in print form in Haiti, in Creole, at some point.

Werman: Matt, ultimately, what do you want this comic book to do for Haiti?

Bors: What I want this project to do is shine a light on Haiti and its problems from a Haitian perspective. Everything that we read from Haiti is written by a foreign journalist, and so it was really important to us to have this done by Haitians. We want to shine a light on the country longer than just one day, on the anniversary. So, we’re running this project throughout the year. Then, I really want to show people what comics journalism as a medium can do and that it’s not just something done for novelty. It’s a very serious form of reporting and that it can show what’s going on there in a way better than, maybe, a lot of mediums can.

Werman: Do you hope that maybe Haitians will read this and think about their country differently?

Bors: Yes. A lot of media in Haiti is actually French languaged and most Haitians can’t read French; they read Creole. So, our goal with this is to really have it printed in Creole so that the masses of Haiti can actually read it. Yet, there’s not a lot of journalism that’s targeted towards them because they are disempowered, they’re completed impoverished and so they’re not the ones buying newspapers so they are not geared towards them. So, we hope that with this project the average Haitian can feel like they’re reading something that was written for them and by a Haitian that understands what’s going on there.

Werman: Matt Bors, a cartoonist based in Portland, Oregon and the Editor for Comics Journalism at Cartoon Movement. The first installment of his latest project about Haiti was published online today.
Matt Bors, good to meet you. Thanks very much.

Bors: Thanks a lot for having me.

Werman: You can see a few images from “Tents Beyond Tents” and a link to the whole chapter at theworld.org.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Matt Bors was insistent that the comics journalism project about Haiti be written and drawn by Haitians. He spent a month in Haiti looking for just the right team.

He summed up his trip in a cartoon and a video that follows his thinking about the Haiti comic journalism project.

Pharés Jerome (Photo: Pharés Jerome)

Chevelin Pierre (Photo: Sandra Cériné)

Cholera has taken the lives of some 7,000 Haitians and sickened about a half million more.

Several studies now show that UN peacekeepers from Nepal likely introduced cholera to the island inadvertently when they were in Haiti following the earthquake.

The details of what are thought to be the first case are in a new study (PDF) Dr. Louise Ivers has co-authored  with David Walton.

It was published Tuesday in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

Dr. Louise Ivers works with Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and with the aid group Partners In Health.

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The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman. This is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston. It’s been two years this week since a powerful earthquake hit Haiti. The Haitian government has put the death toll from the quake at well over 300,000 people. Another potent aftershock was the spread of Cholera which has killed some 7,000 Haitians and sickened about a half million more. UN Peacekeepers are thought to have brought Cholera to the island inadvertently. Now scientists think they may have identified the first Haitian who caught Cholera and then spread the disease to others. The details are in a new study co-authored by Dr. Louise Ivers of Boston’s Brigham & Women’s Hospital.

Dr. Louise Ivers: The Cholera epidemic started when the bacteria was introduced into the river in a small town in central Haiti called Mirebalais, and once the bacteria was in the environment, the way that people have to live in kind of intimate relationship with the water and the river by bathing in it, drinking from it, gathering their water to wash and other things, they were exposed to the bacteria and then became sick because of it.

Werman: So who is this 28 year old now from central Haiti that you think might have set the epidemic in motion? Tell us his story.

Ivers: He is a young man who had serious mental health problems. He had a psychiatric issue and had hallucinations and had very bizarre behavior. In fact, he was a person in the community that they stigmatized and treated as a ‘crazy person.’ He had never been able to really get any treatment for his mental health problems and even though his family actually had access to water that was drinkable, he would bathe in the river and drink water from the river, and we found that he had been in the river and drinking water from the river and became sick very shortly thereafter, did not go to the hospital to seek any advice, and passed away very quickly, and then members of his family who had participated in preparing his body for a wake, became ill themselves a few days later.

