The Challenge of Human Development in Haiti
Spending time on the ground in Ansapit, Haiti, I’ve gained a deeper understanding the other side of the immigration crisis
A couple weeks ago, Krichna saw me making instant coffee with the cold, clean groundwater that gets pumped into the kitchen, so he asked me if I wanted to go get coffee. I said yes and thought he meant some small street vendor, but we instead went to his family’s house, who live by Sadhana Forest (SF).
Krichna, 22, is one of the long-term Haitian volunteers at SF. His family’s house is an informal dwelling with walls patched together from large pieces of metal, cloth, and plastic. It has a tin roof and a kind of cordoned-off outside area surrounding the dwelling on three sides, where the family dries clothes and where Krichna’s young siblings play. In this courtyard of sorts, there is shade granted by trees and by other cloth coverings the family has put up to protect against the harsh midday sunlight. There are also some goats tethered near one of the barbed wire fences and they bleat constantly, weaving in and out of the barbed wire fences as if the fences don’t exist. Apparently these goats belong to the adjacent farm, not Krichna’s family.
There are also small puppies that run around and wrestle with each other, the skittish one far more emaciated than the confident one. Krichna says they are not his dogs. He tells me they have not been given names. Still, I see them there every time I visit and Krichna keeps giving them food scraps. From what I have seen in many places, the developing world does not have the same type of relationship with dogs as Americans and others do: there are simply some specific dogs that have a working relationship with the humans that tolerate them and throw them scraps, but they do not come inside. They certainly never would sleep on one’s bed.
The inside of the dwelling, where the family sleeps and lives, was dark and cramped. It definitely constitutes poverty conditions — much more so than any I’ve ever seen in the US. It had two rooms with a cloth divider hanging between them and an opening about three feet wide to get from one to the other . One room was for the parents and serves as a makeshift living room and kitchen, with a small stove next to the bed. As I observed it, it was about 5ft by 8ft. It has a bed made of cardboard, a decently-neat pile of clothing that seemed to serve the function of a dresser, and other plastic, rubber, or aluminum items that the family needed.
Krichna’s mother was heating coffee on coals in that room through a sock or stocking, and this filled the dark room with a haze of smoke.
The second room was where Krichna and his siblings sleep, about the same size as the first. I didn’t really see what was in that room; it was very dark inside. Although it was 10AM and bright outside, the dwelling has no windows. Outside the main unit, there was another building: shorter than the height of a person. With our language barrier, I believe Krichna said this was an outhouse. I didn’t look in but I imagine they’d have to squat to bathe, and there must be buckets that make up some sort of toilet.
Actually, on a later day the Project Director of SF, Nixon, told me that the land upon which the family’s informal dwelling was built technically belonged to SF when it was purchased. But Krichna’s family didn’t have a place to go, so SF let them have the small plot of land that they live on.
Krichna introduced me to his brother and sister, mother and father, so it meant a family of five lived there, in this small dwelling. The family was friendly and poured me some coffee — strong and sweet, just like how the poor make their stimulant beverages in just about every single country I’ve been to or read about. I enjoyed the hot coffee and Krichna and I hung out in the cordoned-off courtyard for a bit, then I came back and he said he was going to do something at the church. Most of the Haitians I’ve met are very religious, very Christian, and church events seem to happen just about every day.
Then, maybe ten days later, as Krichna and I were cooking lunch as we always do, he asked me about aid organizations. He wanted to know about which organizations I was aware of that helped Haitians. I asked for specifics and he said that he was mostly curious about organizations that do things like building houses.
One of the reasons I do not want to post pictures of his house is because during this conversation, he said that he was a embarrassed to bring friends to his house because he knew it was bad. This broke my heart a little. He talked about how he wanted to maybe move to the US or Europe to work in a restaurant to get money to help his family build a better house. He told me how in Ansapit, it’s basically impossible to make more money than just for subsistence — for food and clothing and gas. Observation clearly demonstrates that this is true.
