In the doghouse now.

Last night Sharon and I had the pleasure of hosting our friend Jeremiah on his last night in Haiti. He's been working with a program in Gresier outside of PaP. He met us at the office, went to the market with Sharon, and welded with Ben and me. We stopped at the overlook in Boutilliers on the way up to Kenscoff, made supper together, and - but I know all of you are waiting with bated breath for news about our new dog friend Bella.

Once we arrived at home last night she came running (and shaking) up to us. This dog is about as nervous as you can get, and always pretty cautious of humans. Smart dog: most dogs get hit a lot in Haiti so she has plenty of justification for being afraid of us. After she shook her skinny nervous body over to us, she seemed hungry and thirsty so I gave her some water and a granola bar. (Really, it's all we had.) She was totally excited and proceeded to spend the rest of the night curled up next to Jeremiah and the edge of his sleeping bag trailing on the patio. When we went in for bed she cried and cried, and when we left at 6am the following morning there she was eager to greet us... and eat a few pieces of bread.

It looks like the neighbor, also known as the dog's owner, seems to be absent. So there's no one to feed the dog or give it water. Really, who abandons a dog? Anyhow, my new theory is that the owner is MIA and since we love the dog more we should rescue her from her negligent owner. (I just looked at the implications of this possible decision and it is indeed easier for a Haitian dog to enter the USA than a Haitian. Dogs don't take other people's jobs, I guess, but they may unfairly compete for resources at PetCo. Hmmm.)

Well, not to be too philosophical, but it does raise the question: why am I willing to care for a dog more readily than a person in need? Is it just because the needs are so much more finite and easier to address? Is it that dogs don't ask me for help six times an hour? Maybe animals are just easier to deal with than people sometimes. Maybe I should have a softer heart. Whatever the answer is,I'm wondering what it would mean if this is the only life I save in Haiti.

Getting published is so last century...

Yesterday afternoon we stopped to pick up a few groceries at the supermarket. While we loaded up the truck, we were approached by a smiling young man selling photocopies of a poem his brother had written. Well, how could we resist?

After the Night

While we contemplated the tender smiles of the new year
Announcing an arrival
beautiful curves full of gaiety
New horizons of all shades

We hoped for coming days of light
evenings of illumination


Oh! It's too terrible to imagine
that such misfortune draws up,
that the trigger of destiny awaited us
packed away our souls. The hearts of our fellows
collapse, dreams absorbed by despair
shaving a third of the seedlings sown over the years

We are suddenly lost
in the density of shadows
We need a candle
we even lost the stars

When evil was sown
Hope already germinated
We hope for the coming of the dawn

after the night, the sun always rises

Lazy blogger

Since the earthquake I've been pretty reticent to post a non-earthquake-related post. Sharon has really insightful posts about trade inequality, as do A&B. Maybe I'm not quite as philosophical or well-spoken but I know I am earthquake (EQ) fatigued, and after being around post-EQ Port-au-Prince and working for a development/aid NGO I just can't bring myself to then sit down and write about it as well. On that note, and with Sharon's encouragement, I am going to rejoin the blogosphere.

As you may know we are living up in the mountains above PaP, and it's about an hour drive to our mountain chalet. Last night Pancha came up with us to spend the night and enjoy the cold mountain air. We had a good time hanging out, and upon our departure this morning I realized I had locked the keys in the car last night. We poked around the truck for a way to get in, but I coincided my first keys in the truck experience with my first-fully-successful locking of all four doors experience. We tried the ol' clothes hanger trick and then moved on to trying to grab the inside door handle through the seam of the door. After several tries I actually managed to grab the handle and pulled as hard as I could and ....nothing. Apparently it's one of those vehicles that makes you lift the little thing, then pull the lever - I know, so 1990s, right? Some cars don't even have keys anymore, and here I am stuck with one that doesn't pop its own lock when the latch is pulled. What about emergency exits? I smell a Toyota recall here.

After that didn't work, we called down to the office and asked them to send the back-up key up to us. Actually, I asked Ben to bring it up as I could think of no one else willing to drive 1 hour up a mountain just to turn around again. That's what friends are for. We didn't make Ben go down right away - while we waited we made some coffee and offered Ben a complimentary cup of Joe for his rescue services. After the java we made our way down the hill, a mere two hours late to start our workday. Sorry MCC.

While we were drinking coffee and waiting for Ben, the neighbor's dog made her way up to our house to inspect our goings-on with the truck and general laying-about that had then ensued. I have a soft spot for black lab puppies, and although she's not 100% the neighbor-dog is enough of a lab to make you miss your very own skinny lab puppy of yesteryear. We let her in the house - by the way, her name is Bella - and she was super nervous inside, so she's most likely not allowed in her owner's house. We are now the neighbors that spoil the neighbor kids. I'm all ready to buy dog treats for her just to woo her over to our house as often as her owner will let her.

I know I said I didn't want to talk about EQ-related things, but just a quick story about my day to day. Each day we get people that come to the office. They hear people talking on a tap-tap about MCC and that MCC is amazing and give aid that is new (not secondhand goods) and give aid in a way that is respectful to Haitians, with no guns, no batons and no threats.

(First, why are people surprised that we are giving away new items? Shouldn't nice new items be the norm? Obviously not. Also, people are pleasantly surprised we arrive for distributions without a UN security detail. I won't go on, but it's sad when people are surprised by these things, as they should be the norm.)

Back to my story. We get people every day that represent communities throughout the area, roughly 10 per day. Each has a heart-wrenching letter about the devastation in their community and the total lack of aid they have received because they are not in a big camp visible from a road. They have handwritten lists of names of families, with ages, gender, etc. Hand. Written. When was the last time you wrote 5-6 pages by hand? They all ask that we come to their communities to see the need and assure me that once we see their communities there is no way we could refuse help. Ugh. Unfortunately, when you do the math, 10 letters per day X an average of 500 people per community = 5,000 new people in need every day. Not counting weekends, that's 25,000 new people in need each week. You see where I am going. These people are asking for shelter, food, whatever they can find. I am in the delicate position, along with several others, of having to decide who finds and who does not find aid. Ugh.

That's it for now.

Meditations on trade and development (or, please excuse the following preachiness)

Lately all signs point to this topic: the value of trade over aid.

One. A few weeks ago I finished reading The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. While the discussion of disaster capitalism was alarming (and maddening), I was struck more by Klein's depiction of what happens after a country's financial system collapses. Humanitarian aid and relief organizations rush in to address the poverty, lack of educational access, compromised local markets, and host of other social problems that result from privatization and low import tariffs. I support these humanitarian missions (obviously) as stopgap efforts, but how much more effective would we be if we kept our eye on the policy ball? If we preemptively advocated for just trade around the world? If we combated poverty by preventing it?

Two. While at home on stress leave, Bryan and I checked out Black Gold, the 2006 documentary about the international coffee trade. In tracing coffee from the fields of Ethiopia to the espresso cups of New York and Italy, the film's strongest moment is at an international trade forum. Representatives from disadvantaged countries argue forcefully that what they want is trade, not aid: they want the chance to receive a fair wage for hard work.

Three. Last night the Bob Edwards Show featured an interview with Iqbal Quadir, founder of the Legatum Center at MIT and GrameenPhone in Bangladesh. He's an advocate of business and technology as a way to fight poverty, and while there are clear pitfalls to that approach I appreciated his emphasis on developing human potential as a way to create opportunities for people to help themselves. In the interview he advocated market-based solutions that allow people to carefully utilize their time (e.g., Americans can be more "productive" than their Bangladeshi counterparts because of time-saving technology) and that respond to actual needs in a community (e.g, bicycles are welcome in areas not served by public transport). He pointed out that education is often named as a panacea - but that the educated few often leave their homelands in search of opportunities to use those educations when the local markets aren't strong enough to hold them. He also argues that international aid doesn't always reach the populace, whereas microfinance and small business stimulation focuses exactly on that group of people.

Okay, so these are obviously simplistic renderings of complex ideas, and I'm conscious of the need to not conceptualize market-based development or trade policy reform as a silver bullet. However, I like the idea of trying to level the international playing field just a bit through trade reform, and I heartily support the idea of small business development that allows people to find their own, dignified way to support themselves (hint: that does not involve standing in long lines waiting for food handouts).

Yes, the earthquake is different, and material and food aid are highly appropriate and much-needed at the moment. I am just wary of development organizations getting comfortable with giving handouts to Haitians, with not engaging the many Haitian voices that should shape the vision for a reconstructed Port-au-Prince, and with continuing to disregard the structural policies that make Haiti more unlevel than any earthquake could.

(A caveat for those of you agreeing with me: taking on unjust trade policies means reshaping our American spending habits. Are we willing to vote on this with our dollars?)

Last week I heard someone joke that Haiti has experienced two earthquakes: first the one that struck on January 12, and then the invasion of foreigners here to "help." Let's hope the aftershocks of the second won't upstage the terrible first.

"Memory at 'The Modern'"

We had seen bare land
And the people bare on it
And men camp
In the city. The lights,
The pavement, this important device
Of a race, I wrote then,
Twenty three years old,
Remains till morning. Nobody knows who died
On the road of that time, of the fact of roads.
I am a man of the Thirties

'no other taste shall change this'

- George Oppen
from New Collected Poems, page 295

What we found.

Bryan and I arrived safely in Haiti yesterday morning (after a bit of last-minute drama with our tickets that gave us a 19-hour layover in Puerto Rico). After spending a few hours at the office, we headed up the mountain to the house in Kenscoff* where we'll be staying for the next few months.

* The lease was up this month on the house in Dezam, and rental properties in Port-au-Prince are few and far between at the moment.

Along with an amazing view, here's what welcomed us:

- The electricity lines had been transferred to the next door neighbor, whose house is owned by the same landlord. (At least candlelight is romantic.)

- A pile of mildewy clothes in the closet, thanks to the moist and cloudy climate in the mountains. (If anyone has connections to a great Kenscoffian washlady, do tell.)

- A teenage boy living in a small shed attached to our house. (We hear he's friendly, but...)

- An ever-expanding number of people who work in the yard. It turns out the landlord has also leased part of the property as a small farm, so that explains why the hedge has been cut to make a path to that new "field." (Who needed privacy, anyway?)

- A yard-sharing neighbor who seems like she will be awesome. (No parenthetical comment necessary.)

Overall, mixed reviews. We're happy to be working again after a terrific few weeks of rest, and as usual we'll keep you blog-posted.

A few links

Sharon and I are in the U.S. through March 22 on stress leave. Haiti's still on our minds and in our hearts, and we've been particularly wrestling with the question: how can Haiti rebuild? One (simple?) way to help is through purchasing one of the few things Haiti exports:

Coffee. We all know the importance of buying fair trade, so add a bag of Haitian coffee into your rotation or get your church or workplace to use Haitian coffee for a few months instead of Folgers.

Art. Haiti exports paintings and metal art (in which artists flatten steel drums and then craft different images by hand). Haitian art fundraisers are happening all around: there's one here in PA, or you can always buy art at your local Ten Thousand Villages store.

We've been realizing more and more that trade - and not simply aid - is incredibly important for Haiti's economic future, earthquake or not. More on this subject soon.*

* A note on "more soon" alerts: Sharon still remembers that she promised details on the Haiti Response Coalition's conference. That update has been delayed because of her grandmother's death and our travel, but it's still in the works.