Werman: Umm. How do you actually go about trying to find the person, the Patient Zero who might have triggered the outbreak? I mean is it like simple, medical detective work?

Ivers: We were able to really trace the oral history of the community back in to find out who was the first person who was sick. The actual, the first documented cases of Cholera in the facilities and the healthcare facilities in the area were a few days later than this particular one. We met with local community leaders and tried to find out from them who they knew was the first person to have become ill with what’s a very notable disease. It’s not subtle to have Cholera, so we were able to trace that back through our networks with the community, really through oral history taking.

Werman: How confident are you, Dr. Ivers, that you did identify Patient Zero in this Cholera epidemic in Haiti?

Ivers: I think we’re fairly confident. It’s certainly possible that there were others and we don’t have scientific evidence because, of course, the person passed away and we don’t have the microbiology to prove that this was Cholera, but certainly everything that we know about the disease and everything we know about this community would lead us to believe that this was the first patient.

Werman: If it hadn’t been this 28 year old man, would it have been someone else with the disease that would have spread it?

Ivers: Yes. I think the answer is, it’s most likely that is the case. This is one young person who was exposed to the bacteria that’s in the river water, but there are many people who live in Haiti and in this area who are obliged to gather their water from the river, so because this disease is not spread necessarily from person to person, but it’s spread because of contaminated water source, it’s most likely that the epidemic still would have occurred even if it wasn’t for this young man, but we wanted to try to learn as many lessons as we could from his case.

Werman: So for you, what are the big lessons for Haiti and anyone concerned about community health?

Ivers: First of all, the importance of mental health. You can’t have health without mental health. The second important point I think is the issue of globalization. Cholera was a disease that had never been recorded in Haiti before and was introduced to Haiti from the (inaudible) from a different country, and similarly, very quickly, within the space of a couple of weeks, a disease that was happening in Haiti began to be introduced back into other countries, so we had cases in the U.S. There were cases in Boston and Miami and in the Dominican Republic that came from Haiti, from what otherwise is a very isolated, rural town in the center of the country that most people never would have heard about before. So the issue of globalization going in both directions, we don’t just have to think about how could diseases that have been eliminated from rich countries where we live, how could they come back from poor places like Haiti. We also have to think about how does our activity and does what we do affect people who live in rural Haiti where we can introduce diseases there that hadn’t existed in the first place.

Werman: Dr. Louise Ivers has co-authored, along with David Walton, a new article in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene. It’s called The First Case of Cholera in Haiti, Lessons for Global Health. Dr. Ivers works with the A Group Partners in health. Thank you very much indeed.

Ivers: Thank you.

Werman: There’s more in-depth coverage from Haiti at theworld.org including a new blog post from Producer, Deb Sharp, recalling her experience in Haiti on the quake’s first anniversary.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

I remember him telling me the funding for his position was funded by an NGO. One of the big issues in Haiti right now is the tension over the role of international NGOs in the country’s governance and economy. Critics complain they distort the local economy, suck power and money away from the Haitian State and don’t do enough for the people of Haiti.

The BBC’s always-thoughtful Allan Little has a new documentary on the subject.

We’ve also touched on these themes in recent interviews on The World, with Paul Farmer of Partners in Health (considered by many to be among the most effective NGOs in Haiti) and Linda Polman, author of The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong with Humanitarian Aid?.

Sometimes the arguments become frustrating and cyclical; it’s clearly not an either or situation. Haiti needs NGOs and it also needs a stronger, healthier government. Still, there’s clearly an urgent and important discussion going on; I for one hope it leads to better outcomes.

Follow @jebsharp

Haiti is in desperate need of skilled medical workers, a need exacerbated by last year’s earthquake. Many Americans have volunteered to help, but in a place where basic needs go unmet and security is tenuous, those volunteers can find that the skills they have to offer aren’t enough.

This is the story of one American who volunteered in Haiti and the hard lessons she learned.

