NGOcracy

If you work in development, you probably wonder sometimes whether what you're doing is actually having a positive impact. If your work has never caused such an existential crisis, you should try working in Haiti.

Haiti is often cited as having more NGOs per capita than any country in the world. After the earthquake, one percent of the billions of dollars pledged went to the Haitian government, which lost 16,000 employees and all but one government building in Port au Prince during the earthquake. Less than one half of one percent went to Haitian NGOs. That leaves billions of dollars going to international NGOs, who are now basically running the country.

What happens when NGOs run your country? Well, to start, the government stays weak and ineffective. Instead of investing in building up a functional public sector that could respond to the needs of its people, the global aid community has decided, for the most part, to skip over the government altogether. As a result, NGOs are creating a system of permanent NGO dependence rather than working towards a Haiti that can someday function without them. (The problems with the Haitian government are a whole other story... but I don't think the solution is just to pretend it doesn't exist.)

NGOs are generally full of do-gooders who sincerely want to help people. But NGOs are accountable to their boards and funders in the US and Europe, rather than to the Haitian people themselves. After the earthquake, they built tens of thousands of "temporary" shelters, while very little attention has been paid to repairing housing or providing rental support, much less any kind of permanent government housing agency. A picture of thousands of shelters for people made homeless by the earthquake looks good in your fundraising brochures, but the picture three and a half years later is bleak. Driving around Port au Prince, you can see people adding little bits of permanence to their tents: a wooden door here, a solar panel there, signs of acceptance that the "temporary" shelters are all they are going to get.

Does that mean the NGOs aren't doing anything good here? I don't think so. I think there are good examples of NGOs doing positive work. But there are also a lot of examples of work that fails to look far enough into the future, that destroys rather than encourages the development of the local economy, and that reinforces permanent dependence on outside aid. I don't think an NGO-free Haiti is anywhere in the near future, but it needs to be part of the vision, however distant.

More here: on Haiti's NGO Republic and on the problem more generally.

How many languages do you have to speak to work in Haiti?

There are some days in Haiti when I speak four different languages in the same day. It's kind of exhausting.

I came to Haiti hoping that whatever I could remember from my high school French would be enough. I don't know where I got that idea. First, high school was a long time ago. Second, Caribbean French is doesn't quite sound like the Parisian French they taught us in Hinesburg, Vermont (and nothing like Quebecois!). Third, most people don't even speak French anyway.

So I'm trying to pick up some Creole. Lucky for me, Creole is as easy as French is hard. It's like what you'd get if a seven-year-old English speaker tried to write down French words, and then took out all the grammar. No string of extra letters that you don't pronounce, no verb conjugations, no subjunctive, no gender, no polite and familiar ways of saying "you" - it's kind of amazing.

And when both French and Creole fail me, I sometimes luck out and find myself in the company of a Spanish speaker. And after I clear my head of broken French and beginner Creole, I can actually have real conversations with people.

In Haiti, I am like a child

Those of you who know me probably know that while I generally prefer doing things with other people to doing things by myself, I'm usually pretty capable of accomplishing basic tasks like feeding myself and finding my way around new places on my own. In Haiti, the exact opposite is true.

Yesterday I walked out of my hotel to do some shopping all by myself for the very first time since I arrived here four weeks ago. It was so refreshing to actually be able to go somewhere all by myself. Before this weekend, I was always shuttled around Port au Prince by a private Oxfam driver. I would just tell them what kind of food I want for dinner, or what kind of errand I need to run, and they would figure out where I need to go and take me there. And they would wait for however long it takes before they have to take me wherever I need to go next. While it makes me feel kind of fancy to have a chauffeur at my beck and call, it's a little stifling.

Traveling in Haiti isn't like traveling anywhere else I've been. There are no international tourists here, except for Haitians living abroad who come back to visit. While not particularly surprising (have you ever considered vacationing in Haiti?), it makes for an unusual traveling experience. Everything is crazy expensive. It's really hard to find food in a lot of places. For two nights I stayed in a town with no restaurants, so the chauffeur took us to a convenience store where we bought cookies and peanut butter for dinner. In Port au Prince I buy single-serving yogurts for more than $4 because the only yogurt you can get is imported from the US. (Food prices are high for lots of complicated reasons - but that deserves its own post). Getting around and doing anything on your own is kind of hard because foreigners just don't do it. I did take public transportation when I went to the beach a couple of weekends ago, but people thought it was kind of weird.

I'll sign off now because my chauffeur is coming early in the morning to pick me up to go back to the field!

A visual tour of SRI

I've been thinking and reading and writing about the System of Rice Intensification (SRI - explained a bit here) for the last few months, so one of the cool things about being in Haiti is getting to see it in practice. And getting to share it with you, my faithful reader(s).

