a result, the UN’s Gender Based Violence cluster invited Villard and Delva to a meeting, but such gatherings are conducted almost entirely in French and not translated into Kreyòl—effectively excluding grassroots women while favoring middle-class organizations whose members speak French. (Unequal access to education remains one of the most disempowering aspects of poor women’s lives in Haiti.)
The erasure of poor women is a common critique of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs operations. Says Monité Marcelin, member of Club of Mothers in Little Haiti, “Sure we say we have a ministry for women, but the minister never calls us to try to talk with us, and when you finally see her it’s only with women high up there, not ones from below.”
The complex tension of class, color, and language—which foreign organizations tend to be oblivious of—is replicated and amplified at the international level. Haiti’s weak economy has rendered it highly dependent on international aid, which accounts for 40 percent of the national budget. In recent years, that aid has been delivered mostly to NGOs because of limited government capacity and a fear of government corruption. With more than ten thousand NGOs within the country—ranging from mega-outfits such as the Red Cross and Doctors without Borders to copious missionaries and tiny organizations that focus on singular missions—Haiti is often called a republic of NGOs. But NGOs are the main source of services for the masses—from health care to education to jobs—and since the earthquake, their power has only strengthened.
But what about all that aid that was sent to Haiti? Surprisingly, little has reached Haiti’s most vulnerable living in the camps. To date, only 27 percent of the $1.3 billion dollars raised in the first few months by major NGOs has actually been spent in country. Of the $10 billion pledged to Haiti at the UN donors’ conference in New York last March, only 10 percent has been delivered. The U.S. pledge of $1.5 billion is still tied up in Congress.
Some of the delay has been attributed to uncertainty over who would be the next president of the country. The women I spoke with were only too aware of this—and it raised their ire because there’s a history of women being disenfranchised through voter fraud and intimidation. They also resent the sudden notice of women at election time.
“When there is an election they give people five gourdes [about five cents] so they can go out and campaign for them,” Jean piped in again, “but when a big decision is being taken, women are not there. Women must be present because women can decide, too. They need to remember women all the time, and in everything.”
Elections were held against the backdrop of a cholera epidemic that threatened to invade the entire country, and the results were clouded by accusations of fraud and violent protests. But, surprisingly, a woman might well be the next president of Haiti, as Mirlande Manigat led with 31.37 percent of the vote. Jude Célestin, the current president Préval’s chosen candidate, was a distant second at 22.48 percent, trailed closely by Michel Martelly—the second favorite in earlier polls. A contested runoff between the two top vote-getters was scheduled for January 16.
Haiti’s a place where the only kind of action that government seems to recognize is krazé-brizé, I was told by Madame Royère, a longtime activist and one of the founders of the crochet club. “Unless you take to the streets and demonstrate, you will never have a response from them,” she said. “Conserving your morality and the kind of person you are is something they don’t understand.”
But the images of krazé-brizé we saw were mostly of men. Fed up with the election results that dismissed Michel Martelly, the second favorite in earlier polls, they revolted against a year’s worth of ignoring the plight of Haiti’s poor.
How would women fare under Manigat, Célestin, or Martelly? It’s impossible to predict. None of them have put forth a national agenda, let alone expressed any commitment to gender issues or how they would alleviate the structural neglect of women.
A year after the quake, I can look at Haiti and only see doom. More public health crises are inevitably on the way. NGOs continue to run amok as a parallel state system that negates local authority and workers. There is still no concrete plan to permanently house the homeless.
But on my first post-quake trip, I had met a blind grandmother, Solange Veillard David, in Petit-Goâve, a coastal town southwest of Port-au-Prince. Though she had to sleep in a tent in her brother’s yard because her house remained unlivable, she remained feisty, undeterred by the disaster around her. “Fòk ou gen volonte pou viv,” she told me: You must have will to live.
Our duty, in solidarity, is to assure that the strength and willfulness of the women I spoke with are not in vain. So I still have hope for the future of my homeland, knowing that some of Haiti’s most vulnerable women stand ready to participate in the country’s future. What will it take for them to be seen and heard?
20
The Haiti Story You Won’t Read
January 14, 2011 / pbs.org @ 5:09 p.m.
As reporting of the one-year anniversary of the earthquake that devastated our birth country continues to fill the airwaves, many of us, at home and abroad, cringe as television screens and newspapers are satiated with standard-formula media representations of Haiti.
Others, like myself and die-hard Haitiphiles, have been preparing for the bombardment of “the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere” taglines that accompany every segment. We know that the misery of those dying of cholera and of the homeless in tent cities is being further exposed in aggressive zooming shots to offer a more human side of the tragedy. As expected, features shied away from history, favoring sound bites focusing on the Haitian government’s failures since January 12, 2010. Unsurprisingly, not enough attention is being paid to the role that foreign nations and international institutions have and continue to play in our predicament.
These rhetorical and visual blows dehumanize us—Haitians on both sides of the water—who are still living with trauma that had to be put aside to deal with the immediate. It remains unprocessed. Moreover, we have yet to truly mourn or to hold an appropriate requiem for those whose lives were lost in those thirty seconds.
You see, if there is one thing we know for certain, it is that without destitution, sensationalism, and violence, there is no Haiti story. As an editor of a news magazine told me months ago after the fouled-up elections, we’re doing an AIDS story right now, so let’s wait for the next big moment for you to pitch me something. The expectation is that there will be more tragedies. After all, it is Haiti.
The heaviness of that same perception so distressed me as a young immigrant in this country during the ’80s that, at the ripe age of twelve, I vowed never to return to Haiti until things changed. With little command of the English language, I had simply grown tired of explaining to inquiring minds that there is much more to us. No, we are not responsible for the AIDS virus. Yes, we are poor and have a history of political strife, but it’s not innate. And hell no, it’s not because we are mostly black. We are not reducible to our conditions.
Still, as insiders, we have intimate knowledge of Haiti, yet we are hardly ever presented as experts. Rather, we are usually positioned as informants. According to University of Miami medical anthropologist Louis Herns Marcelin, “For too long, the predominant discourse [on Haitians] has been framed within a humanitarian condescending characterization: victims of our passion, excesses, and lack of rationality. Because of the premise that we have been blindfolded by excesses, the assumption is that we cannot have a rational/objective analysis of our own condition.”
Fabienne Doucet, New York University professor and cofounder of Haiti Corps (an organization that focuses on capacity building to
