stuck

My friend and colleague recently commented that Haiti is a “frustrating place to work.” His reasonable comment came after learning that the only international airport – his ticket out of the country – was going to be closed on Wednesday and Thursday due to the fact that the airport’s employees were unable to get to work. His observation also came before American Airlines announced all of its flights would be canceled until at least Monday. More frustrating, I imagine.

I couldn’t help but feel some of the same sentiments, having taken off from Port-au-Prince on Tuesday with a laundry list of activities to get done in the north of the country, including three client graduation ceremonies. A series of changes of direction and decisions – more easily made by burning tires, giant roadblocks, and some rather intimidating looking crowds – has landed me in Limbe, near Haiti’s second city, Cap-Haitien. I’ve resigned myself to staying here until at least tomorrow, when I’ll make an early morning dash to Port-au-Prince with a half-completed list of activities in my hand. There are no guarantees that I’ll actually make it back to my house without running into more roadblocks, but we’re going to give it a shot anyway. If it’s not possible, we’ll turn around.

So, yes, it’s frustrating. I’ve talked about it before. Take your pick of any of those tired platitudes: swimming upstream, running in place, spinning my wheels. My current situation is just another manifestation of one of those, except this time it’s physical: I’m stuck.

This, however, is not about me. And it’s not about my understandably aggravated friend. It’s about the thousands of Haitians who have taken to the streets, who have every right to be exponentially more frustrated than we do. It’s about an entire country of people, beaten down by natural disasters, disease, and – more than anything – shackled by constant international intervention for over two centuries. (If you’d like to read more about this from a person who knows much more than me, please read Dr. Paul Farmer’s essay from the London Review of Books.)

While I’m immobilized for a couple of days, most Haitians, such as the 54% who live on less than $1/day, have little or no opportunity to ever move forward. They live day to day, meal to meal, hoping that the next hurricane or cholera outbreak doesn’t hit too close to home. This is, of course, part of what my organization tries to remedy, in the form of microfinance (among other services). It tries to give people some traction, a jumping-off point. Other organizations try to help by providing educational training, access to health care, agricultural products. If you can think of a development- or aid-based initiative, you’ll find an example of it in Haiti. You can also find a group of people raving about, or tearing apart, any of these initiatives; nobody can seem to agree on the best approach to alleviating any of the problems associated with poverty.

The elections, though, are a different story. Here, there should be no debate. You find a way to give all eligible voters a chance to vote and you find a way to give all eligible candidates a chance to run. Not to pull a George W. Bush, but only people who hate democracy wouldn’t agree with that statement. I’ve seen different numbers thrown around, but $29 million is the one that sticks in my head. That’s the amount of money that was poured into the Haitian elections ($14 million of which came by way of the United States). An election fatally flawed from its inception: a President who handpicked the members of the council charged with overseeing the elections; over a dozen political parties arbitrarily excluded from participating; a woefully insufficient effort to register voters who were displaced by the earthquake.

I guess we were all holding our collective breath in the days leading up to the announcement of the election results, hoping that this wouldn’t happen. I admit that, although I knew the elections were far from perfect, I was eager for a resolution that would leave a somewhat large percentage of the population happy. I, despite what I said in the previous paragraph, thought that a somewhat flawed, partly successful election might be good for the country. I thought this mostly because I knew how much people wanted change. I thought this because I knew how much people wanted current President Rene Preval and his Inite party out of power.

Twenty-nine million dollars and this is the end result. If things stand as is, Mirlande Manigat (an academic who briefly spent time in the Presidential Palace as the First Lady in the 1980s) and Jude Celestin (Inite and Preval’s candidate) will face off in a runoff election on January 16th. It’s an absolute farce. Anyone who has spent any time in Haiti over the past couple of months can tell you how tired of Preval nearly everyone is. There is no way that the results released on Tuesday reflect the will of the people. (Even the normally Preval-friendly U.S. embassy issued a statement questioning the results.)

The protests were entirely predictable and justified. “We’re teaching Preval a lesson,” an excitable young man told me at a roadblock, obligating our car to turn around. “He doesn’t respect the people!” It is unfortunate, personally, that I was caught up in Preval’s lesson and my work was affected for the week. But, as I mentioned to my irritated friend, if it were me I’d be setting up roadblocks and burning tires too. I do not applaud the violence toward other people that is associated with the protests, but I do understand it. For many, they can find no different way to get others to listen.

I still contend that a partially successful election could have helped the country move forward. But I was completely wrong to expect it to come out of the constraints that had been set up by the Haitian government and international organizations overseeing the elections. It was set up to fail. Instead, what we have is a complete quagmire, with no real positive options, and a population that finds itself in the same position as always. Stuck.

The best idea I’ve come across to mend the situation is to annul the elections and redo them in a few months after a better effort is made to register voters and all parties are included. However, that brings up the problem of who will run the country until then, which could be a real issue considering all of the very strong anti-Preval feelings in the country, especially after the elections.

Make no mistake about it. This was a completely manmade – and preventable – disaster. And cleaning up this mess is going to cost a lot of time and money in a moment where the people of Haiti are as vulnerable as they have ever been. Once again, though, there can be no debate. The situation must be remedied; if not, the people will continue to teach Preval, and the rest of us, a lesson.