Haiti After the Earthquake (58 page)

Today, Port-au-Prince is an urban disaster. Close to three million people are crowded into a city without even basic services such as water, sanitation, and transportation. Devoid of any city planning, commercial and residential are intermingled in a patchwork of confusion.

Shortly after the earthquake, Leslie approached Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Miami, who is internationally known as one of the founders of the New Urbanism movement. Together, working with a team of Haitian and American architects, they came up with a bold and ambitious reconstruction plan for Haiti. The plan redistributes large parts of the population of Port-au-Prince to smaller Haitian cities and organized rural communities, many of them a safe distance from areas most vulnerable to natural disasters.

One of the goals supported in the plan for Haiti's development is to restore a population balance to the country by building up other cities and creating sustainable agricultural villages in rural areas. The relocation of schools, hospitals, and industry will develop what Leslie calls “magnets of attraction” based on job opportunities and educational and social services. The plan also includes a reimagined Port-au-Prince, with zoning segregating residential from commercial activities in the dense parts of downtown and strict building regulations for earthquake-resistant construction. The new city layout also calls for the development of various kinds of public spaces—parks, squares, markets, exchange centers—including a beautiful historic district.

An article calling the plan “lucid and surprisingly convincing” appeared in the
New York Times
on March 31, 2010, sparking enormous interest. “I thought nobody would see it because it was published in the Art and Design section.
Everybody
read it. I got calls
from all over the world inviting me to come and share Haiti's plans. So many people want to help.” Since that time, Leslie has crisscrossed the United States and the Caribbean sharing the vision for a new Haiti. “I'm interpreting the Haitian plan and have illustrated it in drawings and renderings so I can explain to the people what is happening.”

This is surely not the first plan for Haiti's renewal. Leslie showed me the presentation that he uses in his speaking engagements, which places intricate drawings of a master plan for the city of Port-au-Prince prepared in 1785 alongside the renderings by the University of Miami in 2010. Success is by no means guaranteed and depends on economic, social, and institutional rebuilding. Continued international goodwill, the difficult process of consensus building, the real possibility of another natural disaster during the next hurricane season, and competing priorities all affect the process. And as Leslie well knows, “it takes time to build. The decision-making process is very intricate, very difficult to do . . . there is a difference between decision-making and decision-taking.”

The reconstruction process has indeed proven to be difficult. As I finish this chapter, a year after the earthquake, progress has been painstakingly slow, life in Haiti remains unbearably hard, and those who work untiringly for Haiti's recovery are deeply frustrated. The massive needs of more than a million people in tents, the rebuilding of physical and institutional infrastructure, and the negotiation of a complex political landscape are overwhelming challenges. But Leslie remains dedicated to his country, and all of us working for Haiti forge on. Even disinterested observers cannot help but root for Haiti. Even skeptics cannot help but be impressed by the fortitude and grace with which the Haitian people are bearing up. They are a strong lot. Leslie says it best. “We are warriors. It's in our DNA.”

 

 

 

I
n May 2009,
President Bill Clinton was appointed the UN Special Envoy for Haiti. His passion for Haiti, dating to his posthoneymoon visit to the island nation, was well-known. He had been deeply engaged with Haiti while President of the United States and had launched a development program for Haiti at the Clinton Global Initiative.
^*
He had been successful as UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery in 2005 and 2006. Now Annan's successor, Ban Ki-Moon, looked to President Clinton for his unmatched convening power.

Ban recognized that progress was being made in Haiti and believed that a focused effort could result in further success for the country. The UN peacekeeping operation that had been deployed in Haiti since 2004 had dramatically reduced the levels of violence in the country; reported kidnappings had declined from an average of thirty per month in the first half of 2008 to fewer than eight per month in the first half of 2009.
^†
However, the UN recognized that what Haiti needed most was private sector investments, which UN officials and peacekeepers had little expertise in attracting.

 

*Established in 2005 by President Bill Clinton, the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) convenes global leaders to devise and implement innovative solutions to some of the world's most pressing challenges.

†Report of the Secretary-General's on the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), September 18, 2009.

I had worked for President Clinton in his capacity as UN Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery. Trained in human rights law, with a focus on women and children, I have spent the majority of my UN career at UNICEF. Although I have seen firsthand what organizations such as UNICEF can do at the country level to improve the lives of communities, I also know the limits of UN agencies' mandates and capabilities. With President Clinton in the lead, however, I sensed that the UN had a unique opportunity to create positive momentum in Haiti.

