By Mar­tin Patriquin, MacLeans

Can a 10-year, $10-billion rebuild­ing plan turn this coun­try around?

The domes of Haiti’s pres­i­den­tial palace once soared over the Champs de Mars park, a green space dom­i­nated by a four-metre sculp­ture of Hait­ian rev­o­lu­tion­ary leader Tou­s­saint L’Ouverture—“a place,” as pro­fes­sor Mario-Jacques Scott, who teaches in the area, puts it, “to breathe and take a break.”

Today, the camp that now occu­pies the park sits in front of a col­lapsed palace that, rem­i­nis­cent as it is of a man on his knees, has become an endur­ing sym­bol of a bro­ken Haiti. In the wake of the Jan. 12 earth­quake, the park is a teem­ing, chaotic labyrinth of tents, shacks and lean-tos. The odours of life—exhaust, sewage, char­coal smoke—fill the air; women and their chil­dren wash them­selves behind L’Ouverture’s back. Crowd­ing 3,800 des­per­ate peo­ple into the equiv­a­lent of six city blocks has had its mis­eries: on a recent Sun­day night, res­i­dents say, a young girl was gang-raped by 17 boys.

“We’re hun­gry,” says res­i­dent Car­los Jean-Charles, who sells oil paint­ings by the pres­i­den­tial palace fence, “and our hunger is turn­ing peo­ple into dev­ils. Haiti is hell. We are liv­ing in hell.” The young man shrugs and shoos away sev­eral chil­dren crowd­ing his path. “We need an occu­pa­tion, I think.”

Arguably, they already have it. Six months after the mag­ni­tude 7.0 earth­quake struck the island nation of nine mil­lion, the prac­ti­cal non-existence of the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment is as plain to the eye as the ubiq­ui­tous piles of rub­ble and rebar clog­ging the roads. Instead, some 1,200 or so non-governmental orga­ni­za­tions (no one is sure just how many, or exactly how much money they have), under the nom­i­nal direc­tion of the United Nations, are spread out across the coun­try, dis­trib­ut­ing aid and con­duct­ing piece­meal rebuild­ing efforts with lit­tle or no regard for the country’s cen­tral authority—which they see (right­fully, in many cases) as woe­fully corrupt.

It is why, despite global good­will and almost US$10 bil­lion in pledges from coun­tries and inter­na­tional orga­ni­za­tions around the world, much of that intended to be admin­is­tered by the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment (Canada alone has com­mit­ted over $1 bil­lion from 2006 to 2012), the coun­try remains a patch­work of mis­ery, shock­ing inequal­ity, cor­rup­tion and chaos that would be famil­iar to any­one with even a cur­sory knowl­edge of Haiti’s his­tory. And there is more than enough time for fur­ther nat­ural dis­as­ters, polit­i­cal upheaval and insta­bil­ity for the poor­est coun­try in the West­ern hemi­sphere, if his­tory is any indi­ca­tion. Pov Ayiti, as they say in Cre­ole. Poor Haiti.

For Georges Jr. Davis, there is no greater mon­u­ment to the fail­ure of his gov­ern­ment than the Sylvio Cator sta­dium. For three months, the 22-year-old has lived in and helped man­age the sprawl­ing tent camp in the stadium’s park­ing lot, where some 10,000 peo­ple sleep every night. Coin­ci­den­tally, Davis saw roughly the same num­bers clam­ber into the sta­dium, which sur­vived the quake, through­out the World Cup to peace­fully (if not qui­etly) watch the games on sev­eral giant screens.

Look at it this way, he says: 10,000 poor, hun­gry Haitians came together to par­take in the national, hooligan-prone obses­sion of soccer—without any of the oppor­tunis­tic crime and vio­lence. If there was a pop­u­lar, Haiti-wide exam­ple of sol­i­dar­ity amidst ruin, Davis thought, this was it. Yet no one from the gov­ern­ment has even showed up to the sta­dium, much less the camps that sit within spit­ting dis­tance of it.

“The camp has been here six months, and not one visit from the pres­i­dent, not one visit from any min­is­ter,” Davis says, walk­ing past a two-metre-high pile of garbage. Only the police showed up three months to the day after the earth­quake, and it was to remove peo­ple liv­ing on sta­dium grounds. “We have moti­vated peo­ple here ready to help, and yet there are no trucks, no rake, no broom, noth­ing. There’s no gov­ern­ment, only NGOs.”

As a result, toi­lets and water facil­i­ties are over­bur­dened, and food dis­tri­b­u­tion petered out sev­eral months ago as NGOs moved on to other projects. Only six secu­rity guards, hired by the sta­dium, patrol the grounds. Res­i­dents whose tents are pitched on the road through the park­ing lot know to tem­porar­ily move else­where when­ever it rains; the road becomes a river, with the cur­rent strong enough to drag tents, latrines and what­ever else 200 m down the hill onto the streets out­side the stadium.

