Gerta Louisama is a member of the Executive Committee and the National Women’s Committee of Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan Ayisyen, Heads Together Small Producers of Haiti, Haiti’s largest and oldest peasant group. She is also head of the local Tèt Kole Women’s Committee in her village of Savanette. Here she speaks about the Tèt Kole’s efforts to win recognition, social equality, and economic rights for rural Haitians, especially women.

I am a peasant women and the daughter of two peasants. I’ve been a victim of this society which ostracizes women.

• Gerta Louisama. Photo: Beverly Bell •

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance and is working on the forthcoming book, Fault Lines: Views across Haiti’s New Divide. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. You can access all of her past articles regarding post-earthquake Haiti at www.otherworldsarepossible.org/haiti.

Copyleft Beverly Bell. You may reprint this article in whole or in part. Please credit any text or original research you use to Beverly Bell, Other Worlds.

This article is based on reporting from Haiti-based Haiti Grassroots Watch and AlterPresse.

HINCHE, Haiti, June 27 – Last week, thousands of farmers and supporters of Haitian peasant agriculture marched for hours under the hot Caribbean sun to call for more government support for locally grown seeds and agriculture.

The demonstration was organized by the Peasant Movement of Papay and other farmer associations, human rights and women’s groups, and the Haitian Platform for Alternative Development (PAPDA), the Haitian online agency AlterPresse reported from the march. The official theme of the peaceful demonstration was “Land Grabbing is Endangering Agricultural Sovereignty.”

• Chemically treated Monsanto/DeKalb corn seeds in Haiti. Photo courtesy of Haiti Grassroots Watch. •

[1] Email from Elizabeth Vancil to Emmanuel Prophete, Director of Seeds at the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture, and others; released by the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture, date unavailable.

Copyleft Beverly Bell. You may reprint this article in whole or in part. Please credit any text or original research you use to Beverly Bell, Other Worlds.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. You can access all of her past articles regarding post-earthquake Haiti at www.otherworldsarepossible.org/haiti.

Jose Luis Patrola is a history professor, farmer, and member of the Brazilian land reform group, the Rural Landless Workers’ Movement, or MST. He has lived in Haiti for three years. There, he coordinates the MST’s program, an exchange of agricultural and technical cooperation between Haitians and Brazilians. In a departure from many international programs of “teaching” and “aiding” Haitians, Patrola speaks here about mutual learning and respect.

We are here in Haiti in an educational solidarity exchange program. We’re not here to teach. We are here to learn.

In our work, there’s great respect for Haitian farmers and movements. That’s something that has been greatly lacking: respect. Not only from foreigners, but from Haitian elites who don’t acknowledge their own peoples.

The MST and the Vía Campesina [a coalition of farmers and landless people’s organizations from around the world] in Brazil have had contact with small farmers in Haiti for many years now. Since 2004, we’d been thinking about a solidarity exchange program between campesino [small farmer] movements in Brazil and Haiti. We were finally able to make this possible starting in January 2009, when the MST and other small farmers’ organizations from Brazil sent a brigade of four people to identify what the solidarity exchange would look like. The exchange now works to achieve horizontal solidarity between these farmers.

With the earthquake in January [2010], things changed a little, and movements in Haiti suggested to us the possibility of strengthening the brigade with more Brazilians. We organized a brigade of 31 people, who sleep and eat in the Haitian farmers’ homes.

There are different farmer movements from Brazil that are participating. The MST is the biggest group, but there’s also the Movement of Small-scale Agriculturalists, the Movement of Women Campesinas, the Movement of Dam-Affected People, and the Pastoral Commission of the Earth that’s part of the Catholic Church, and a representative of the Movement of Unemployed Workers.

The brigade consists of people with different skills. We have farmers. We have technical agronomists that are also children of farmers. We have veterinarians, professors, construction specialists, and two medics. We’re doing a little bit of everything; the diversity is very important. A doctor, for example, helped install a cistern for water catchment, and professors are also working the land.

• Brazilian and Haitian farmers are together constructing 1,200 cisterns in rural Haiti. Photo: Federico Matias. •

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. You can access all of her past articles regarding post-earthquake Haiti at www.otherworldsarepossible.org/haiti.

Below are excerpts from the International Forum on the Crisis of Housing, held in Port-au-Prince May 19-21, 2011. During the forum, hundreds of Haitians, plus allies from around the Americas, developed strategies to force a solution to Haiti’s greatest crisis: homelessness. Almost 17 months after the earthquake, more than one in nine remain displaced in camps and in other dangerous and inhumane lodging. Neither the government nor the international community has offered any viable plan for resettlement of this population. On the contrary, government officials and private landowners are stepping up violent evictions of people in camps.

• The Zan-7 (Ancestors) cultural group performs a piece about human rights at the International Forum on the Crisis of Housing. Photo: Ben Depp, www.bendepp.com. •

- We heard testimonies about the living conditions in IDP camps, wherein our basic rights as individuals and communities are violated every day. We heard of the many diseases contracted by people living under tarps, of the pain of women suffering from all kinds of violence, and of children who cannot attend school or plan for their futures;

- We discovered that most of us in the camps are living in fear. We live under the threat of eviction, as both the government and private landowners are maneuvering to force us out (even setting fire to some camps), even though we have nowhere else to go. According to an International Organization for Migration report published in March 2011, more than 47,000 people have already been evicted and 165,977 more face the threat of eviction. We resolve to fight against these evictions and to ask for reparations for victims of forced displacement, a human rights violation;

- We were pleased to hear the testimonies and analysis of friends from foreign countries like the United States (New Orleans and Miami), Dominican Republic, and Brazil on the struggle for housing rights. We salute the determination of our friends and the movements they represent;

- The Haitian government, ruling classes, and international institutions have not responded to the housing problems that millions of Haitians have long faced and that have become more serious since January 12, 2010. Sixteen months after the catastrophe, 700,000 people are living in the streets and many more families are living in horrible conditions in shantytowns. Many people had to return to damaged houses that could collapse at any time. We reject false solutions such as the distribution of tarps or building of temporary shelters;

- We resolve to continue the struggle to force the state to define a policy on housing that guarantees the right of all Haitians to have a home to live in that respects their dignity. The government should start housing construction projects to respond to our needs;

- The government must define a land use policy for the country. Before the earthquake, 80% of the population in Port-au-Prince was living in 20% of the land. We want housing discrimination to end. We reject all the wealth and infrastructure being concentrated in only some parts of the city. We also reject the reconstruction of the nation’s land only to create free trade zones;

- The Parliament must draft and vote on a law to guarantee the right to housing;
The government must look for and acquire land though expropriation [eminent domain] so that there is sufficient space for housing needs;

- The population must participate in decision-making. We have to say what Port-au-Prince we want to build. Those that come from other countries with plans already drawn up cannot determine this for us;

- We are ready to give our contribution (in financing, work, and materials) so we can create housing that respects people’s dignity. However, the government must finance construction projects to let us get housing as soon as possible, and immediately create a special fund to finance public housing. There is a lot of money being wasted that could be invested instead in housing;

- Homes and land are the source of life. The government and our communities must take all measures for these resources to remain this source of life, instead of turning them into a commodity;

- Institutions like BNC (National Bank of Commerce) and the commercial banks should establish special programs to help the population repair or build good houses, with particular attention paid to those with few economic means and those with disabilities;
The government must implement rent control, since rents have risen up to 17 times higher than before [the earthquake]. We must keep speculators from making millions off of our misery and despair;

- The government must guarantee security as to where we live. Land use must be based in prevention of the biggest risks (earthquakes, hurricanes, landslides, floods, tsunamis, etc). The government must develop education and training programs so we can prepare for these and other risks;

-The right to housing cannot be separated from our other rights: to work, health, education, leisure, a clean environment, etc. All house construction must be done in a way that facilitates our enjoyment of all of these rights;

- The Parliament should ratify the International Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights as an important tool;

- The government must plan for public spaces that allow our communities to play sports, hold meetings and assemblies, and carry out cultural activities;

- We believe that cooperative housing is a viable alternative for those without great economic means;

- We want houses that respect our local architectural style and that use as much local material as possible, representing our culture. We want houses to have yards and gardens where we can grow vegetables and medicinal plants. We want houses that respect a bit of privacy that everyone needs. We want houses that provide space for us to live as families with neighbors in the lakou [traditional communal courtyard];

- Each neighborhood must have a cultural center to educate children and youth on the values of Haitian culture;

- In the houses we are building as in collective infrastructure, we must remember people with disabilities and facilitate their mobility and daily activities;

- Every housing construction project must give special attention to the rights of women. It is good, whenever possible, for the title to the house to carry the name of the husband and wife. In inheritance, men must not benefit disproportionately to women. In housing law, the government must protect the rights of women living alone or in a family where a husband has multiple wives. Women and men have the same right to housing. Our organizations must struggle against all forms of physical and moral violence that women are subjected to in the home. Work in the home must be shared equally between men and women. We request a special training program to allow women to be integrated into all levels of the construction work being carried out;

- We denounce the corruption scandals in the management of housing programs by the government, NGOs [non-governmental organizations], and the ICRH [Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti].

We resolve to:

- Fight against forced evictions and all forms of intimidation on the part of the government and landowners, who inflict more misery on us when they force us to move without providing alternative sites for housing. We ask all communities to organize in order to rapidly circulate information regarding intimidation and threats;

- Strengthen our organizations and alliances amongst grassroots groups and social movements;

- Make the struggle for housing a priority, and support homeless people and those living in camps;

- Disseminate information and conduct trainings across the country, building organizational strength to force the government to respect these rights;

- Remain mobilized to change our society and our government, aimed at constructing a new state that gives more importance to people’s lives than to money, and that defends the interests of the exploited classes. Only this kind of government can respond to our demands for housing;

- Stop considering housing as an issue that can be resolved on an individual or familial basis. Only collective solutions can revolve the problem of access to land for us to build on, rent speculation, and environmental management;

- Create training programs on radios, in churches, temples, and schools. We will organize trainings and debates in the camps and in low-income neighborhoods. We will launch a special newsletter on what is happening in the camps and shantytowns;

- Participate in a week-long mobilization in October 2011. We ask for a national day each year to celebrate the right to housing for all;

- Ask all grassroots organizations and all other movements to mobilize with us on the housing issue so that we can achieve this dream of justice and liberty.

Signed by [hundreds of representatives from at least 40 grassroots and Haitian non-governmental organizations and at least 35 IDP camp committees in Haiti, plus ally organizations from Brazil, the Dominican Republic, the U.S., and Belgium].

May 21, 2011

Translated by Alexis Erkert and Monica Dyer, with help by Beverly Bell.

Copyleft Beverly Bell. You may reprint this article in whole or in part. Please credit any text or original research you use to Beverly Bell, Other World.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. You can access all of her past articles regarding post-earthquake Haiti at http://www.otherworldsarepossible.org/haiti.

On May 23 and 25, police in the Delmas district of Port-au-Prince destroyed camps which sheltered people who were otherwise homeless since the earthquake. Police and other municipal workers beat and arrested residents, and physically threatened the lives of a human rights lawyer and an advocate who had come to investigate. The mayor of Delmas announced that this is part of a new campaign to evict internally displaced persons [IDPs] from public spaces.

• One of this week's many violent "cleanings" of public spaces. Throughout the Delmas district of Port-au-Prince, police and bulldozers smashed earthquake survivors' tent homes and all their possessions. Photo: Ben Depp, www.bendepp.com. •

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

We may soon look back on this period in Haiti with greater appreciation. Amidst the world-historic levels of death and suffering from last January’s earthquake, citizens have at least been spared the scale of government violence that has marked much of their nation’s past (not-with-standing attacks against internally displaced persons during forced evictions, and occasionally against street protestors.)

• Funeral of Samuel Georges, 18-year-old who died eight hours after contracting cholera. Cholera is on the rise in Haiti. Ben Depp, www.bendepp.com. •

Forces are already readying for violence, which will likely be exerted both through the army and through gangs. Journalist Isabeau Doucet filed this eyewitness report last month: “For over a year, on a hillside south of Port-au-Prince, around 100 former soldiers and young recruits train three times a week. They claim to have a network of camps all over the country where Haitian men meet and exercise, learn military protocol and martial arts and receive basic training... The black-and-red flag of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s party hangs in their tarpaulin dressing room… Somebody is paying for this, even though they claim that it’s all-volunteer, and the current government is turning a blind eye, if not giving tacit support.”

Just how the forces of violence may ally with various backers - some combination of Martelly and those surrounding the returned former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier - is one question. Another is how much they may tyrannize a citizens’ movement which is demanding solutions to widespread homelessness, unemployment, and extreme poverty. Two U.S.-based groups supporting community organizing in Haiti are already preparing emergency responses in case significant political violence should erupt.

Beyond Martelly’s plans for an army, his past associations raise concerns about what policies he may bring to office. Martelly was public in his support for the death squad-friendly regimes that reigned after coups d’état against Aristide (1991 and 2004). More recently, Martelly has made such public statements as "I would kill Aristide to stick a dick up his ass."

Martelly won in a run-off in which less than one in four registered voters bothered to turn out, meaning he was endorsed by 16.7% of all registered voters. If this sounds abysmally low for a mandate, it is lofty compared to the 4.6% who are believed to have supported Martelly in the first round. No one knows the figure for sure, because that round was so fraudulent that even the government’s Provisional Electoral Council refused to ratify it with a majority vote. While legally, this should have nullified the first round, the Organization of American States and the U.S. government intensively pressured the Haitian government to approve the elections and send Martelly to the run-offs. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even traveled to Haiti to ensure these outcomes.

After Martelly was declared president, Clinton said, “Now he has a chance to lead and we are behind him. He is committed to results. He wants to deliver for the Haitian people. And we are committed to helping him do so.”

Other bad news dogs Haiti. The lives of those left displaced from the earthquake are growing more, not less, precarious, contrary to what one might expect with the passing of time and the many billions of aid dollars circulating.

A primary risk is cholera, which is due to spike once the imminent rainy season hits, because the near-daily storms will leave standing water and mud in most camps. The camps are already the perfect breeding ground for this disease of poverty, with their densely concentrated populations who are frequently weak and ill, often lack water – not just drinking water but often any water at all – and suffer from a dearth of hygiene options and medical care. A recent study in the medical journal The Lancet predicted 779,000 cases and 11,100 deaths from cholera by the end of November.

With all humanitarian and international agencies in Haiti aware of the dire risk of this illness which can result in death only a few hours after infection, 39% of ‘transitional shelters’ still do not receive water or basic sanitation services. Michelle Karshan, an American advocate engaged in anti-cholera efforts, reported: “There is a deadly shortage of available cholera prevention and treatment supplies. And the most important prevention of cholera transmission – creation of a water system infrastructure making treated water widely available – is still not off the ground, while distribution of water continues to reach only a minuscule number of camps. The majority of the resource-poor camps are left to fend for themselves.”# The U.N. Cholera Appeal for Haiti has only received 45% of the funds it needs.

The deeper worry is why, with up to 1.5 million people still homeless after 16 months, water purification tablets and port-o-potties are still being discussed as a solution. The only way to make people safe from this disease is to resettle them into decent housing. Yet still neither the international community nor the Haitian government has any workable plans. The government has yet to invoke its constitutional right to declare eminent domain and claim large plots of unused private land in order to relocate people. International aid has yet to be significantly employed in clearing rubble, 80% of which remains, rendering much of Port-au-Prince uninhabitable.

Another hazard that internally displaced persons (IDPs) face is being forced out of their camps, left in even greater precariousness. According to the International Organization for Migration, 820,000 of the original set of IDPs dwellers – more than half - have left the camps, but not because they have found a better situation. Only 4.7% have gone to new or repaired housing. The remainder, as reported by the International Organization for Migration and substantiated by many community watchdog groups in Haiti, have fled for two reasons. One is an anywhere-but-here response, in which families have escaped to dangerously earthquake-damaged structures, ravines, crowded rooms, or whatever they can find. Others have been evicted in a growing wave of expulsions – some violent, many illegal - by both government institutions and private landowners.

As they have since the earthquake, coalitions of progressive NGOs, community groups, and camp committees are trying to mount pressure to win gains in a broad-based agenda which includes democratic participation and socio-economic rights. Predominant strategies include popular education, legal support for camp residents, policy advocacy, and grassroots mobilization. A snapshot of some of the groups’ activities in the three-week period surrounding this article includes: a three-day May Day mobilization for workers’ rights; a three-day symposium critiquing disaster capitalism, “What Financing for What Reconstruction?”, and a three-day exchange to strengthen efforts to force resettlement of IDPs, “International Forum for the Right to Housing.”

These movements currently lack funding and cohesion. At many points in Haitian history, however, pressure from below has proven to be the critical variable in forcing change. Given the disappointing track record of the international community and development industry, and the ominous prospects of Martelly’s presidency, they may be Haiti’s best hope.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

We put this question to numerous Haitians. Below are some responses.

Konpè Filo has been one of Haiti’s most popular journalists since 1974. Arrested, tortured, and exiled by Duvalier in 1980, Konpè lived in numerous countries until he could return home when the dictatorship fell in 1986. Today he runs a widely watched daily TV show on Radio Tele Ginen Haiti.

• Is Haiti poor? "That depends on how you define poverty and wealth," said Konpé Filo. Photo: Ben Depp, www.bendepp.com. •

Ronel Thelusmond is the director of the technical division of the National Institute for the Application of Agrarian Reform (INARA), which is part of the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture. Extreme concentration of land, giving little to no access to the 60-80% of the population who are farmers, is one of Haiti’s primary challenges. In part II of an interview, Ronel speaks to the barriers and opportunities of agrarian reform. (See also “Haiti Needs a Social Policy for Housing.”)

• Redistributing Haiti's highly concentrated land is essential for the sustenance of agriculture and of farmers. Photo: Ben Depp.•

We’re also supposed to reinforce unity among peasants and define the minimum and maximum amounts of land a person should own. But INARA has never had the necessary means to be able to conduct agrarian reform.

Recent History of Agrarian Reform

[In his first term], President Aristide issued the decree to create INARA. But it was President Préval [during his first term] who took the first action toward agrarian reform in the Artibonite Valley, in 1999 through 2001.

That experience was a modest success, with close to 6,000 families in the Artibonite getting a total of 5,000 carreaux [15,938 acres] of redistributed land. The Artibonite has between 30,000 and 40,000 carreaux [95,629 and 127,506 acres] total. They gave each peasant half a carreaux [1.6 acres], which came out of the holdings of large landowners and also the state. The goal was to see to it that the peasants could earn an income higher than the minimum wage.

The land each family got was practically nothing, but it was the compromise solution given land pressures and the number of people who were demanding land at the time.
But people weren’t made the owners of those small plots. They didn’t get titles to the land, only given a usufruct contract [the right to use the land and own all products from it] with the state. And this made the situation very fragile. It meant that people couldn’t appeal to the justice system. Then other challenges arose, like a blight called black straw which affected rice, plus hurricanes, and droughts and floods.

With time, the government expected to create non-agricultural activity which would allow for more employment in other areas, thus decreasing the pressure put on the land. The hope was that people would come and bring investment and create jobs and transformation. Unfortunately, those complementary measures never took place.

After the [2004] coup d’état which removed Aristide, Latortue came in as Prime Minister and gave land reform the coup de grâce. He disapproved of the reforms which had been taking place in the Artibonite, so [large landowners] started taking land away from the peasants. And that’s when the peasants began to fight back again. In fact, the conflict continues to rage in the Artibonite.

I can tell you that close to 40% of the people who’ve been given land by the government in the Artibonite have had their land outright stolen from them. And unfortunately, up to this point, no concrete actions have been taken to see to it that the government’s authority is respected.

Then came the second administration of President Préval. He came in with a discourse of reconciliation, a mentality of bringing back peace in society, so the land-related problems were set aside. They didn’t deal with them.

Today, INARA has a program with the Inter-American Development Bank to remove obstructions on 28,000 carreaux [89,254 acres] in the Artibonite so peasants currently working that land are legally protected. We have other, smaller programs underway around the country.

Challenges to Land Reform

When we talk about land security, there are three issues we have to take up, with serious problems at each level: Which land are we talking about? What rights do people have to this land? And which people have these rights?

Take the last question. Thirty to thirty-five percent of the population don’t have birth certificates. If people can’t be identified, they can’t establish what relation or rights they have to a plot of land. And as for determining the [boundaries and owners of the] property itself: the documents and titles are non-functional. Furthermore, people don’t have the resources for the extremely high costs of the procedures. The government has failed to create the necessary conditions which would allow people to own the proper title to their land.

All the work is proceeding slowly because the first thing you need for a true agrarian reform is political will. But the political trajectory which is being followed so far is a neoliberal policy, which is more oriented towards private property than state-owned property. For example, we’re seeing more interest in pushing the people towards free-trade zones than towards the land.

Despite all the talk about it, they haven’t even passed an agrarian reform law. The government is playing the role of observer more than really supporting people.

Then we’re talking about a whole group of government institutions which are involved in land matters but that don’t have much of a relationship with each other. Each one is doing something different. So if INARA is only providing plots of land, but the other players aren’t playing their parts, we still won’t get results.

And we can’t fail to take into account the broader political and economic context. Agrarian reform doesn’t just have to do with the land, it has to do with water, credit, technical assistance.

