It’s March 21st, two months and nine days after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. I’m seated at a table surrounded by five other diners, in a crowded outdoor restaurant, trying to work a legally undersized lobster tail out of its shell.
The town in which this restaurant is located is called Jacmel. It’s a special place. In addition to being situated near some of the best beaches in the country, it has a rich colonial history that survives in the form of crumbling ruins and seaside forts. It’s also artistic. There’s a film school and a small but burgeoning artisan industry that reaches a crescendo of expression every year with Haiti’s most elaborate carnival of paper machete masks and costumes, an event that transforms several thousand Haitian youths into a vision of the spirit world. Jacmel is also imbued with a mystique of criminal hip-ness in the form of a thriving narco-political cartel; both of the resident senators would soon be accused of drug trafficking, kidnapping, and murder. Capping it all off is a tinge of pot-smoking Jamaican-like, Rasta-esque tradition. There’s no question about it: Jacmel is the chicest town in Haiti. And it’s become a magnet for elite aid workers.
At the next table, two aid experts sit talking. One is a twenty-something-year-old male. He’s wearing a Ralph Lauren Polo shirt, designer jeans, and he has a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses pushed up on the top of his head. The other aid expert is a stylish middle-aged woman from Norway with a pair of sunglasses pushed up on her head as well. I can hear their conversation. The twenty-something guy with the designer jeans is telling the Norwegian woman about riding around evaluating rural communities struck by the earthquake. He was with a UN colleague and they were, “looking for very hard-hit areas that need help.” One village they drove through looked bad, “sooo bad,” he says, “that I was suspicious people might be faking it.”
That gets my attention. I want to know exactly what made him think they were faking it. I lean over, try to get a little closer so I can hear better. What makes him think the people were faking?
But the chic guy changes the topic. He begins talking about himself. He lives in France but is originally from New York City where his father owns candy stores in “The Village” and he thinks that, “everyone should know New York.” He tries to get back to “The City” at least once every two months, “You know,” he explains to the woman from Norway, “do the jeans and the sunglasses thing,” Then he mentions a special type of clothing salesman he calls a “jean doctor.” “Yeah,” he says, “It’s really necessary, you know. I mean, I never thought about how important it is before. Jeans have to be right in the rear and in the crotch.”
“Yah!” the Norwegian woman is beaming, “That is absolutely correct!”
I turn my attention back to my own table and the five people who are seated around me. A former movie star turned aid worker is telling my fellow diners about the local film school. “It’s terrible, the building is destroyed”
“It fell down?” I ask.
“No. But it has a crack in it.”
The Movie Star goes on to tell us about a benefit concert that was held for the cracked film school. It was in “The City.” Barbara Streisand attended. Someone at the table lets out a “wow!” The rest of us are impressed as well. “They must have collected millions,” another diner remarks. Someone else asks the Movie Star about her own career, and the aging siren rattles off a list of films culminating with a starring role opposite Jack Nicholson. We are all, once again, impressed.
When the Movie Star gets up to go back to the buffet for a second helping of Coq au vin, an elderly gentleman from the American midwest—who I now notice looks and even sounds like Henry Fonda–begins to talk. His name is Ivan and we quickly learn that Ivan is fluent in three of the significant five European languages, has worked for aid agencies all over Africa, is supposed to be retired, doesn’t really want to be here as he’s “tired of disasters,” but feels “my skills are needed.” Ivan then goes on to tell us that he is an avid Trout angular who “hangs out” in Minnesota where he has a house and a dock built on the bank of a river that the Minnesota State Fish and Game Commission annually stocks with trout. When he’s not fishing in the river, Ivan flies his agro-industrial brother’s planes. Ivan owns his own brand-new Honda Gold Wing motorcycle that he has not yet had a chance to put more than three thousand miles on. But all that’s background. What Ivan really enjoys doing—and apparently what he really wants to tell us about– is traveling to the “great sites of the world with my lady friend from Montreal.” Soon Ivan and my co-worker Laura are talking tourist sites. Laura is a 27-year old, University of Georgetown graduate and senior consultant for a Washington DC think tank and, she tells Ivan, “I love to travel.” Laura and Ivan talk about the Catacombs in Paris, Baha’i Gardens in Jerusalem, pyramids in Egypt, gondolas in Venice, sailing on the Med, scuba diving in the Red Sea, cruises down the Nile. After a couple minutes, Laura is literally squealing with delight.