A wary look passes over René Hubert’s face when he hears of sit­u­a­tions like the one play­ing out in the sta­dium park­ing lot. He is with Groupe IBI/DAA, a Montreal-based urban plan­ning firm hired by the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment to effec­tively build Port-au-Prince’s legal and bureau­cratic frame­work. “It’s a vicious cir­cle,” says the self-described opti­mist. “The NGOs believe that the gov­ern­ment is cor­rupt so they go out on their own, and the end effect is that the gov­ern­ment becomes less rel­e­vant, and the project ends when the fund­ing dries up. We have a lot of money but no con­ti­nu­ity, and there­fore no results.”

The Hait­ian gov­ern­ment has never instilled con­fi­dence in the global com­mu­nity. For eight years, the coun­try has been hov­er­ing at the bot­tom of Trans­parency International’s Cor­rup­tion Per­cep­tions Index, a sur­vey of 180 gov­ern­ments around the world. In 2009 the coun­try climbed to 168 from 177 the year before, but the government’s effi­cacy has been greatly dimin­ished in the earthquake’s wake. Clear­ing the esti­mated 20 mil­lion cubic metres of rub­ble from Port-au-Prince’s streets largely remains a shovel-and-wheelbarrow oper­a­tion. U.S. Sen. John Kerry recently crit­i­cized Pres­i­dent René Préval’s admin­is­tra­tion over the “trou­bling signs that the recov­ery and longer-term rebuild­ing activ­i­ties are flagging.”

Bill Clin­ton, who recently said he is devot­ing the next three years to Haiti’s recon­struc­tion, was more blunt: “We must—all of us involved in Haiti’s recovery—do bet­ter,” the for­mer U.S. pres­i­dent wrote in a col­umn co-written by Hait­ian Prime Min­is­ter Jean-Max Bellerive.

Yet, as Hubert notes, the NGOs them­selves oper­ate within a sys­tem that has lit­tle trans­parency, over­sight or direc­tion. Some 1,200 of them are reg­is­tered with the Office for the Coor­di­na­tion of Human­i­tar­ian Affairs (OCHA), a branch of the UN head­quar­tered near Haiti’s airport—though whether this is an accu­rate num­ber is anyone’s guess. Every day, dozens of NGO per­son­nel arrive in the coun­try; a recent Sun­day flight saw roughly 30 relent­lessly cheery mem­bers of the North Car­olina Bap­tist Mis­sion wear­ing iden­ti­cal T-shirts arrive in Port-au-Prince.

“I’m bliss­fully igno­rant,” says Matthew Hewett, the OCHA’s infor­ma­tion man­age­ment offi­cer. A tall, tidy fel­low from Car­man, Man., Hewett is prone to these kinds of star­tlingly frank dec­la­ra­tions that tend to cut to the prob­lem of coor­di­nat­ing non-governmental aid groups. “We ask them for num­bers. Whether they report is another ques­tion. We don’t have the resources to check if they are.”

Those NGOs that do choose to reg­is­ter are cor­ralled into the UN’s orga­ni­za­tional sys­tem of 20 so-called clus­ter groups, along with mem­bers of gov­ern­ment, uni­ver­si­ties and other UN agen­cies. These “clusters”—“nutrition,” “pro­tec­tion” and “shel­ter” are among them—meet reg­u­larly to hash out logis­tics and coor­di­na­tion. This stag­ger­ing bureau­cratic heft reveals the enor­mity of the task of rebuild­ing a coun­try from scratch—and it’s work­ing, accord­ing to Hewett. “Clus­ters are embed­ding with gov­ern­ment more than ever before,” he says, which is the UN way of say­ing that NGOs and gov­ern­ment are finally work­ing together.

If so, it remains an uneasy alliance. “It’s not always easy to work with the gov­ern­ment, let’s be hon­est,” says Car­ole Coeur, Doc­tors With­out Bor­ders’ coor­di­na­tor for the Swiss-based NGO’s Choscal Hos­pi­tal in Cité Soleil, the noto­ri­ous Port-au-Prince slum. “That’s the diplo­matic answer. They aren’t nec­es­sar­ily used to work­ing at our pace. It was the same before the earthquake.”

The NGOs put the gov­ern­ment in a vex­ing sit­u­a­tion: it needs them to sup­ple­ment its own relief effort, which con­sists mostly of medium– and longer-term recon­struc­tion plans, yet they under­cut the government’s legit­i­macy the longer they stay. More­over, accord­ing to an Octo­ber 2009 Hait­ian gov­ern­ment report obtained by Maclean’s, 70 per cent of NGOs pay an “unjus­ti­fi­able per diem” to their employ­ees, up to US$260 a day. The end result, accord­ing to one Hait­ian Health Min­istry esti­mate, is that NGO employ­ees are paid three times more than their gov­ern­ment col­leagues. “The gov­ern­ment doesn’t know what the NGOs are doing,” Hubert says, “and they have more money than the gov­ern­ment does.”