I was the first one recruited to serve President Clinton in his capacity as UN Special Envoy for Haiti in June 2009. By early August, his team consisted of five staff members. five. We were thrilled to learn that Dr. Paul Farmer would soon be appointed President Clinton's deputy. Both Farmer and President Clinton had agreed to lead the UN effort for a salary of one dollar a year. Their mission was to build on the success of UN peacekeepers in establishing stability and seize the political moment to jump-start international investment and strengthen the government's capability to deliver social services to its people.

During President Clinton's first visit to Haiti for the UN in June 2009, he met a twenty-seven-year-old Haitian who ran a fuel briquette project. The program processes household waste into briquettes in an environmentally responsible as well as a less-expensive alternative to wood-based charcoal that people can use for heat and cooking. The president immediately saw the environmental value of the program and its potential to reduce community violence through youth employment. He was also determined to support this young entrepreneur who had successfully run the project in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince. After watching a group of young Haitians sorting garbage to make the briquettes, President Clinton told us that he would help make this small project an example of “building back better,” an expression he had coined while working in the countries affected by the tsunami.

During another visit to Haiti in October 2009, President Clinton met Valentin Abe, a Cote d'Ivorian who had studied in the United States before moving to Haiti, where he created Caribbean Harvest, a
fish farm run on solar energy. When President Clinton visited the small farm outside Port-au-Prince, he was captivated by Valentin's ingenuity and commitment to helping the poor. Valentin's fish farm teaches local farmers to grow fish and then farms out fingerlings to families who raise the fish in cages in nearby ponds. (The cages are privately owned and each family is responsible for their investment.) After the growing cycle, Caribbean Harvest collects the fish and transports them to Port-au-Prince for sale; the profits are shared evenly between Caribbean Harvest and the farmers.

It's difficult to imagine now, post-earthquake, how optimistic we were in the fall of 2009. Our UN office strategized around two central concepts. First, the country's future had to be guided by the Haitian people. And second, we would position Haiti not as a lost cause but as a country primed to make a huge leap forward. Our objectives: facilitate job creation through private sector investments; secure donor disbursements; support hurricane preparedness across the country; and promote coordination of the estimated ten thousand not-for-profits working in Haiti. Both Paul Farmer and President Clinton often reminded us that “in its two hundred years of independence, Haiti has never had a fair chance.” We were determined to use the extraordinary momentum created by our bosses to turn the tide and put an end to unfulfilled pledges to the island nation.

From day one, President Clinton made it his responsibility to hold donors accountable to their pledges. Equally important, the mission of the UN office was driven by support for Haiti's own vision for its recovery, not the international community's. Paul Farmer calls this approach “accompaniment.” It means that any intervention in Haiti must be built on the premise that Haitians will lead. We would work with the Haitian government, support efforts to recruit and train Haitians whenever possible, and advocate that a greater portion of aid funding be channeled to direct budget support for the government.

During their October 2009 visit to Haiti, President Clinton and Dr. Farmer attended a high-level private sector meeting organized by the
Inter-American Development Bank in Port-au-Prince. President Clinton was the keynote speaker. His attendance at the meeting helped to draw an estimated five hundred investors to Haiti, most of whom had never set foot on the island. The conference began with then-Prime Minister Michèle Pierre-Louis announcing: “Haiti is open for business.” A survey conducted by the Inter-American Development Bank on the heels of the conference revealed that 97 percent of the participants expressed an increased level of interest in investing in Haiti.

Back in New York, our small team was working closely with the Inter-American Development Bank to compile the first comprehensive, dynamic, web-based directory of not-for-profits working in Haiti. More not-for-profits per capita are in Haiti than in any other country except for India, and coordination among them is woefully lacking.

By December 2009, momentum was building. For the first time, the tone of the international media coverage on Haiti was hopeful. Meanwhile, private investors were showing interest in committing to Haiti. An estimated thirty-five thousand short-term jobs were created nationwide between March and September 2009.
^f

Just before Christmas, Paul Farmer convened a meeting with the staff. Each technical expert had to present his or her 2010 plan and provide strategic advice on how the UN office should fill in existing gaps and accompany the government of Haiti on its path towards recovery. Paul was focused on hurricane preparedness. He was visibly worried about the next cyclone season. Our disaster expert, a staff member from the UN, said: “Paul, the next disaster will most likely be an earthquake or a tsunami.”