Again, I turn my attention to another table. The owner of the restaurant is a 50-something light-skinned Haitian of aging beauty more stunning even than the Movie Star at our table. She is seated on the lawn, surrounded by a flickering yellow glow of citronella candles. She sips wine while talking to a high official of United Nations World Food Program, an Italian gentleman who is visiting from headquarters in Rome. I cannot hear her, but I imagine that she is saying the same thing she said to me earlier in the day, “I spent most of my adult life in Berlin. I have been married twice, both times to German men. I had children with both. And they both left me a widow.” I see her sip her red wine and look at the high official, “I would never marry a Haitian man,” she says, squinting, quite adamant about it. “I will be friends with them,” she continues, and I see her setting her glass down, “But I will never marry one.” Her German bred son, Christophe, is circulating from table to table, hands clasped behind his back as he supervises a bustling team of coal-black peasants. Christophe grew up in Germany with his mother but is named after a black King of Haiti who was, perhaps ironically, a restaurant waiter before he helped to bring down the greatest and most repressive slave empire since Rome. Our Christophe, the one going from table to table, has all the trappings of a maitre d’ at a high-class Berlin restaurant. The peasants he supervises are dressed in white shirts, bowties, and black slacks. They move nimbly from table to table, attentively filling empty wine glasses. Christophe moves in behind them, bowing ever so slightly as he gently asks guests, “Is everything to your satisfaction?”
And indeed, the level of satisfaction is high.
This is a hotel where at $70 per day for room, buffet breakfast, and dinner—about the monthly income for a Haitian family of 6– it’s a post-earthquake bargain basement deal. And it is packed with aid workers. We are all in the reception area because the restaurant that overlooked the bay and the more expensive air-conditioned rooms above it collapsed when the earthquake struck. Fortunately, there were not many clients before the earthquake, so no one was in them at the time, and no one was killed. On an even happier note, the earthquake has been good for business, very good. The hotel is now packed and will remain at full occupancy for the next year. World Food Program, ACDI/VOCA staff, CARE, CRS, and the film school’s visiting movie stars are all housed here. We who have all come to help Haiti.
But here on this dining room patio where wine glasses clink, and a dessert of vanilla flan is about to be served, it doesn’t seem much like Haiti. The real Haiti, peasant Haiti, the one that most aid workers ostensibly come to help and the one from which these peasant waiters and waitresses come, seems far away. But it isn’t. It is just beyond the glow of the citronella candles.
***
Ninety percent of the 527,531 people out here in the 2,023 km.2 of Haiti’s Department de Sudest, the municipality where the restaurant is located, reside outside of town in the countryside, little villages, hamlets, and in homes constructed of local timber or rock plastered over with lime. The life these people live is shockingly simple compared to most of the modern world. As with 99% of Haiti, there is no electricity outside of the town. At night homes are lit with oil lamps made of milk cans or, in fancier homes, imported glass oil lamps. If you go inside one of the little houses you pass first through a tiny salon where there is a dining table made of locally hewn and crafted wood. A matching cupboard of dishes, drinking glasses, cups, and saucers stands against the wall. In a corner is a single bed fashioned locally out of scrap steel. Against the far wall there is a door that passes to the only other room of the house, the bedroom, used exclusively for sleeping and storage. In a corner of the bedroom, banana thatch sleeping mats are stowed. They will be spread on the floor at night for the children. The double bed, sometimes a simple frame stuffed with goodwill clothes and, in better-off homes, a real second-hand mattress shipped from the US in a leaky old metal freighter. It is here in this bed that the mother and the father and infant sleeps. Out the back door across the dirt-swept yard is the kitchen, typically airy stick and thatch hut. The food is cooked over wood on the ground, for while they make charcoal in the rural areas, it is only used in villages, towns, and cities.
Indeed, from the remote outback of the rural areas to the urban slums, despite the billions in development aid poured into Haiti over the past century now—since the US Marine occupation–they continue to live like people hundreds of years in the past. Their frugality is stunning and the extent to which they are adapted to the environment amazing. To ensure they always have food, they farm a multiplicity of little garden plots, some on the plain, some in the mountains. They are what we would think of in the United States as micro-farmers. They have an average of three sheep and/or goats, five grown chickens, one turkey, two guinea fowl, maybe a pigeon house. Half of them own a cow. They feed the poultry just enough so that they don’t run away, they scavenge the eggs wherever they may lay them. As for the goats and cow, rather than corral them, they tie the animals to bushes or to a stake wherever they find a little foliage for them, moving them new locations throughout the day and leading them to water at least once per day. For their own water to wash clothes and bath, the vast majority of people must walk to a spigot or spring, averaging in 30 minutes round trip from the homestead. Their lives are labor intensive. They depend heavily on their children to move the animals, fetch water, and help maintain the household.