A Desire to Help

Erin Curtiss is a midwife in Seattle. She is 34 years old, has sharp blue eyes and a raunchy sense of humor. She lives with her two young sons and her girlfriend.

Erin, who runs her own home birth business, recently learned of an American nonprofit organization called Midwives for Haiti. She found it on Facebook.

“I’m being asked to help, and I can help, and so I will help,” she said. “And it is just as simple as that.”

Haiti has a desperate need for midwives. Women in Haiti are fifty times more likely to die during childbirth than women in America. One big reason is there aren’t enough medical professionals to deliver babies.

Erin says she has always wanted to help where she is needed the most, so she volunteered to go to Haiti for one week.

She traveled to a little city called Hinche, in Haiti’s Central Plateau. She came to volunteer at the public hospital, where patients are crammed into long rooms with no electricity, and where the windows and doors are open to the air – and the mosquitoes and flies and lizards that come through.

Back home, Erin only deals with uncomplicated pregnancies, but here, women have extremely high blood pressure, anemia, even cholera. These are the sickest patients she has ever seen, and the hospital staff doesn’t seem to have enough time for anyone.

Erin came here mostly to train midwives, but now that she sees how much needs to get done, she wants to do more. So she makes a generous offer. She’ll work the night shift, when there are fewer midwives on staff.

Night at the Hospital

“There’s really so much that doesn’t get done here, so I think there’s plenty to get done tonight,” Erin says as she arrives around 9 p.m.

The maternity ward is completely full. Families crowd the spaces between beds and listen to their radios. Thirty-three women are about to give birth or just did, and there are only two nurse-midwives on duty: Adeline and Denise.

Adeline and Denise are graduates of Midwives for Haiti’s training program. They both smile, but they look strained. Adeline says this is their seventh night working. She hasn’t slept in a week. “God sent you,” she says with a laugh.

Erin and the Haitian midwives deliver a baby. Then Erin checks on the sickest patients.

Around midnight, Erin gives medicine to a woman with dangerously high blood pressure, but it’s not working, and she doesn’t know what else to do. “I’m almost to the end of the syringe full of meds,” she says. “When it’s done, I’m going to tell the midwife that it didn’t work.”

But the Haitian midwives are nowhere to be found. They’re asleep in the labor and delivery room. They lay down sometime before midnight. Erin realizes she’s on her own.

The hospital is dark. A bunch of young men are standing in the courtyard. A lizard runs up the wall. Dogs turn over trashcans.

Erin goes to check on her patient. As she switches on her headlamp, the light illuminates a bucket – a chamber pot – beside another woman’s bed.

“There’s a lot of blood in that bucket,” Erin says with a gasp. This woman is hemorrhaging. It’s one of the reasons so many pregnant women here die.

The woman’s voice is faint. She says she gave birth six hours ago – just before Erin arrived. She may have been bleeding that whole time.

“Her uterus is full of blood and probably has clots in there,” Erin says. “I’m going to need to get them out.”

Erin tries to stop the bleeding, but she’s worried.

She is also frustrated – that Adeline and Denise are asleep.

“You would think that there would be some kind of protocol set up for every two hours, somebody does a round,” she commented later. “And as far as I could tell, that wasn’t happening at all. Here are people who are trusting you to help them, and you’ve abandoned them.”

It’s not until after 4 a.m. that the Haitian midwives finally wake up. Erin gets the woman’s bleeding under control, but when she leaves the hospital at 6, she is still on edge.

“That was positively horrible,” she says. She realizes that her Haitian colleagues are overworked and need sleep, but she can’t understand why Adeline and Denise didn’t check on their patients, especially the woman who hemorrhaged.

Hard Truths

A few days later, after Erin has gone back to Seattle, the Haitian midwives explain what happened that night.

Denise and Adeline say one of the reasons they slept is simple: they were exhausted. But there’s another reason they don’t check on the patients at night. They’re scared to go into the courtyard where the patients’ rooms are.