Krichna said that he wanted to get a visa to go to the US or Europe but visas were very expensive and he did not and would not have the money to afford it. So he wanted to know about aid organizations who might help his family build better housing. He said he wanted an education, but didn’t know how to go about doing that either. So he wanted to leave Haiti so that he could help his family with improving their conditions.
At a time when the US has been experiencing huge amounts of undocumented Haitian immigration followed by huge amounts of deportations, this really provided some grounding for these issue for me. I knew the numbers, but didn’t viscerally feel the human impact of the truth of them.
Just a few days ago, a boat capsized coming from the Bahamas to Florida, trying to get to the US unofficially. Most of the thirty to forty people on the boat are missing, and probably drowned. It’s likely that many of them were Haitian; the Bahamas is a common stop before Florida. Just last September, there was the video of border agents on horseback tormenting Haitian migrants, and the Biden Administration in a profoundly tone-deaf move, promised not to use horses to perpetrate that kind of degradation upon immigrants anymore.
From being here and talking to people, it makes sense why they want to leave. There are just no opportunities for economic advancement in most places. Krichna says that two of his brothers are in the capital, Port-au-Prince, working at bars and selling stuff. But he says he will not go there. He, like many other Haitians here, say that it is dangerous and stressful and generally terrible to be there — but there is money to be made there.
The other Haitian volunteer here, Patrick, says that he too wants to move from Ansapit. But Patrick wants to go to a different part of Haiti, not another country. He says he wants to get an office job with an organization, and he is currently taking a class where he can learn computer skills that’ll enable him to do so. He wants a laptop, but of course cannot afford one.
[Incidentally, there are basically no laptops here and the schools need them, Patrick needs one, everyone needs one. I feel a little like an asshole for editing photos and videos and blogging on mine but I believe that if you’re traveling like this, getting to know the lives of the less-fortunate, then you’re going to feel like an asshole sometimes. I travel to be able to really see and understand those who just happened to be born in worse conditions than me in that brutal cosmic lottery. Often, it makes me feel like someone who has infinite layers of privilege more than others for no good reason at all. Still, a laptop isn’t cheap for me either, and I am doing this to draw attention to conditions here, to potentially get others to come here. This blog series on Haiti is, after all, not a work of journalism. I have an opinion. I have a goal in mind. I have bought food or items for the Haitians here. I am not objective, not here.]
Anyway, Patrick said that if he stays here, he will have done nothing for his family. I understand that he means financially. From him I know that Sadhana Forest Haiti pays 2500 Dominican pesos a month for Haitian volunteers — about $43. This is not to fault the organization, which seems to pay this stipend and offer food and housing on the site only based on donations and volunteer food donations. There simply isn’t enough money in the system to pay more, as far as I see.
But it also isn’t enough to live on, and I know this because whenever Patrick and Krichna show me and other travelers around town, I know they cannot afford the food on the street, especially the meat. So we buy some for them, too. For the sake of scale, a filling Haitian meal of rice and veggies and fried chicken costs about 250 Haitian gourd — about $2.50 US dollars . This is about 5.8% of their monthly stipend.
So when Krichna asked about aid organizations, my heart sank a bit more. The first time I was in Haiti was a decade ago. It was in Port-au-Prince as a recent college graduate. I came with a professor and a group of others students, working with and around aid organizations. What I saw confirmed then what I had learned in college, but which I had perhaps denied. After that, I more believed reason why the world is bad is not because there is a great conspiracy to keep people down. The world is bad because things are a fucking mess, with so many different interests trying to advance themselves at the same time as — and in competition with — others. The aid industry in Haiti was no exception.