The tools used in performing agriculture strategies are, for the vast bulk of the population, no more complex than picks, hoes, and machetes. Animals are free-ranged in dry areas, but in humid areas where agriculture is more common, they are tethered to bushes with rope. One does not see barbed wire, but rather, gardens, homesteads, and the rare corral are enclosed with wooden stick barricades or living fences made of fast- growing and malicious vegetation such as dagger-like sisal, cacti, and poison oak (katoch, kandelab, pit, pigwen and bawonet). The 10 percent who fish use paddles and canoes hewn from local trees; traps crafted from bamboo; inexpensive polyethylene rope or those made from sisal or from scavenged and shredded feed sacks (polypropylene); weights of stone or lead scavenged from used car batteries; floats for the nets are made of discarded flop flops, plastic containers, light wood or the giant seeds of the Monben tree; nets are made of imported rolls of nylon string but woven locally. The few items in the artisanal fisherman’s tool kit that are entirely imported are cheap imported monofilament and metal hooks for line fishing, and masks and fins for spearfishing and gathering conch. But even most snorkels are crafted from scraps of PVC, and spear guns from a length of PVC for the stock of the gun, braided strips of inner tubes for an elastic charging band, and a length of scrap steel sharpened into a spear. Processing and storage of fish is largely the same as pre-Columbian techniques: specifically, cleaning, salting, and sun drying. Transport to markets is more often accomplished on foot or pack animal, by sailboat, public bus, or truck. Administrative technology is simple as well. The artisanal fishers and female market women who sell the fish have little interest in organizational structures beyond their own household labor pool and local seining teams (teams of men that pull in long nets): no associations or cooperatives. Those organizations that do exist are almost entirely responses to NGO initiatives and connected to offerings of resources: specifically free boats, nets, and improved storage facilities in the case of the men; promises of cash and credit in the case of the market women.
Many of the items used in and around households are procured or manufactured by household members from useful plants, trees, and shrubs found in the yard, growing up around the garden, along paths, or in the kadas (arid State land). Limes and sour oranges are used as all-purpose disinfectants; aloe and maskriti as a hair oil and conditioner. Galata and gayak leaves, and seeds from the bawonet plant, serve as soaps. Rope is woven from sisal and palm thatch. Sacks and saddlebags are fashioned out of thatch and grasses. Baskets are made of grasses, royal palm leaves and/or splintered bamboo. Sleeping mats are made from dried plantain stalks. Gourds from the kalbas tree provide a range of different sized storage and drinking vessels. Sticks are collected for use as cooking fuel. Flammable coconut husks, pitch pine, and dried orange peelings are used to start fires. Often households do not even own a pack of matches, but send a child when necessary to borrow a burning ember from a neighbor. Uses are found for imported industrial refuse: flammable plastic bottles or packaging serve as fire-starter, mattresses are fashioned from worn-out Goodwill clothing and sheets, pigeon houses are made from flattened cans of cooking oil, a scrap bucket lid makes a wheel for a boy’s go-cart, a nail is the axle, a stick is the drive shaft, and a sprinting boy is the motor.
When drought or blight strikes these people regularly consume at least thirty varieties of wild leaves; a wild olive, which before the recent advent of imports and food aid was an important source of cooking oil; and at least one wild bean. During times of crisis, they eat boiled green mangos, unripe fruit from the corosol tree, at least five types of undomesticated seed pods, two wild yams, and the fruit of a cactus. People in the region also opportunistically eat feral cats, iguanas, and most types of birds—including eagles, hawks, and woodpeckers. They consume land crabs, fresh-water crabs, and crayfish. They need cash to pay for school and medical care. To get it they sell their garden produce and animals in flourishing Internal Rotating Market that astound most outsiders. Throughout the country, thronging open air markets with thousands of corralled and braying donkeys occur on alternating days of the week such that people living in any given region have walking distance access to at least two markets per week. Montane micro-climates, their differing rainfall patterns, and the consequently differently timed harvest season make it logical for farmers to sell their crops rather than risk losing them to insect and mold and then store surplus in the form of money. The opportunity has facilitated the evolution of the intense interregional trade dominated almost entirely by women. Called machann and madan sara, the women may sell daily small quantities of items produced by the household- such as eggs, manioc or pigeon peas. But the prevailing strategy is for one women to seasonally specialize in a particular item, such as limes. She buys small quantities from multiple farms, accumulates a profitable quantity, and then takes them to market or sells them to another female intermediary higher up the chain, one more heavily capitalized, who accumulates greater quantities and who is likely destined for a larger town market, city or, the holy grail, Port-au-Prince, where prices are two to five times.