“We are women, so we can’t go out of the labor and delivery room to check on the patients,” Adeline says through an interpreter.

“Haiti is a dangerous country,” she continues. “We don’t have light in the rooms. Even if you had a flashlight, you’re two women. After midnight or 1 a.m. you can’t check on the sick because of the lack of security.” Adeline and Denise say not long ago a girl was raped in the hospital at night.

In a place where women desperately need midwives, these midwives can’t do their job right because they don’t feel safe.

Later, back in Seattle, Erin reacts to the midwives’ explanation.

“That makes me sad to hear,” she says. “I was too stupid to be scared.”

Erin knew there would be a lot about Haiti she wouldn’t understand, but now she realizes that things were even more complicated than she expected. She went to help fix a problem – too many Haitian women die during childbirth – but she found that simply training more midwives isn’t enough.

“It doesn’t matter what kind of protocols you have set up if you’re afraid of being raped,” she says. “I don’t know what the solution is to that, though.”

Erin has returned to delivering babies in Seattle, at comfortable homes where every candle is in place and the perfect music is on the stereo. She is grateful for how easy things are here.

But Erin still thinks about the women she met in Haiti. She knows she doesn’t have the answers to Haiti’s problems, but she plans to go back and try again.

Jenny Asarnow traveled to Haiti with support from the International Reporting Project.

Polman says Haiti is an example of a place where a lack of coordination has hampered aid distribution.

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The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Marco Werman: In Haiti yesterday, President Michel Martelly met with two of his most controversial predecessors. He got together with both former exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and former dictator, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier. Martelly says he’s trying to get Haiti to get over its troubled past and move forward. That’s going to be hard in a country still suffering from the devastating effects of last year’s earthquake. Thousands of non-governmental aid organizations are still in Haiti to help and billions of dollars in recovery aid have been pledged, yet much of that money hasn’t materialized and what has is not being spent efficiently. Dutch journalist Linda Polman is the author of The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong with Humanitarian Aid? She says there’s been a lack of coordination among aid organizations in Haiti.

Linda Polman: After the earthquake the aid world came together in New York in March 2010 because they realized that the unaccountability and the disorganization and the lack of coordination, they all realized that that is a big problem. So they came together and they established the Clinton Commission. It combines the donors and the Haitian government, and the commission was going to be the nucleus of this entire aid operation. Everybody who came to bring charity to Haiti would all go to the Clinton Commission and ask look, where is it the best place this time to spend our money? And everybody applauded and they called it Aid 2.0. Everybody was happy and as soon as the commission was established it was largely ignored and it is being ignored until today because both donors and aid organizations prefer to be the boss of their own money. And they want to be in charge of how to spend it, where to spend it, and if to spend it at all.

Werman: Who’s role is it traditionally in a disaster, a famine or civil war, to vet the NGOs and keep the incompetent ones out?

Polman: Well, nobody has that role. They do give bits of permission to the United Nations to try and get some coordination into those really large international aid organizations, so United Nations thought up a system where aid organizations meet with each other and where they talk each other’s projects over, and they sort of try to establish that their projects don’t overlap, etc. But that whole system is not obligatory so it is a very loose thing and that again, has to do with the fact that both donors and aid organizations prefer to be their own boss.

Werman: Ms. Polman, I want to know what you think. Who should be coordinating this?

Polman: Well, I know that aid organizations and donors are very sensitive towards the public opinion. They hate to be exposed as wasting money and fraudulent stuff. So I think there’s a big job for journalists. There should be a lot more journalists seriously investigating what the aid industry is actually doing with what agenda and in what extent are they accountable? So there’s a task for journalists, but there’s also a task for people who donate money to organizations. I think they should take that responsibility too, it is your money, do your homework and try to find the least damaging and most accountable organization or project that you could possibly find.

Werman: I want to get back to the UN. I mean the UN has UNICEF, it has UNHDR, the high commission for refugees, the food and agriculture organization. Why can’t the UN be the main aid agency or at least be the umbrella coordinator and would that avoid some of the pitfalls you’ve been speaking of?

