contradictions

Last week, I flew up north to Cap Haitien for a nice combination of work and play. While some days are still better than others, I'm prematurely claiming my week in the north as my turn around point. Although I am 100% certain I'll continue to face my fair share of personal challenges, I gained some good perspective about my life here and how I should be handling it.

I flew up on a Friday afternoon, and proceeded to spend a very nice couple of days with the director of one of our rural branches and his family. It was a blast straight from the Peace Corps host family past - relatives filtering in and out of the house at all hours, low budget Haitian movies and music videos, and some old fashioned host mom food. It was a helpful reminder to me of what I do like about living in foreign countries, sharing and spending time with the people who live in them. Although 99% of the people I work with on a day-to-day basis are Haitian, there is a marked difference between a work relationship and a familial one. I had been spending all too much time transporting myself from my house to work and back to my house again, unintentionally shielding myself from most of the Haitians I might otherwise be interacting with.

It is this imposed distance between the people who work in jobs such as mine and the rest of the Haitian people that is the development industry's biggest problem. I would like to think that this separation that I feel in my own life is, as I mentioned, unintentional. It's more of a question of circumstance on most days - sometimes, my day just consists of leaving my house, going to work, and going back home. With that said, I am always happier when I make the effort to get out a little bit (as I imagine most people are, no matter their location). However, there is another kind of separation that unequivocally falls into the category of "intentional." And it is this type of separation that concerns me most. This is the type of separation that looks like armed guards, armored cars, gated communities, curfews, and "red zones" (places that are off limits because they are supposedly too dangerous). Although some organizations encourage their workers to get out in the city and the country, to use the public transportation, and speak the language, it seems that the majority of organizations on the unwieldy list that inhabit Haiti encourage just the opposite. There is an inherent distrust in the development culture - to speak bluntly, an extraordinarily high number of development workers think that Haiti, and Haitians, are dangerous and unpredictable.

While people are certainly entitled to their opinions, however distasteful they might be, this particular attitude is especially insidious in this environment. At some point in the last couple of decades, people realized that the traditional development tactics of the post-World War II era weren't working - the classic example is a World Bank-sponsored mega dam that displaces tens of thousands of farmers in order to provide electricity to run a factory that some multinational corporation wants to build to exploit the cheap labor of the host country. Well, times have changed. Now, the development industry in Haiti and elsewhere loves to use a different kind of language and trumpets certain kinds of words: sustainability, grassroots, local, capacity-building, etc. Now, we are a culturally-sensitive, grassroots type of development industry that focuses on building up local capacity so that people in their own countries can take charge of the decision-making process, thereby leading to long-term and sustainable solutions.

Nice, right?

The question raised, then, is how can you reconcile the fact that many of the development workers sent to work with local populations in order to paint this beautiful picture of cooperation and sustainability are, in so many words, scared of the local population. The answer is simple: you can't. And it's not just the development workers who are distrustful of your average Haitian on the street. On a larger scale, the international community consistently has delivered the message that they don't trust the Haitian government to make the right decisions either. From the U.S.-backed coup to remove the democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the international support of non-inclusive Haitian elections, it's the same story: "Haiti, you know, we really, really want you to succeed (seriously we do!), but we don't trust you to do it yourselves. So, just follow along now and don't step out of line."

If we actually want to be helping Haitians to help themselves, then we first need to start trusting them and believing in their abilities. If we can't take those most elementary steps, that we have no business working in Haiti.

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On a completely different side note, tomorrow marks the three-year anniversary of my arrival on the island. Trying to wrap my head around that one...

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And, finally...I went on a little trip to the Citadel last weekend. My friend and colleague Steve and I took along a few members of the aforementioned branch director's family too. It's a remarkable place, and we had a great time. Here are a couple photos!

Me at the top.

On the edge.

Carried this little guy up a good part of the mountain.

Admiring the architecture.

This little one walked three miles up the mountain and hardly said a word.