And take people who come from rural areas and go looking for work in the city. The ideal way [to reverse this] would be for the government to create agricultural sources of employment. I mean creating a master plan, mechanisms that would allow people in the countryside to earn money, creating schools and programs which encourage people to leave Port-au-Prince. Unfortunately, there are more people coming into Port-au-Prince than going out.

In summary, for agrarian reform to work, it has to be part of a bigger package of reforms and a broader comprehensive economic development policy. At this time, we don’t have any such plan.

Beyond that, we can’t talk about agrarian reform if we don’t confront the problem of environmental degradation. We can’t talk about agrarian reform if we don’t deal with issues of social injustice, the problem of inequality.

Land Reform and Food Sovereignty

One proposal would be for the government itself to take charge of land in conflict, which means they would do all transactions to allow for a gradual transition of the land. The State is the only party that can take the appropriate measures to put a stop to today’s land insecurity.

If the state doesn’t fulfill its responsibilities, then violence is what comes next. That’s when peasants take matters into their own hands to use force to defend what they have. And if we want to create a society in which the rule of law is respected, we have to allow the institutions whose purpose is to defend people’s rights to play their role.

The only thing that’s going to move the country towards policies that respond to people’s needs is a popular movement. That is, for the peasants who work the land to organize themselves to pressure the government to take responsibility, to play its role as arbiter.

I would say that agrarian reform and food sovereignty have to be pillars in a plan for national reconstruction. People have to be able to eat, and the people who work the land have to be supported. When food is imported, it causes competition with peasants who’re producing food. Look at the problem of rice: the nation certainly has the capacity to produce rice, to be self-sufficient as a rice producer, but rice is freely entering the country without being taxed. This as an illegal exchange, a form of dumping. And that’s what we need to avoid.

If we want to fight against poverty and misery, we need to start by changing our orientation so we, as the Haitian people, take responsibility for our country’s own development.

Thanks to Larousse Charlot for transcribing this interview, David Schmidt for translating it, and Tory Field for helping edit it. Many thanks to Ben Depp for his generosity in sharing his photographs.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

At the Toussaint Louverture Airport in Port-au-Prince, I spot Ronal’s taptap, pick-up-turned-public-bus, painted to resemble an Argentine flag - a salute to his favored team in last year’s World Cup soccer match. Ronal’s first report is about his glee over last month’s return of Jean-Claude Duvalier. Duvalier’s ouster in 1986 following popular uprisings ended a three-decade regime which was one of the most brutal, neglectful, and corrupt regimes in the hemisphere’s history.

At age 47, Ronal lived through 13 years of the tyranny. The vagaries of memory and an odd – if currently common - interpretation of cause and effect have converged to give Ronal this analysis: “The thing about Duvalier, you had peace as long as you weren’t in politics. If you didn’t speak out, they wouldn’t arrest you. You had no problem.”

The peace of which Ronal speaks was the peace of the graveyard, as he himself immediately points out. “Now you see that man standing there? He was one who got into politics and paid the price.” He points to a person by the airport gates who, as chance would have it, is my former colleague Bobby Duval. Under Duvalier in 1976 and 1977, Bobby spent 17 months in Fort Dimanche, a prison which few ever left except as corpses. Bobby never knew of what crime he was accused, but it could have been anything. People were regularly imprisoned, tortured, or killed for literally any reason: not stopping in front of the Palace for the daily noontime playing of the national anthem; speaking – if you were a man - to the girlfriend of a government henchman; protesting that a cow got into your garden, if that cow’s owner had a friend in government. (At least one of my neighbors from the village where I lived during Duvalier’s regime was arrested or disappeared for each of these reasons.) When an intensive campaign by Jimmy Carter won liberty for Bobby and other prisoners, this normally burly man weighed less than 100 pounds.

Bobby is one of those who filed a grievance with the government for a case it’s mounting against Duvalier. Meanwhile, the fallen dictator is living as a free man after having likely returned, at least in part, to try to liberate from his frozen Swiss bank account $6 or so million which he allegedly came by illegally and over which he has been fighting a 25-year legal battle. Unfortunately for his aspirations, a new Swiss law, dubbed the ‘Duvalier law,’ went into effect February 1. The Swiss government now has greater authority to confiscate stolen assets from bank accounts and return them to their country of origin. Duvalier’s return is surely political, too, though the end goal is not entirely clear.

When I return to the taptap after greeting Bobby, I try to tell Ronal how wrong he is. He protests with a logic I can’t contest. “But compared to today, life was good. Everything wasn’t so expensive. Food was cheaper. The state owned its own factories. The country hadn’t deteriorated like it has today.

“It’s the people today who’ve left this country in rubble.”

I would like to believe that Ronal’s opinion is an outlier, but in the informal poll I will conduct amongst dozens of people in the days to come, I will find wide support for the return of the man who took over the nation as a dull-witted, motorcycle-racing, 18-year-old.

There are at least two ways to understand this. One is that government negligence to earthquake victims’ needs, failure of foreign aid to reconstruct in any noticeable way, and other social and political crises have been so grave since the earthquake that any other leadership looks better. It’s a pretty damning indictment of the status quo when ‘anything else’ extends even to a man who oversaw crimes against humanity.

The other way to understand the confusion is a faulty analysis of causality. Levels of poverty and social exclusion were not lower 25 years ago because Duvalier’s policies were kind. The variables are the global wave of structural adjustment, which is the condition of International Monetary Fund and World Bank loans, and other ‘free trade’ and deregulation policies which have ravaged many countries in the world, including Haiti, since the 80’s. Since Duvalier’s fall, foreign pressure has forced: the privatization of state-owned companies, lower tariffs on agricultural imports which had protected domestic production and allowed small farmers to stay on their land, the creation of new ‘free trade’ zones to encourage sweatshops, and other policies disastrous for the destitute majority.

This month, human rights, labor rights, youth, and popular education organizations throughout Port-au-Prince are holding public colloquia on the dictatorship, featuring survivor testimony, showings of photos and documentaries, and discussion. The objectives are to educate those who didn’t live under Duvalier and to reignite popular opposition for those who did. “We will never fall asleep forgetting,” read one program’s announcement.[1]

(Those of us from the U.S. might do well to never fall asleep forgetting that the American government gave the Duvaliers consistent financial and political support, except for a brief period under Kennedy and then in the final months, when widespread dissent made it clear that the dictatorship was doomed. At that time, the U.S. flew Duvalier to his exile in France aboard an American government airplane and negotiated a transition to a military-led dictatorship.)

As for future political leadership: The run-offs are moving ahead despite the fact that last November’s elections involved so much fraud and voter exclusion as to be illegitimate by any honest measure. Even the Haitian government’s electoral council failed to ratify them. Approval by the majority of the eight council members was needed for the election to be formally stamped as fair and honest, but only four endorsed its credibility.

Nevertheless, the Organization of American States recommended that two candidates, Michel Martelly and Mirlande Manigat, who got 4.5% and 6.4% of the vote, respectively, proceed to a next round. (Manigat was first lady to one of the figurehead presidents of the aforementioned military dictatorship that followed Duvalier.) Foreign governments and international institutions intensively pressured the Haitian government to accept the recommendation, with the U.S. even going so far as to send Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the island. The Haitian government bowed to the pressure.

Other events in Haiti are cascading with dizzying speed. Cholera is killing at least one person every thirty minutes. An increased risk of evictions of those living in tent camps. An increase in rape of children.[2] A diplomatic passport for former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who has been living in South Africa since having been ousted from power a second time in 2004. To this development, the U.S. government – which, a wealth of evidence shows, was involved in both ousters – panicked. In the words of State Department spokesperson P.J. Crowley, Aristide’s return might be “an unfortunate distraction” and that the U.S. would “hate to see any action that introduces divisiveness” before the second round of elections. Now the Haitian government appears to be stalling in getting him home.

And this: In December, the Department of Homeland Security informally announced that it would resume deportations of people with “serious criminal convictions,” after having granted temporary protected status to Haitians nine days after last year’s earthquake. Human rights and refugee organizations sounded cries of alarm given conditions in Haiti and especially in its deportee holding cells. Nevertheless, the U.S. proceeded. Among the many deported was Wildrick Guerrier, on January 20. Guerrier was held in a vastly overcrowded police holding cell, where he quickly developed the telltale signs of cholera: severe diarrhea and vomiting. Despite well-known World Health Organization epidemic protocol and interventions by a family member, Guerrier was left untreated and died a few days later.[3] The U.S. says it will continue deportations.

Perhaps the brightest element of Haiti today is the absence of political repression. For now, that is. Pretty much anything is possible, especially given the forces that might take power after the election run-offs.

But this is where Haiti’s long tradition of political protest comes in handy. It’s easy to forget, amidst all the media imagery of hungry, desperate earthquake survivors, that strong dissidence has been a constant in Haiti’s history since before it was an independent nation. I am reminded of a line by historian Rebecca Solnit from A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster: "Disaster shocks us out of slumber, but only skillful effort keeps us awake."

Tonight I join two friends, other survivors of Duvalier’s torture, to hear a compa band in a Pétion-ville club. It’s Carnival season here, surreally enough, and one of the features of Carnival during years of political repression was that veiled protest songs were allowed to pass as celebratory street music. The coded lyrics were sung all day long with jubilant defiance, exciting the popular imagination. Tonight, the musicians have worked into their show rebellious Carnival chants from the Duvalier days, call-and-response numbers where “Yes!” – in English – was the safe stand-in for “Let’s bring him down!” The middle-aged members of the crowd, who remember all too well the misery of that era, pump their arms in the air and shout.

“Yes!”

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

[1] “3-Day Program of Activities on the Duvalier Period,” announcement by STAIA, MODEP, KRD, SEK GRAMSCI, AKP, UNNOH, CATH, GREPS, FRAKKA, GREAAL, CHANDEL, and Antèn Ouvriye, received by email Feb. 9, 2010.
[2] This is according to the women and children’s rights group Commission of Women Victim to Victim (KOFAVIV). From verbal testimony of KOFAVIV co-coordinator Malya Apallon Villard to author, January 25, 2011, based on outreach in IDP camps and reports filed by survivors.
[3] Email from Michelle Karshan, director of Alternative Chance, a re-entry program for Haitian criminal deportees, to Steve Forester, January 31, 2011.

“Everyone expects there to be a new problem daily in Haiti. I can’t concentrate on problems each day,” said Roseanne Auguste, coordinator of a youth art program in the sprawling, under-resourced Port-au-Prince section of Carrefour-Feuilles. The program is run through the community clinic Association for the Promotion of Family Integrated Health (APROSIFA).

• Islande Henry with one of her paintings on women's rights. Photo: Allyn Gaestel.•

Roseanne, who is director of APROSIFA as well as a nurse and community organizer, held up one painting. It featured two hands nurturing a brilliantly colored women’s head; the hands seemed to be helping the woman open her mouth. “They’re envisioning all this despite the earthquake,” Roseanne said.

“These kids hear about violence every day,” Roseanne said. “We have to concentrate on what another country could be. That’s what interests me. If we had cultural centers in each shantytown, imagine what we could do. Culture and citizenship… if youth came and talked about this every day, found different ways to express their views on the matters, we could have a different country.”

“Other countries want to control us, giving us a little money for elections, a little money for development, while keeping the country as it is. But if we really had the chance to do for ourselves, if we had the means, you’d see what we could do.”

APROSIFA’s youth art program began in 2009 in a couple of cement-block rooms in the back of the clinic. A few professional artists donated their time to teach. Today, 68 youth from ages 8 to early 20s are painting and sculpting. A few of the youth who began learning two years ago are now teaching the others.

The artwork represents the daily stuff of Haitian life, like forms of labor, scenes inside village huts, vodou imagery, and landscapes. The work also feature historical heroes, maps of Haiti, and Escher-like clocks ticking away the country’s past.

When the young painters have canvas and paints, the images are bold, the colors brilliant. Often they have only sheets of typing paper and a pencil or a Bic pen. APROSIFA raises money to subsidize the supplies. “We give them string to fish with,” Roseanne said.

In late January, APROSIFA sponsored the Haitian Renaissance show at a hotel in downtown Port-au-Prince. On opening night, hundreds of people – journalists, artists, advocates for women, dignitaries, and especially youth from Carrefour-Feuilles - squeezed into several rooms whose walls were covered with art. The theme of the art was the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1979 and took effect in 1981. Haiti ratified the convention in 1981 (unlike the U.S., which never has), though it has never been applied. Roseanne had given copies of the document to the young artists and had asked them to express their opinions creatively.

One youth whose work was featured is 22-year-old Islande Henry. She spoke in front of one of her paintings, of two women talking in front of their home, inspired by Article 16 of CEDAW which protects women and children’s rights in family relations. Islande said, “To me, CEDAW is a beautiful thing. It speaks to the restavèk [child slavery] system and how those kids have no rights. It speaks to violence against women, and how women are mistreated in society, and how there are so many things they can’t do from serving in Parliament to playing ball.

“Our artwork says, ‘No! Women can do anything. Women must have access to everything this society offers.’”

Islande said, “I have a lot of capacity and I always knew I could paint, but I didn’t have any support. You know, sometimes your family can’t really step up and help with resources. But I found APROSIFA in 1999. I feel proud as a woman to sit with a canvas, with all my pride, and create paintings. We young artists come with our imagination, our inspiration, our understandings. We can paint anything.”

“What I’ve gotten from APROSIFA, I want to pass along to other youth so this country can have another future.” When asked what her hope is, Islande replied, “My hope is that I can be a great painter so the entire world can know my work and can know that Haitians need solidarity, unity, patience, love, and peace. I have a lot of hope for that.”

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

While the eyes of the world are on Haiti’s illegitimate elections and the return of the deposed dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, about 1.5 million displaced earthquake survivors continue to live in sub-human conditions. In the absence of large-scale or systemic responses by the government, international community, or aid organizations, progressive civil society organizations are evolving strategies to win the right to housing.

“We’re supporting earthquake victims who are organizing themselves to form a social movement to claim their rights, first, for quality housing and, second, against being evicted,” said human rights lawyer Patrice Florvilus.

• An internally displaced girl sketches her new dream home. Photo: Ben Depp.•

No one knows how many people remain in the camps. Some have been evicted by private landowners, occasionally through Haitian police violence. This is despite a November ruling by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States that the Haitian government must put a moratorium on forced evictions unless they provide evictees with safe shelter. The Inter-American Commission’s ruling, following a petition brought by five Haitian and U.S. law centers, also mandates other protections and remedies from the government. The government has yet to fulfill one of the mandates.

The Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti - the unconstitutional, Bill Clinton-led, international governing body – claims that half of the 1.5 million displaced people have moved from tents to housing. It also asserts that “Much of this is directly attributable to the I.H.R.C. and its partners.” In fact, The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports that only 31,656 transitional homes (‘transitional’ sometimes meaning only a slightly scaled-up tent) have been built as of last month. And according to Schuller’s research, most camps that have dissolved have done so “because of the complete failure to provide sanitation services following the cholera outbreak”,[1] not because they’ve been offered relocation options.

The Interim Commission is now encouraging a ‘market’ angle to respond to the crisis. In a confidential report which it produced together with the Government of Haiti and which was leaked to this writer, “Work Plan for Returning the Displaced to Their Homes and Reconstructing Housing” (no date), the Interim Commission calls on the private sector to “fully play its role [in the reconstruction] and assume a progressive leadership in creating markets.” And the World Economic Forum that just met in Davos, Switzerland formed a Rebuilding Haiti Initiative to “leverage the power of the private sector, working in partnership with the public sector and civil society, to help Haiti realize this untapped potential – a direct example of corporate global citizenship.”

Interim Commission politics and corporate profits aside, permanent, dignified housing is a right amply protected by national and international law. Attorney Florvilus said, “The legal principle of the Haitian state is that when a person is in danger, that person has the right to assistance. And Article 22 of the constitution guarantees decent housing for everyone. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [of the United Nations] guarantees housing for all. The U.N. [Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs] Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement says that people may not be evicted. And then there’s the moratorium in evictions we got from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

“The right to housing is tied to other rights, like the right to respect of physical integrity, such as for women and girls, and to clean water - all the more important in a period of cholera. The International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights gives protections which complement the right to housing. It says that without other social and cultural rights, the right to housing isn’t being respected.”

Some Haitian NGOs have stepped outside their normal missions to provide housing, like the small-farmer support group Institute of Technology and Animation (ITECA). ITECA is building 1,700 houses that are environmentally sound (the roofs collect rain water, for example) and that use local building materials to the degree possible.

Other progressive Haitian non-profits, grassroots organizations, and camp committees are engaging in advocacy to claim the right to housing. Florvilus explained, “About ten groups, including camp committees, formed the Initiative against Eviction. We’re mobilizing, like during the week leading up to [the earthquake anniversary] on January 12. We brought visibility to the question of housing. We had teach-ins, photo exhibits, and film showings at different camps.” The Initiative against Eviction has also organized sit-ins on the days of the threatened eviction deadlines, distributed fliers and information packets, and hosted numerous meetings for camp residents and civil society groups to come together and discuss issues and possible solutions.

“We’re also articulating rights that people have to quality housing and property, using popular education. A couple of organizations have used theatre and dance in the camps, through a group called Ancestors. We help people see that their lives didn’t just develop haphazardly, but that they’ve evolved from social and economic history. Now from that place, we help them see that they’re social actors who can struggle to change their conditions, and then all together we can develop strategies.”

Legal support is another component. Florvilus said, “Through the Bureau of International Lawyers, we’re accompanying people to go to court when they’re evicted. But first we try to stop the evictions with legal arguments in the camps before we get to court.

“We have plans to start training volunteer community paralegals. These are people who might never have studied law but whom we train in the camps so they can collect evidence. When we’re bringing cases against evictions, they’ll have the facts to help us defend the victims. Another thing we’re going to be doing is working with law students who don’t have the possibility to finish their schooling. We ask them to give two years of volunteer service in exchange for the training. They’ll work with the community paralegals to train more and more people.

“The whole problem relates to who has control over land. We have to reflect on how a small minority of people in the country have almost all the land and the majority have no space where they can construct houses they’ve lost. Only 5% of Haitian land has legal owners. The state has to verify land titles and find out who are really the landowners. We’re taking people to court to verify titles, to see if the presumed landowners are the actual ones.

“We’re also showing people that no one can keep big landholdings vacant while others are living under tents. Article 36 [of the constitution] says that people have the right to private property and that their property can’t be arbitrarily taken away, but Section 3 [of that article] says that the right to private property can’t be contrary to the public good.”

We are very grateful for the tremendous work that Rachel Wallis has done to get these articles out far and wide since the earthquake. We wish her great success at her new post at the Crossroads Fund.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

This week we depart from Haiti to visit the native son of another country with a deep history of oppression and resistance: South Africa. The luminary Dennis Brutus - freedom fighter, economic and environmental justice activist, professor, and poet - died last year on December 26. We republish this eulogy because of the transcendent lessons Dennis’ life offers to Haiti, the U.S., and all places where people seek greater justice and humaneness.

• Dennis Brutus. Photo: Monica Rorvik. •

How does one pay tribute to Dennis Brutus? To do so appropriately would take a short book or a very long poem. Someone should attempt the feat, both because Dennis deserves it and because it would help spread the power of his life, work, and words. And spread is what Dennis’ life, work, and words must continue to do, for in them lie the essentials for a more just, nurturing, equitable, and environmentally sustainable world.

The Dalai Lama is reported to have said, “Let your life be your message.” Dennis’ was, in the humility with which he carried himself, the kindness with which he treated others, and the wisdom and clarity of those words. His message, and his life, lay also in the strength of his convictions and the energy with which he worked for them, whether the cause be liberation from oppressive regimes; reparations to victims of Apartheid from corporations that made profits off the system; the dissolution of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization; or control over corporations creating climate change.

I met Dennis in the early 80’s when we were both fighting the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti, during which time he was also fighting for his own political asylum from South Africa. Our collaboration deepened in the 90’s through the global boycott of the World Bank, and through our joint engagement with the Center for Economic Justice. Though reaching the Center’s board meetings in the remote city of Albuquerque required many hours of travel, and though he often had meetings or presentations in other countries on the front and back ends, and though his participation was often for no more than a day, still he came, for Dennis was faithful to whatever he committed to. The same was true of the World Bank boycott: Dennis appeared for most any workshop, presentation, or meeting we requested, raising high the flag with all his strength and brilliance.

He lobbied us all to involve ourselves, to turn out, to unite our voice and strength, to do more than we were already doing. The man was tireless and fearless, and gently urged us to be, too.

He always showed up with his most pressing passions and politically urgent campaigns. I recall running a workshop on strategies to challenge the World Bank’s power in a church in Washington during a week of protests. Making a cameo appearance, Dennis asked for the floor and proceeded to make a long appeal for everyone to join him at another gathering on another topic in another country, many months out. As he went on about that gathering, a woman hissed at me that the speaker was off-message and that I should cut him off. I was polite while denying her request, but what I really wanted to say was, “Do you have any idea who is speaking? You should just feel honored. Listen very carefully to what he has to say.”

The schedule he kept was remarkable for anyone of any age or state of health, but I never heard him complain or make excuses. On he plugged even after he had surpassed 80, when his health had diminished, when his itinerary exhausted him, when his memory had wandered. I ran into him at the World Social Forum in Mumbai in one of his final years when he was clearly weary of body and mind. After sharing a big hug, he said, “I must go now because I have a meeting. I can’t remember with whom, or where it is, but I know I have one.” And off he went through the throngs, tenacity and a fierce commitment to obligation trumping all personal challenges.

