Repeating Islands

The dust has settled, the news crews have gone, and gangs are seizing the aid. Do Haitians have any hope left?  A detailed report from London’s Times speaks to the remaining urgency of the situation. Excerpts from the article are reproduced here, with a link to the full text below.

This earthquake was a women’s tragedy. It was of course a nation’s tragedy, but it leant particularly heavily on women. There are no figures, but it seems that more women died than men. It was the time of day, the late afternoon, women were at home cooking, making the children’s tea, when the sky fell. In the amputees’ wards my rough count finds twice as many women as men, and the hospitals are beginning to see an increase in the number of rape victims. There is a lot of muttered gossip about the vulnerability of girls, their families smashed, orphaned, foisted on neighbours and distant relatives in overcrowded camps, themselves mostly built and maintained by women, who still do all the washing, cleaning and cooking and protect the young. On the benches, women wait to see the doctor. Quiet and serene, they hold each others’ hands and mantle wan children with their arms, hard, capable fingers resting in laps, their faces ironed by grief, set with a brutal resolve. There’s something else I’ve seen before that’s difficult to explain; there is a terrible, calm beauty in calamity.

I was last in Haiti for its despairing bicentennial in 2004. It was the most frightening place I’d ever been to. I was gassed, shot at, threatened with voodoo zombies; there were bodies in the streets. I watched the army beat up students, and a lad was shot and killed in a gang fight in front of me. The streets were run by trucks of thugs and murderers known as the Chimères. It’s said they were paid by President Aristide, a one-time Catholic priest who was rumoured to pound live babies in a mortar and pestle to make the voodoo that kept him in power. The place seethed with fury and lashings of violence. It wasn’t anarchy. Anarchy implies a philosophy, a rough purpose.

It was a howling chaos. The one belief that united most Haitians was the conviction that the country was, and always had been, cursed. As I left, I thanked God I’d never have to come back to this black and benighted place.

. . .

The fenced-off airfield is a vast dump of stuff: military tents, warehouses, helicopters and equipment. There are hundreds of charities here, NGOs, international bodies, thousands of workers, volunteers, professionals, some more useful than others. They all need beds, food, water, western sanitation. The first concern of all these organisations is the health and safety of their members — an enormous amount of the logistics is used to support the purveyors of logistics and the mongers of prayer.

. . .

At first sight, Port-au-Prince looks remarkably as I remember it — even before the disaster it was the crumbliest, most backward and pitiful capital in the western hemisphere. As we get into town, I start to notice the collapsed buildings. Tectonic plates are capricious in their choices. Random houses fall in on themselves; their neighbours remain upright. Buildings pushed onto their sides split open to reveal the eerily empty dollhouse rooms of domestic probity. Rubble spews into the street in great, emetic mounds. Electric cables swag the traffic, supermarkets, offices, hotels, the presidential palace, cathedrals, all rent and laid low by Haiti’s geology. On hillsides, the poorest breeze-block-and-concrete homes have collapsed into forlorn heaps, throwing up pathetically mutilated furniture, ragged, bright clothes, crockery, shoes, shattered ornaments, kitchen utensils, shredded books and fluttering photographs of the dead, all like a bitter harvest of chattels. It looks so insignificant. So undramatic. So bereft of gravitas and dignity — just annoying rubble. The air is hot and heavy with moisture, stiff with the stench of rot and dung, and sometimes you stumble into the sickly-sweet stink that is unforgettably a corpse. The smell of departed souls, the gagging odour of sanctity. Bodies still lie entombed under slabs. Nobody knows how many.

Just to get this straight, lest we forget, this is the greatest, most cataclysmic disaster of the modern era. The worst natural organic event since the demise of Christ. The official death toll is somewhere around 230,000. Local people think it’s much higher. If you’re into top-10 lists of misery, you might argue that the Asian tsunami was worse, but that was spread over two continents. This happened in the space between London and Brighton in a nation of barely 10m.

The survivors do their living in the streets. On every piece of flat land, there are lean-tos and shacks. The bivouacs of the displaced choke petrol-station forecourts and lay-bys. The parks are like human beehives. Laundry is strung from trees, charcoal fires smoke, pigs and chickens pick through the syrupy rubbish. Ranks of throat-searing portable loos cling to the outskirts in a vain attempt to stop the shit infecting everything.

