why are you here?

Any regular follower of this blog has read my descriptions of the juxtapositions and contradictions (and, due to those, personal frustrations) that I’ve come across while working in Haiti. The contrast between the extremely rich and the destitute poor is stark, exposed, unabashed. The wealthy, seemingly with blinders on, plow through the streets in their large vehicles and build walls around themselves and their families. The poor, who must have missed the message to stay in their place, spread into every nook and cranny of the city – house on top of house, dangerously close to the ocean, impossibly high into the hills. The resulting picture – tent cities next to mansions, homeless children next to ten-dollars-to-enter nightclubs – is a remarkable, if uneasy, equilibrium. I wonder how long it can last.

Last Friday, I went to a typical expat party. It seems that at every one of these parties (seriously), the same topic of conversation comes up. It looks like this:

Aid Worker #1 (slurring his speech): You know, sometimes I feel kind of bad partying like this, with that tent city right across the street. Something about it doesn't feel right.

Aid Worker #2: Yeah, I know what you mean [hiccup]. But, I mean, it's hard here. We need to take care of ourselves, too.

Foreign Government Employee #1: I mean, it's just the way it is. There's nothing we can do about it.

Development Organization Worker #1: You guys want another drink?

All (together): Definitely!

At this most recent party, the conversation carried on a little longer than usual. In an unusually candid moment, one young woman stated the obvious: "Not every person can live the same way. We couldn't live this style of life is all of those people had the same amount of resources that we do." In so many words, their poverty allows us to be wealthy; or, depending on your perspective, our wealth makes a lot of people poor.

We carried on. The same young woman started talking about her Washington, D.C.-based, U.S. government-salaried, development job. Once again speaking honestly, she told me that she didn't think her job was anything special. She agreed that her job wasn't doing much of anything to actually change the general dynamic of the situation. At the end of the day, poor people were still going to be poor, and rich people were still going to be rich. The job paid her bills, though, and allowed her to live a comfortable lifestyle. She said, "Well, at least I'm trying to do something."

Let me say that I have no problem with people having jobs and paying bills in order to support themselves and their families. People have a right to a certain level of comfort and safety, and you should have to work a reasonable amount to obtain those things. However, I found her reaction to the injustices of the world to be particularly uninspired and impotent, considering she is part of an industry that is supposed to help remedy the world's problems. It's one thing to say "I'm going to Wall Street and I'm going to become a millionaire because I want to live an opulent lifestyle." It's quite another to travel around the world with different organizations under the pretense of helping people, only to end every week with a shrug of the shoulders and a hangover. It's fake help. It's colonialism with a nice face, and there should be no room for it in a place where real, deep-rooted problems are irreversibly damaging millions of people's lives.

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Earlier that same day, I had a chance to go to the graduation of a group of our clients. It's the best part of my job. This graduation was really great because I had seen the same women a couple of months before and told them that I'd be back to see them when they finished the program, so it was nice to be able to fulfill that promise. Here is a short video clip of them singing and dancing during the ceremony:





This particular group was from one of the most beautiful places that I've seen in the country, high above the ocean on the top of a mountain. The video doesn't do it justice, but maybe you can get a sense of the ride down the mountain: