And then sometimes I think it's a good idea to venture out on my own...

Without a doubt, the hardest part about being in Haiti (sorry Aathi, I mean the second hardest part) is my lack of independence. Because of a combination of the lack/unreliability/difficulty of public transportation or taxis and my security rules (warranted or not), I can't really go anywhere by myself in Port-au-Prince unless I can walk there from my guest house.

So last weekend I was very excited when I found out that there was a movie playing (this is very exciting in a country with not one single movie theater) at a bar that, according to google maps, was only a few blocks from my guest house! So off I went, with a little map drawn on a piece of paper just like I used to do in the pre-iphone days, excited to be going out into the world without a private driver, and very excited about seeing a pirated DVD on a screen bigger than my laptop.

I supposed I will never know if I found the intersections where google maps told me the bar was, but considering how long I wandered around I'm sure I passed it at least once. But it doesn't really matter, because google was off by about a mile. And of course nobody I asked had ever heard of the bar I was looking for.

So I thought I had learned my lesson, and today I asked the woman who runs my guest house how to find the hotel/restaurant/pool where she suggested I spend the afternoon. You won't fool me again, google maps!

An hour and a half later, after asking at least half a dozen people for directions, I bought a sandwich from the grocery store and brought it back to my guest house to eat in front of my survey code.

What most of my time in the field is like

Ok, do you want to know what field work is really like? Well, sometimes it's walking through rice fields, sometimes it's talking to farmers, sometimes it's sitting in on meetings.... but that's only a fraction of my time. A much greater fraction of my time is spent trying to find help with things I can't do myself, typically things that require knowing certain people or being Haitian. And waiting, and wondering whether whatever it is I have asked for help with will happen or not.

All this waiting wouldn't be a big problem if I were a patient person (which of course I am not). But even if I were, the waiting gets complicated when I am relying on too many moving pieces that simultaneously rely on each other.

Tomorrow, for example, I want to talk to small groups of farmers to learn more about different things related to farming. Here are all of the different ways I need help from other people to make these groups happen:
1. I need someone to help me run the focus groups. This really has to be done by someone from Haiti who's fluent in the language, and who understands research and focus groups.
2. I've hired people for #1. But before they can start working, I need them to sign a contract with the university we are working with here. So I need someone there to write a contract, get the necessary people together to sign the contract, and show up to sign it.
3. I need someone from the area who knows the farmers to help me find farmers and convince them (to the tune of about $3.50 each) to be in my focus groups.
4. I need someone who understands research enough to know what I want with my focus groups, and who knows person #3, to translate what I want from research-ese to farmer-ese.
5. Finally, I need transportation and lodging. No small task in Haiti.

So I find myself making many conditional plans at the same time: "Ok, we're on for interpreting tomorrow, assuming I can get that meeting scheduled..." and then I call whoever I need to call to schedule my meeting and cross my fingers that I won't have to cancel on the interpreter, or the driver, or whoever. Because when I do have to cancel something, someone always gets mad at me. It's a difficult and frustrating juggling act.

A (weekend) day in the life of a foreigner in Haiti

What do I do when I'm not in the field? Well, here's what I did yesterday:

Morning: grocery shopping at the grocery store that I can walk to from my hotel. I spent $9.50 on a travel-sized bottle of contact solution, $6 on a box of five (small) granola bars, and $13.50 on a 6 oz. bag of baby spinach (and it's not even organic). At least my guesthouse cook told me that the $2 I spent on a gigantic avocado seemed reasonable.

Afternoon: lounging (and working) by the pool at the newly re-opened El Rancho Hotel that had been destroyed in the earthquake. Pros: lovely landscaping, nice pool, delicious salad, and comfy lounge chairs. Cons: slow wifi, loud dance music ALL DAY, and the feeling that I'm in a weird rich-person bubble that 99% of Haitians have never even seen.

Evening: dinner at the Quartier Latin, another foreigner bubble where they serve fresh pasta and French wine, and last night's location for the week-long international jazz festival happening in Port-au-Prince. Even though it is two blocks from our hotel, we had a private driver take us there and bring us back, "just to be safe."