The sit­u­a­tion lends cre­dence to a cyn­i­cal say­ing in Port-au-Prince: if you are going to con­tract a dis­ease, catch­ing AIDS is like win­ning the lot­tery. After all, the AIDS clinic is funded by for­eign gov­ern­ments and NGOs, and it’s the clean­est and most mod­ern in the land. Given the state of the national health sys­tem, though, God help you if your kid­neys fail.

Nav­i­gat­ing the streets and camps of Port-au-Prince is an exer­cise in all-encompassing frus­tra­tion, and it is easy to see why it isn’t only the NGOs who ques­tion the Hait­ian government’s abil­ity to steer the coun­try through the dis­as­ter. The pre-earthquake unem­ploy­ment rate stood between 70 and 80 per cent and is likely much higher now, while only 28,000 of the 1.5 mil­lion dis­placed peo­ple have moved into new homes. The mid­dle class was scarce before the quake; it is prac­ti­cally non-existent today.

The months fol­low­ing January’s dis­as­ter seem to have strength­ened the population’s resolve in what Hait­ian film­maker Joseph Hil­lel calls “Hait­ianInshal­lah” (“If God wills it” in Ara­bic): a reliance less on acts of gov­ern­ment than the grace of a higher being. “Only God knows when things are going to change,” says 20-year-old Jayla Dieula, who lives with her fam­ily in the Del­mas 2 camp, located on a for­mer mil­i­tary land­ing strip. Dieula says she is afraid of being raped, and wor­ried about what she’ll next eat; gov­ern­ment, pol­i­tics and pub­lic pol­icy seem painfully abstract in the dark, sweaty place where she exists.

It speaks to the Pré­val government’s con­sid­er­able PR problem—one exac­er­bated by the pres­i­dent him­self, who has been prac­ti­cally invis­i­ble in his own coun­try since the earth­quake. On the rare occa­sions when he appears on tele­vi­sion or radio, he is uneasy or antag­o­nis­tic in the face of ques­tions. “Pré­val doesn’t feel his power is threat­ened,” says Bernard Chancy, pres­i­dent of the SNC-Lavalin-affiliated engi­neer­ing firm LGL S.A., “and he doesn’t feel he has to do PR. He’s the chief, and he’ll be there until the end of his man­date.” (Pré­val con­ducts most of his busi­ness in a tem­po­rary office set up behind the palace.)

The first phase of Haiti’s recov­ery and devel­op­ment action plan, unveiled last March, will see the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment dis­perse nearly US$4 bil­lion over the next 18 months. Pré­val likely won’t be pres­i­dent by the end of the first phase; assum­ing the sched­uled Novem­ber elec­tions take place (though one should never assume here), he is con­sti­tu­tion­ally for­bid­den from run­ning for the office again. Nev­er­the­less, his legacy will be marked by how effec­tively the gov­ern­ment admin­is­ters the bil­lions of dol­lars head­ing its way—the first time in Haiti’s his­tory that the admin­is­tra­tion in Port-au-Prince has taken charge of such an amount of money.

If it works, and that’s a big if, Haiti will be patch­work no more. The recon­struc­tion includes a ground-up redraw­ing of the country’s infra­struc­ture. Bureau­cratic and leg­isla­tive power, long cen­tred in Port-au-Prince, will be rad­i­cally decen­tral­ized; no longer will res­i­dents of Cap Haï­tien travel 250 km to the cap­i­tal to, say, renew their driver’s licence.

There will be con­struc­tion codes and zon­ing laws for the first time, as well as the rebuild­ing of 1,300 col­lapsed schools and 50 hos­pi­tals, 600 km of new roads, two new regional air­ports, and two new sea­ports, among the dozens of other infra­struc­ture pro­grams. Accord­ing to the plan, it will take 10 years to rebuild Haiti. In 20, the plans says, Haiti will be an emerg­ing country.

“I think it’s actu­ally hap­pen­ing quite quickly,” says Hubert, not­ing the Pré­val gov­ern­ment imple­mented the plan at the end of June, three months after it was intro­duced. Still, there are myr­iad caveats. The Hait­ian peo­ple need to be shaken from their renowned fatalism—the col­lec­tive assump­tion that every­thing will go wrong, or at least stay the way it is. For this to hap­pen, the coun­try needs to phase out its reliance on non-governmental aid, a Band-Aid solu­tion that Hubert says has become all too per­ma­nent in Haiti. “Find me a coun­try that has devel­oped itself with NGOs,” he says.

The gulf between plan and real­ity lies no fur­ther than what sits in the shadow of the pres­i­den­tial palace. “Look how dirty it is,” says pro­fes­sor Scott in his teacher’s bari­tone, jab­bing his thick fin­ger at the dirt beneath his feet. “The gov­ern­ment does noth­ing. We have 13-year-olds pros­ti­tut­ing them­selves for 100 gour­des [about $2.50].”

Nine-year-old Medine Gen­tille, Scott’s lone stu­dent, sits in the dirt and looks on as her teacher bel­lows against the wretched­ness that might await her, and the injus­tices she already suf­fers. Poor girl. Pov Ayiti.

http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/07/22/we-are-living-in-hell/