Regardless of which system a rice seed is destined for, it begins its life in a nursery, typically a small section of one's plot. You can see one here, in the middle of the picture:

While your seedlings are starting, the remainder of your land gets tilled - twice. In the picture above, they haven't tilled yet because they haven't had water for a few days.

If you're doing SRI, you then trace gridlines, 20cm apart, across your plot. These gridlines are a guide for transplanting the rice seedlings. This is important because with SRI, you have to weed a lot, and if you have straight lines you can (theoretically) use a mechanical weeder. Once you've drawn your grid you transplant individual seedlings, 8-12 days old, in a grid pattern. (This is very different from traditional rice, in which big clumps of seedlings, several weeks old, are transplanted at random and closer together.) Here's what it looks like:

See how tiny the seedlings are?

And then the teeny seedlings multiply! Here are some seedlings that are about a month old:

The other notable thing about SRI is that you let the soil dry out for a few days at a time, then flood for a week or so, cycling through wet and dry periods. Dry periods aerate the soil and encourage the roots to reach down to look for water, which makes the plant stronger. 

But there are two problems with this flooding and drying cycle. When the field is dry, weeds pop up, so you have to spend a bunch of time weeding. It also requires an ability to manage your water pretty carefully: you have to be able to drain your water off of your field at the right time, and you have to have access to water when it's time to flood again. These two challenges are basically the foundation of the research I'm doing here. Stay tuned.

Here's what a field of SRI looks like. Notice the straight(ish) lines:

For contrast, here's a non-SRI field, which stays flooded all season.

And then, if all the SRI evangelists are right, the SRI plants will grow up big and strong and produce more rice than you know what to do with! I won't be here to see that, at least not on this trip.

My quest for information

In the age of wikipedia and google, it's easy to think that if there's information out there in the world, we can have it. Instantly. But remember back when things were on paper, or just in people's heads?

My main goal for the past week or so has been to learn as much as I can about the blocks of land (agricultural parcels in this area are divided into blocks, based on the distribution of the irrigation canals) that we are considering for expansion of the project. Oxfam has introduced SRI in two blocks this year, and we want to expand into more blocks next year - the hard part is choosing the blocks. So I'm trying to learn anything I can about the blocks: how many people are part of the irrigation association, whether there are any other organizations operating in the area, how well their drainage canals work, topographic and agronomic characteristics, etc.

I've been told that some agronomists who work for the local development agency have some of this information, and that there might even be maps and aerial photos of the blocks we're considering, but the people at the development agency don't answer their phones. Voice mail is one of the things I really miss from home. I've met with the committee of the irrigation association that serves all of the blocks we're looking at, but they don't like to acknowledge differences between the blocks. They tell me that everyone has the same problems with water management, that everyone is actively involved in the association, that everyone has a lot of flooding - eventually they told me to stop asking the same questions over and over because they're just going to give me the same answers for every block.

So what's next? I can try going to the development agency that won't answer their phones and hope to find someone there, but nobody is at work today because of tropical storm Chantal. I can also skip over the committee and go straight to the farmers to ask them questions - but nobody is in the fields today either because of the storm. So today I'll read my Creole phrase book and do some yoga and wait for the storm to pass and start again tomorrow.

Haiti: First Impressions

Ok, I'm going to try out this blogging thing again. I've been in Haiti for two weeks now, so it's about time I guess.

Perhaps I should start with why I'm here. To study rice, of course! Haiti is a mostly agricultural country that imports more than half of their food, including most of their rice. (Thank you US farm bill - more on that in a later post...) Haiti's hunger and food insecurity problem is multi-dimensional and is going to require a lot of solutions to work at the same time (probably more on that later too), one of which is improving agricultural productivity. So that's why I'm here.

Specifically, I'm studying an alternative rice production mechanism called the System of Rice Intensification (SRI). In short, it's a method that requires more careful management, and more labor, but less of everything else: seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, and water. And depending on which study you read, the yields may be much higher. So the most basic question I'm trying to answer is whether people are better off if they switch to SRI once you account for the differences in both yields and expenditures on inputs and labor. Then there are more questions that I hope to get to: Who chooses to adopt SRI, and who doesn't, and why? SRI requires careful water management, so do we see (or what can one do to promote) cooperation among neighbors over shared water systems? How do adoption rates and success with the method change over time as people learn more about it? And probably more...

I'll try to post updates on what I'm doing as I go along. My blogging may be more sporadic than in the past due to the rarity of both electricity and internet, but I'll do my best!

The first thing that greeted me in the Port-au-Prince was band that had both a banjo and an accordian in it - I learned later that this style of music is called twoubadou - and of course I knew I would like Haiti. I also thought there has to be some kind of joke here, like Haiti is the place where we send all the things we have no use for any more, like the old school buses and used clothes, and even the banjos and accordians. I bet it won't be long before I see some oboes.

Since then I've been wandering in rice fields, talking to farmers, trying to learn a few words in Creole, and eating mangoes whenever I can find them.