The Hard Work of Rebuilding Haiti Continues
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Haiti is still reeling from the January 12th earthquake. While there was an unprecedented fundraising and relief effort in the weeks following the disaster, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere still needs rebuilding, even as the media spotlight fades.
My friend Lisa Ruth – artist, traveler, writer, baker – is in Haiti, working with Grassroot’s United, a US-based, service and volunteer-driven organization working to connect relief workers, social groups and humanitarian organizations to local resources. Lisa Ruth sent an email out today describing her experiences. These are her words and photos.
tomorrow will mark my first full week in haiti. it’s incredible how travelling, and especially disaster-related travel, can make seven short days seem fuller than the last seven months, and how sleeping six hours can feel like a restful night, whereas i’ve been clocking in up to 9 hours most nights at home.
even on sunday funday – our day off from keeping the grassroots united projects alive – it felt like we did enough to fill an entire weekend. we welcomed to GRUB (the grassroots base) visitors from the Hands On Disaster Relief (HODR) rubble and deconstruction crew based in Leogane which was the epicenter of the earthquake and had 80% of its infrastructure destroyed. i worked with HODR in peru in 2007/2008 and two of the three guys who came up were friends of mine either from the peru burners without borders crew which took over after HODR or from my early days in thailand. joa was the tsunami volunteer who i met up with first on my return trip to thailand in january 2006, and along with catching up after years of only being connected on facebook, we talked at length about the crazy politics that have now turned to civil war in that country.
i hadn’t yet been outside of the limited triangle of our street, the air conditioned seating area in the nearby gas station where we sometimes go for meetings or lunch, and the airport, but sunday morning three of us ventured out on a motorbike to the market, clanking helmets on the way and musing about what the locals must be thinking about so many helmets on one bike. the market was identifiable before we reached the entrance with the pungent acridity of rotting…everything lining the road, and between the stalls. to walk between vendors one has to step over, but mostly through, mounds of smelly, wet trash. i have never been in such a filthy marketplace. i picked up some reserve mac and cheese boxes for those nights that our cook ends up putting the slices of hot dog or beef into the noodles or rice though we tell her every day that some folks want it on the side, pauline got a nutella-like spread that comes in containers marked “UN, not for resale”, and DJ mourned the green and yellow tennis shoes he can’t afford to buy. i found a pair of flip flops which i paid US$4 for, as we most everywhere encounter US prices on things, though haitians’ salaries are nowhere near enough to afford these inflated, imported-good driven prices. a plate of food is cheap at a street stall (mmm… diri et pwa – rice and bean mixture), but my mac and cheese boxes were the same price i’d pay back home and the shoes were no bargain. fruit of course, is affordable, and we are blessed to have untold numbers of mangoes, plantains, and limes at GRUB within a pole’s reach. and we’ve also enjoyed a few local roosters from the property. i’m so glad i started eating chicken last year.
back at base we found out a pool reconnaissance mission has been successful, two of the guys located a hotel populated by locals with a pool and dj, so we all climb a passing water truck on the main road, then fill all nooks of an suv which stops for us, and spend the afternoon in the sun dancing and swimming and chilling out. most aid organization workers here have tight security, don’t travel except in convoys, have a 6 PM curfew, and would never think of walking along the street let alone hitching a ride with a local. we are just a little different, and really enjoy the connections we make this way and adventures we have. for example, when one of our party didn’t quite make it on the water truck before it drove off, two guys on a motorbike asked her if she wanted to catch up to us, slid her on and delivered her to the rest of us on the truck. we saw them a couple days later and we all recognized each other and waved enthusiastic bonswas. also significant was that this hotel did not cater to the jet set NGO elite, but to a pool full of haitians who work in telecommunications or other mid-level jobs, and who we joked around with after checking each other out from opposite sides of the pool from for awhile. i was shaking my hips and ended up in a couple different dance-offs in and on the side of the pool. one song in particular elicited a rousing cheer from everyone – us included – which is about the earthquake and everything coming tumbling down. i zoomed in time back to a thai song on constant repetition in the months after the tsunami about the wave and its destruction as i mused on how music is such a powerful force of bringing people together in their shared trauma.