Polman: The UN only can do what its member states allows it to do. The UN can come with recommendations and then it’s up to the member states to say yes or no to those recommendations. It is a totally voluntary thing and there’s nothing that the UN can do against that.

Werman: Obviously, humanitarian aid is a complex and messy business. But standing by in moments of crisis doesn’t seem really to be an option either. Isn’t compromised aid work better than none at all?

Polman: Aid is a very emotional thing and it’s very difficult to be rational if you are confronted with those pictures of starving children. There’s always this micro picture of this one human life being saved, but there’s also a macro picture that we don’t often get presented about damage that aid can do and about the political and military agendas behind aid operations and behind donors. Aid is not necessarily choosing the weakest and the poorest on this earth. Most of the time it is sort of on our own agendas, and I believe it is the duty of journalists to expose that and to make it known to the public.

Werman: That’s journalist Linda Polman, and the author of The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong with Humanitarian Aid? Thank very much.

Polman: You’re welcome.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Gerry Hadden is The World’s correspondent based in Spain

Excerpt from “Never the Hope Itself: Love and Ghosts in Latin America and Haiti”

When, even a year after a devastating earthquake, first priorities are still basic needs like food, water and housing, what happens to the rich culture of the island? Can the art be saved too?

The present in Port-au-Prince is very loud: traffic jams of dirty cars, slopping water trucks, clean NGO SUVs, people selling and yelling. All this is happening just outside the church I’m standing in. Actually, I shouldn’t say “in.” The church is gone, just pieces of some walls remain, which are now covered in scaffolding.

“We’re now on site of the collapsed Holy Trinity Cathedral, which suffered massive damage, entire naïve collapsed,” Stephanie Hornbeck said.

Hornbeck is an art conservator working with the Haitian Cultural Recovery Project, in partnership with the Smithsonian. He is here to remove and preserve murals that were once inside the church, but are now exposed to the elements. From an original 14, only three survived.

Created in the 50s, the murals were created by Haitian artists, who painted the biblical scenes.

“[It is] considered very innovative because they chose Haitian artists to depict the new testament and the scenes have Haitians in them so it’s telling the story of the new testament, but through a contemporary lens,” Hornbeck said.

So the last supper, one of the paintings that survived, has Haitians sitting at the table, and the baptism of Christ has some Haitians doing laundry in the water next to the river.

We looked closer into the stone face of Jesus, who is painted white, not Haitian. There is significant water damage to the face, as evident in the form of white salts.

So why work to save the cultural past when there is still so much suffering in the present? When hundreds of thousands still live in tent camps and have limited access to basic services like sanitation and water?

Olsen Jean-Jilian is the Project Manager for Haiti’s Cultural Recovery Project.

“It’s very important to give water to people and give food to them, but you can not help them to rebuild a country without education, without understanding the culture,” Jean-Jilian said.

“The past is very important to understand so you can see where you’re going. If we try to save cultural materials from the past we can better resolve the problems we’re going to face in the future. That’s our hope. So preserving culture is a means to better approach; the reconstruction process.”

Art is one way that is actually helping Haiti recover.

Toni Monnin runs a high-end gallery in the wealthier Petionville area of Port-au-Prince.

“Art, in any form, is an integral part of life in Haiti. So if you don’t preserve that, then I believe you’ve taken a chunk out of this society, this culture. Art is the lifeblood of the country,” she said.

While there was vast structural damage, Haiti’s vibrant art scene was only slightly wounded in the earthquake.

“That was the longest 35 seconds of everybody’s life here in Haiti,” Monnin said.

“The earthquake was on a Tuesday and we opened the gallery on Saturday because we knew they’d need help. We’re very lucky that most of them, all of them were alive; all the artists we work with. But everyone of them lost family members and almost everyone lost his home because they lived down near the epicenter.”