The important point for anyone wanting to understand these people, their production and how they survive is that while this is a market system, it is emphatically not oriented towards “wants,” but rather subsistence and local production. The overwhelming bulk of products sold are inexpensive, locally produced and somehow related to production and subsistence; with respect to the profits that the machann earns, the bulk of the money is destined for reinvestment in commerce, other income generating enterprises – such as fish traps – or spent on subsistence foods and necessities for the household and, ultimately, the growing ‘mama lajan‘ (literally “mother money,” or more technically, the principal or capital) used for commerce but inevitably destined as an insurance for survival during times of crisis. When all else fails, the production, packaging, shipping, and sale of charcoal is the primary fallback on which these people out here in the Sud-Est of Haiti survive crisis, something regrettable in terms of deforestation, but that, far more often than any NGO or state intervention, has acted to stave off famine and it has done so for more than two centuries.
This market system bleeds over into a burgeoning economy of micro-producers, service specialists and petty vendors. There are farmer specialists in digging holes in gardens, or castrating livestock. There are even specialists who castrate particular kinds of livestock. Other specialists train dogs to hunt wild cats and mongoose. There are specialist tomb builders, grave diggers, casket makers, and those who wash and prepare bodies for burial. Their are specialists in a myriad of handicrafts. There are part-time farmer-specialists who hew with their hands lumber for houses and furniture. Local iron smiths who work with nothing more than a hammer, burin, pliers, and burning coconut shells for heat to make nails, hinges, latches, iron bed frames, and the bits for horse bridles. Other specialists make nets, weirs, and boats. Others specialize in caulking boats. Others go into the hills to find buoyant monben tree seed pods for nets and poles for oars or vines and galata poles for roofs. Other specialists sew shoes. There are specialists who climb coconut trees for coconuts and those who climb royal palms for thatch to make roofs to cover houses and to make baskets for carrying and storing goods. There are those who gather rock to build houses, those who mine clay and others who mine lime and sand. There are those who slake the lime, those who cut wood and then smolder the wood to make charcoal. There are half a dozen specialists involved in building homes, from masons to roof makers to door makers and window setters. There are latrine diggers. There specialist tire repairmen and even children who specialize in repairing bicycle tires. There are healthcare specialists and herb specialists called leaf doctors who know hundreds of remedies made from local plants and trees to treat everything from colds to AIDS (not all of them are effective). There are masseuses, midwives, spiritual healers, magic practitioners, and card readers. There are prayer-saying specialists, and even those who specialize in saying particular prayers on particular occasions. All these specialists charge fees or produce or fix something. There are alcohol distillers, butchers and bakers, tailors and basket makers, rope weavers and bridle makers. And all of these specializations articulate with and spill over into the urban popular quartiers in the city of Jacmel, where they take on new forms of productive petty enterprise with jerry-rigging electricians, plumbers, toilet and radio mechanics and typesetters and copiers and painters and makers and vendors of dozens of different foods, alcoholic beverages and medicines. There are porters with their wheel barrows, butchers, bakers, tailors, basket makers, rope weavers, carpenters, and jewelers, watch repairman. They work as captains, mariners, and boatswain in the thriving domestic shipping sector. They work as loaders and drivers or money collectors. And they find “informal” employment in houses of the wealthier and the NGOs workers and offices in positions such as night watchman, yardman, maid, cook, nanny, guard, construction worker, mechanic, and welder.
And everyone involved in this thriving informal economy that most foreigners scarcely notice or understand is bustling back forth on the backs of the hundreds of moto-taxis and calling one another on cell phones for which they have to incessantly purchase recharge cards sold by hundreds of ambulant vendors and that they periodically have to have fixed by one of the dozens of telephone technicians. All that I am describing falls in the realm of the Sud-Est’s informal economy. Those who cannot find work and have the possibility, go to the capital city of Port-au-Prince where all that is being described occurs on a scale perhaps 100 times greater than Jacmel. Or they migrate to the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Brazil, French Guyana, Canada and the United States where they engage in any number of occupations. Once there the men often engage in seasonal farming, fishing, transport, construction, the sex industry and narcotrafficking. Women migrate to the same places where they work in factories or as cooks, nannies, maids, prostitutes or masseuses or bar girls or where they marry foreigners and fly off to North America or Europe. Most of both men and women send back money to family and friends and lovers, money that fuels the vibrant informal economy described above. But still, back in Sud-Est, in the rural outback, in the towns and in the slums of Jacmel, the core of the country still pulsates to the same beat it has since independence 200 years in the past.