The UN literally brought cholera to Haiti in 2010, not because of evil intent but because of a set of mistakes. Flawed testing cycles of UN Peacekeepers from Nepal facilitated the Nepali Peacekeepers bringing a deadly waterborne disease from half the world away. Then, the UN’s cost-cutting with contractors caused waste management to skimp on sewage containers, letting fecal matter carrying the cholera bacteria seep into waterways that led into Port-au-Prince. Shortly after, tens of thousands in Haiti had cholera. The UN then shirked its responsibility to the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. It wasn’t in their best interest to be responsible.
From a couple aid workers back then, I heard that the massive aid agencies also play a crucial role in the brain drain that guts Haitian-led organizations and the Haitian government. The international aid agencies raise enormous amounts of funds from Western nations. They then have the ability to pay high salaries in countries where they deploy programs. When something like a huge, horrible earthquake kills 200,000 people, the news machine kicks into gear. It makes the whole world gasp and say, “Damn that’s so sad” and then donate enormous amounts of funds to the organizations that seem familiar.
As the aid machine then begins to kick in, readying to deploy into another country, organizations may not have existing capacity and know-how on the ground. So they come in and buy up the talent. Need sanitation experts and urban planners who understand Port-au-Prince? There may not be than many, but the money’s rolling in, so pay whatever price it takes to get them. You know who can’t pay the high prices? Haitian-led organizations without those massive fundraising networks.
So of course, the brain drain occurs. Who wouldn’t take a salary that’s two, five, ten times as high to do the work they were doing anyway? Who wouldn’t want a promotion and the opportunity to work with a better-resourced, better-staffed organization to get things done? It’d be with an international organization and not a Haitian-led one, though. So as a system, this means that Haitian capacity is kept down. The international organizations eat up that capacity.
Just recently, following the 2021 earthquake that hit the Western part of the island, the former US ambassador to Haiti, Pamela White, said “We did wonderful, wonderful things there after the earthquake. There’s no doubt about it. But it wasn’t enough money to get down deep enough to change the fact that people did not have the skills to build Haiti back better.” Nevermind the economic and political forces that made it so.
No grand conspiracy, just a fucking mess. Everyone clambering on top of each other to be good, to look good — the effective outcome is a weak nation, human development in near-total paralysis. This, is how I honestly see the world.
When I was here in 2012, I was with others students like me to do some research with a big aid organization. After, I used my three extra days to tag along with a Haitian worker from a different aid organization from what was then called J/P HRO and is now called CORE. This was the one started by actor Sean Penn, and is a much smaller organization. Our task was to drive around parts of Port-au-Prince assessing the schools to see if they were ready to receive some new computers. Microsoft had offered to donate a number of computers to schools for childhood education.
As we stopped at school after school, I felt like we were fulfilling a formality of sorts for a very disconnected tech company. Many of the schools lacked walls waterproofed roofs, weatherproofed floors, and electrical outlets. In some of them, people told us that the school had failed to pay regular salaries for teachers, so many teachers simply were not there when we dropped by. There were only two schools that seemed ready for a computer lab: the private ones that already seemed flush with cash.
This problem seemed like a microcosm for what was common in Haiti, as I heard from others. Microsoft had put the cart before the horse. They had a solution, and Haiti offered a problem where they could showcase how socially-conscious their company was.
Was it the right solution? Certainly not, at least not at that time. The Haitians in Port-au-Prince needed basic infrastructure and teachers in the schools we visited needed stable salaries. The students needed desks and electrical outlets. The presence of computers could only solve problems that would come much, much later.
In a way, this solution exacerbated inequities instead of addressed them. The wealthy schools could save money by not buying computers they seemed to be able to afford, while the struggling ones would receive nothing from Microsoft. I am not sure what happened with the computers after I left the country, but if they were in fact donated, the would’ve gotten donated to the already-wealthy schools, the ones with a potential computer lab space that fit the criteria that was handed to us: secure, weatherproofed, and with an adequate number of electrical outlets, and faculty that could be responsible for the equipment.