As I was gazing at the expensive art, wondering who actually buys it, an aid worker from Save the Children came in, hurriedly on her way out of the country, and dropped $2,000 on 3 small fabric pieces, apparently a tiny addition to her collection back in Washington D.C. “I don’t have kids,” she said, “so I collect art.”

I still worry how people survive in Haiti, the poverty, the suffering, but I no longer worry about their culture, their art surviving.

“All Haitians are artists, they are just an entire nation of artists,” Monnin said.

Truittier trash heap (Photo: Amy Bracken)

The village of Truittier, on the northern edge of Port-au-Prince, has a certain charm. Pigs snort and fowl cluck amid vegetable gardens and cactus hedges lining dirt paths. But the village’s raison d’etre lies in plain sight – piles of sorted trash in almost every yard. Truittier exists because it’s next to the city dump, where residents scavenge for recyclable materials.

It was never pleasant living here, but things have gotten much worse since last year’s earthquake. Truittier resident Gerald Desrosier points toward a pond at the dump. “They empty toilets over there,” he says. “Right over there.”

Every day, a stream of trucks empties hundreds of portable toilets into the pond. The toilets serve the million-plus displaced people living in camps around Port-au-Prince, which has no sewage treatment plant.

Elsewhere across Haiti, millions of people don’t even have toilets. Even before the earthquake, there was said to be only one toilet for every 1,000 Haitians. And the country’s poor sanitation system has contributed to chronic public health problems and deadly cholera outbreaks, like the one that ravaged Haiti last fall.

Here in Truittier there have been all kinds of health problems related to the waste, Desrosier says. And residents have to smell it when the wind blows toward the village. Desrosier‘s neighbor, Joseph Eguens, says there have been demonstrations against the dumping, but that nothing’s been done.

The aid groups that run the camps say they’re not happy with the dumping location, either. But other organizations are trying to keep sewage from being dumped at all, anywhere.

Nick Prenata of SOIL (Photo: Amy Bracken)

The canal is a reeking mass of trash and human waste. It’s even worse in the rainy season, when it sometimes overflows and the raw sewage floods into people’s homes.

SOIL is trying to help change that – and change the way Haitians think about their waste. After the earthquake, a local group asked SOIL to help set up a sanitation system here in Cite Soleil. It would be based not on porta-potties, or even a municipal sewer, but on composting toilets.

Cite Soleil’s composting toilets have separate removable compartments for urine and solid waste. Instead of flushing, users throw in sugar cane scraps from a local rum factory to cover the waste and start the composting process. Prenata says the five composting toilets at this site are used by an estimated 100 people a day. When they fill up, volunteers haul the waste off to a nearby site for what’s called thermophilic composting.

“If you get it right, the temperature gets really hot,” Prenata says. “The microorganisms eating through the feces and the carbon generate a lot of heat.” That kills off pathogens like E. coli and the cholera bacteria. Diseases avoided, wastewater problem solved.

And there’s another key benefit. What’s left after the composting process is a nutrient-rich organic fertilizer. Which is why experts say the simple technology is an innovative way to deal with two major problems at once—Haiti’s sanitation crisis and its soil fertility crisis.

Over centuries of land mismanagement, Haiti has lost much of its topsoil, and so its ability to feed itself. At the same time, it’s been dumping millions of pounds of potential soil nutrients into landfills and waterways, where they become a serious problem.

“So you have this issue of human waste treatment, and you have this issue of agricultural depletion,” says Brown University ecology professor Stephen Porder. “How you produce enough food for undernourished populations, and how you do that while solving water quality problems that lead to tremendous illness?” Porder says composting toilets, also known as ecological sanitation, are part of the answer, and a growing number of people in Haiti agree, including some in the Haitian government.