When we were lucky, Dennis had the time and inclination for a story. The narrative was always marked by his beautiful verbiage, exquisite oration, enlivened eyes, and -if a good story- delight, or -if one of injustice- calm. My favorite stories were of his and his comrades’ fierce fights against Apartheid. So much courage and creativity they bespoke. He found humor in unexpected places, and always understated his own suffering.

There was the tale of attempting to flee guards as he was being transported from one prison to another, jumping out of the police car at a red light and setting off in a dash. “That was when I learned what a through-and-through wound was,” he said of the bullet which pierced his chest and went out his back. He told of lying on the ground bleeding, “in the shadow of the Anglo American Corporation, appropriately enough,” waiting for the ambulance. When a whites-only ambulance arrived by mistake, he was not allowed in it and had to lie on the verge of death for another long period awaiting a second ambulance, this one for so-called coloreds.

He told of his comrades’ breaking into the hospital to free him after the shooting, as he barely survived on life support, and of his stealthily writing on his hand, “Abort mission,” sure that he would die in the attempted rescue. He told of being under house arrest with guards parked in front of his home around the clock, while he climbed out the side window to attend political meetings.

During one of his narrations in my living room, I noticed that the self-deprecating chortle that usually punctuated his stories had vanished. Dennis was quietly crying. A tear ran down his nose and hung at the tip, where it remained throughout the rest of his tale of horror and brutality. Like Dennis’ life, the sadness and frustration behind that tear never stopped his truth-telling.

Poems were easy to get from him, whether he read them during a public presentation or shared them in a calm moment. Whenever Dennis had a new book (he published 13), he carried copies around and freely gave them out, after adding a warm inscription in his exquisite calligraphy. Dennis was perhaps most full in his poems, which merged the personal and the political, which never denied the existence of tyranny but always brought his breath of hope that the world can be different – if we organize to make it so.

It is perhaps easiest to remember Dennis the fighter, but I was always equally impressed with Dennis the human being. No matter how ugly the political fight, Dennis’ anger remained streamlined on the unjust systems and policies, not wasted on the individuals behind them. He kept his eyes on the prize: the principles at play.

The same was true with his approach to social movements. When comrades and allies around him made errors, when internal politics divided, his response always shone like a beacon. He seemed to know better than most that we are all limited and imperfect, and that the benefit of the doubt or the possibility of change is a grace we need for humanity to continue to evolve. Or perhaps it was simpler: perhaps he believed that he was no one’s judge. Or maybe he just knew that the world was harsh enough already, as he expressed in his poem “Somehow We Survive”:

All our land is scarred with terror
rendered unlovely and unlovable
sundered are we and all our passionate surrender
but somehow
tenderness survives.

Dennis wrote his own simple obituary in 2009 as he discussed the 1960 Sharpeville massacre. “I was committed to the struggle and I would if necessary die in the cause of liberation: ‘Freedom or death.’ It was a very simple resolve.” He did indeed die in the cause of liberation, though fortunately not violently or prematurely. Every single thing that Dennis did was in the cause of liberation.

I would say I will miss Dennis, but he's not going anywhere. He’s in all of us who care profoundly for justice, humanity, and the planet.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

The start of Haiti’s most recent crisis came with ample warning. Most Port-au-Prince residents scurried to their homes mid-afternoon last Tuesday, certain of the violence and chaos which would ensue once the electoral council announced which two presidential candidates would make it to the run-offs. The trouble-makers didn’t wait until the 8:00 p.m. announcement, but started throwing rocks and erecting barricades by late afternoon for good measure. By nightfall, gunfire ricocheted around the capital and other towns. Through Friday, the black smoke of burning-tire barricades rose above the small crowds who rampaged through towns, destroying shops and other structures, burning cars, and occasionally shooting people. Haitian Radio Metropole reported five deaths.

• Two of the three top contenders for president, in front of the National Palace. Photo: Joris Willems. •

The electoral council’s results were as transparently fraudulent as the vote itself. The only candidate with popular appeal, Michel Martelly, was excluded from the run-off. The widely hated president René Préval’s chosen successor, Jude Célestin, was inserted into the January 16 run-off along with Mirlande Manigat.

Scrambling to get itself out of its jam, the electoral council announced a recount, but both Martelly and Manigat have rejected this option. Cancellation of the vote is a distant option. The council’s routes through which to backpedal appear blocked.

Meanwhile, on Friday, Sen. Patrick Leahy, who sits on the Senate Appropriations Committee, called for President Obama to withhold aid to the Haitian government and suspend travel visas of senior Haitian officials until “necessary steps” are taken to guarantee a democratic result. And yesterday, the United Nations, Organization of American States, European Union, American, and four other ambassadors in Haiti urged the government on to the next legal step, requesting that the 72-hour period in which parties may contest the results begin today.

The weekend brought calm - partial on Saturday and broader on Saturday. Some ventured out hesitantly after days spent house-bound to stock up on food or view the destruction, but still motor vehicles and pedestrians remained scarce. This morning dawned as just another Haitian day, except that schools remain officially closed. But there are more electoral council announcements on the horizon. No one knows what the coming week will bring, but calm is not high on the list of options.

The only ones who stand to gain from the current upheaval are the candidates vying for victory, and the demonstrators and agitators they have paid. Some acts of violence and construction of road barricades appeared to be random, enacted by thugs who control various neighborhoods or others who were perhaps simply bored. Those grassroots organizations who normally sponsor demonstrations against Préval sat this week out; these are not the activities of an organized pro-democracy movement.

As always, it is the poor who have paid the heaviest cost. For starters, those who live from the informal economy have lost days of the miniscule incomes which barely keep their families alive. The small army of vendors of phone cards who congregate at gas stations, the men who peddle long-expired medications from red buckets on their heads, the women who sell imported corn flakes or second-hand underwear, and all the rest were not to be found on the deserted streets from Wednesday through the weekend, meaning that their families lost the few cents they make on each sale.

Those living in shantytowns where much of the violence was concentrated could not leave their homes out of fear. Neither could those living under plastic tarps or tents on the streets or in internally displaced peoples’ camps in volatile neighborhoods; they, moreover, could not even retreat behind walls or lock their door. Numerous women in these settings, among a circle who call me whenever they can buy cell phone minutes, reported that their meager supplies of food and water ran out after a day or two. With no means to buy more even if they could have gone to the market, they ran to neighbors’ homes in calmer moments to try to collect small gifts to sustain their children – sometimes with more success than others. Hunger, every woman told me, has been the norm since Wednesday.

Yesterday morning, for example, one of my daily calls was from Dieuveut Mondestin. She is a widow who lives with four children and an infant in a tarp-covered lean-to in the shantytown of Martissant. She has no nearby relatives, no job or other source of support, no source of free or nearby water, and no electricity. Dieuveut had just returned from two days in the hospital, where she was watching over her dead husband’s father who had cholera. I ask how she’s made out these last few days. “I can’t suffer anything I haven’t already suffered, so I still have hope. But it’s been hard, hard, hard, I tell you. There was so much shooting in my neighborhood, there was nowhere to run. I haven’t had anything to feed my kids. They’re so skinny, even little Larissa; you remember she was chubby. They’re just sticks now.”

This past week has also provided the perfect conditions for a spike in cholera, what Partners in Health calls “a disease of poverty” which impacts those without safe drinking water. With roads blocked and all but a valiant few health care and sanitation workers at home, much of the humanitarian coordination effort in Port-au-Prince and other parts of Haiti was in “lock-down,” a high-level cholera response worker told me on Friday. My inbox brought an urgent call for anyone who could travel to ten camps to deliver the cholera-prevention essentials of water purification tablets and bleach. Clean drinking water, another essential, also ran out in many places early on in the days of mêlée.

Because sanitation workers could not get to the camps, toilets and garbage overflowed to extremes. (For a chilling account, see Sascha Kramer's recent article in Counter Punch.) The sporadic rains throughout the week, moreover, spread contaminated water and sewage, perfect vectors for the disease.

One eye-witness told me that the group controlling the burning tires on the central Champs de Mars Boulevard refused to let medical transport vehicles through. The street barricades and lack of available drivers limited possibilities of the cholera-struck to get to health care centers during the window in which healing is possible, which in extreme cases is as short as four hours. Lack of drivers for medical vehicles also meant that corpses of many cholera victims remained in camps, bringing serious risk of contamination.

The socially and economically marginalized will gain nothing for their troubles, as no president sympathetic to their cause is forthcoming from these elections. None of the 19 candidates has been outspoken or active on behalf of the needs of survivors languishing in camps, or on behalf of a reconstruction process or economic model which prioritizes the most vulnerable. The unknown Célestin, from the party that has failed the citizenry, is so clueless about state responsibility that he even told a campaign crowd, “To counteract this illness [cholera] is a matter of hygiene more than anything. Hygienic measures, the state can’t assume that… It’s a personal and individual matter.” The right-wing intellectual Mirlande Manigat briefly served as first lady in 1988 to the figurehead civilian president of a military dictatorship, but is otherwise undistinguished. Michel Martelly has made public no policy agenda, though it’s hard to imagine that he could effectively push through any policies. His notoriety stems being a buffoon and carrousing musician, known for such non-presidential antics as flashing his bare backside in public.

A vote for Martelly, several people interviewed for this article said, was a vote against the standard political elite. Human rights lawyer Patrice Florvilus said, “The [people] don’t know if Martelly will give them anything different, but they know that they won’t gain anything from the suits who are the current politicians. Martelly is a product of the vacuum of alternatives. People need an alternative to the current conditions of their life but they’ve been totally abandoned.

“So many have been under tents for eleven months with nothing coming to them. They haven’t seen any of the international aid. They’re at the end of their rope with their social problems. It’s such a shame that politicians are using them for their own political profit.”

Regardless of who wins and how, the next president will come in with constitutionally constrained powers. Since the parliament ceded its power in April to the Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti, a 28-member body whose membership is 50% foreign and whose co-chair is Bill Clinton, the president holds little power over the country’s future beyond the right to veto the commission’s decision. With the World Bank as the group’s fiscal sponsor and all the international muscle around the table, even that veto option is unlikely to translate to much authority. This constraint will remain at least until the commission’s current mandate expires in August 2011.

The electoral debacle appears to have one other beneficiary besides whoever wins the presidency. It is the boys who, for once in this super-dense city with almost no recreational spaces, have had endless open streets on which to play soccer. Block after block is full of fleet-footed kids moving between the broken cinder blocks which serve as goals. On an outing to check out the state of the streets, I called out to one group of boys, “The elections gave you your soccer field. You lucked out!”

One called back, “No way! We’d rather have a free election!”

Many thanks to Allyn Gaestel for her research help.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

by Beverly Bell and Tory Field

As we file this article, Port-au-Prince is thick with the smoke of burning tires and with gunfire. Towns throughout the country, along with the national airport, are shut down due to demonstrations. Many are angry over the government’s announcement on Tuesday night of which two presidential candidates made the run-offs: Jude Célestin from the widely hated ruling party of President René Préval and the far-right Mirlande Manigat. This is another obvious manipulation of what had already been a brazenly fraudulent election. A democratic vote is one more thing that has been taken from the marginalized Haitian majority, compounding their many losses since the earthquake of January 12.

What is at stake in Haiti? What interests underlie the grab for power in the country? One answer is the large amount of aid and development dollars that are circulating. Among those benefiting handsomely from the disaster aid are U.S. corporations who have accessed U.S. government contracts. Below is the tale of one U.S. corporation and its subsidiaries, who have received contracts which involve both a conflict of interest and harm to one of Haiti’s largest and most vulnerable social sectors, small farmers.

“We were already in a black misery after the earthquake of January 12. But the rice they’re dumping on us, it’s competing with ours and soon we’re going to fall in a deep hole,” said Jonas Deronzil, who has farmed rice and corn in Haiti’s fertile Artibonite Valley since 1974. “When they don’t give it to us anymore, are we all going to die?”

• Small farmers' rice harvests sat unsold in warehouses for three months, because they could not compete with U.S. food aid.  Photo: Beverly Bell. •

Deronzil explained this in April inside a cinder-block warehouse, where small farmers’ entire spring rice harvest had sat in burlap sacks since March, unsold, because of USAID’s dumping of U.S. agribusiness-produced, taxpayer-subsidized rice. The U.S. government and agricultural corporations, which have been undermining Haitian peasant agriculture for three decades, today threaten higher levels of unemployment for farmers and an aggravated food crisis among the hemisphere’s hungriest population.

Two subsidiaries of the same corporation, ERLY Industries, are profiting from different U.S. contracts whose interests conflict. The same company that is being paid to monitor "food insecurity" is benefiting from policies that increase food insecurity. American Rice makes money exporting rice to Haiti, undercutting farmers’ livelihoods, national production, and food security. Chemonics has received contracts to conduct hunger assessments and, now, to distribute Monsanto seeds.

Haiti is the only country in the hemisphere which is still majority rural. Estimates of the percentage of Haiti’s citizens who remain small farmers – or peasants, as they call themselves - are 66% to 80%. Despite that, food imports constitute upwards of 50% of what Haitians consume. And still the nation suffers under a dire food crisis, with more than 2.4 million of 9 million Haitians estimated to be food-insecure. Acute malnutrition among children under the age 5 is 9%, and chronic undernutrition for that age group is 24%.

It didn’t used to be this way. In the early 1980s, Haiti was largely self-sufficient in food consumption and was even an exporter nation. The destruction of agriculture and food security came through policy choices. In 1986 and again in 1995, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) gave loans to Haiti with the condition that the government reduce tariffs on goods imported into the country. While previous tariffs on some staple foods had been as high as 150%, by 1995 the Haitian government, under pressure primarily from the IMF and U.S. government, cut import tariffs on food basics to as low as 3%.

Unable to compete with imported goods and thus unable to survive, Haitian farmers have flocked into the overcrowded capital in search of a living. They have joined the ranks of the underemployed or been welcomed by sweatshops. And they have taken up residence in shoddily constructed housing built on insecure lands, like ravines and the sides of steep mountains. The devastating toll from the earthquake, with anywhere from 250,000 – 300,000 killed in and around Port-au-Prince, is in part due to farmers’ inability to remain in their rural homes.

Rice is among the five most heavily subsidized crops in the U.S., with rice growers receiving $12.5 billion in subsidies between 1995 and 2009. The subsidized production and the industrial scale, on top of the lowering of import tariffs in Haiti, combined to become a money maker: beginning in the early 1980s, rice grown in such places as Arkansas and California and shipped by boat to Haiti could be sold cheaper than rice grown in a neighboring field in the Artibonite Valley. With the U.S. television show Miami Vice in high popularity during the time the threat to local producers unfolded, Haitians named the imports ‘Miami rice.’

Between 1992 and 2003, rice imported into Haiti increased by more that 150%, with 95% of the imports coming from the U.S. The USA Rice Federation claims on its website that 90% of the rice currently eaten in Haiti is from the U.S.

The flood of imported rice has shot up since the earthquake. In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, USDA purchased 13,045 metric tons of rice for Haiti. In such a dire humanitarian crisis, even Haitian peasant organizations who normally oppose food aid agreed that short-term assistance was essential.

At the same time, however, locally grown food was and is available. “If the foreigners want to give aid, it shouldn’t be food. We have the capacity to produce. They should give us a chance to grow our own food so agriculture can survive,” said Rony Charles, a farmer and member of the Agricultural Producer Cooperative of Verrettes. But a supplemental aid bill in the U.S. Congress – the Haiti Empowerment, Assistance and Rebuilding (HEAR) Act - which, among other things, would have increased the percentage of food aid purchased from Haitian producers, seems doomed because of Republican opposition. Advocacy groups in Washington such as Haiti Reborn will work to get the bill reintroduced in January, but it is unlikely that any local procurement will happen for several years.

ERLY Industries is one U.S. corporation that amply benefits from aid and trade opportunities in Haiti. ERLY is the parent company of American Rice, which has been selling rice in Haiti since 1986 via its Haitian subsidiary, the Rice Corporation of Haiti. By the mid-nineties, American Rice was importing 40-50% of all rice eaten in Haiti. A press release by the USA Rice Federation, of which American Rice is a member, referred to the federation’s “collaboration” and “proactive efforts” with USDA and USAID in getting rice to Haiti just after the earthquake.

Chemonics, another subsidiary of ERLY Industries, has been running two USAID-funded projects since before the earthquake and received one of the first post-disaster contracts in Haiti, for $50 million from USAID. Chemonics gets 90% of its funding from USAID and works in more than 75 countries. One of Chemonics’ focus areas is agricultural work, with many projects aimed at developing international trade opportunities. Chemonics has also been a large beneficiary of USAID contracts in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

One of Chemonics’ pre-earthquake contracts in Haiti, as in other countries around the world, (2006-2010) is the USAID-funded Famine Early Warning Systems Network. FEWS NET II, as it is known, monitors food security and reports on such issues as food prices, climate, and market flows.

Chemonics also holds a $126 million USAID contract for 2009 through 2014 for its Haiti-based Watershed Initiative for National Natural Environmental Resources (WINNER). Some of WINNER’s stated contract goals include increased agricultural productivity, strengthened watershed governance, and reduced threat of flooding.

WINNER now has a new role of distributing Monsanto’s recent donation of 475 tons of hybrid corn and other vegetable seeds throughout Haiti. While this year’s seeds were free of charge, farming advocates familiar with Monsanto’s history around the world consider the donation a Trojan horse, with Monsanto seeking to gain a foothold in the Haitian market. The full extent to which Monsanto will now join Chemonics and American Rice as economic beneficiaries of the earthquake remains to be seen. Elizabeth Vancil of Monsanto gave “special thanks to USAID and USDA, who connected us to be able to secure this approval.”

Meanwhile, Haitian peasant groups have declared this donation an affront to their seed sovereignty, which they refer to as “the patrimony of humanity.” Among other problems, they point to the Calypso tomato seeds being treated with Thiram, a pesticide additive so toxic that the EPA has banned its use for home gardeners in the U.S. On June 4 for World Environment Day, more than 12,000 Haitian farmers and allies marched in a rural town and burned Monsanto seeds. In the U.S., solidarity groups from Chicago to Seattle did the same. Doudou Pierre, a leading food sovereignty advocate, said that the June 4 action was “a declaration of war.”

In March, Bill Clinton formally apologized for his role in having promoted the import of U.S. rice into Haiti at the expense of Haitian farmers. "It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake… I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else." Mea culpa notwithstanding, nothing has changed in U.S. foreign aid and trade policies.

As for the March rice harvest grown by Jonas Deronzil, Rony Charles, and other producers in the Artibonite, it finally sold in June for almost exactly two-thirds of what it would have brought in before the earthquake: US$13.27 a sack versus US$20.77.

“It’s not houses which will rebuild Haiti.” said Rosnel Jean-Baptiste of the national organization Heads Together Small Peasants of Haiti. “It’s investing in the agricultural sector.”

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Tory Field is an organizer, farmer, and Program Associate at Other Worlds.

Josette Pérard is director of Fon Lanbi Haiti, the Haitian counterpart of the Lambi Fund. Fon Lanbi trains, builds capacity of, and gets grants to women’s and small farmer organizations in rural areas. Josette’s perspectives on community development follow.

• A meeting of one Lambi Fund partner organization. Photo courtesy of the Lambi Fund. •

The idea of development is to provide everyone with the means to work, to meet their needs, and to let them enjoy their human rights so they can be full citizens. But for development to occur, the system must change. And the people must be agents of that change.

If Haiti and our communities were organized, development activities would come just from the initiative of the community members themselves. But because of how the country works, because there’s no government action, there must be some organizations like ours to help people implement community development programs.

Alternative means if something that is necessary doesn’t exist, you must do it yourself. Lambi Fund’s development programs constitute an alternative compared to what the government does. But I don’t think this form of development can lead to a complete solution.

What we have now is a subsistence economy. An economy of local or community small businesses won’t change the national economy as a whole. The country's economy must change so that people can get education, health, and many other things. For this, there must be a responsible government. There must be two-way communication and joint participation between the government and the communities.

Everyone wonders why Haiti is in the state it’s in. It’s because since 1804, there are so many who’ve been called moun andeyò, outsiders [those living in the countryside]. These people continue to be excluded from what’s happening in their own homeland. They don’t know what the big social, political, and economic powers are doing. They must accept or take whatever is designed for them.

Some of the privileged are descendants of former colonists. After the revolution in 1804, they simply wanted to continue using the former slaves, keeping them in their fields of sugar cane and coffee just like in the days of slavery. Today it’s the great-grandsons and granddaughters who maintain political, economical and social power, at the expense of the majority. Those holding the reins of power aren’t affected by the problems of those ‘outside’, and they just don’t care.

A society that maintains so much exclusion simply can’t achieve development. No way. Development has to involve everyone.

I’ve been listening to the statements of the presidential candidates. Many of them say absolutely nothing about the majority of the Haitian people. You hear them seldom, if ever, even open their mouths to utter the words "the people.” You never hear them say they will do anything with the participation of the population, but you often hear them say, "We’ll do this or that for the people!" In fact, no leader can do anything for anybody.

Another thing since independence: Haitians have known that they have the courage and that they must take responsibility for their own lives. They know that they can’t rely on others. With this in mind, when they find organizations such as the Lambi Fund that support their initiatives, they become participants with all their energy and their whole being. They cooperate to make changes in the communities where they live.

Now, with the support of Lambi and other organizations, community members have been able to implement some development activities. For example, where there’s a corn mill, our organization helps members of the community increase their production by providing seeds for them to produce more corn. But the mill can still go unused because people don’t have access to roads. They need the means to transform their raw products [into more durable ones that can survive long travel] and they also need roads so that they can go sell their products in better market conditions. We can’t build inter-city roads; that’s the responsibility of the government. But through konbit, collective work teams, we can help construct paths that will allow farmers to go from one place to another, walking with their donkeys. That's how we’re implementing a few small programs of alternative development as a first step in a comprehensive intervention. That's how I see things.

The Lambi Fund is trying to help those organizations that have identified problems in their communities and are trying to resolve them. But even when people already know the means to solve a problem, there will always be financial issues, because for each activity in a development process, there must be money. So we sit down and talk to them, we work with them.

But giving money for community development activities isn’t the only work we do. We also have a support function of giving hope. The community members are facing major problems and have identified the solutions, but they want our help. We see how they envisage the planning and implementation of programs to bring change to their lives. We listen to what people have to say. We help them find the knowledge, resources and know-how to implement their projects. We educate and train the members of this organization, we pass on techniques for management, we strengthen the organization itself. We help people move through the processes to achieve their goals so they can become independent.

Now they create management committees, they appoint a coordinating committee, and you can feel the momentum. These people’s hopes are buoyed with the appearance of a small business they’ve managed to put on track. We can see the light that springs from this little hope that starts to shine brighter and brighter through everything else.

Consider, for example, the management and operation of that corn mill I talked about. Customers come and pay to have their grain processed into flour. Now with the education we’re providing the mill owners with, the community organization learns to better manage the money they earn. They know they need to save some of that money to use later to repair the mill if it breaks down. They know they must be able to cope with any problem that might arise. They have to be able to eventually buy another mill. They have to pay wages to the operator who runs the mill. Part of the money should go to fund the petty cash they keep to lend some money to group members, etc. So, it’s a whole chain of actions in which each activity leads to another activity.

It’s in the process of organizational development that people understand and learn that they must they must assert their rights and that they must demand what the government or the authorities owes them. So the work we do isn’t only implementing small development programs, because how could we change the economy that way? We’re also helping people to survive, to resist, to get the change they need.

After the earthquake of January 12, things got more complicated but regardless, I think there is hope in the air. Don’t you see how all the people move without getting tired like ants do, how they’re trying to reestablish their lives with their own hands? You’ve visited some camps; you saw the small businesses they’ve created. They make these small investments because nobody is doing anything serious to help them, because they’ve gotten little to none of the aid.

My dream is that there be real development in Haiti. As I said, these small community development initiatives we’re implementing now are simply for relief. We're just trying to help people to hold on until the legitimate demands of the Haitian people can be met, until significant changes can really be made; that’s why we call them alternatives.

Another part of my dream is that we have a responsible government. Progressive ideas have to come forth so that they can really make positive and tangible changes. And there has to be space for participation by all citizens who’ve courageously begun the development of their communities with their own means, however modest. Change will come when the people are engaged right at the heart of things.

For more information, see www.lambifund.org.

Many thanks to Joseph N. Pierre and Pro Bilingual Interpreter Services for translation of Josette’s interview.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

When people ask me, as they do all the time, “Is there any cause for hope in Haiti?” I answer yes.

It’s more tempting to think that the situation is so hopeless that it can’t any worse, especially right now. Last week, Hurricane Tomas brought three days of heavy storms, causing flash floods which washed away farmers’ homes, animals, and crops throughout the island. The storm also left filthy standing water in towns, promising to spread cholera even more rapidly throughout the country. Cholera has already killed more than 500 people and infected about 7,500, and will surely ravage many more, particularly as the best measures for prevention –using a sanitary toilet and washing one’s hands often – are not possible for most of the 1.5 million living in internally displaced person’s (IDP) camps. (One recent, extensive study of IDP camps found that 40% have no water and 30% have no access to toilets of any kind; a second showed that 44% primarily drink untreated water and 27% have no toilet.)

• Residents of one camp beat pots and pans to protest a pending eviction.  Photo: Ben Depp. •

Despite this grim state of affairs, I like to recall two definitions for ‘crisis’ offered by historian Rebecca Solnit. The Greek origin of the word means “a point of culmination and separation, an instant when change one way or another is impending.” And in written Chinese, ‘crisis’ is a combination of the ideograms for ‘disaster’ and ‘opportunity.’

The natural disaster of January 12 and the social and economic crises it has propelled mark a sharp rupture with Haiti’s past, a fulcrum in an as yet uncertain future. Labor organizer Yannick Etienne told me, “This earthquake was one of the worst things that could have happened, but we have to turn it into something positive. We have to make sure that people are agents of change and right now this is a good opportunity, positive in a political sense. There are so many things that can be done to shake up the traditional way things have always worked here.”

My hope comes from the power of progressive movements in Haiti, which have been active at many periods since the slave uprisings began in 1791 and which are again today, slowly, gathering force. Throughout Haitian history, united action from the grassroots has been the locus of all systemic change benefiting the majority. Just a few advances from modern political history (a period usually demarcated by the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship in 1986) are a popularly ratified constitution, universal elections (though their results have already been ruptured twice by coups), and the right to free speech and free assembly (not always protected, but infinitely more so than in past times). Sometimes progress has built slowly. Other moments have seen the camel’s-back phenomenon, in which one act has set off long periods of relative quiescence, such as when the killing by Tontons Macoutes of three youth in November 1985 ignited the spark of fury against the dictatorship; Duvalier survived a scant ten weeks of the resulting social upheaval.

A few examples of recent advances from the post-earthquake work of social change organizations include the following:

- A few environmental groups like Haïti Survie are using this moment not just to address the symptoms of ecological crisis like deforestation, but to challenge the root causes, including lack of income opportunities for the rural population which force them to over-exploit natural resources.

- Women’s organizations, such as Women’s House (Kay Fanm) and Solidarity among Haitian Women (SOFA), are using the visibility created by post-earthquake gender-based violence to draw attention to the ongoing need to reinforce women’s rights;

- Friends of Health, the Haitian branch of Partners in Health, has developed an alliance with the Haitian Ministry of Health to remake the University Hospital, the largest public hospital in the country and a long-standing symbol of the deplorable state of health care available to the poor;

- The networks Society for Social Mobilization and Communication (SAKS) and Haitian Women’s Community Radio Network (REFRAKA) are literally giving voice to earthquake survivors, providing radio transmitters to camps around the country;

- Several IDP camps have, under women’s leadership, created a culture of community support and initiated programs – cultural, skills-building, income-generating, educational, and empowerment - which model what a nurturing society would look like.

A wholly new movement – though rooted in the long tradition of organizing - arose within days after the quake to claim a just reconstruction. The effectiveness of the women’s sector, peasant farmer cooperatives, popular media, human rights groupings, youth and student associations, and other mass organizations is a critical variable in how equitable, rights-based, and democratic their country becomes. The grouping is not yet strong, both because coalitions were already fissured by political divisions when the earthquake hit, and because in the quake they lost members and organizing fundamentals (computers, internet possibilities, cell phones, offices, supplies, archives, etc.). This movement has in its short history already repeatedly stalled and restarted in new configurations. But given the urgency of the crisis, they are gaining steam. And two moves toward reconciliation between former adversaries - amongst peasant organizations and amongst some groups long divided by their positions around former president Aristide – give hope for greater unity and thus greater strength.

A declaration from this movement stated the priorities as “strengthening national production, valuing the riches of the country…; [and] establish[ing] a reconstruction plan where the fundamental problems of the people take first priority. These include housing, environment, food, education, literacy, work, and health for all; a plan to wipe out exploitation, poverty, and social and economic inequality; and a plan to construct a society which is based on social justice.” As usual in Haiti, the means to the solution is collective action, or what the statement calls building “a social force.”

Today the united action is most visible in the form of street demonstrations, which reemerged in August. The demands of the protests span the political gamut, mostly concentrating the right to permanent housing for those in camps. The movement is also engaged in information-sharing, consciousness-raising, and advocacy.

The potential for a real rebellion against the unacceptable status quo is strongest within the camps, where 1.5 million or so people – all of them desperate, many of them angry – have languished for ten months. Small groups of activists have been moving through some camps, trying to raise political awareness there. Though the population’s response is repressed by hunger, illness, and depression, increasing engagement by camp committees indicates the potential for mass mobilization.

Rising self-organizing from within the camps may be a fear among the Haitian and U.S. elite and others. A Wall St. Journal article hinted at the logic for the fear: “Inside the many tent cities… a rudimentary social order is beginning to emerge as committees agitate to secure food, water and supplies in high demand from international aid organizations. ‘We knew we wouldn't receive any assistance unless we formed a committee,’ says Mrs. Beaupin… She presides over an executive committee [which]… handle[s] everything from getting people to sweep outside their tents in the muddied terrain to ensuring that the sick and injured get treatment. ‘There is no government but us,’ says Mrs. Beaupin.”

In the bleak landscape, it may be tempting to think that the Haitian people are losing their shot at the structural transformation alluded to in the disaster/opportunity dyad. But to believe that they have lost the battle discounts the evidence of their history. My own reading is that in politics, as in love, remarkably unpredictable shifts can and often do happen; any number of factors could flip the downward trajectory of the majority’s well-being and power since January 12. The organized grassroots are working to ensure that they do.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Reconstructing Haiti is not about buildings, projects, or money. It’s about power, about who gets to control what the future Haiti looks like. Redistributing power, and creating a new society based on different theories and practices of it, are perhaps more important in the aftermath of the January 11 earthquake than ever.

This priority is not particular to Haitian women. But they are most often the ones propelling it, and they and their children have the most to gain from it because of the special burdens that poverty and insecurity place on them. For the majority of women, their work to transform power is focused on including the excluded: the peasants, the residents of internally displaced people’s camps and shantytowns, all those who have little voice or participation in national political and economic decisions and who rarely benefit from those decisions.

• Phalane Gilles says women leaders need to be "transfomative feminists" who can change "the economic foundation and the foundation of social relations." Photo: Beverly Bell. •

What could a new power paradigm that serves women look like? And how might a government emerging from the November 28 elections use its leadership to advance that paradigm? We asked Haitian women their thoughts on women, power, and the elections.

Elisabeth Senatus is a journalist and member of the coordinating committee of the Petite Rivière Shelter Center internally displaced people’s camp in Léogâne. She describes her work as “service to humanity.”

Some man made a declaration recently that he hopes a woman doesn’t win power, because if she does, all women are going to have power.

But me, I hope it’s a woman exactly for that reason, and because of the recent experience we’ve had with government. I don’t ignore the fact that there are men who have beautiful dreams and who have capacity, but still I hope we get a woman as president. The entire world over, men want to govern without women and prevent women from advancing. They want women to stay in the home as mothers and indentured servants.

All that women would do in terms of decentralization, development, education, health… a woman could do everything a man could do but with more attention to the needs of all society.

We need equity in education, at least as many girls in secondary and college levels. We need education - traditional, sexual, professional, family - which is at the base of social and economic power. We can address prostitution by letting girls have a chance at education. We want decentralization [from Port-au-Prince], with adequate work opportunities and government services and offices everywhere. We want to create opportunities for creativity.

If women take power, we’ll have a lot to do to educate everyone about women’s rights and responsibilities and gender equity.

But a woman doesn’t need to be president to have power. If a woman is strong and is educated and has the capacity to make decisions, that’s already power.

Claudette Werleigh is a long-time advocate for democracy, peace, and women’s empowerment. She has served as prime minister, minister of social affairs, and minister of foreign affairs. She is currently secretary general of Pax Christi International, and resides in Brussels.

Haitian women participate in politics. We’ve already had a female president, we’ve had a female prime minister, cabinet ministers, secretaries of state, and parliamentarians. But an important consideration is the final goal. Will a politician seek to ensure that the market vendors on the roadside, the charcoal merchant, and the peasant woman living in the hills can participate in decisions that determine their country’s politics? Will she choose to spend public funds for education and housing? She is biologically the holder of life, but will she have policies in favor of life?

When we talk about women in politics, we should clearly define the type of women we’re referring to. Until all women in Haiti, not only the elite class, have access to the decision-making process, we can’t say that they really participate in the country’s politics.

Women’s involvement shouldn’t just be a matter of their presence, but of their ability to offer an alternative course or to introduce something that’s lacking. The whole world is organized so you have political parties, you have a president, you have specific ways for people to play their role in politics. We have to find other ways that women can participate. We have to find ways to bring the qualities that women have in other fields into political life, to make things work better.

Magalie Bretou is a member of the Regional Coordination of the South-west (KROS), a coalition of small-farmer organizations. She sits on the executive committee of the National Coordination of Peasant Women (KONAFAP), as well as the executive committee of the Coalition of Organizations for the Municipality of Belle-Anse (KODAP), which brings together women’s youth, and peasant groups. She also serves on the coordinating committee of KODAP’s women’s division.

In the municipality of Belle-Anse, we’ve made choices for two candidates for the national Chamber of Deputies [the lower house] from within our women’s and peasants’ organizations. We chose our candidates together, and we’re all going to vote for them. We decided to do this because we needed someone with accountability.

Both our candidates are men. No woman wanted to put herself forward in the elections. Maybe in the future that will happen, but we’d have to sit together as women and decide that.

We don’t know yet what candidate we’ll support for president. Whoever it is, we’ll all go vote for that person so that we don’t undermine each others’ vote.

It could be good for us if we had a woman president, but it would depend on who it was. She could be someone with a fancy skirt from Port-au-Prince who doesn’t even see us, who just says “This is how it’s going to happen,” and “That’s how it’s going to happen.” People in Port-au- Prince usually look to their own people in the capital; they don’t see us outside. Power will always be to their advantage. We don’t see ourselves reflected in them, as women or as peasants. They don’t represent an opening for us.

We don’t yet have a way for rural women to integrate into politics and into new forms of power.
What we need is leaders who come from the grassroots, who we can choose, train, and send up. Not just for some women, but for all women.

Lucienne Darger was rendered homeless by the earthquake. She is now a member of the women-run leadership committee of a displaced person’s camp on Camp Nationale Route de Frères.

The elections won’t resolve women’s problems. But to my mind, they have to happen anyway.

A lot of people say they won’t vote as long as they’re living under a tarp, but if I can get a new electoral card [she lost her last when her home was crushed], I’m going to vote.

We’ve had so many men in office, we took beatings for them, but they never did anything for us. When we’re here in these tents, not even able to breathe, I ask myself, “Is there no government in this country? What are they saying or doing for these women who are under these tents?”

If I had the chance to vote for a woman like me, I would. Even if she couldn’t resolve my problems, I might get more access that way. Maybe she’d have more compassion for women who are suffering under tents.

But even then, I suspect that when we’re done voting, she’d forget we’re there. All the new leaders: once they’ve gotten what they want from us, they won’t care any more that we’re living in camps. As soon as they are elected to the office they want, they’ll just forget us.

Phalane Gilles has been studying social work in the State University for the past five years. She is now finishing her dissertation on prostitutes who were former street children. A mother of two, Phalane doesn’t have to take on outside work because her husband is “very understanding” and supports the family while she studies. She considers her domestic work, however, as a regular job.

For me, the election that the government, politicians, media, keeps talking about: they make it seem like a sign of stability. But there are too many hidden hands in this. At the core, in this political moment, it’s just another opportunity for those who always control everything to hold on to their power. Whoever’s elected, I believe they’ll continue to be instruments of the imperialists and capitalists, people who want the country to stay how it is -or if it changes, to change in the interests of a few people while the majority stays in the same misery they’re in.

What little I know about the Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti [the surrogate government, half of whose members are foreign] tells me that the head of state doesn’t have the space to really make a difference in Haiti. The president of the country is a marionette. He proves that by his positions toward those people who are supposedly coming to help Haiti. He gives in, he gives in. He seems like he’s working for the interests of the country, but in fact he’s working for those who only see in Haiti the possibility to increase their power and their wealth. We know there are contracts going to multinational corporations who have their own profits in mind. So whether it’s the administration that’s there now or another that takes power, the interests of the foreigners and of those who have nothing to do with the well-being of Haiti will predominate.

We’ve seen political changes in terms of women: more women in the parliament, even if it’s only a few; more women active in parties; more women who are agents of change in the political system. But most of these women –most, if not all- position themselves within what they call feminism which, to me, is not true feminism. Why? Feminism which don’t consider first and foremost the social reality of the country that both women and men are living in, to me that’s not transformative. Transformative feminists don’t just deal with women, they question what’s at the core of all problems.

The soul of women’s problems rests within society. Women’s problems aren’t contained within women; they’re living within a larger society. As long as the economic foundation and the foundation of social relations don’t change, nothing else will. As long as a few control the finances of the country, the vast majority will suffer.

A true transformation of power to change political life in this country: it has to sit in a revolutionary movement. Some people don’t like the word ‘revolutionary’, they find it shocking because it implies changing a lot of things, and those changes are not in the interest of a lot of people. But if you don’t want to enter directly into the problem, whether you call yourself a feminist or not, we’ll always stay the same.

Iliane Prospère resides in an internally displaced people’s camp in Martissant. She is an unemployed, single mother of three.

To resolve the real problems of women, give us employment. Now if I need work, even if I had three diplomas, I would still have to sleep with the boss to get the job. If all women got work, women’s lives would start to change because they play the role of both women and men. Men are absent from the responsibilities of the household. Women are the pillar.

For more perspectives on women and elections in Haiti, see “Haiti: Why Vote for A Woman?” and “Haiti, Women, and the Elections: Following Africa’s Lead”.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Haiti is a reminder of a lesson we in New Orleans got after Hurricane Katrina and the broken levees: the capacity of humanity to survive, sustain culture, and create joy – no matter the external circumstances - is without limit. That capacity is unsinkable, like trying to keep a cork underwater.

• "We're fed up." Photo: Beverly Bell. •

Ronal Toussaint, who sometimes takes me around in his taptap – pick-up converted to public transport vehicle - on especially meeting-packed days, and who walks with a permanent limp from a building having fallen on him during the earthquake, evinced the spirit of resistance so common here. “We do so much with so little. People here can take anything and make it work. Just give us a little bit, and we’ll fix this country.”

I hear variations of this sentiment every day from people in the streets and from activists in the progressive movement. When I ask for assessments from colleagues in small farmer, women, human rights, popular media, and other sectors, they respond with comments like this one by economic justice advocate Ricot Jean-Pierre: “I can’t say we’re advancing yet; you know the challenges are so big. But they say it’s darkest just before daybreak.” An old friend, a community organizer whom I know would not want her name cited, gave a similar analysis as we shared cups of sweet coffee. “This country is no good. Really it’s no good. But what can you do? We’re just going to keep throwing everything we have into making it better.”

But it sure would help if Haitians had survival resources other than individual strength and courage, and collective organizing.

The suffering of the people is as unimaginable as is the poor planning or sheer neglect of their government, the United Nations, and large international non-governmental organizations. As for the estimated 1.5 million Haitians who live in roughly 1,300 internally displaced people’s camps (the numbers being rough guesses, as no census has been taken), three recent reports by the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti et al., Professor Mark Schuller, and Refugees International paint dismal pictures. Here are just a few facts and figures from one report, from a five-month survey of 90 camp-dwelling families:

- In more than half of the families, the children went at least one entire day in the prior week without eating at all;

- 44% primarily drink untreated water;

- 78% live without enclosed shelter;

- 27% have no option but to defecate in a bucket, plastic bag, or open ground in the camp;

- 37% of families have no form of income whatsoever.

An exposé by the new investigative journalist group Haiti Grassroots Watch found that – though the government has never mentioned it - a national plan for relocation does exist, but that it appears almost impossible to implement. Excerpted here are some of its findings.

A piece-meal, only vaguely coordinated, and as-yet unofficial “Return and Resettlement Strategy, Draft 5” appears to have been underway [by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), multilateral agencies, and foreign government assistance agencies] for the past month or two. It is not led by the Haitian government. Instead, agencies pursue their own projects with some loose coordination provided by UN-organized Shelter Cluster staff.

The plan calls for, in order of feasibility: “(1) return to the original area; (2) resettlement to the countryside where they are from or where they have land; and (3) relocation to a planned site, as the final choice.” The plan calls for camps to be progressively closed, and for services to be progressively added to original neighborhoods and progressively diminished in the camps to create a “pull factor.”

Before building permanent homes, NGOs and agencies plan to build 135,000 transitional or T-shelters, which are 12- or 18-sq. meters, wooden or metal frame, plywood or plastic walls, and tin roof. The cost, including transportation, customs and labor, is about $1,500 - $2,500 each. So far about 15,000 have been built. The full 135,000 will not be completed until September, 2011, according to a recent Shelter Cluster document. In the meantime, various NGOs, like the US-based CHF International are working on small neighborhood-based projects.

Haiti Grassroots Watch notes reasons why this plan is unworkable. Quoting the group, a few challenges include:

- Move families back to original homes – Challenge: What about the rubble? The capital and other cities affected by the earthquake are still encumbered with between 20 million and 30 million cubic meters of rubble. So far, only a small amount – estimates range from two to ten percent – has been removed. Delays in funding, and also the fact that there is no single agency coordinating rubble removal, indicate that the rubble will be in the way for years to come.

