Haiti After the Earthquake (35 page)

Major infrastructure rebuilding proposals were heartening but slow to get moving. The grace and comity that had animated the Haitian and international response efforts immediately after the quake had largely evaporated even before cholera struck. Every day the press reported stories of struggles over scarce resources, within the camps and without. People in the camps were frustrated: persistent vulnerability frayed nerves. They complained about the lack of services, especially the lack of schools available for displaced children. Dramas occurred as a few landowners tried to push the displaced out from under their tarps, tents, and beat-up sheets of tin or plywood. At the close of September, the
New York Times
ran a long report about efforts to enforce property rights instead of sheltering homeless people. On the leafy grounds of one church mission, foreign and homegrown clergy seemed set on pushing refugees out of the camp that was set up there immediately after the quake. “‘This used to be a beautiful place, but these people are tearing up the property,' said . . . a Church of God missionary living at the site. ‘They're urinating on it. They're bathing out in public. They're stealing electricity. And they don't work. They sit around all day, waiting for handouts.'”
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Surely the missionary intended no irony by applying a phrase like “tearing up the property” to people displaced by an earthquake that quite literally tore up the Haitian capital, their homes, and their lives.

The cholera outbreak created yet another set of obstacles on the rubble-strewn road to reconstruction, and made the persistent lack of readily available funds for large infrastructure projects such as municipal water systems ever more crippling.
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Although the United States, Cuba, and many other government and nongovernmental groups had invested in cholera treatment and prevention, none of us mistook these frantic efforts for reconstruction. An Associated Press story documented the slow pace of reconstruction:

Other accounts disputed the exact numbers and the causes of delay. (Some simply invoked the word “bureaucracy” as an explanation.) But one thing seemed certain: the holdup stemmed from fundamental weaknesses in the machinery of foreign assistance, often having more to do with donor-country problems than Haitian ones. The $1.15 billion the United States pledged in March for reconstruction had stalled because of partisan politics in Congress.
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In its sluggish delivery on aid promises, the United States was far from alone. The Associated Press reported that, as of September 29, less than 15 percent of all reconstruction pledges had arrived: $696 million compared to the almost $10 billion in pledges.
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And of the money that had been disbursed according to official reports, some was a phantasm born of bookkeeping wizardry (retooled aid dollars, debt relief, or tardy delivery of already promised loans to the government of Haiti).

When funds were, at last, released from the bureaucratic snares of foreign assistance, there was no guarantee that they would reach the most deserving projects. There was stiff competition for contracts, from the quake's immediate aftermath to the long road of reconstruction, and as noted, the Haitian companies seemed to be losing these fights.
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Unless the rules of the road for foreign aid were changed, the anemia of reconstruction projects in terms of creating local jobs and strengthening Haitian capacity (including that of small construction firms) seemed likely to persist.
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Although many NGOs still preferred to work on their own or in collaboration with other members of “civil society,” some of the big players were beginning to rethink the merits of public sector engagement. Try as they might, the dozen or so NGOs working at the General Hospital could not keep the place afloat. The hospital, months after the quake, still faced the double burden of the biggest caseload in the country and perhaps the biggest facility funding shortage. But international NGOs had raised millions of dollars for earthquake relief.
Trying to connect the dots, we went to the American Red Cross and asked them to invest money in salaries for nurses, janitors, surgeons, and others at the General Hospital. It took convincing by a number of people (including President Clinton), but they said yes. The Red Cross provided—through what was for them a modest grant—invaluable medical equipment and staff salary support.

NGOs had many other opportunities to accompany the public sector as it struggled to rebuild the shattered health system. The story was the same in public education and, as cholera reminded us, public water and sanitation. But beyond the cluster system, how could the machinery of foreign assistance better coordinate funding flows and the division of labor to strengthen public institutions and generate long-term reconstruction?

The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission sought not to be yet another cog in the vast machinery of foreign aid, but rather to introduce some transparency and coordination to the process. It leant a seal of approval to projects—whether from NGOs, contractors, or line ministries—that fit within the national plan, and then tried to patch together funding for approved initiatives. The commission would also track pledges and disbursements to prevent donors from defaulting on their promises and grantees from failing to make efficient use of funds.

These failings of mainstream aid in Haiti were, of course, well-known.
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The rebuilding efforts (or lack thereof) in Gonaïves after it was ravaged in 2004 by Tropical Storm Jeanne were a case in point. As bad as parts of New Orleans looked four years after Katrina, the city of Gonaïves was, on the eve of the 2008 storms, almost completely unrestored by the money pledged after Jeanne. It was never clear how much of it ever reached Gonaïves, or Haiti for that matter, because there was little in the way of tracking mechanisms at that time.

The end of 2010 was too early to tell whether the new Recovery Commission would work. If it fails, it would probably be because the body lacked teeth and had to rely on the goodwill of all parties. In its first three months of existence, the commission approved reconstruction
projects worth $3 billion, but unmet pledges meant that most of these projects remained incompletely funded or not funded at all. It wasn't clear why, other than the usual bureaucratic siloing, major funders had not put more resources into the commission. Some argued that the commission existed only to green-light projects lacking sufficient resources. But this was circular reasoning, especially when made by those who themselves control many of the resources: what good was a stamp of approval if projects lacked funding for implementation?