Paul Christian Namphy, a Haitian-American engineer who once worked with SOIL and is now an advisor for Haiti’s new water and sanitation agency, says ecological sanitation is the future. Namphy says that along with solving immediate problems, ecological sanitation increases people’s awareness of the realities of sanitation, and how communities can take charge of their own problems.

Certainly the idea is catching on in Cite Soleil, where the waste from the new composting toilets is already being put to work in a community vegetable garden. Agronomist Archibald Miracle, who manages the garden, says the compost generated here lets community to do completely organic farming. “It allows people to create their own little economy, when otherwise they would have to go to the market,” Miracle says.

Backers hope the Cite Soleil ecological sanitation project will be a model for Haiti and elsewhere. They say their biggest concern is finding a sustainable financing model to operate and expand the effort. More than a year after the earthquake, project organizers say donor fatigue has set in, and that the task ahead is largely to convince potential supporters that ecological sanitation systems are worth their investment.

Toilet Tales Series Page

• Our Soil
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• Peacetones website
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• Wanito’s Facebook page

Jean Wesner Guirand (photo: Jeb Sharp)

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By Jeb Sharp

Class divisions are stark in Haiti. A tiny elite holds most of the country’s wealth and much of the rest of the population is desperately poor. People are divided by income, by language, even by skin color, and there’s fear and resentment all around.

Louis-Henry Mars thinks about these divisions a lot. He’s a former factory manager who comes from a long line of Haitian intellectuals. He says the outside world is focused on Haiti’s economy, but that’s not his priority.

“The front line issue for me is the issue of relationship between people and people, between the rich and the poor, between all sides of society, all sectors of society,” said Mars. “Until we actually focus on that first, nothing is really going to work here because that’s the real deep issue of the country.”

Mars traces the gap between the haves and have-nots to Haiti’s victorious slave rebellion more than 200 years ago. He says after independence in 1804, the elite who were closest to the colonial masters grabbed what they could of the country’s resources.

“But the foot soldiers, the peasants, those who actually were in the heat of the battle, did not get their fair share of the resources of the country and it’s that struggle that is still going on here today,” said Mars.

Talking to each other

And he doesn’t think it’s a struggle that will be ended by paving roads and building electricity grid. He thinks it’ll take people talking to one another, trusting one another, knowing one another.

For the past few years Mars has been working to bring rich business people together with gang leaders from the slums in a neighborhood called St. Martin. It was one of the places where political violence erupted when President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced from power in 2004. Businessman Yves Bourjolly’s building supply store was looted during the riots.

“It was terrible,” said Bourjolly. “There was nothing left. They stole everything. There was nothing left.”

Bourjolly joined the dialogues Mars helps facilitate through a project called the Partnership for Peace and Prosperity in St. Martin. We meet Bourjolly in his air-conditioned office. Armed guards stand watch outside. Bourjolly said he was afraid to meet slum leaders at first.

“I said to myself, those people probably don’t like me or they will be asking me for money all the time,” said Bourjolly. “I was really hesitant.”

But Bourjolly went ahead and joined the dialogues, which he found transformative. In retrospect, he doesn’t even blame the mobs who destroyed his store.

“I don’t think the people were responsible. I think we are all at fault,” said Bourjolly. “The whole society is at fault. The whole society who didn’t do anything for the people so they got angry at themselves, at everyone, because we didn’t do anything for them.”

Gangs

Mars takes me down the road to meet one of the gang leaders, Jean Wesner Guirand. Guirand says he knows gang leaders but he’s not one of them. These days he heads the neighborhood committee that helps run the camp where people have been sheltering since last year’s earthquake.

We sit down to talk in one of the tents. It’s sweltering. Guirand turns out to be less introspective than the businessman Bourjolly but he too says the dialogues have been eye opening.

“There was a tendency in the old days to think that the person who was bourgeois or who has money cannot be friends with someone who is poor,” said Guirand. “But it’s not true. There were differences of color, maybe of means, we were afraid of him, he was afraid of us, but when we sat down around a table it was all a myth. There was no need for us to fear each other.”