monday lunch required a trip down to the food stands on the corner of our road and the main road to the airport. we’d just been talking about making an effort to not get the styrofoam takeaway boxes, and possible ways to recycle it if we can, so i brought a tupperware container with me, and the first question from the vendor was the same as it would be in the states, “say pwop?” (is it clean), and when i affirmed, she loaded it up with rice, a runny black bean mix, a fried chicken leg, hot sauce, and cabbage salad… it’s a huge mound of food for 100 goudes (just under $3). they tried to give me a plastic bag to cover it, and when i brought my bandana out to cover it on the walk home, my fellow volunteer said, “i don’t think they are getting your sustainable approach.” i walked home without taking any plastic or styrofoam with enough food to feed three of us… meanwhile, back at base, internet research was showing that styrofoam can be broken down by using orange oil. i happened to bring some with me to use as a deterrent against fire ants, and within an hour they’d created a glue with styrofoam and the oil, and research continued into the potential offgassing of such an exercise, plantations in haiti with large amounts of orange production (grand marnier anyone? reports from the haiti-based plantation show horrible labor practices…), and ideas to go down to the bus station to take a photo of the huge mound of styrofoam and say “we have a solution to this!”
this brings up again that there is trash everywhere. we include with our various efforts to showcase sustainable building practices here at GRUB as we move into the transitional shelter building phase, a vision of a haiti where no more plastic bottles or plastic bags are floating in the wind. plastic bottles can be filled with plastic bags and used as bricks to build cisterns and walls of houses. the ubiquitous plastic bags of drinking water are used as planter start casings in our garden, we have a burn bin and compost pile, and use all our grey water to water the garden or flush the toilet.
in addition to connecting up medical supplies with clinics and camps who need them, we are creating a tool lending program, and developing safe new dwellings for folks, we’re currently also propagating a ton of beets, beans, peas, tomatoes, neem, and fruit trees that were donated to us by the Ministry of Agriculture. together with haitian permaculture students, and our partner Kleiwerks International we planted a ton of them at an orphanage just last week, and will be transporting fruit trees to another orphanage later today.
monday evening i experienced the first GRU family meeting. on agenda was a heavy topic: developing evacuation strategies in case of 1) political unrest, 2) hurricanes, 3) earthquakes. there’s something really empowering about being 8 dedicated and invested people discussing worst case scenarios. it takes all of the fear out of the possibilities. it also turns out, and to rest your minds back at home, we’re well-connected to various evacuation options due to our role as a connecting organization with contacts to helicopters, planes, officials, etc.
tuesday we awoke to reports of students protesting an arrest of one student a few days earlier, and internally displaced persons (IDPs)joining in to highlight a lack of food, water, and sanitation in the camps near the palace. they targeted MINUSTAH (UN stabilization mission in haiti) and the national forces. it resulted in national forces using tear gas and rubber bullets on the demonstrators, and everyone in the NGO community lying low tuesday. so we stay confined to the house due to safety concerns, and the weight of our hypothetical situations discussed last night was felt by all of us.
on wednesday i was the designated GRU rep for a visit to UN HQ to attend a couple of forums, on NGOs and humanitarian issues. it’s all very glamorous there, and feels like something out of film, so i brought out my clean linen shirt and shorts for the occasion. i met up with a friend of a friend of another GRU volunteer, tom, who is from paris and working with caritas for the next six months. we had lunch paid in american dollars in the airconditioned canteen next to two lithuanian pistol packing peacekeepers. over our french fries tom explained the complicated issues they come up against in this vatican driven charity and with the local parishes. after the meetings which were basically a download of information on security, the plans for resettling the IDPs, the MINUSTAH’s contingency plan in development, and updates on what’s still held up in customs, i offered to show him GRUB, and we drove the five minute ride back in a brand new sea foam green suv with his driver, so he could see our base, the tents we sleep in, the hole in the wall that serves as our beer supply line to the neighbor… i think our standard of living is not quite what he’s used to, but he didn’t seem too phased, was glad to connect with pauline from home, and we agreed to try to hang out or go dancing this weekend.
also on wednesday, i was given the title of director of fundraising and PR at GRU, and have agreed to be the continuity around our proposals and documentation for the next several months after i return to the states. i also already know this is going to be just the first of more trips to be here in port-au-prince, though i still don’t know yet what that will look like concretely. but after a week, the problem solving we’re doing to start this venture up right in order to use the platform to be rapidly deployable in future disasters is right where i want to be, and i want to see the long term effects of our work here in haiti. our immediate need is $3,000 if you’re interested in contributing now toward building our foundation (literally, pouring a concrete slab as we move our operations into a dome and leave the inside of our base available for other NGOs to have administrative space to work out of.)
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