So. I did see that the aid was providing some necessities back then — like housing — but I was certainly not impressed by the way it was being done, the lack of coordination among agencies, the lack of meaningful awareness of the needs on the ground, and the way donation funding spiked and then dropped off. More importantly, it didn’t seem like there was a desire to build up the capacity of the Haitians. Again, no great conspiracy. Just a fucking mess, everyone clambering on top of each other.
So, coming back to cooking lunch with Krichna: with difficulty due to the language barrier, I told Krichna that most organizations don’t care about ongoing poverty. They care about cataclysms. They care about doing what’s typical and nice for them. Earthquakes, hurricanes, wars, and brutal, newsworthy violence — these things bring the aid train into town. Ongoing paralysis of human development and lack of critical infrastructure? Nope. If your government, businesses, or communities can’t reduce the ongoing suffering, then internationally, no one with resources really care.
(There are two great books on this: The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong with Humanitarian Aid by Linda Polman and The Big Truck That Went by: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster by Jonathan Katz. But the conventional narrative — as mentioned to me by a guy on the flight to Santo Domingo and another volunteer here — is that Haiti squandered its $13bn in aid money.)
It took some explaining — my cynicism about the fleeting nature of “The West’s” attention span and the self-serving nature of an industry of people who mostly want to advance themselves by using the suffering of others to do so. Eventually Krishna laughed and said he understood. “Ok, ok we tell them there is cyclon, violence, tranblemannte [earthquakes]. Then they will come.” Of course he was joking. But he understood.
However. Decentralized, scrappy, people-led organizations like Engineers Without Borders had made a different impression on me years ago. They tend to respond to the requests of people who need small-scale engineering projects. After a request, they crowdfund the project, and then work with locals, on building the thing. There must be others like this, but I am not sure.
I told him I would look into it, into other organizations. But I also feel I have a better sense of the impossible situation so many people in this world are in. Really, what we’re looking for here is empowerment, not handouts. Basic needs provisions and critical infrastructure.
Krichna’s house does not have electricity, running water, or a sewage system. The roads to and from there are rocky, bumpy paths with no streetlights. A friend had given him a smartphone so he has access to information, but structured education was beyond his grasp. A formal job, one that pays a livable wage? Also beyond his grasp.
Perhaps the worst thing about poverty is not the intensity suffering, but its promised duration. Anyone can endure suffering for a short while. But the lack of hope in the long term makes it truly agonizing, it seems. In the absence of hope, people take drastic and difficult action. Sometimes that’s undocumented migration. Sometimes, that’s mass-scale civil unrest.
But maybe there can be another way — slowly building, slowly improving the situation. When Krichna asked about moving abroad to work in a restaurant, I tried to deter him. It may not be my place, but I have some sense of how incredibly difficult and dangerous and trapped people can feel when doing this with a limited network and limited linguistic understanding. It may not be my place, but I also want to see — perhaps idealistically and unrealistically — places like Ansapit bring themselves up. I want to see people like Krichna and Patrick finding ways to bring money and resources here rather than them having to be separated from their families, leaving their homes to go get their labor exploited in the US or UK or elsewhere.
I tried talking about starting some export-focused industry that would bring foreign money here, or tourism and guided tours for foreigners, even. I tried explaining that if the locals don’t have much money, then maybe try to pull in foreign cash because foreigners are willing to pay much, much more for things that are unique to Haiti. This could be done from visitors and donors, sure, but it could also be done by exporting something uniquely Haitian. And with those funds, it could be possible to build the infrastructure, locally. There were a couple issues with this. First, I have no idea how difficult it is to start a business that exports stuff here. It’s probably very hard. Secondly, I think the language barrier prevented me from communicating this properly.
Still, I do think critical infrastructure is first step, and I am writing something about the water here, about how perhaps Sadhana Forest Haiti can help secure this one basic necessity for many of the locals with a relatively small amount of foreign funds. Empowerment, not handouts.
I think that here in Ansapit, this must start with water, which is mostly carried to homes by children and young women and girls. I will post again about this when there is time.