Case-by-case investigations of where the money was stuck revealed, as noted, foreign-grown political obstructions and bookkeeping tricks but also the very real lack of what aid specialists call “absorptive capacity.” Haitian institutions, public and private, have been long starved of resources; a massive influx of funds, unless carefully distributed and monitored, could have overwhelmed them. But some of the build-up was merely the wait-and-see approach characteristic of the foreign aid enterprise. If the commission were able to shepherd some large-scale projects forward in the early days of reconstruction, it could grease the skids for future projects and begin to serve its purpose—improving aid efficiency and effectiveness and transparency and speed.

If the commission fails, and if development assistance in Haiti remains mediocre, it's easy to guess who will be blamed: those who stuck their necks out for more a nimble and transparent process. But the default mode is to blame the Haitians: their culture, institutions, and lack of ownership over reconstruction and development schemes. And as of late October, the way aid was flowing—or rather, the way obstacles were appearing to curtail its flow—seemed to augur a future in which Haitians not only lack sufficient resources for a massive, New Deal-style job-creation campaign, but also are themselves held accountable for any failure. (Such accountability becomes a further reason to deny them support.) That was what happened after the four storms of 2008, after the flooding of Gonaïves in 2004, and after so many disasters natural and unnatural over the course of Haitian history. At the close of the year, the Haitian government was
receiving few foreign assistance dollars and collecting little in the way of taxes.

Knowing that billions of dollars have been spent in Haiti over recent years can lead to cynicism about aid effectiveness. Tim Schwartz and several others have offered scathing assessments of the failure of development assistance in Haiti. The challenge before such critics—and I'm one of them—is not just to diagnose the problem but to fix it. Some aid agencies and foundations, paralyzed by failure, have been, at times, reluctant to work in Haiti. But they returned soon enough after the many crises of the past years—storm, flood, famine, quake, displacement, epidemic disease. The trouble was that no famine or refugee crisis or cholera epidemic was solely a
natural
disaster. They were always social disasters, and almost never local in their etiologies.

This insight is not new: Mike Davis made this point about what he called the “late Victorian holocausts”—a series of famines that occurred not in isolated backwaters but rather in settings firmly integrated into the British Empire.
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These famines were the result of policy decisions made far from the famine-affected areas, just as the late-twentieth-century collapse of Haiti's rice production was triggered by biased trade rules set in North America and Europe. Small-scale Haitian farmers could not compete with huge First World agricultural subsidies after Haitian import tariffs were removed as part of strangely labeled free-trade agreements.
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These policies were of course designed without the agreement of Haitian farmers, who then watched their livelihoods slip away within the space of a few years.

Unfair trade policies were nothing new, as any Haitian historian could tell you. What was new, or newly significant, was the rise of a massive machinery of humanitarian assistance, much of it rooted in the private sector. In the last few decades, the number of NGOs exploded, in large part because of the great and unattended needs of the increasingly unequal world. In a damning new book,
The Crisis Caravan:
What's Wrong with Humanitarian Aid?,
Linda Polman dates this explosion not to the nineteenth century, when the Red Cross was founded, but to the Biafran War of 1967–1970, which led to the first televised famine and as stirring an international response as had been seen since protests over Belgian rule in the Congo a century ago.

Polman offers an unsparing ethnography of humanitarian assistance: “Wars and disasters generally attract a garish array of individual organizations, each with its own agenda, its own business imperatives, and its own institutional survival tactics.”
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The Haitian earthquake certainly attracted an array, garish enough, of organizations, each with its own imperatives and plans. By the fall, some of these organizations had already moved on to the next disaster. But plenty more were in Haiti to stay, joining an already dizzyingly complex mix of international NGOs, local NGOs, church groups, and mainstream purveyors of development assistance. Writing just after the quake, Mark Danner called Haiti “the great petri dish of foreign aid.”
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Few would agree that it has been a successful experiment.

The pitfalls of humanitarian aid are becoming better known. Indeed, careful consideration of more recent humanitarian disasters, especially those linked directly to strife, offers scant hope for the business-as-usual approach to disasters natural and unnatural. Philip Gourevitch reviews Polman's grim book and several others in a recent
New Yorker
essay, “Alms Dealers.” He summarizes the arguments of the now “groaning bookshelf” of aid critiques by echoing Polman's argument: “Sowing horror to reap aid, and reaping aid to sow horror, [Polman] argues, is ‘the logic of the humanitarian era.'”
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The logic of assistance that focuses on funneling resources to the NGOs large and small, and its unintended consequences, were played out in dramatic terms in Africa (Nigeria in the late sixties and the Great Lakes region and Horn of Africa from the eighties until today) and in Southeast Asia (Cambodia).
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Those first weeks after the quake, when rescue and relief workers poured in, seemed animated by a different spirit than that evoked by Polman and other aid critics. There was much goodwill and generosity; and there still was almost a year later. But we ignore these critiques
at our peril. It's useful to consider each of Gourevitch's examples and reflect on the current Haitian dilemma. Doing good is never simple. He invites us to “consider how Christian aid groups that set up ‘redemption' programs to buy the freedom of slaves in Sudan drove up the market incentives for slavers to take more captives.” This dramatic example has echoes in modern Haiti: the political economy of servitude underpins not only the Haitian
restavèk
tragedy, linked as it is to both poverty and the lack of public education for all, but also the hardship of the
braceros
who cross the Dominican border to harvest sugar cane under conditions denounced as slavery as recently as 2003 .
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Growing inequality, both within countries and between them, is the linchpin of modern servitude and weakens the ability of those with the best of intentions to avoid perverse consequences. Efforts to prosecute those who rely on children for domestic labor are less likely than structural interventions—making sure that children go to a school where they might receive sound instruction and at least one decent meal—to lessen the
restavèk
problem, a symptom not of Haitian cultural uniqueness, but of poverty and inequality.