And the aid workers come, and they radically misunderstand it. They promote programs designed to squeeze high quality mangos out of peasants so that the mangos can be shipped for resale in the US. And to do it, to buy the mangos at an affordable export price they have to pay less than they sell for locally. And to do it, to get the mangos, the exporters and NGO workers must trick, cajole, and capture. They have to undermine the local economy. When I’ve worked for these organizations, hundreds of times now, and I hand them reports showing them their mangos are not profitable to the Haitian farmers, or that their food aid is destroying the market, or their children are not really enslaved, or that they really do not beat their wives unmercifully, or that by creating male cooperatives we are breaking the traditional power of the female market women and instead empowering men, or that credit we think they so crave is breaking the bonds of financial interdependence between families, or when I tell them that, like it or not, the peasants want children, not contraceptives, when I give these comments or make these conclusions, the directors and the experts invariably ask for changes. Sometimes say things like “go back and think about it” and they slide the report and their comments across the table for me to take back to my office and correct. And if I don’t correct them, I don’t get paid. They ask for narratives and happy stories and photos showing how they have saved women and children and turned their lives around. They do it so their programs look good. They take out all the critical parts, all that they do not want to hear, that goes against their plans or makes them look bad. And then they send to their donors reports that make it all look successful. But life still goes on, and for those here in this outback, and in the slums little has changed. Many will get out. Others will live their lives in this system I’ve described. Some tragically some not so tragically.
****
Back on the patio at the elegant restaurant by the sea in Jacmel, Ivan, the retired aid worker and world traveler from Wisconsin, has wrested the conversation from the other world traveler, my co-worker Laura, the 27 year-old senior consultant from Washington. It seems Ivan has tired of sharing stories with Laura, who has been trying to outdo him with her own tales of exotic 4-day voyages, and so Ivan has turned his attention to the rest of us and is now recounting how he dove off the Galapagos. He’s talking about, “these peculiar fish they call a bat fish.” At the precise moment when Ivan is leaning over the table, gesticulating with such earnestness and emphasizing the word peculiar with such intonation that we all desperately want to see one of these bat fish, a gentleman on the far side of the patio loudly says to someone sitting next to him, “I bought these sandals while on a diving excursion to the Red Sea.” He says it so loudly that it booms across the patio as if it’s an announcement of sorts. Ivan stops talking and turns to see who the man is. Laura perks up as well, turning her head and craning to get a glimpse of the man. The man has twisted in his seat and is adjusting one of Red Sea sandals. I’m expecting Ivan and Laura to start a cross-the-patio discussion about diving, but there is no time to respond. The World Food Program gentleman from Rome who was dining on the lawn with our beautiful Haitian hostess is now standing in the middle of the patio tapping a spoon to a wine glass, ringing it like a bell and calling everyone’s attention. Silence falls on the patio as all heads turn. He’s a dapper old gentleman in Zegna shirt and slacks. The wine glass is ringing a near perfect tune. He says something in Italian to us all. Then he faces the Movie Star, says something in Italian to her, bows, and then begins to sing. The scene is surreal. Although I can’t understand a single syllable, the World Food Program executive’s outstretched hand is supplicating the Movie Star as he bellows out an unmistakable and heart-aching declaration of love. His voice rises to an operatic staccato and just as I’m thinking that this guy must be completely fucking insane, the movie star starts singing back. The first words seem to come from deep inside of her, she’s mustered them up somewhere within her body and they seem to float up through her mouth, like the sound has simply risen from her soul. Then she begins to craft the sound, bending and shaping it as if it is real substance, a flowing stream of melody coming out of her and filling the patio with its beautiful shape. It’s exquisite. She’s a virtuoso. Her voice is full and soothing. The elderly gentleman from Rome rejoins her again and the patio is filled with a harmony I’ve never experienced before. We are all carried away on the splendor of their voices. All the while the peasants in white linen bustle about delivering plates of flan to the distant and distracted NGO workers.