- Move families back to home – Challenge: Who will pay for house removal or repairs? According to the latest tallies, there are about 50,000 homes that need to be destroyed and cleared, and another 54,000 to 64,000 needing to be repaired. Who will pay for and coordinate these massive public works projects? As of September 24, NGOs had only about 15 percent of the funding needed for the repairs.

- Move families into 135,000 [transitional] T-Shelters – Challenge: Where to put the shelters? There are over 300,000 families currently in the camps. 159,749 families rented their home prior to January 12. NGOs don’t want to give a T-Shelters to a family that does not own the land or at least have a proper, long-term lease. A PowerPoint prepared by the Shelter Cluster [noted] that no land has been made available to host affected population in new camps/housing areas.

A post-earthquake phenomenon even broader than the insecurity and abandonment of camp dwellers is increased poverty. What does an even poorer Haiti look like? The question is almost like “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” To an untrained eye it may be difficult to distinguish pre- and post-earthquake levels of poverty, and no statistics exist to quantify the difference. But survivors will tell you that the latter is much, much harder.

A sampling of comments I have heard from the mouths of women is:

“We don’t have anything. It’s all under the rubble.”

“We don’t talk much any more, because we’re all in shock.”

“I have cold shivers all the time, like I’m in New York.”

“I lost my medicines in the earthquake, but I don’t have a way to get more.”

“None of us have houses or husbands any more.”

“Now it’s just a skeleton of a country.”

“The only things I have are the dress on my back and my nine children.”

Nozine Leclerc is a young friend who, after his own house collapsed, was violently evicted from one camp and has since moved between three others. His father was crushed in the earthquake. His mother, Esthère Miradieu, may have throat cancer; we do not know since her numerous attempts to get medical care have all been thwarted because she does not have the money for the tests the ‘free’ clinics keep prescribing or the transportation to get them.

Nozine’s face has become deeply ridged since the quake, the bones standing up like the Andes. He has no income, and survives through small gifts and acts of solidarity from friends and strangers. He owns nothing more than the contents of a little backpack. Most distressing to him is that he has no way to help his mother.

Last week Nozine told me, “I’m hoping to find redemption from my tribulation.”

He focused his eyes on me hard. “Do you think I will?”

Just when I begin to wonder how the human spirit can handle one more minute of suffering and struggle, I have experiences like these.

On an evening walk in the neighborhood of Croix des Pres, I swing left with the road and suddenly find myself in the middle of a refugee camp, with lean-to’s made of wood, tin, and tarps lining either side of the street. But this camp is different from most; it’s positively festive. Someone has put on loud compa music. Older women sit on stools or cement blocks - or, in one case, a smashed refrigerator turned on its side - and braid each other’s hair while sharing news. Some greet me as though I were a long-lost friend.

One woman wants to make sure I see her little son, but two-year-olds rarely get past me; we had already waved energetically at each other when I was still back a ways. His name is Jesley, and he is elated to practice his high-five on me. His 4-year-old sister tries out her French, asking “Tu t’en vas?” Are you leaving? Another little girl enthusiastically spins a long piece of black tape in a circle, arcing it high into the air.

The boys, as usual, dominate the scene with their volume and activity. One shrieking teenager is taking running leaps over a pile of burning garbage. Others play soccer on the steeply sloped road with a ball that more resembles a filthy round of yarn. A poor little kid with no bargaining power keeps getting sent down the hill to retrieve it.

Four teens bathe in their shorts with gallon jugs of water, clearly relishing the chance to show off their sleek bodies. As I approach, one shouts, “Blan, foreigner, come bathe with us.” The crowd about loses it when I reply in Creole, “Oh, thanks, but I’m not really dirty right now.”

Five youth are deploying a very tall bamboo pole to try to liberate mangoes from high in a tree behind a garden wall. Soon they come marching to the center of the camp, holding the pole above their heads with their right hands and their stolen fruit aloft in their left hands, loudly singing a victory song.

The place is reminiscent of other camps I’ve visited where all the residents are neighbors, if not friends: they’ve come together from their surrounding shattered houses to recreate community and to help each other make the best of a horrible situation.

“People are surviving because they’re survivors,” said Jacques Bartoli, an art collector and apartment house owner. While that may be true, what if the Haitian government and international nations and agencies gave a little assist, stepping in with some of those billions of dollars in pledges and donations that have gone missing or just been squandered, and with an emergency resettlement plan that really addresses the urgency of the crisis?

Why should it all come down to people’s internal defenses?

To quote a woman from New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: “I’m tired of being resilient.”

A taxi driver laid it out as he gave me, together with many more people than were ever meant to fit into his compact Nissan, a ride across town. “Hello blan,” he said as I got in.

“Hello, Haitian.” I replied. “How are you?”

“My tarp is torn. The other night I was completely wet in the rain. But we’re children of God. Still, really, we need some help.”

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

“I came to protest so we can find a solution. Misery is killing me,” said Mascarie Sainte-Anne, 70, at the edge of a rally in front of Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive’s office on October 12.

Haitians have been taking to the streets with increasing frequency since August in calls for redress of the economic and social crisis which has followed the earthquake. The social movements’ demands of the government include the right of those living in internally displaced people’s camps to permanent, humane housing; accessible education; and an increase in minimum wage. Rallies have also protested the continued presence of the U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti, or MINUSTAH.

• Unprovoked, a UN 'peacekeeper' and private security officer level their guns on a protester at UN logistical base, Oct. 15.  Photo: Federico Matais. •

“There was no provocation at all. The Haitian police and the private UN security guards were so aggressive. They were just looking to do violence,” said Miles.

On October 8, demonstrators were in front of the Ministry of Education, peacefully calling for education for the nation’s students, when Haitian riot police fired tear gas. Jean Louis Filbert (his name also reported as Jean Filbert Louis), a math teacher and member of the teachers’ union, was hit in the head with a tear gas canister. He died in the hospital the next day. Jean Pierre Edouard, who was not involved with the rally but had gone to the ministry simply to pick up a certificate, was also hit in the head.

One recent protest focus is also the principal concern of citizens today: permanent housing and other support for the estimated 1.5 million people who lost their homes in the earthquake and who still languish in tents or under tarps nine months later. No authority has told this group what their fates will be. Their shelters, usually made of plastic or nylon, are variously sweltering in the daytime heat and wet and muddy in the torrential night rains. Protection against thieves and rapists is non-existent. According to an extensive new study, 40% of camps have no water, 30% have no toilets, and only 20% have access to education, medical care, or psychological support. With near-total unemployment; with food aid suspended since April; and with virtually no outside assistance; hunger, illness, and poverty are on the rise.

“Tighten our belts, we can’t take it any more,” loudly sang Sainte-Anne and 200 or so others in front of the prime minister’s office on October 12. “Tighten our belts” is not a metaphor in Haiti; it refers to the belts or ropes that people bind tightly around their waists in an attempt to dull hunger pangs.

The demonstrators continued their call-and-response chant:
“Heat under the tarps is brutal, we can’t take it any more.
We have fever, we can’t take it any more.
We’re being raped, we can’t take it any more.
We have no water, we can’t take it any more.
We have infections, we can’t take it any more.”

This was the third demonstration for a response to massive homelessness in as many months. “Each rally has been larger than the last,” said Reyneld Sanon, a leader with the Force for Reflection and Action on Housing (FRAKKA). “People are starting to stand up for their right to housing that is, after all, guaranteed by the constitution.” The protests are convened by a coalition including a housing rights group, a human rights group, and committees of camp residents.

Sainte-Anne said, “I’m old, I’m going to die, but I don’t want it to be from hunger. I don’t have a husband. I don’t have children. I’ve been sleeping in the street since my house in Martissant fell flat. The government has to do something.”

At least three recent demonstrations, led by labor groups and grassroots organizations, have called for raising the minimum wage from $3.20 (125 gourdes) a day for export assembly work to $12.82 a day (500 gourdes). Last year, after the Parliament passed legislation to raise the minimum wage for all workers, factory owners complained to President René Préval. He refused to implement the law. Instead, a compromise agreement raised the salary of factory workers producing for export to only $3.20 a day. “You couldn’t live on that before the earthquake. But costs have risen so much since then, it’s really impossible now,” said Gerome Dupervil, an advocate for workers’ rights.

Another series of rallies has taken place on October 1, 14, and 15 in front of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the U.N. logistics base. Demonstrators were protesting the annual renewal of the U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), which has been here since President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s ouster in 2004. The force includes almost 12,000 armed personnel. Its current annual budget is $380 million.

MINUSTAH troops have been charged with killings, arbitrary arrests, and human rights violations. They are currently suspected in the death by hanging of a young man, Gerald Jean Gilles, in the courtyard of a MINUSTAH base in Cap-Haïtien on August 17. MINUSTAH personnel claimed that the youth killed himself, a fact disputed by family and friends.

Activists interviewed say their call for MINUSTAH’s departure is based on the force’s violence, its ineffectiveness in accomplishing its mission, the waste of money, and the undemocratic and colonial nature of the operation in a sovereign nation. The actions have been convened by a coalition including a media network, human rights and housing rights groups, and committees from various camps.

Asked what she and others in Haiti’s social movement want, Jetty Jenet said, “We’re calling out for help to make the authorities hear us. We’re all dying.” For nine months, Jetty has had no income and has lived with her children under a plastic tarp in Cité Soleil. “But we’re people, too.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the journalist injured during the October 15th protest.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

We asked dozens of Haitians from different social sectors how they felt about the November 28 elections, and what they want or expect from a new government. Here are some of their responses.

Louisiane Nazaire defines herself as a peasant. She is a member of a local peasant farmer group in the Grande-Anse, and is coordinator of the National Commission of Peasant Women.

• What difference will a new government make in the daily lives of Haitians? Photo: Beverly Bell. •

“We don’t trust these elections, either the power or the electoral council. But we realized that the elections would go forward anyway so we decided we had to participate so we peasants don’t stay in the same situation we’re in now. So now we in [the national peasant movements and agricultural federations of] the National Commission of Peasant Women [KONAFAP], the National Movement of Peasants of the Papay Congress [MPNKP], and the National Haitian Network for Food Sovereignty and Food Security [RENHASSA] are running local candidates in a bunch of places, peasants who will represent our interests and our voices. This can help us get power that represents the peasants and all the people.

“Now society treats us terribly, peasants and poor women. Especially women: as citizens, we need our rights, our voices, and laws respected. We shouldn’t be treated differently than men, regardless of class.

“One thing we want from a new government is for the national budget to reflect the interests of peasants and agriculture. We need credit, too. The country depends on us peasants, but they don’t give us anything. If we farmers didn’t work for a month, the whole nation would perish. Still, the [percentage of the national] budget for peasants and agriculture was only 3% for years, and after a lot of mobilization it went up to 4%.

“We’re claiming our vote, and we’re using our participation to ensure that our vote has worth. If we see that our votes aren’t counted, we’ll take to the streets and demand that the election is redone or just annulled.”

Suze Jean is a primary school teacher, a university student of electronics, and a self-described revolutionary. An elected member of the management committee of her internally displaced people’s camp on the grounds of an evangelical church, after she and others put out a press release about camp conditions in September, Suze was evicted and her tent and belongings were destroyed by the pastor’s son. She now lives on the streets, and is eight months pregnant.

“I see the elections of November 28 as an injustice to the population who are victims of the earthquake of January 12. This money [from the campaign] could be used to help people who are in difficulty.

“And all these candidates: we’ve been living under tarps for nine months, and we haven’t seen one of these people do anything for us. They’re deaf, they don’t hear anything. We need forced expulsions to stop. We can’t stand them anymore.

“Ten camps in [the neighborhood of] Carrefour have come together to mobilize against the elections. We will resist. We’re organizing to not participate in elections as long as we’re living under tarps in the rain and the mud, and as long as they’re throwing us out of camps. We’ll do demonstrations, sit-ins, everything we can to not participate and help other camp committees not participate. We won’t use violence to block people, but we’re trying to mobilize them to boycott.

“We’ll participate in elections once they respond to our demands, once they address the problems of people living in temps and getting evicted from them, once they stop forcing people to work as supposed volunteers in the camp, once they stop forcing women to sleep with men who control [distribution of] humanitarian aid to get any.

“The positive alternative we want is a candidate who’s sensitive to our needs, who has a good vision of how to take care of our problems, who would create a pro-people government. Who would take our needs to the international community. We need someone who knows our suffering and who has the maturity and conscientiousness to lead. We need someone from the level of the people.”

Wilner Jean-Charles was a marketing student until political upheaval in 2004 forced him to leave school. Wilner now serves as a guide and driver for tourist groups.

“I’m not into politics. But I believe that if someone had a really good, long-term program for youth, we could have real development. If that candidate had an education program to get all the street children to school, and gave them the opportunity for a good university education, and developed good employment for those kids once they get out, they’d be building a different kind of citizenry. Just project 50 years out to what kind of people those kids would be.

“What candidate do I support? I haven’t taken the time to read up to see if any of the candidates have a program for Haiti’s education program. But if I found one that did, and if that person had a minimum of credibility, I’d vote for him.”

Jocie Philistin is a human rights advocate. She coordinates a network of women’s organizations for the Bureau of International Lawyers in Port-au-Prince.

“Once we have the candidate we need, someone who can hear and respond to the rights of the people, you’ll see the majority accompanying him or her to the elections. You saw that in 1990, when all the Haitian people decided they wanted a candidate [Jean-Bertrand Aristide]. They [67% of the electorate] voted him in. Naturally, the people would have to continue to make sure their demands are applied even if that candidate wins.

“Meanwhile, what I see with the elections is that Parti Unité [President Préval’s party] is just looking to validate a selection that’s already happened. They’ve already stolen the presidency and the parliament. Selection isn’t election.

“I know the international community always plays a big role in elections. If they just back up a selection, the people will just stay as they are in their camps and in their insecurity. One word: block any selection.”

Josette Pérard is director of Fon Lanbi Haiti, the Haitian counterpart of the Lambi Fund. Trained as a social worker, Josette runs a program to train, build capacity of, and get grants to women’s and small farmer organizations in rural areas.

“It wasn’t long ago that a small group of people used French as a way to isolate everyone. People couldn’t participate in anything because they didn’t speak French. They couldn’t even understand what was being said on the radio. Today, everyone says what they think, they want to participate, to enter into the debate. It’s a movement.

“The people will have to be a part of any change of the state. Otherwise, it won’t work. But for that, [the president and government] will have to trust the people. I hear candidates open their mouths to speak of ‘the people.’ They talk about what they’ll do for the people, but never what they’ll do with them. Nice vision and nice speech from the president aren’t enough. The only way for us to have a change is if the people are part of the process.”

Ludovic Cherustal is a young database technician working for a humanitarian aid NGO from Canada. He hopes for a more stable job so he can start a family.

“People would be interested in the elections if they saw that the outcome would have an impact on their needs. But the candidates are all gwo manjè, big eaters, from the same group of people who always exploit us. Most of them have been the system, benefiting from it, for a long time. They’re not going to do anything for us, the little poor people.”

Alina “Tibebe” Cajuste was a slave as a child, and now is a children’s rights activist and poet. Her dreams in life are to become literate and to see an end to child slavery.

“I lost my electoral card in the earthquake [when my house was destroyed] and it’s so hard to get a new one. I have to vote but I don’t know how I’m going to do that.

“But a new president can come to power and Haiti will still be the same, especially if all he sees are his pockets and not the people. If a new president doesn’t give us primary schools, professional schools, and business in the countryside, it’ll be just like washing your hands and drying them in the dirt.

“If we don’t have a change in consciousness, we can have all the elections we want and Haiti will remain as fragile as a crystal.”

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Rony Charles, a rice grower and member of the Agricultural Producer Cooperative of Verrettes, said, “Instead of foreigners sending us food, they should give us the chance to do our own agriculture so it can survive.”

Giving domestic agriculture the chance to survive would address four critical needs:

- Creating employment for the majority, estimated at 60% to 80% of the population;
- Allowing rural people to stay on their land. This is both their right as well as a way to keep Port-au-Prince from becoming even more perilously overcrowded;
- Addressing an ongoing food crisis. Today, even with imports, more than 2.4 million people out of a population of 9 million are estimated to be food-insecure. Acute malnutrition among children under the age 5 is 9%, and chronic under-nutrition for that age group is 24%. Peasant groups are convinced that, with the necessary investment, Haiti could produce at least 80% of its food consumption needs; and
- Promoting a post-earthquake redevelopment plan that serves the needs of the majority, unlike the one currently promoted by the U.S. and U.N. which is based on the growth of sweatshops. (See “Poverty-Wage Assembly Plants as Development Strategy in Haiti”.)

• What would it take for Haitians to feed their nation? Photo by Ben Depp, www.bendepp.com •

To attain these goals, Haitian groups of small farmers (or peasants, as they call themselves) are challenging a decades-long pattern of conflict and competition, a trend which the Duvalier dictators actively fostered in order to sustain their fierce control. Groups are uniting into coalitions and beginning to work together, thereby building political might to shore up domestic agriculture. They are advancing their agenda collectively through negotiations with the Ministry of Agriculture, national pressure, international policy advocacy, and creation of common cause with other farmer movements and allies elsewhere.

These farmers, like their counterparts the world over, are focused principally on building food sovereignty. They are on the frontlines of a clash between two development models: food sovereignty and neoliberalism.

Food sovereignty is the right of a people to define their own food and agricultural systems, premised on growing domestically for domestic consumption. It is based on other social and economic rights, too: the right to food, the right of rural peoples to produce, and the right to land.

Food sovereignty promotes small-scale agriculture, government management of food imports, protection of native seeds, and large-scale redistribution of land with protections of land tenure for small farmers. It calls for the democratic participation of the population in shaping trade policies and for development programs which protect domestic production, especially by small growers.

The opposing model, neoliberalism, is the one governing farming in Haiti and much of the world. An ideology as well as a set of free-market policies and programs, neoliberalism opposes a significant role of government or community in planning, investing in, or intervening into markets in ways which could protect and promote national development. Neoliberalism gives primacy to corporate control over domestic production and the environment. Key players here include the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, governments of industrialized countries, large landholders, and corporations.

The model is based on global trade rules which allow rich countries to make profits off of Haiti and other low-income countries in two ways. First is as a source of cheap, raw goods for the so-called First World, which are extracted or produced by intensive exploitation of labor, land, and other resources. Haiti used to fill this role, historically exporting hardwoods and more recently – until the 1980s - foodstuffs, when the agricultural sector no longer had the capacity to do so.

Low-income countries’ second role is as a market for corporate goods from high-income countries. The trade policies of wealthy nations and the conditions on loans by international financial institutions pressure low-income countries to lower import tariffs, though high-income countries’ own production remains protected by subsidies. In Haiti, conditions on two loans from the IMF, in 1986 and 1995, forced the government to reduce tariffs on food imports to as low as 3% from former levels of up to 150%. This made it suddenly cheaper to buy food from U.S. agribusiness than from the farmer the next field over, thus effectively putting out of business the farmer in that next field.

Until the early 1980s, Haiti was largely self-sufficient in food, but now domestic agriculture meets only 43% of Haitians’ food consumption needs. This has led to the further impoverishment of the small farmer sector; those who still try to survive through growing do so in grinding destitution. Another option has been to flee to the cities, and for more than three decades peasants have been arriving in droves for Port-au-Prince, where they have found jobs in the assembly sector or the informal sector if they were lucky, or have remained unemployed if they weren’t. This led to another impact of so-called free trade policies: the dense population in Port-au-Prince of rural emigrants and others, virtually all of them living in shoddy housing on terrain often unsuitable for dwellings, contributed greatly to the high death toll (estimated at 250,000 to 300,000) from the January 12 earthquake.

Attaining food sovereignty in Haiti would necessitate a governmental commitment to invest significantly in agriculture. Farmers need support for tools, seeds, credit, irrigation and water storage systems, and assistance from agronomists. Food sovereignty must involve land reform, since peasants currently don’t have the land they need to grow. It would mean staunching the flow of dumped U.S. commodities (today mainly handed out in ‘food for work’ programs, usually in crony systems) which, more than ever since the earthquake, has meant that Haitian farmers either have to sell their food for a pittance or cannot sell it at all. Food sovereignty would require raising tariffs on food imports to protect national production.

Food sovereignty would also involve turning around Haiti’s ecological crisis, since its effects - topsoil erosion, deforestation, destruction of watersheds, floods, and droughts - all impede agricultural production. Some Haitian farmer-activists are promoting a set of programs to address this crisis, with their own programs of reforestation, integrated water management, and creation of non-charcoal energy sources. But the farmers say they cannot reverse the environmental decline on their own, and ask the government to commit to national programs and to enforce ecological protection laws that are already on the books.

Food sovereignty in Haiti would require, furthermore, passing a law against genetically modified [GMO] seeds and limiting multinational corporate involvement in Haiti’s seeds, which Haitian farmers call “the patrimony of humanity.” The need has been underscored this year by new imports of seeds from Pioneer and Monsanto. Some of them, such as Monsanto’s calypso tomato seeds, are treated with deadly poisons which the EPA banned for home use in the U.S. While Monsanto, for one, is donating its seeds this year, one suspects that that largesse will quickly end and that farmers will be forced to buy them in subsequent years. Meanwhile, agriculture becomes dependent on foreign corporations for the very foundation of agriculture. (For more, please see “Haitian Farmers Commit to Burning Monsanto Seeds.”)