As there is no regular or clean water, it has to be brought to the city every day by tanker. Urchins sell small plastic bags of water that tastes of chlorine. This doesn’t feel like it’s a short flight from Florida, or one half of an island that is a golf-strewn, five-star holiday getaway. Haiti has always seemed more African than Caribbean. It’s like Accra or Freetown. Haiti has held onto its slave roots, the dark pride of being the very first black republic. The first black army to defeat a white one since Hannibal. The only non-European army to lay Napoleon low. The French extracted a terrible price for this humiliation. They took Haiti’s entire hardwood forest as reparation, which led to the worst soil erosion of any country in the world. Now the main industry is aid, drug- and gun-running, and stitching cheap T-shirts.

The first wave of disaster relief has departed, and with it the news crews. I can find only a desk man for AFP diligently trying to rustle up a story a day, and a camera crew from Al Jazeera. Contrarily, and without apparent irony, the preferred story in a natural catastrophe is a good-news one: miraculous rescues and escapes, acts of heroism and bravery, selfless rescue workers from Rotherham, sniffer dogs from Barking, saintly surgeons from Surbiton. As the hope of more wide-eyed victims being plucked from the grave diminishes, as the disaster medics wrap up their kit and go, so too do the 24-hour rolling-news teams. This is very expensive stuff, and nobody has the budget or the audience for the grim, dull depression of resurrection.

The emergency hospitals are no longer dealing with trauma. They have to see to the grind of exacerbated poverty, the infantile diarrhoea, the constant respiratory problems, the infections and sores. In the makeshift hospital run by the Swiss, the most common complaint they’re treating is Mups — Multiple, Unexplained Physical Symptoms. Aka grief. Or the need for a bed. Or the yearning for some attention, or the hope of a pill that might make it all right.

. . .

There was so much haphazard, arbitrary emergency medicine, so many children flown around the globe towing film crews. Surgeons and doctors from rich, first-world hospitals took pride in giving first-world treatment, began long courses of drugs and procedures that nobody can afford, from pharmacies that don’t exist. There was an assumption that someone else would arrive in their wake and turn this into a real, functioning country.

There are hundreds and hundreds of amputees. The most common injury among survivors is the guillotining of an arm or a leg, severed by a wall or a ceiling. There are many children without feet or hands. The amputations were done quickly; victims had often been lying for hours or days, crushed. Now that they have to be given prosthetics, the long process of rehabilitation, of exercising atrophied muscles, must start. A lot of stumps were left raw and weak. The victims have to have their legs re-amputated. A woman wails beside a bed, waving her hands, imploring God. Her husband and sons are dead. She is with her daughter, who lost a leg and now must have it cut again. Is there no end to the pain, to the disappointment? She cries hopelessly.

But medicine is no longer the most pressing concern. There is a boiling, unreported problem with logistics. It’s getting practical aid to the millions who live under plastic. This is the second wave of the disaster. If they drive a truck full of tents, or buckets, or beans — just about anything — into a refugee camp, there is a riot. The charity workers are bullied and beaten, the goods are fought over, destroyed, stolen, to reappear again on the black market. There is no infrastructure, no order, no way to distribute aid. The government has no power. The NGOs are young volunteers who can’t police themselves; the UN and the Americans have no mandate or desire to get physical; and the victims, struggling every day without practical help, grow angrier. They know that huge amounts of money have been given for their relief, they know that third-rate pop stars and reality-show contestants are covering saccharine power ballads for their benefit, that stand-up comedians and over-the-hill soap-opera actors are running marathons on their behalf, but they’re not seeing it. What they see are streets jammed with 4x4s in the branded logos of charity, driven by white kids. This is a country that has only ever existed as a kleptocracy — a masterclass in corruption. Everyone knows that the money, the goods must have been stolen by businessmen, by charities, by American Christians, and they’re being sold. So people are beginning to take desperate measures — they have started kidnapping white aid workers as a lever to get back what should be theirs. This is also kept unreported.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), whom I travelled with, have just had two nurses kidnapped. They were freed after a few days, unharmed. MSF say no ransom was paid — they never pay. The police say someone paid. There are rumours about other NGOs; nobody wants to make this public, but executed bodies have appeared, and it changes the whole shape of the problem — makes everything much, much more fraught, much harder, more cautious, and slower.

The two or three expensive hotels left in the old colonial part of the city are packed. Not with charity workers but born-again baby-nappers and businessmen, here to make an opportunity out of a disaster. There is a good deal of potential here — a lot of money to be spent. Sharp-eyed buccaneers sell phone masts and digging equipment. Experts hawk their expertise. T-shirt moguls are in the market for T-shirts.