That sentiment resonated when the earthquake hit last year. About 25 people involved in the dialogue project were meeting in a courtyard. Louis-Henri Mars shows me the spot.

“If we were going to die, we were all going to die all together,” said Mars. “This building here kind of swerved towards us as we were standing in that yard there. And afterwards one of the guys told me, Louis, we were all going to die together. I said yes there was not going to be a difference whether I had a car or you were walking or whatever. We were all human beings. “

Mars loved that moment of togetherness just after the earthquake. He knows dialogue alone won’t be a panacea for what ails Haiti. But he may well be right that all sorts of other interventions are doomed to fail unless and until Haiti’s rich and poor find reason to trust one another.

Edwidge Danticat (Photo: David Shankbone)

Haiti-born author Edwidge Danticat tells anchor Marco Werman about the role of art and culture in building a new Haiti. Download MP3

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Marco Werman: Author Edwidge Danticat grew up down the road from Saint Martin. She lived in Haiti until she was 12 years old. Now, she lives in Miami where she writes, and she’s just edited an anthology called “Haiti Noir”. Edwidge Danticat, we just heard about class divisions and fear in Haiti. I’m wondering how you experienced that divide as a child. What can you recall about how rich and poor related in Haiti?

Edwidge Danticat: Well, it’s interesting hearing about Saint Martin, because it was really down the block from where I grew up in Bel-Air, which is another often [cited as iconic???] iconically poor neighborhood in Haiti. And, my recollection is that, you know, there were really very little class interactions. I mean, I saw people with more means than we did, you know, when we went to the bank, when we went to the shop, and they seem to almost inhabit a different world. So, it’s so important that this, you know, as the country has a new President, and is turning another page, to examine very closely these issues; because, even rural-urban divides have always been so entrenched as part of our culture, and we have often neglected them. But, all of that needs to be part of this ongoing conversation.

Werman: And now, you’re one of your country’s best known authors, and also, we should say, one of the more than one million Haitians who live in the Diaspora. Describe the divide between the Diaspora and those who live in Haiti? Is it an even deeper gulf than the one that divides the classes in Haiti?

Danticat: Well, I think of it as a kind of family separations, because often, families are separated on these lines. And the Diaspora, in a way, is sort of a buffer between the classes, because a lot of people had to leave in order to come back and contribute a certain way. So, the Diaspora itself, I think, has become a kind of middle-class, if you will, outside of the country, which contributes a great deal financially to the country. And is always, as it is now at this moment, demanding further involvement, economic involvement, further political involvement. So, there’s always a back and forth. I mean, there are differences like in any other communities where this sort of feuds, or who stayed, who left, and who benefits. But, I think ultimately, we’ve realized that we can’t…one cannot survive without the other.

Werman: Given, as we’ve just heard, how entrenched the divisions in Haiti historically are, I mean, going back to the early 1800′s, won’t that spell a really tough challenge if dialogue is indeed the way ahead?

Danticat: Well, dialogue is important, and I think it has always been part of this missing…this gap between, not just people in and outside of the country, but people of different economic status, or people rural versus urban people within the country. And, dialogue, for dialogue to happen, there has be to certain assumption that the person that you’re talking to is at least worth talking to. And, I think that’s essentially been a very important issue for us, in terms of who is around the table, who is allowed to speak, what language they’re allowed to speak; even in schools where, for example, children have, in the rural areas, are made to speak French where obviously it’s not their daily language. So, I think, all of these issues, if we bring them to the table and try to come up with some commonalities, I mean, heaven knows.  If in these neighborhoods, you have the business people talking to these young men in these neighborhoods, it sends a powerful message that those of us who for centuries since Independence have been trying to talk to one another, that we can, and that we should, for our country to have a future.

Werman: Haitian-born author Edwidge Danticat has a new anthology out, it’s called “Haiti Noir”. Thank you very much indeed.

Danticat: Thank you for having me.

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