Strengthening the agricultural sector is viable because of the size, strength, and growing unity of the peasant movement, and because of the international attention and support of progressive allies. What is needed now is the political will of the Haitian government, the U.N., and foreign governments.

Below is a listing of some of the coalitions, both Haitian and foreign, which are building the movement. Doudou Pierre of the National Network for Food Sovereignty and Security said, “All these networks basically have the same agendas. It’s for food sovereignty and against neoliberal agricultural policies.”

Four Focused Eyes (Kat Zye Kontre) unites the four largest and strongest peasant organizations. The name comes from an expression pertaining to cheating in Haitian card games: “Four focused eyes, an end to lies,” and refers to the long-term distrust between some of these organizations. They include the country’s two national peasant groups - Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan Ayisyen, or Heads Together Small Producers of Haiti, and the National Peasant Movement of the Papay Congress (MPNKP) - plus the two largest regional organizations - the Peasant Movement of Papay (MPP by its Creole acronym) and the Regional Coordination of the Organizations of the South-East (KROS). For the first time, these groups are overcoming old division[s] to work in unity. They are pushing the state for alternative, pro-peasant policies through mobilization, especially around land reform.

National Network for Food Sovereignty and Security (RENHASSA by its Creole acronym) is a coalition of 54 organizations from different sectors and regions. Formed in 2006, RENHASSA’s mission is to advocate for national policies which would allow Haiti’s self-sufficiency in national food production, for policies against foreign food aid and dumping which undermine that self-sufficiency, and for land reform. See “So Everyone Can Eat, Produce It here: Food Sovereignty and Land Reform in Haiti (Part I)”.

National Coordinating Committee of Peasant Women (KONAFAP). “You can’t speak of food sovereignty without women’s participation,” said one farmer in the rural North of Haiti. KONAFAP was formed two years ago by women from the 54 member organizations of the National Network for Food Sovereignty and Security (RENHASSA). Still in a building stage, most of its members currently hail from the Peasant Movement of Papay and the National Peasant Movement of the Papay Congress. KONAFAP promotes political fights against hunger and against neoliberal agricultural policies, and organizes for the strength and rights of peasant women. For more information, see “Thinking about Ourselves and Our Future: Rural Women Organize.”

Hand-in-Hand Foundation (FONDAMA by its Creole acronym) brings together approximately 400,000 members in eleven organizations that together cover most parts of the country. FONDAMA’s mission is food sovereignty and environmental protection. FONDAMA is holding an ongoing series of post-earthquake meetings to construct and advocate for a national agricultural program.

Vía Campesina (Peasants’ Way) is the network of small farmers, peasant farmers, landless people, indigenous people, and rural women, with member organizations around the world. One of Vía’s emphases is food sovereignty, which it advancews through coordinating and promoting international-level activities and through helping member countries like Haiti lead domestic fights. Three of Haiti’s peasant organizations – Tèt Kole, the National Peasant Movement of the Papay Congress, and the Peasant Movement of Papay– are members, while the Regional Coordination of the Organizations of the South-East (KROS) is applying for membership. A Haitian representative has long had a seat on Vía’s International Coordinating Committee.

Silion Pierre, a national coordinator with Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan Ayisyen, Heads Together Small Producers of Haiti, said, “Our idea is to reinforce our strength and capacity to mobilize by bringing together all progressive forces, Haitian and foreign, to make Haiti into another nation where people can live with security and food.”

Other Worlds is very grateful to our friends who have donated their beautiful photographs from Haiti: Ben Depp as well as Roberto (Bear) Guerra, Julie Dermansky, and Salena Tramel.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Haiti is famous around the world primarily for its problems, one being advanced ecological destruction. However, as with its other problems, citizens – with international friends and the occasional help of the government – are working to turn this around and create a healthy environment.

Aldrin Calixte tells of the social, economic, and political causes of the environmental crisis and what is being done to create a different future. One of Haiti’s principal environmental advocates, Aldrin is an agronomist who specializes in natural resource management. He is also Executive Secretary of Haiti Survie [Haiti Survive], an organization which ties broad awareness-raising with citizen action. Haiti Survie believes that the struggle to defend the environment should be an active part of the life of every human being. For more information, see www.haitisurvie.org.

If we take a look at all the components that make up the environment in Haiti, it’s a pretty somber picture. If you look at the loss the trees, soil erosion with millions of tons of topsoil flowing towards the sea every year, waste, air quality, lack of water, threats to an extremely rich biodiversity of fauna… The situation is, well, catastrophic.

• Schoolchildren at the environmental frontline, planting trees. Photo courtesy of Haiti Survie. •

I want to talk about alternatives to change this. But first, let’s take a look at the political, social and economic causes, and foreign influences as well, because we can’t forget that the environment is a single, coherent unit. Something that takes place in one place has repercussions in other places. Look for example at migratory birds from areas with cold seasons. Some of these birds migrate to Haiti, so if we’re looking at protecting Haiti’s biodiversity, it will affect all the areas that these birds are coming from as well. This is just to give you an idea of the complexity and interrelation between all components of the environment, including governmental policies, in different countries.

If we look at the social and economic causes, poverty is one of the biggest forces. Most people live on $1 or less a day. People are in dire straits and they’re abandoned, so they have to use the environment any way they can. You have so many peasants struggling to use such little land, and often land that’s not really viable like on steep mountainsides. In order to ensure their subsistence, people have been forced to exploit natural resources without rest, so the land keeps degrading. A simple example is people trying to farm to survive but it’s not profitable enough, so in order to send their children to school, a lot of them are forced to make charcoal and of course that in turn means exploiting trees.

Let’s look at the political side of things. The decision-makers don’t have a political will to really give priority to the environment. There are already many laws on the books concerning environmental protection, but unfortunately, they’re not implemented.

Over time, the government granted big concessions to foreign firms that came and exploited trees from Haiti; a lot of trees were cut for export. Other foreign companies exploited our resources, leading to degradation of things like soil, and there never was and still isn’t a political will that will encourage all this to regenerate.

Yes, the environment is natural, but the catastrophic situation is all tied to the actions of man: socially, economically, politically. That’s why I believe that even though the situation is very rough, we can find solutions for it. We can develop solutions at the broad, macro-level, in things we can do together, and also at a more local, micro-level, with actions and interventions that work at a smaller scale.

At a macro-level, the government has a large role it has to play to integrate the issue of the environment within overarching development policy. If we’re talking about development today, it can’t give priority simply to economic factors in what we call capitalist development. The government has a responsibility to ensure legislation that will protect the environment. As I said, there are already many, many laws on the books that are meant to protect the environment, but they need to be adapted to the current circumstances, updated within the global development framework.

On this same level, too, we need to look at reinforcing capacity, that is, training citizens. We have to lead big campaigns of awareness-raising, because without awareness there won’t be action. Strength is derived from capacity and training. The mentality of people must be changed, and then their behavior toward the environment will change. Otherwise, everything will always remain at the level of talk, talk, talk. We have to put a lot of effort into this.

At the same time, we have to have proposals for concrete actions. As we face this climate crisis and energy crisis, for example, we need to look for alternative energy solutions which are economically, socially, and environmentally viable. We need to begin thinking about using energy sources that we have at our disposal, like wind or solar energy. We have a lot of sun here. This doesn’t mean that we’ll completely eliminate the types of energy we’re using right now, but that we take measures to diversify.

At the micro-level, I’ll give you some examples of what Haiti Survie is doing. We have a nation that’s ill, suffering from the loss of topsoil and deforestation, so we’re leading campaigns. But before we do reforestation, we have to reinforce community capacity and training. Not just with adults, but children as well, because they’ll be the decision-makers of tomorrow. We educate the children in schools about preserving biodiversity - the multitude of species which are in danger of extinction - and protecting the environment where they live.

And this affects more than just the children themselves, because they have the ability to reach adults. They can teach a lot of things. For example, adults might be handling garbage poorly, and the child could some and say, “No, Mama, Papa, that’s not how you deal with trash; you can’t just throw it anywhere. We can make revenue off it, we can transform it.”

After the education, awareness, and training programs, we move on to concrete action. In the case of deforestation, Haiti Survie begins with replanting efforts involving the community. This way we’re also developing an alternative source of income for the community so people don’t have to create and sell charcoal. Now, instead, we generate income for the people using the trees themselves. We believe that people won’t cut down trees if they’re economically productive. So we have some people here who have fruit trees. Those trees will give you fruit every year, which you can bring to the market as is, or transform it [into other products like jam] and convert into income, or eat it and improve your nutrition.

So we’ve solved the problem on three fronts: deforestation, the ensuing loss of soil, and the loss of biodiversity, because there have been a lot of species of trees which have been disappearing but that we’re reintroducing back. Reforestation programs involve preservation and conservation, regeneration of the ecosystem, and an economic element because people get a source of income.

In addition, we ensure that the replanting activity involves everyone. For example, we have these seedlings but we don’t just plant them, we involve the children to integrate their knowledge with their actions. We’re instilling a sense of connection between the people and the trees that make up their natural environment.

Another project Haiti Survie is working on is water management in dry zones. There were lots of places where the people didn’t have drinkable water. What was worse is that this was most affecting two groups that were already so vulnerable: women and children, who often had to walk two to three kilometers for one gallon of water. It was tiring, plus the children didn’t have time to go to school and the women didn’t have time to devote to other activities at home or in the community. So we said, “When the rainy season comes, let’s find a way to collect the rainwater.” We set up collection and storage systems. We gave people a way to have water for their everyday uses, bathing and cooking, but we also tied it to agriculture because the people used this water for growing their gardens.

This relates to adaptation to climate change, too, because the dry season has become much longer. If it didn’t rain, people simply weren’t able to grow gardens. Now we’re trying to help people adapt, to encourage them to still keep gardens but to water them with rainwater they store in the reservoirs that we built for them. I wouldn’t say that the problem has been solved 100%, but we have definitely improved the situation.

Haiti Survie also has some micro-interventions relating to the catastrophe that took place on January 12. We want to see sustainable development projects taking place, but if we don’t link sustainable development with urgent assistance, it’s a lost cause. That’s because Haiti is always hit by emergencies; every year we’re rocked with natural disasters of some sort: cyclones, floods, droughts, and then this earthquake that caused so much loss of life and so much destruction. So Haiti Survie put in place post-earthquake measures, with the help of Christian Aid and other partners like Friends of the Earth. On the one hand, we immediately helped 344 families in Port-au-Prince and 300 rural families with food, medical aid, preventative health care, and shelter. You know they lost so much in 35 seconds [of the earthquake].

But we also provided financial assistance so the rural people could reconstitute their economies. We helped them reinforce their agricultural well-being so they didn’t have to lose this year’s planting season in March. We also gave them help to send their kids to school, because we believe that education is a cornerstone of sound development. Our goal is to help these people be stronger so they can take part in development.

We know that each person has the right to live in a healthy environment. It’s also the responsibility of everyone to protect the environment where they live. For each of you who has the chance to read this article, what will you do about it?

Thanks to David Schmidt for assistance in translating this interview.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

“There needs to be a new vision for Haiti, and that vision needs to come from the people,” says Marc-Arthur Fils-Aimé, director of the Karl Leveque Cultural Institute (commonly known by its Creole acronym ICKL), a grassroots center which supports peasant and other popular organizations to help them develop their analysis and capacity as a movement.

• A collapsed hospital under the traditional symbol of conquest: U.S., Canadian, U.N., Haitian, and French flags.  Photo: Beverly Bell. •

Post-earthquake Haiti is often portrayed in the international media, by some international humanitarian organizations, and by the U.S. government as a nation of victims whose future depends on the largess of the international community.

A more accurate portrayal is that a large and diverse social movement is highly mobilized to participate in rebuilding a country that won’t resemble Haiti as it was. The movement is continuing in the tradition of awareness-raising, organizing, and mobilizing that it commenced during slavery times, and which it has never ceased, even during the most brutal dictatorships. The core agenda has remained constant. With new post-earthquake particulars, it includes:

1.) Opening the space for participatory democracy. Citizens – all citizens - have to be allowed voice, decision-making, and power to develop future policies and programs which will, after all, impact them more than anyone. Haiti being a democracy in name, the government must serve the people and be accountable to them. Yvette Michaud, an organizer with the National Committee of Peasant Women, said, “If Haitians want to have a better future, we are the ones who must decide what that future is and construct it.”

2.) An essential corollary to the first point, restoring power to the Haitian government. Today Haiti is a literal protectorate, its parliament having voted in mid-April to turn its power over to the Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti, a wholly illegitimate body. The commission’s 18-month mandate is to determine Haiti’s reconstruction model, e.g. to create the country’s future. The membership of the ever-expanding group is 50% foreigners, who literally buy their seat at the table: either their government or institution donated $100 million or more since the earthquake, or it cancelled $200 million or more in debt. The only power left the Haitian government is veto by the executive, which power everyone knows that President Preval won’t use. Should the next president choose to use this power, there are other vehicles of control, such as the World Bank being the fiscal sponsor of the process, which means it has oversight over all the international aid of governments, financial institutions, and major agencies.

The members are elected by no one and are accountable to no one. They don’t have to publish any reports or make any statements. There’s no number a Haitian citizen can call to find out what they’re doing, no office to whom they can lobby. U.S. Special Envoy Bill Clinton co-chairs the commission along with Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive. This naked colonialism must be replaced by the power of the elected government.

3.) Ensuring women’s and children’s rights, security, and well-being. This must be front and center in the fragile and dangerous post-catastrophe environment.

4.) Providing permanent housing for the homeless and displaced, who the U.N. estimates at almost one in five.

5.) Putting central focus on providing for social needs. Besides housing, people need food, potable water, health care, education, and work with a living wage.

6.) Rebuilding under a new paradigm of economic justice, one which breaks free of the old path in which more than 50% of the people live on less than $1 a day.

7.) Privileging peasant agriculture. Rural farmers comprise 65% to 80% of the population who can barely survive, and who produce only 45% of the food needs of the population. It’s critical to invest substantial resources in restoring the agricultural sector. Just trade policies which protect domestic production are an essential component.

Below, Fils-Aimé tells how Haiti got in the shape it’s in and what is necessary for an alternative reconstruction.

“Haiti’s problems didn’t begin with this earthquake. Haiti began [as in independent nation] in 1804 with a system of exclusion in which a minority was in league with the French colonists. The people of this minority were already big property owners and slave owners when Haiti was a colony - people like Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Henri Christophe, who played a key role in the Independence and in driving Haiti after the Independence. That is to say, class divisions were already existent, so when they took power they developed the system to benefit the minority.

“So from 1804 until today, we’ve had a class system in which a small minority controls all the wealth of the country, while the majority suffers every kind of misery imaginable. And, unlike in many countries in which the wealthy ruling minority develops a national policy for the country’s advancement, in Haiti in general, every government that’s come to power has taken sides with the dominant class and doesn’t make the slightest effort to develop the country. That’s allowed misery to compound upon misery. That’s led to a small group of wealthy today investing its money in foreign countries, in the Dominican Republic, in Jamaica, in the United States. They leave the country in this condition.

“The earthquake of January 12 gave us a lesson. It let us know the limits of this rotten system, a system that can’t be fixed anymore, and it made us see once again the weakness of this government. The government is protecting its own economic interests and its own power, and submitting to the international community which gives the government that power and its blessing.

“The government hasn’t used this event as an opportunity to move the country forward. On the contrary, it’s let everything fall into the hands of the international community, especially the American government. But the American government isn’t here to defend the interests of the Haitian people; it’s defending its own interests. Capitalists do what they do to make more money. They have political and strategic interests. The American governments and Western powers are profiting from the weakness and absence of the vision of the Haitian state.

“Political change is necessary for Haiti to make any progress. But the traditional political class doesn’t agree with this kind of change. On the contrary, members of that class are all restavèk, indentured child servants, of the international community.

“The reconstruction plan is their [the traditional economic class and Western powers’] plan. It isn’t the people’s plan. For us, it’s a false plan, first because the money that was pledged isn’t arriving; second because all the decisions are being made by foreign countries; and third because the plans are to build houses and buildings and roads, but not to build a new system. What we need is real agrarian reform, reform of the health care and educational systems, and another civic system in which there can be real participation by the grassroots majority.

“Real development has to do with the path the nation wants to take, how a country thinks, the participation of the majority. Development doesn’t mean a lot of huge buildings. We don’t need that or billions and billions of dollars. Today, for example, you see schools that were made of cement that were destroyed, so they’ve recreated the same schools under nice big tents, and they’re working.

“People have to have power in their own hands and they have to be organized. With the country’s preexisting resources and solidarity of people in other countries, we’ll have the power to reconstruct.

“The thing to do is to help the people think, understand, analyze. This seems a little abstract but it’s really not, because when people finally take power, they’ll have the will power and the real capacity to change things. We’re helping groups strengthen themselves so they can know we don’t have to wait to get our reward in Heaven. We’re teaching that it’s human beings that created the system that makes them poor, and it’s human beings who can destroy that system. They’re the ones who carry the burden, and they’re the ones who can bring about the solution.

“A few drops of water makes a brook, a brook makes a stream, and a stream make a river. The work we’re doing now, little by little, will grow to encompass the majority of the people in the country. Working together, that majority will create change so they can control the politics and the economic and political affairs of the country.

“I have so much hope for the Haitian people, who are a rebellious people. They’ve been used by others ever since the first battle, by those who took control after 1804. They’ve continued to fight, and they’ve continued to be used a lot. I have hope that one day people won’t let themselves be used anymore. My hope is that, as long as there are people who are being exploited, there will be struggle, and as long as there is struggle, there will be victory.”

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Jonas Deronzil is a farmer from the village of Mogé in Haiti’s fertile Artibonite Valley, and one of about 2,000 members of a production and marketing cooperative. Here he analyzes the problems Haitian small producers face, notably U.S. food imports, and proposes alternatives.

I am a peasant planter, that’s all I do. From 1974 when I got out of school, I attached myself to my hoe so I could earn my bread. I’ve been farming for 36 years. My parents were planters too, my whole family going all the way back.

• Jonas Deronzil and daughter clean this year's meager bean crop. Photo: Beverly Bell. •

Before the 1980s, farmers could work on the strength of their courage. But since 1986 especially, when Jean-Claude [Duvalier] fled, through the government of [Gen. Henri] Namphy in 1988, rice has fallen flat in the country. The cost of everything is rising. The cost of manual labor is rising. They’ve had to leave a lot of their land fallow. What you harvest, you can’t sell for enough money to cover your costs. Peasants have had go to Port-au-Prince. That’s one of the causes for the expansion of slums throughout Port-au-Prince. Peasants are discouraged, the government doesn’t do anything to encourage their production.

Since foreign rice has invaded Haiti, we plant our rice but we can’t sell it. The foreigners have all the possibilities: they have water, they have machinery, they have easy access to fertilizer and other inputs. They can grow their rice in quantity. The peasants, poor devils, we spend a lot to grow it, but we can’t sell it. Sometimes we have to go to the loan sharks just to get enough money to survive.

We had a bad rice harvest this year, we didn’t get a lot of rice. We were already in a black misery by the time all the cast-off rice came here after the earthquake of January 12. But with the rice they’re dumping on us, it’s competing against ours and soon we’re going to fall into an even deeper hole.

This country has water, it has land. They used to call this country the pearl of the Antilles, today they call us the garbage bin of the Antilles. This country has been sold off.

They’re investing in the capital, but they don’t do anything to promote agriculture. What we need from the aid is agricultural machinery, is the means to collect water, ways to clean out our irrigation systems, fertilizer, technicians to help us, outlets to sell our produce, cheap places to buy seeds. Sending us big quantities of rice is not our solution.

We have to be able to work. I plant peas, corn, and rice. But I’m just growing dust.

I’m going to plant my rice this year, the same amount I normally plant or maybe less. When things are as hard as they are now, I can’t be sure that I’ll be able to buy seeds or anything else I need for the harvest. Maybe I’ll be able to buy two sacks [of seeds].

Our pea harvest was bad this year. But we don’t have any agronomists or technicians to help us. I don’t think we even have agricultural labs in this country. We can’t get any solutions. The government is absent.

Peasants have had to stop raising animals, too, because so much meat is being imported; when peasants go to the market with their little animal it doesn’t bring any kind of a reasonable price.

The rice they’re sending won’t be forever. They might start having problems back home, and then what? When they don’t give it to us anymore, are we all going to die? They have to help us produce.

That’s our situation today. If we keep going like this, there’s one chance for the future of this country: to perish. I’ll say that to anyone, including our bum of a president. I’d say the same thing to him.

If our national production were valued, if we got what we needed to produce, we could have another Haiti tomorrow. It could be more beautiful, more prosperous. We’d have order, discipline, security.

RACPABA [the Cooperative Farming Production Network of the Lower Artibonite] gives us support, watches out for us. They buy from us and sell for us, it’s a cooperative for both production and commerce. They help us: they work for us, let us mill our rice and corn, they help us get inputs, they give us credit that we only have to pay back when we’ve harvested. If it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t survive. But they’re just local.

I would like to tell the leaders the way things should be done. Everyone needs to participate. But the government doesn’t pay any attention to the peasants. They’re thinking about the well-off, not the bad-off. They’re just watching their own backs. But the poor class is dying of hunger, we need people thinking of us. The [earthquake] victims are getting a few grains, but what about the rest of us?