So I'm not exactly roughing it.

Big Game of Chicken

[Note: I wrote this in August, on the plane ride home from my first trip to Haiti, and never posted it. Now I'm starting this blogging thing again, starting with this post from many months ago.]

The other day I was out in a rice field, like usual, trying to learn a little more about the irrigation system. SRI requires more precise water management than traditional rice farming methods, so if farmers are to be successful with it, they will need clean, well-functioning canals. The small canals that run between the farmers’ fields are made of dirt, and they frequently get clogged up with weeds and plant debris that needs to be cleaned.

There is a word in Creole for a bunch of people getting together to do communal work, like cleaning shared canals: kombite. The existence of a word means that there is a precedent for sharing work. I asked them if they ever cleaned their canals together, and they told me they used to have kombites all the time – every week some said, or a few times a season. And now? No, they said, not so much any more.

Why not? I asked. Oh, they said, because some NGO came in last year and paid us to clean our canals. They haven’t come back this year, but now people will only work on the canals if someone pays them to do it.

A canal full of weeds

The farmers tell me that cleaning the canals is the responsibility of the local government agricultural agency, while the agency claims to be responsible only for the large concrete canals that feed each system of smaller dirt canals. But even the agricultural agency is plagued by wait-for-the-NGO-to-do-it syndrome. This year, as part of the SRI project, Oxfam gave the agency some money for cleaning the larger canals. But when the machinery broke down halfway through the project, the agency said they had spent all of the money. It was up to Oxfam to come up with more money to fix the machines and finish the cleaning.

So a big backhoe sits, broken, next to a half-cleaned drainage canal, and the smaller canals are filling up with weeds, while everyone waits for someone else to come in with the money to fix it.

This is partly a story about farmers with insufficient access to public infrastructure and an underfunded government agency. But it is also to some extent a story of donations undermining preexisting local solutions. If farmers cleaned their own canals just two years ago, the benefit of cleaner canals must be worth the work it takes. But why do something for free if you think someone might come and pay you to do it?

Beach days

I haven't had too much vacation time on this trip, but even farmers take Sundays off, so I do too. And when you're working in the Caribbean, a day off means time to go to the beach!

Early in my trip I asked around to find out where I should go if I wanted to get in the ocean, and the people at my guest house sent me to Club Indigo, a fancy resort that used to be a Club Med. Anyone who's reading this knows that I am not the fancy resort type of person. But traveling alone in Haiti, that seemed like only option if I wanted food and water and a place to sleep, and if I wanted to get there without a driver. This is what happens in a country with no tourism industry.

Then last weekend, I tagged along with a bunch of Haitians working on a survey with a French geographer who was staying at my guest house. They took me to the local beach, hidden away down a bunch of winding dirt roads, with no big sign on the highway. The water was just as beautiful, minus the fancy mixed drinks and the giant pool right next to the ocean.

I really wish I could tell you I liked the local beach better. But maybe I've developed expensive taste. I didn't miss the mixed drinks or the pool; in fact, I didn't take advantage of either when I was at the resort. But there were two things I really missed.

First: silence. Long-time blog readers know about my love of silence. It is a love not shared by Haitians. When I dove down a few feet below the surface, the bass drum beats became soft and almost ignorable, but you can only stay under the water for so long. When I wasn't under water, I was in an all-day outdoor dance club.

Second: a place to read. Comfortable seating can be hard to come by in much of Haiti, my guest house and the beach included. I would guess that the plastic reclining chairs at the fancy resort are probably cheaper than the heavy iron chairs at the local beach, so I don't think it's a question of money. Maybe it's just a question of whether the beach is for partying or for lounging around and reading a book. Maybe they do it on purpose, so you'll dance more and get thirsty and buy more beer. In any event, I'm excited to see my chiropractor when I get home.

So which beach will I go to if I come back to Haiti? Hard to say. Private cars are so expensive that the resort is actually cheaper if I'm by myself because it's on the highway (I didn't see anyone else going there by public transportation, but it wasn't that hard). But if I make friends with more Haitians, I think the company of friends compensates for the club music. And I can always bring a hammock.

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.