Too many motorcycles? Or, in search of a silver bullet.

Each week during our team meeting, we each have the chance to share news: local, national, and international. As TV is almost nonexistent and the internet is available only to some, the local radio is Haiti's #1 news source. Yesterday we talked about the new prime minister, the local soccer team, and then one story topped them all. Frantzo told us about a recent study that has at last figured out what Haiti's development problems are: motorcycles.

According to this study, there are 4 million made-in-China motorcycles in Haiti, and the purchase of one of these apparently causes the new owner to drop out of school and stop doing anything that contributes to sustainable development. So if all we have to do to "save Haiti" is get rid of all these motorcycles, what are we waiting for?

"Really, Frantzo? You have a motorcycle and you do development work."
"Well, it's not people that work for an organization, but private people."

Our team finally concluded:

- 4 million motorcycles would mean every other Haitian owns one. In Michelet's hometown of Valere, to take one example, he estimates there are 5 motorcycles and approximately 30,000 people. Looks like Valere is short by 14,955 motorcycles.

- Most motorcycles are not private vehicles but are small businesses - the owners "make traffic" (it's so great that that's the verb) by operating their bikes as moto-taxis. So if there are no moto-taxis that would mean even fewer jobs, right? They are indeed dangerous, but there are already a lot of young men hanging out with nothing to do, and taking away all the motos in Dezam would create another sort of crisis. I'm all for advocating bicycles over motos but putting blame on motos as a stumbling block to development seems like a unliklely culprit.

- Moto-taxis make it much easier to take goods to market. With a motorcycle you can carry drums of oil, sacks of produce, 4 or 5 people, and we once saw someone carrying another motorcycle.

- Yes, it is bad that so much Haitian money ends up in the hands of Chinese manufacturers, but that's a problem faced by more countries than this one. Hey, maybe the solution is to start a business manufacturing Haitian motorcycles! Anybody up for a new development project?

As a final note, as I was searching for verification of this story I came across a new website: www.wehaitians.com, which seems to be a news source for Haitian diaspora. Here I learned President Preval is again a married man. Congrats.