Here’s what Jonas Deronzil has to say to the U.S. government: your policies are bad. Help us produce, don’t give us food. We’re not lazy. We have water. We have land, especially in the Artibonite. Give us seeds, give us material. Don’t give us rice, we don’t need it. Our country can produce rice. If we’re short, we’ll let them know. There’s a lot of things I’d like to tell the American government but I don’t know where to find them. But if I could find the Americans, I’d tell them that.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

If one positive thing has come from the earthquake of January 12, it is the greater inclusion of Haiti in the human family. True, the catastrophe has brought out of the woodwork many scoundrels – individuals, corporations, agencies, and governments – looking to gain wealth and power off of poverty and disaster. But it has also cracked open many hearts and brought solidarity from people everywhere who view themselves as citizens of the world.

•Marisol Baez (in headscarf) helping earthquake survivors determine their plans for their camp. Photo: Beverly Bell.•

One group of women and men who already viewed themselves that way is the Movement of Dominican-Haitian Women (MUDHA by its Spanish acronym). These Dominicans of Haitian ancestry, together with allies who have joined the group, have long been engaged for rights of Haitians in the Dominican Republic by battling mistreatment of cane cutters and others. Today they are hard at work outside the town of Léogâne, close to the earthquake’s epicenter. There they support three orphanages, some peasant groups, and three women-run internally displaced people’s camps (including the Petite Rivière Shelter Camp described in our August 25 article, “Part of the Dream for National Reconstruction: Haitian Refugee Camps Model Future Society”.)

MUDHA is helping create a dignified, education-filled, participatory, and even joyous experience for earthquake survivors. MUDHA provides staff, shelter, medical care, food, and other resources. In the camps, they conduct trainings in first aid, health care, natural disaster, environment, manufacturing of jewelry and household products for sale, and small business. They facilitate sessions where the displaced people plan priorities for their camp, and others where they articulate their dreams and goals for their and their country’s future.

Their work in the community integrates singing, dancing, and a spirit of celebration. It is based on respect, emphasis on women’s participation and power, and lots of affirmation of the community and its members.

One reason MUDHA’s work is so effective is that the team supports local leadership, instead of leading. It also fortifies the strength and power of women.

It is our hope that the women and men of MUDHA may soon be able to leave their tents and go back home, like the displaced people they are supporting. Would that the Haitian and U.S. governments, U.N., and other international agencies be moved by the same spirit of care and compassion – not to mention respect for the right to housing guaranteed by the Haitian constitution and the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights – as MUDHA, and begin meeting the needs of the vast homeless population for permanent housing.

Marisol Baez, a 23-year member of MUDHA who has been in Haiti since the week of the earthquake, tells of the work.

We at MUDHA [the Movement of Dominican-Haitian Women] came from the Dominican Republic to work in Haiti on January 16th, four days after the earthquake. We spent a week carrying victims to the hospitals, helping rescue people under the rubble, whatever we could do. Then we went back to the Dominican Republic and put out a call on the radio that anyone willing could join the ranks to help Haiti. In about a week, we came back with 115 people and 20 vehicles. We came with doctors, orthopedists, gynecologists, all kinds of doctors so we could help Haiti, because Haiti is our country, too. We came from the womb of Haitian families. It’s true that we were born in Dominican Republic, but we’re part of Haiti.

The reason we chose to stay and work in Léogâne is that when our director Sonia Pierre was walking around the town, two people came up to her and told her that there was an orphanage here and the children were in bad shape. Also, we saw that all the international organizations were concentrated in Port-au-Prince; Léogâne had nothing.

The orphanage was in rubble. It collapsed in the earthquake and the children were in peril. They were hungry, they needed clothes, they were abandoned. So we stayed with them. We’re working with the children to do everything that needs doing. We also have doctors who provide care to the community, and each week we bring them in to take care of the kids.

We’re working with three orphanages now, including an all-girls’ orphanage. We also work with some peasant councils helping them with seeds and equipment to clear off the rubble. We’re also supporting the women in three camps.

These camps are mixed-gender, but they’re all run by women. We think that women are the pillar of the home and society. All the load is on their shoulders: the load of the children, the load of marketing. They’re hard-working. People have to take off their hats off to them. Men are always there to help, but the women are the ones with the most responsibility. I think God reserves something for the Haitian people, but especially for women. I think God will deliver Haitian women someday because of what they do.

There aren’t any camps in Haiti that are all women, but there are other camps that are run by women. I think that’s the reason the three camps you see here are different. We don’t need male-dominated [camp management] councils. They have one or two women on them and things don’t get where they are supposed to go, like food rations. Women are better at managing.

We’re working with women in the camps on health, micro-enterprise, education, and a lot of other things. We do classes on protecting the environment. We do preventative health care trainings with the women and children because health care isn’t only when you’re sick and go to the hospital. We’re giving training on women’s personal hygiene. We’re also bringing in doctors to treat the women, and they’re especially finding a lot of cases of vaginal infections because of the [contaminated] water. We’re also training on first aid and on natural disasters so that if something else happens in Haiti, people can know how to help others like the elders and the children.

We’re doing courses with the women so that they can start their own small business, start bringing income into the household so they aren’t dependent on men. The women are eager to learn. They want to find the means to start businesses so they can sell. They can trade, they can do everything.

We always tell the people: because you’re poor, the last things to lose in your life are your dignity and hope. We tell them to be brave, because they can’t let foreigners come and do everything for them. If they don’t have tents yet, we tell them to do their best to find a tarp or something so they can have a shelter. We tell them they’re not obliged to beg or to sell their bodies as women. They can do some marketing so they can survive.

Dignity is a beautiful thing. When you have dignity, you can talk loud and you can walk tall and no one can touch you. You don’t need to let people mess with you because you’re a woman. You have to be strong. You need to respect yourself first so others can respect you, because if you don’t respect yourself, no one will. We always do workshops on this topic with them. I’m so happy with the women in the camp because they take their dignity very seriously.

For Mother’s Day, we got 150 tents for all the families that only had makeshift housing before. So things are getting better. Not all at once, because the tents are not houses where people should be living. When it’s too hot, the people almost pass out in the tents. But in any case, things are getting better.

We’re using alternative strategies on security because things are getting out of hands on the question of violence against women [in other camps]. There are so many rapes in those places, including a 12-year-old girl who was raped by four men until she passed out and was hospitalized. When all the dust settles, we won’t be able to imagine how many girls and women there will be with diseases and other problems. Men are putting guns to women’s heads and knives to their bodies. If someone can do that, it’s because they are either crazy or sick. The Haitian authorities need to start addressing this issue.

Where we work, there are men’s councils who do vigilance to protect the women because these camps are made up mostly of families. Not just anyone can come in. They always ask you who you are and what you need. They keep a careful eye out. Now we’re giving women whistles, so that if they’re being attacked they can start blowing and everyone will know that there’s violence going on so they’ll come to the rescue and identify the person doing it.

I do this work as a woman because I was born and grew up in a neighborhood in the Dominican Republic where Haitians were sugarcane cutters. I’m part Haitian because my grandfather and my grandmother were Haitians. I feel like Haiti and the Dominican Republic are like an animal with two wings; it’s one animal separated in two parts.

When I was growing up, I saw my grandmother frying dough to sell so she could send her children to school. My grandmother was a respected woman, a hard-working woman. So was my mother. Since I was little, I was always helping people, especially the old Haitian cane cutters who were stuck away and forgotten in little rooms.

I joined MUDHA when I was 19 because they were working with Haitian cane cutters. Now I’m 42. If you’re part of MUDHA in the Dominican Republic, you have to be careful because they can easily kill you. MUDHA is always defending Haitians against bad treatment so they view us as devils.

I feel like I can help Haiti, so that’s why I’m here. I have courage and I can help.

As for the future of this country… We have to keep on struggling. Awhile ago I said that the last things someone should lose are hope and dignity. The Haitian people are a strong people; they’re courageous. This is what I wish for the Haitian people: to start being united, to start tearing down the walls in front of us. One thing I believe is that Haiti will be a new, beautiful country because Haitian women are strong and they’ll put all their strength into working for Haiti. If we put our hands together, we can overcome any obstacle.

Many thanks to James Eliscar for translating this interview.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan Ayisyen (Heads Together Small Producers of Haiti) is the oldest peasant group in Haiti, born covertly in 1970 during the Duvalier dictatorship. Today Tèt Kole is one of Haiti’s two national peasant farmer movements, with more than 55,000 members in all ten departments of the country. Here, members talk about their problems, needs, and priorities for their future.*

Silion Pierre, national coordinating committee of Tèt Kole:

• Tèt Kole members head into a banana grove for a meeting. Photo: Roberto (Bear) Guerra. •

How to improve the lives of peasantry? We are always battling for decentralization, the principal problem to be resolved. Most of those who were killed in the earthquake were peasants who went to Port-au-Prince to search for bread and work and a better life. Because the government doesn’t give anything to the country, we have to go to Port-au-Prince for a better life. Some of those who died were just in Port-au-Prince for an identity card or some document. If the country had been decentralized as Tèt Kole has always said it should, the damage of the earthquake wouldn’t have gotten where it did.

Our biggest challenge is to see how Haitian peasants, workers, street vendors, and everyone from the excluded sectors can put themselves together to create another country where the Ayiti Cheri [dear Haiti] that we used to have can return. That’s the work of Tèt Kole. Our idea is to reinforce our strength and capacity to mobilize by bringing together all progressive forces, Haitian and foreign, to make Haiti into another nation, another state, where people can live in security, with food, with education.

Niclaire Auguste, Piatte chapter of Tèt Kole:

We are peasants. Our strength is agriculture. Since January 12, our economy has been so affected. But for God, that’s nothing.

We are organized peasants. If we didn’t have Tèt Kole with us, giving us strength, I don’t know where we’d be today. When you’re organized, you never live alone.

We haven’t been abandoned; we also have friends with us, both Haitian or foreign. So we can’t let the struggle go. It has to go on. I applaud everyone who’s let us know that we peasants aren’t alone, especially since January 12. I applaud all peasants who stand strong in the struggle, especially today when life is so hard after the catastrophe.

Dieudonné Charlemagne, Piatte chapter of Tèt Kole:

We are children of the earth. The earth gives us the food we need to eat, the income we need to send our children to school, everything we need to take care of our lives.

We love agriculture. We love to plant. We love to live as people who’re recognized as citizens of this nation.

So what’s our problem? We don’t have seeds, or when we have them they aren’t producing well. We irrigate a lot of land, but our plants aren’t producing. The banana trees are sick, the melons and peas are barely producing, but we don’t know why. We don’t have agricultural extension offices or anyone to come tell us why our plants are diseased or why they’re not producing and what we should do about it.

We build our canals with our own hands so we can irrigate when the rain doesn’t fall. When the rain does come, it bursts the canals and the water gets wasted and we don’t have the support to restore the canals, so our crops die. No government comes to help us.

We ask for agricultural system to be improved so we can get some relief. We’re working the lands with picks; we don’t have tractors. We’re working so hard to grow food to send to the cities, but no matter how much we work, we can’t ever get ahead. Nothing we do brings back anything for us peasants. It’s all off our own strength, even though we’re skinny with hunger. No one is supporting us to let us work the way we want so we can make something off it.

Even if we’re peasants, we deserve to live, too. It shouldn’t be that because we’re peasants we’re condemned to death.

As for the catastrophe of January 12, the few who didn’t die have all come back home. We’ve had to welcome lots of relatives to our homes. Those who came with friends, we’ve had to take them in, too.

So much of the aid they’ve been talking about has never gotten beyond Port-au-Prince. In Piatte, we are the aid, we’re the ones who’ve had to supply everything.

Sony Jean-Louis, son of farmers:

We ask the national and international community to help us decentralize our nation. We youth of peasants who are living in the countryside, we go to school but we can’t advance. Why? Every last resource in the country is in Port-au-Prince. All those youth who went to Port-au-Prince to get an education: you see January 12, so many of them died. This is what’s behind the drama of January 12: the government chooses not to realize that there is a rural part of the country. They forget us, they don’t consider us human beings.

Take our hand! Support the youth! Give us schools and training. Put some of those resources in the countryside to help the youth of Haiti, including those in rural areas, live.

Vales Gaspard, Piatte chapter of Tèt Kole:

All the small producers in the countryside, they tighten their belts, they work, they buy a cow, they buy a goat and sell the goat, they say they’re off to buy a couple of rooms in Port-au-Prince to see if they can get education for their children because there’s none here. When they get to Port-au-Prince, they build their houses poorly because they don’t have any economic means to build better. When a catastrophe comes, they’re the ones who suffer.

Countries are sending money to Haiti. There’s money to develop the country. Where is it? If foreign powers want to come help us, if they really care about what’s happening here, the first thing they should do is help us reconstruct the land. No country can survive without agriculture. If farmers are unemployed, what’s the country going to eat? Nothing.

They should send engineers and technicians. They should come give us technical support to show us how to produce food: Congo peas, cassava, bananas, vegetables. We need schools, hospital, credit, the chance to buy our seeds and tools at a good price, community stores where we can market.

President Aristide said that we should live in a way that everyone is recognized as someone. We have the means for that.

We’ve buried all our children who died in the earthquake. Now those who’ve come back to our homes, we’re taking care of them. What we have we’re giving to others. You government officials, you do this, too.

* A note on the gender balance in this article: there is none. In two meetings with Tèt Kole representatives involving 39 people, only three women were present. Others may not have been invited by community leaders, or they may not have been able to leave their household and child care responsibilities, or their male partners and fathers may have dissuaded them from attending. The interviewer repeatedly asked the few women who were present to speak, but only one did at the very end of a meeting; it is not included here because she addressed a different topic. When this writer meets with peasant women alone, they have much to say, but the dynamic changes dramatically in mixed groups.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

While it should never be the case that a high percentage of the Haitian population remains living in refugee camps seven months after the earthquake, still camp residents have managed to create in a few of those camps a small-scale model of the type of future society that many would like to see. This includes democratic participation by community members; autonomy from foreign authority; a focus on meeting the needs of all; dignified living conditions; respect for rights; creativity; and a commitment to gender equity.

The Petite Rivière Shelter Center (CHHPR by its French acronym) camp, near the epicenter of the earthquake outside Léogâne, contains some of those elements. For one thing, it is run by a group of women whose full attention is on the well-being and dignity of the community.

• Elizabeth Senatus is coordinator of a community-run, women-led refugee camp that emphasizes creativity and cultural expression. Photo: Beverly Bell.  •

Another notable factor is that the camp was started and remains run by Haitians, both those directly impacted and grassroots allies. Most Haitian camps are managed with the heavy involvement, if not leadership, of foreigners, either non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or individuals. Certainly, outside help has proven crucial to these displaced people who frequently struggle on the edge of survival. But in Haiti’s thousand-plus camps, that help has all too often come in the form of management that represses Haitian decision-making and participation, as well as the potential for community advocacy for a systemic response to the crisis based on justice for homeless survivors.

Part of what makes the Petite Rivière Shelter Center camp work so well is that it is composed of members of a preexistent community which relocated en masse after the earthquake. Relations are based on knowledge, if not always full trust, among individuals. The relationships have made it possible for governing committees to quickly emerge and function well, and have allowed agreement on a set of rules to maintain calm and order. Strangers trying to enter the space are questioned and may not be allowed in, thus offering security from violence and theft.

Another advantage this camp has is its physical environment; it sits in fields under a grove of lush mango trees, in a clean, quiet, rural area. Elsewhere, more than a million people are forced to lodge in smog-choked median strips amidst whizzing traffic; in remote, broiling deserts; or in overcrowded urban spaces with no sanitation or utilities. Survivors remain in these inhumane locales because neither their government nor any agency has initiated better options for them, and they have no funds to make other plans on their own.

Elizabeth Senatus is an unemployed journalist who now serves as general coordinator of the Petite Rivière Shelter Center. Below is her description of how the camp functions.

This camp started on January 12, the day of the earthquake. In shock, everybody in the area went to sleep in a field without sheets or anything. They spent three days like that, affected emotionally and psychologically because of the strong aftershocks. Some people were scared because of the rumors that it was the end times, that God was coming. Some didn’t even bother to find out if their houses were collapsed or if they had people who died; they just went to the field. After four days, they came to this area under these mango trees; they made little houses out of sheets.

I heard that these people were abandoned and humiliated. I use my leadership and met two or three friends who were from Léogâne. We decided we couldn’t let this situation continue. I asked them to help form this committee, and that’s how we started.

One thing that makes this camp different from most others is that we formed the management committee - not an NGO but young volunteers who believe that Haiti is a country like any other. What’s also different here is the close collaboration between the members of the committee. It has 16 members; I’m the general coordinator and we also have a general secretary, plus coordinators of other committees like human rights and civil protection, public relations, communications, and evangelism. We didn’t wait for people to come give us orders; we organized it.

The camp management committee was formed by invitation quickly because we were in an emergency situation. It wasn’t a favorable time to have elections because it was a disaster.

We’ve used what resources we have. We don’t wait for millions to arrive, we just create. There’s lots of creativity. We’ve done extraordinary things with the means we have at hand. That’s how we established a children’s space, for example. There are Canadian military who were building an orphanage behind us, and another woman and I went and asked them for materials for the children. They gave materials, some tools, and a case of blue plastic tarps. CARE gave us tarps to create a children’s space, too, and a podium. We used cement blocks from the collapsed houses to build that space. We use that space for dancing and theater, too.

We borrowed a drum from a vodou priest. We had people dancing with the drum, like an old lady who lost her son. You know in Haiti, folklore is a big deal. The drum is the sign of music and the sign of happiness; it allows people to recreate. The drum makes everybody dance; even if you have problems, you dance. We started the folkloric group dancing like this in the ancient way, everybody dancing and singing like crazy with no control. We had kids who went down to dance for May Day by the sea; we even signed a contract with a team from Canada for one of the little girls to go to participate in a cultural event in Canada in August.

We had people living in misery under little sheets. You know the world was seeing Haiti’s image through little sheets. And it kept raining. People from elsewhere asked me, “Elizabeth, how can they survive like this?” I said, “It’s all because of the drum.”

At that time we had more than 150 people, and every time it rained all the people had to go like sardines under one big tarp that someone had borrowed to create a health center. So we used the tarps the Canadians gave us to create spaces for kids to sleep with their parents. Later MUDHA [the Movement of Dominican-Haitian Women] approached an international agency and helped us find tents.

Besides the drumming and dancing, we do theater to help people’s state of mind, popular theater that expresses what’s happening in the community. We help farmers organize, we have a women’s group, we have an education space for kids because a lot of schools were destroyed and some of the kids had never gone to school. We don’t follow the same pedagogy as a formal school because we lack the means. We do something like the club where the kids can learn and recreate. We have workshops [like jewelry-making] where people learn skills that can help them economically.

We made uniforms for May 18 [Flag Day], and with our sense of patriotism we went to the street. The kids wore red and blue uniforms [the colors of the Haitian flag] to give a lesson to hypocritical NGOs and an apathetic state who’s not responding to our needs. We showed them that what our ancestors left us as our heritage, we still have it. The kids marched in the street, singing the national anthem, and everyone – parents, people from the diaspora, students and teachers from other schools – accompanied us in the streets. People thought that the organizing had to have been done by a big school in Léogâne; they couldn’t believe that a camp of displaced people could do that.

Like I said, we use whatever resources we can find. For example, for the dance trainer and the two drummers, we pay their transportation fees to come here by motorcycle. We collect money between ourselves to do it because we don’t have money from NGOs or from the government. We’ve never even been visited by a government representative, not even once after January 12. We’ve told other camps with committees not to wait with a begging bowl but to create, to go out looking for what they need.

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The women’s organization Shining Star came about when I sat down with several women who were dancing together. They exchanged about their lives, about what they used to do when they went to the market together. Men were sitting around not participating, so one afternoon I said to the women, “Why don’t we form a women’s organization?” We did it. Our first activity was for Mother’s Day, with all the mothers of the camp. CARE helped us find 200 gifts for 200 mothers. We also got support from a German mobile clinic and MUDHA. We did theatre; the mothers were in it. The kids and adults danced, and we had a buffet where everyone ate. This was Shining Star’s first action as a women’s organization.

The women of Shining Star are shadow advisers to the camp committee. Most of the camp committee is women, too; the men are a little apathetic. You know that society is made up of men and women and we need the balance, but you also know that Haitian women are really put down. It has taken so much effort for women to become doctors and lawyers and such. We want to hold that balance. But we don’t exclude the men.

We know that in this camp, within the families under the tents, women are being abused by their husbands. This is the reality even though these same women stand up when we do women’s activities.

[Regarding rape] I would say this area is calm. The residents were living together before. They know each other, there are things they won’t do. If something like a rape of a woman or girl were to happen, it would be by someone from somewhere place.

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We have a mission here to prevent children and young girls from falling into danger. We don’t allow young girls to have their own tents here that would attract young men and facilitate rape. Here kids stay with their parents in their household. That’s how we try to limit sexual violence.

I think it’s true that the role women play in this camp make it different, but I don’t think that male chauvinists see it that way. Frankly, if we didn’t have a group of women in this committee we would have failed already. Holding together people who are living under a piece of sheet, homeless, is not easy. The men are crossing their arms and waiting. The women get dressed and go out to see what resources we can find, while the men are waiting to see what we bring back.