A half-trashed, ferrety little expat Englishman buttonholes me at a bar. He’s selling protection: “I cover all of Latin America.” He’s doing a brisk trade in bodyguards, drivers, kidnap insurance, all the belt-and-braces kit of paranoia. It’s expensive but, he says, charities pay to protect their staff, or rather the people who pay charities pay. It all comes out of the aid budget. He nods at a large and threatening Haitian standing in a corner. “There’s my security. Of course he carries a gun — probably won’t need it, but I wouldn’t go out after dark without him.” I gave the bloke a long look. I wouldn’t go out after dark with him. “You should think about it,” he says. “You’re high-profile, work for a rich international com-pany.” Thanks, but I think I’ll stick with my tried-and-tested strategy. “Oh yeah, what’s that?” Hysterical begging and soiling myself.

We drive to the outskirts of the Cité Soleil to deliver tents to a small community. On the way, we pass ghost camps: smart local entrepreneurs put up fake rag towns, like venus flytraps, to catch unwary charities. There are signs on the road saying simply “Help”. The distribution has taken days to arrange. The community appointed a leader, a dignified and stalwart woman. There is a list of which families will get tents. The team of MSF workers hold a masterclass in putting them up. The community has spent a couple of days clearing the land; they’ve organised their own security. It’s friendly and jolly, but it’s an awful lot of work for a very small distribution. Getting here, we drove up the wrong road and came across a gang from the slum, their faces obscured with scarves and balaclavas. They cut the attitude of hard men the third world over, and turned us back. They’re guarding the city’s landfill, a broad plain of smoking detritus, the stuff that has been thrown away a dozen times before it gets here. This is their fiefdom, the last scavengers at the end of a long train of disposable, replaceable western civilisation, the violent vigilantes of filth. And underneath the smoking, stinking field that is their harvest, are bulldozed 100,000 mangled corpses.

Another winning top-10 fact: this is a disaster that uniquely cost more than the country is worth. Haiti is technically an insurance write-off. In New York there is a donor conference where they’re asking governments, philanthropies and charities to stump up $17 billion. That is 120% of Haiti’s value. Bill Clinton said that if the international community put Haiti back to the way it was the day before the earthquake, it would have failed. This is a once-only opportunity to build a whole new country from scratch, perhaps to offer something of the good wishes the new nation should have been given 200 years ago. The big, blue-sky idea is to build a brand-new city. This port is silted up and unusable. For this sort of money they could just abandon Port-au-Prince to the dead, leave its cursed slums to the zombies. But right now, the aid distribution of the tents, the food, the plastic legs, is a race against time and the patience of the survivors. The rains are coming. There is the serious threat of mudslides. Nobody knows how the newly fractured geology of the city will behave.

. . .

At the side of the muddy track, wet children sell mudcakes — smooth, round biscuits made of water and soil and a little fat, baked in the sun. They are eaten by the starving: fill your mouth with earth, your stomach with the grave. I have never seen these anywhere else in the world. Mudcakes are a Haitian speciality. We’re here to see the slum’s head man, to organise the giving of survival packs — a basic starter box of life: a tarpaulin, a bucket, soap, water-purifying pills, sanitary towels, nappies and some food. We find him in a lean-to, sitting behind a desk, flanked by silent muscle and lots of children. There are mobile phones, a telly, a DVD player, a satellite decoder. He is instantly recognisable — it’s the black Tony Soprano surrounded by the trappings of his power. He’s amused and friendly, with an edge of smiling psycho-menace. With an air of a man who’s rarely been told “no”, he tries to make these negotiations for aid sound as if they were organised by him on behalf of his people. The MSF negotiators are firm and poker-faced. He does what bullies do: he pats children and makes light of the things he can’t get. His lieutenants look stony. The child-ren weave between their legs like cats. They’re all aware that disasters like this only happen once in a millennium. This is an opportunity — they’re strung and tense, waiting to catch the wave.

We leave and I ask why they’re doing business with the gangs, these malevolent bloodsuckers who’ve blighted Haiti since the Tonton Macoutes, who make the poor poorer and a lot of them dead. “At the moment, these are the only people who can guarantee the security of a distribution.” But they’ll give it to their cronies, sell it, use it as leverage. “We hope not. We will do what we can, but it’s more important to get this stuff into the community until we can deliver so much it loses its value.” These are the hard truths of charity.

The article appeared at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7105524.ece