Juxtaposition

Dear Friends,

I think that I will have to write many shorter posts, rather than fewer long ones, as the daily thought of writing a long post has kept me from writing for nearly two weeks.

So, what can I say more briefly? Haiti is an overwhelming place at the moment, and taking time out from work to write for posterity seems almost sacrilegious. The last two and half weeks since arrival are nearly a blur already, but I’ve tried to hold onto a few details along the way, and I will make those into shorter posts.

The entirety of my Haiti experience has so far been focused in Port-au-Prince (the capital city), and in several communities along the coast just to the north of Port-au-Prince (everyone abbreviates Port-au-Prince to “PaP” here).

Port-au-Prince is wild, wonderful, and terrible all at once. As with much of Haiti, Port-au-Prince has been largely in decline for the last 20 years, and the January 12 earthquake finally completed the job of bringing Port-au-Prince low that the years of neglect and mismanagement had not been able to fully achieve. As with many cities in the developing world, there is an enormous and visually evident disparity between the extremely rich and the extremely poor. For example, I live in one of the super fancy houses on top of the hill in the picture below. Spread out below me is one of Port-au-Prince’s hundreds of hillside slums (referred to in development parlance as an “informal settlement”).

I live with the rich people at the top of this photo. The rest is self explanatory...

The house I live in along with other Peace Corps volunteers and various USAID staff and contractors is run down, but in a cleaned up state would easily be nicer than any house I ever entered in Guinea (and that includes the American Ambassador’s Residence). To say that poor people suffered disproportionately as a result of the earthquake in Haiti would be an understatement, as posh neighborhoods of mansions and walled compounds stand literally undamaged while many poorer areas are near universally devastated.

Older and/or historic parts of town also suffered heavily, and the central downtown district looks in places like photos of post war Dresden. Out of 28 Haitian Government ministry buildings, 27 were pancaked, as were the offices of every local mayor, the national cathedral, the presidential palace, most police stations, many schools, several of the largest hotels, and thousands upon thousands of houses and businesses. Most of them remain unchanged since the earthquake, though rubble has been pushed to the margins of roads to allow passage of traffic. The official death toll stands at 230,000 people, but nobody knows for sure because many tens of thousands were expediently buried in mass graves north of Port-au-Prince, and exact counts of bodies were not kept. Unknown hundreds or thousands of other bodies remain buried in the still omni-present rubble of buildings 8 months after the earthquake.

The loss of so many government buildings and employees in the earthquake made a previously weak and ineffectual government even more handicapped, and this has made the humanitarian response to the earthquake largely the purview of international NGOs and official development agencies like USAID and GTZ. The fact of being in an election period further complicates matters, and while the Haitian government is actually working very hard (but invisibly) behind the scenes to make things better, very few Haitian people on the street seem to have much confidence that their government is helping them.

Tent camps are ubiquitous here, housing hundreds of thousands in conditions that vary from merely unpleasant, but well organized, to near chaos, misery and squalor. It is rainy season here, and each time it rains, the camps are flooded with fetid water, trash, and mud. Each hurricane forming in the Atlantic looms large as a possible new disaster in the making, though we have so far dodged each bullet. A tent is no place to be in a hurricane, and a Red Cross official personally confided to me that despite the fact that Haiti is “more prepared than it has ever been” for a hurricane, if a serious storm does hit Haiti this year, there is no place left for people to evacuate to. People are already there.

But, despite all that, life goes on. People make do and find ways to accomplish reasonable things in an unreasonable setting. More details later.

In the meantime…

Here are a couple of blog posts from friends (Peace Corps Guinea folk) who are also working here in Haiti right now:

Good Haiti photos from my friend Julia Maxwell: http://juliasnextadventure.blogspot.com/2010/08/omg.html

Haiti photos and words from my friend Trayle Kulshan: http://www.trayle.org/2010/09/what-was-once.html

~ by tchibanga2000 on September 5, 2010.