We’ve done so much with this site. When we look at the conditions in some of the camps in Port-au-Prince, we’d have to say that we’ve created a model for how things could be in camps. Others could look at our way of organizing the camp and use it to do something in a bigger scale. We think that our camp could form part of the dream for national reconstruction.

It’s about understanding, patience, educational, training. It’s also about wisdom, credibility and all that to succeed. Yes, you could say we’re a model.

Many thanks to Agathe Jean-Baptiste for translating this interview.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

With the motto “Providing a preferential option for the poor in health care,” Partners in Health offers an unusual model of health care provision. Its mission is both medical and moral.

Partners in Health is widely recognized as changing the potential for health for low-income people and countries throughout the world. Partners in Health’s extraordinary success comes from its philosophies regarding health and justice, which include a belief in the power and dignity of the patient; a commitment to health care as a human right; and an understanding that true health for the poor can only come through challenging the poverty which causes so much illness. The success of the group also comes from the zeal with which it pursues its philosophies through hands-on medical and social care in several countries.

• Partners in Health provides free health care in eleven hospitals and four displaced people's camps  throughout Haiti. Photo courtesy of Partners in Health. •

In a rare interview, Loune Viaud tells about Partners in Health’s Haiti program, Zanmi Lasante, or Friends of Health. Loune serves as Director of Operations and part of the strategy and planning team in Haiti.

Beverly Bell: Tell us about Partners in Health, how it constitutes an alternative in health care and especially how its philosophy has contributed to bringing about another model of care in Haiti.

Loune Viaud: We started in Haiti more than 25 years ago. We realized right away that you can’t talk about health without talking about the social aspects of health: justice and rights. That’s why we try to embrace a lot of social elements underlying health. When a patient is sick, we don’t see the sick person only, we see the environment and community they came from. After they leave the hospital and go back home, will they have water to drink? Do they have a place to live? Do they have food to eat? Can they send their children to school? Do they have work? We try to touch on all of it: job, home, nutrition, malnutrition, agriculture. We try to touch on schooling and sanitation, meaning potable water.

That’s why we don’t just consider ourselves a health organization, although we have a big medical team: doctors, nurses, pharmacists, lab technicians, etc. We also have community health workers, outreach agents, and agricultural agents who live in the communities and strengthen those communities.

BB: We know that Partners in Health’s work is not only a social program, that it’s tied to the idea of transformation, to the idea that as long as people are living with injustice and inequality they won’t enjoy good health. I understand that people that in the village of Cange, where Partners in Health has been for so many years, really trust the group, and that this is one of the reasons you’ve have better success with people following HIV/AIDS treatment programs than even the National Institute for Health. How is power connected to the issues of treatment and the relationship to the patient?

LV: I don’t want to start rejoicing about what you call success because we still have a lot of work to do. It’s forward, forward, forward. Matter of fact, every time we see the numbers going down, we make more efforts to see if we can get them to zero.

I can’t say that we change the lives of the people completely, but we’ve seen improvement.
Let’s take for instance an HIV patient. We know that if that person can’t afford medicine, can’t eat, can’t send their kids to school, doesn’t feel that they’re heard as a person and seen only as a patient, that person’s not going to get well. But when people are sick and know that they can count on an organization to help them send their children to school, then they can concentrate on improving their lives, which means taking their medications. When people are sick and know they don’t have to keep on drinking the river water they used to drink but can drink potable water instead, when they don’t have to live in a straw hut in poor sanitary conditions and get bitten by mosquitoes anymore… even though physically they’re not totally well, morally they know that they’re recognized as a human being.

I think what makes us successful is our accompaniment program. Take tuberculosis, a disease of poverty. When a person comes in and tests positively for tuberculosis, what we do is send an accompanier to visit that person’s home to see the social conditions they’re living in. If that person sees they need a new house, we work with the community to get them a house that, as we say, can’t fool the rain. In terms of water, we set up filters or other catchment and treatment systems. The accompanier goes to visit the sick person each day, assures that the patient takes their medications, assures that if the patient has a problem that he or she listens. Even if the accompanier can’t solve the problem, the very fact that the person can talk about it and someone can listen without judging is really important.

Well, at that point, if the accompanier can’t solve the problems by him or herself, he or she will go talk to the supervisor in the hospital. The accompanier becomes an advocate for the sick.

Health also goes alongside education. Early on we realized that the best thing we can do in a community is to send children and the youth to school so that they don’t spend their time in the streets. What we did, starting in Cange, was to create a school with trained teachers, books, and at least one hot meal for the kids so they can concentrate and study. The parents don’t have to worry about where they’ll find money to pay. Now we have 15 schools throughout the Plateau Central. We have thousands of students, children who go to study, sometimes just primary school if that’s what the town has, though in Cange the school goes up to 12th grade.

We also send young people to study in universities in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, or we send them to study nursing in [the Haitian towns of] Léogane and Gonaives. We help them find scholarships to go to Europe for specialized studies.

BB: From the perspective of Partners in Health, what do Haitians need to be a people with good health?

LV: Access. One of the things that really frustrates me and makes me mad is to find someone who’s walked eight or ten hours to get to our hospital in Cange, sometimes in terrible pain. For that person to go through what it takes to get there, you can imagine how advanced the sickness must be. Sometimes it’s almost too late. If that person could stay where they lived, they could go to the clinic or the dispensary early on, without having to go far from the community.

That’s what people need: access to care. But I’m not just talking about access through proximity. It’s not just about building a hospital or a health clinic nearby and then asking people to pay. If the care or the medication is expensive, the people won’t get it.

It’s access, access, access. It’s the right of people to heath care when they need it, drinking water, sanitation. If you offer these things that are far away or that people can’t pay for, it doesn’t serve them. They have the right to have their needs met, quantitatively and qualitatively.

BB: So does that mean that everything that Partners in Health does is free of charge?

LV: I always avoid saying that our services are free. Health care is expensive. Someone pays. But not the poor, because they can’t afford it. We don’t want the poor to pay with the little that they have. We don’t want them to say, ‘’I don’t have money, so I’m not going to the doctor.’’ We don’t ever want that to happen.

People pay with what they have. Sometimes they carry on their heads bananas, fruits they grow, they bring a chicken, you understand. They bring what they can so that they can pay. But we always struggle that it’s not the poor who pays for the care.

BB: If we’re looking at structural change, we know that at the end of the day it can’t be done through NGOs, in Haiti or anywhere else. NGOs can’t replace the state. But all of us who know Haiti know that right now the state isn’t fulfilling or can’t fulfill its responsibility. Are you doing advocacy vis-à-vis the state to make it assume its responsibility to the citizens, now or in the future?

LV: The state is the one who’s in place, legally, to respond to the needs of the people. What Partners in Health tries to do is to collaborate with the state so that if there’s weakness in one aspect, we can reinforce its efforts, so that down the road it can better meet its responsibility.

We always say that the Ministry of Health is our most important partner. We realized a long time ago that it doesn’t make sense for us to do our own little efforts apart, to build our own hospital or clinic or even separate schools. We insure that everything we do supports and reinforces the Ministry of Public Health, the Ministry of Education, and the Ministry of Agriculture. If there were a Ministry of Housing or Water, we’d support them, too. We don’t invest in separate efforts.

Apart from [Partners in Health’s hospital in] Cange, we work with ten public hospitals. We started supporting the Ministry of Health in these hospitals in 2002. And then, we’ve started building what’s going to be one of Haiti’s best hospitals, in Mirebalais. It will have a training program for residents in a partnership with national medical school. That’s twelve hospitals where we’re working, in all.

For the most part, we’re strengthening the state-run hospitals. But when you take, for instance, the hospitals in [the towns of] St. Nicolas and St. Marc, really Partners in Health provides a lot of staff. We pay for salaries and equipment. We’re really part of managing the hospital with the Ministry.

BB: Please tell us about what’s happened since January 12th. Partners in Health has played an important role after the earthquake, assuring that at least some people have received the care that they need.

LV: January 12th came upon us without warning. We started clinics in four [internally displaced people’s] camps. We have almost 400 employees - doctors, nurses, lab technicians, pharmacy technicians – that we’ve hired since January 12th to provide medical services in these camps.

One of the first things we did after the earthquake was to start supporting the government in the largest hospital, the University Hospital [also known as the General Hospital]. We provided and coordinated volunteers; we came with medications and equipment that they needed. There are fewer and fewer volunteers coming now, but our work continues so people can get the care they need in a hospital, with dignity.

We haven’t signed anything officially with the Ministry of Public Health. It’s really an engagement with the directors of the University Hospital to support the place. We’re not managing it. It falls into our line of work to support what the Ministry is doing.

Also, with other partners we’re creating a foundation, Friends of the University Hospital, to really rebuild the hospital and make it into what it should be. We’re working with the national medical school, too, so students can get training there.

BB: If I understand correctly, Loune, you weren’t trained in health care or management. You came to help at Partners in Health and you got your “doctorate” on the job.

LV: I’ve been at Partners in Health for 22 years. When you start working here, you enter a vocation. You have to love it to do it because it doesn’t pay very much. You do it because you truly believe in the human being. We at Partners in Health treat every person as though it were our own sister, brother, mother, child.

BB: I’m guessing you have a great need of funding.

LV: Like I said, this work is expensive. We’re always looking for people to help pay so the poor don’t have to. We’re looking for partners, as our name implies - as long as they share the philosophy and understand what we’re trying to do. Alone we can’t do this work. It’s the work of many hands. If you look at our logo, it’s hands together.

To support Partners in Health’s work in Haiti, please click here.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Carine Exantus is a 22-year-old university student majoring in social communications. She lost her home, aunt, and cousin in the earthquake of January 12. In “You Need to Hear from the People: Communicating from Haiti’s Refugee Camps” (August 5, 2010),” Carine explains why she has been blogging from the internally displaced people’s camp where she now lives. Here she tells more about daily life in the camps, and why creating permanent housing for the displaced populations is essential.

• The Haitian government response to the mass displacement has been occasionally to move refugees to another set of tents, like the acres of sweltering shelters in the desert pictured here. Photo: Beverly Bell. •

I used to participate in a religious group in a church right near the National Cathedral. The group was having choir practice inside the church at the time of the earthquake. Luckily I hadn’t gone, because about fifteen young people died. We tried to regroup, and we had a priest with us who gave us psycho-social help because at that moment the group was very hard hit. And then I went back to my university to find out what had happened to other young students, asking “Is so-and-so alive? Is so-and-so dead?” We found that a lot of our friends were still alive, though there were also those who died or disappeared.

Even though we lost everything we had, we had relatives and friends who helped us however they could. Those relationships with family and friends helped us; we supported each other. And little by little we got the urgent things we needed.

We weren’t used to sleeping outside under the stars, getting soaked by the rain so that when you get up you and your clothes are drenched. That makes us feel undignified. But we realize that we who survived are privileged, so we can’t just fall into sadness and depression.

You see all these people who lost their houses who don’t have the means to build other houses. In the camp, someone who has a tent is someone who’s found someone to give them a gift; the majority of people are living in tonèl, a little shelter made of a tarp over [four sticks of] wood. They’ve taken a little wood and some nails and they’ve built a little place to live. I can’t say that this is bad because people need a place to stay and no one is doing it for them, so they’re making do the only way they can. But the authorities should have foreseen this.

Especially now that we’re in hurricane season until November… For people who don’t have a good tonèl or tent, when the rains come, they spend the entire night standing up on their two feet. After seven months, people are tired.

Everyone’s primary needs are sanitation, health, bodily needs. Water is hard to get; you have to stand in a line in the sun to get water. They put in port-o-potties, but they don’t come and clean the toilets on time, so people don’t want to use them. You have to watch and see when they’ve just finished cleaning them to use them. In my camp, there are 12 toilets in the front, 12 toilets in the back – 24 total for 4,200 people. Me, when I wake up early, I go to a friend’s house and she lets me use the shower. But in the camp, it’s people themselves who have installed showers with their scarce means, and you can’t use them: you wash just to get dirty again. People hardly use these facilities anymore. Everyone at their tent has a little plastic basin where they throw water over themselves, or they just shower in public from the basin. In my journal I wrote about this: young women suffer sexual aggression because they have to bathe in public.

For food, everybody is getting by the best they can. As far as health goes, two months later, mobile clinics started coming. But now they’re gone. If you have a problem, you have to wake up at 4:00 in the morning to go get in one of the lines in the clinic they’ve set up in the CIMO camp. Then you wait til they open at 8:00. If you’re not there by the time they open, they won’t take you. If you have an emergency problem you have to go to the general hospital, but it’s hard to get care.

The question of security? Ha! They never did anything about that and they still haven’t. Because – I was just talking about the sexual aggression that exists in the camps – there’s all kind of rape happening in the camp. There’s rape, but people don’t want to talk about it publicly because here in Haiti, someone who has been raped is traumatized, and they don’t want people to know.

There’s a lot of theft, you have to watch what you have very carefully. I remember someone gave us a gift of a little chair to sit on, just a little chair. My mother was sitting in it, and she got up to drink some water in the tent, and when she came back, the chair was gone.

Look how Champs de Mars [the giant camp in the central park] is. You can just go in and out because these were public spaces, there are no walls or gates or anything. Anyone can just frequent the camp, whether they live there or not.

Before, we used to have a very big problem. There were escapees from the national prison who put their tents [in Champs de Mars]. When the people in the camp noticed all the trouble these people were causing, they went to the police. The police paid strict attention to the camp for about fifteen days. Every night they would come and arrest some people, which diminished our problem a little.

But the biggest problem we have now from a security perspective is that people come while you’re asleep, slit the tents open, take what they need, and disappear. That hasn’t happened to us, but we’ve talked to people around us who it’s happened to.

People aren’t adapted to live in environments like this. You have to work hard not to get sick. You see children who were normal before January 12, and now you see their color has changed, they’re skinnier, they have bumps all over their skin.

The most urgent need is to move people to a more comfortable place where they won’t be under tonèl or tents anymore. The most important thing is to move them to a different place - not under a tonèl or a tent again [the current government plan involves relocation to new tents], but a better, permanent structure. Put them in little houses so each family can have a place, more or less comfortable, to sleep, to leave their things, because to live you need stability, you can’t be walking around all day with all your belongings under your arms. You have to be able to say, “That is my place, that’s where my possessions are, that’s where I sleep, that’s where my home is.”

For people to evolve, they need to live better. If people can’t sleep well, how can you expect them to think or make any effort or work? People need a normal, stable life. Can they spend the rest of their lives under a tent?

It shouldn’t be this way. When you’ve been hit like this, when you’ve lost everything, there have to be authorities who can help. But people have been left to deal with it all on their own.

I thought that this was a chance for us to think about and change all of the problems we had. It touched us in all ways, and gave us a way to think about doing things differently. But we haven’t seen anyone taking action to really help us, to put together a reconstruction plan or help us with any of our other problems.

Talking about the future is complicated. I wonder if our future isn’t in jeopardy. Because sure, you see a big international presence in Haiti, but the Haitian authorities have disappeared. Sometimes they inform you of projects they’re doing, but you never have concrete proof that they’re doing anything.

If the government were to take responsibility, I won’t say that Haiti would develop, but it would have a radical change. Every day we wake up and think “Haiti has so many problems, Haiti has so many problems.” You don’t hear about any solution, you just see the problems growing.

For [Haitians] with willingness to help… when they don’t see their personal interests supported, they let go of the common interests because they’re so preoccupied with taking care of their own lives. The people who have the means to do so leave, and go somewhere else where they can live better.

We have a lot of work to do. We need to have dialogue so we can tell the international organizations what we need, what problems we have. I’d hope that the Haitian authorities and the international community can collaborate, can have good relations to develop really useful solutions for those who have problems.

UPDATE: In an interview in last week’s article, Carine Exantus told about why she feels it’s important to blog from the refugee camp where she lives. She is not alone. A recently established mobile Telecenter currently moves between six camps, offering computers and blogging potential to as many as 60 youth. The Groupe Medialternatif, which organized the initiative, hopes to make it possible for every camp to have its own blog. You can read more about the project (in French) here.

Thanks to Laura Wagner for translating this interview.

“We’re mobilizing people in the camps and the shantytowns to let them know that getting housing is a right. Our vision is to make the problem of housing a focal point of people’s struggle,” said Reyneld Sanon of the Force for Reflection and Action on Housing (FRAKKA by its Creole acronym).

Grassroots groups in Haiti are developing strategies to respond to one of the greatest lingering crises of many after the January 12 earthquake: homelessness for 1.9 million people whose houses crumbled or were too damaged to occupy. FRAKKA represents one initiative, though still fledgling, to unite grassroots groups and residents of internally displaced people’s camps to win their human right to housing. (For another initiative by the Support Group for the Repatriated and Refugees, see “The Right to Housing in Haiti.”)

• Thousands of internally displaced people live in cramped structures on smog-filled medians between thickly trafficked highway lanes. Photo: Beverly Bell. •

Dotting almost every street and open space in Port-au-Prince, and stretching as far as two hours’ drive out of town, are 1,300 formally recognized camps and many more unrecognized ones. Shelter for this nation of refugees occupy even the most unlikely spots, such as median strips on highways and fields near former dumping grounds of dictators’ bodies. At times, camps comprises no more than a few shaky lean-to’s overtaking a sidewalk; at other times, they cover vast terrain and contain tens of thousands of survivors. The shelters are built with whatever people can find, from cardboard boxes to Styrofoam trays, from plastic advertising banners to strips of imitation Arabic rugs. They offer little to no protection from the pounding night rains, thieves, or rapists.

Sanitary conditions are all but nonexistent. Some offer no latrines at all, while others provide putrid port-o-potties. Standard ‘bathroom’ procedure involves plastic buckets which are then emptied in communal spaces. When it is available at all, getting water with which to wash can involve standing in a long line in the tropical sun. Flies, mosquitoes, and other health risks are ubiquitous.

Loune Viaud, the Haiti Operations Coordinator of Partners in Haiti, told me, “Fortunately, we haven’t had any of the epidemics we’ve all been expecting. We’ve had a few cases of diphtheria, which are normally very rare.” She leaned over to knock on the wood of a window sill. When I asked about a spike in post-earthquake HIV rates, she said, “We don’t yet know, but with all the rape and promiscuity in the camps, there’s no way there couldn’t be.”

Violence and physical insecurity are endemic. The State Department renewed a travel advisory after four Americans were killed in Haiti in three months (though almost as many Americans, 3.6, are killed in a typical week in my town of New Orleans, where the population is only about 5% of the island nation’s). Yet the violence primarily impacts those living in camps and on the streets. The cause of the spike in crime can be found in the proximity and vulnerability of victims, since everything the displaced own is in their makeshift shelters, which have no locks or often even walls. Surrounding families in the camps are as many as thousands of strangers. Women’s and girls’ bodies are similarly unprotected and easily accessed, aggravating high preexisting levels of gender-based violence. The spike in crime can also be traced to growing poverty, frustration, and alienation.

One unemployed woman living in a tent in the shantytown of Carrefour told me, “On the street, in the tent, there is no security. Only God.”

In interview after interview I’ve conducted over six months, people have regularly cited the following priorities for their security: a functioning national judicial system, responsive Haitian police, and fulfillment of basic needs. (The responses do not include, notably, greater U.N. ‘security’, as those troops have been involved in many acts of violence against the population. See “United Nations Attacks Refugee Camp, Protests Mount”). But more than anything, they report, they want and need permanent, secure housing.

Two months into hurricane season, no national or international agency appears to have any plan; except for some 28,000 temporary shelters donated by aid agencies – usually just a fancier tent - the only response has been to move Haitians from one tent city to another. A rainstorm on July 12 provided just one indicator of what might happen in the case of a hurricane. Ripping through camp Corail, a bleak desert plain at the foot of a denuded mountain, hundreds of tents were flattened. Corail is one of the few sites where the government and international agencies took any action around internally displaced people, relocating them form their home-made tents elsewhere to commercial tents there.

Here’s another example of emergency preparedness. Amidst current conditions of desperation, tents and other emergency supplies are being withheld and stockpiled for a future humanitarian crisis - at least by international NGOs like Concern International, if not the United Nations itself. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, in its Weekly Facts and Messages for June 22, wrote "Contingency planning: Plans for the hurricane season already in place by the international response in Haiti include pre-positioning of emergency supplies.”

Over and over in my conversations with camp residents, they ask, “Do they think we’re animals?”

The question can’t be conclusively answered, but some indicators reveal negligence at best, and high disdain at worst. Food aid has been suspended since the end of March, except for ‘food for work’ programs whose benefits typically flow to friends and family of insiders. Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive is reported to have called for the closure of some camps. Forcible governmental removal of residents from camps is on the upswing. The U.N. apparently tried to negotiate a three-month moratorium on expulsions with the Haitian government, but the government only held off for three weeks.

Cheryl Mills, chief of staff for Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, said on May 10, “We've been trying to incentivize people to return to their homes, particularly if their homes have been adjudicated as safe. But people seek to remain in the temporary communities because, as surprising as that might seem outside of Haiti, life is better for many of them now.”

It’s hard to miss the parallel between Mills’ comment and that of former First Lady Barbara Bush when she visited evacuees from New Orleans in the Houston Astrodome just after Hurricane Katrina. "What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is that they all want to stay in Texas. Everybody is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway so this – this is working very well for them."

Mills’ statement is also akin to popular talk among some middle- and upper-class Haitians, and U.N. and NGO employees of ‘false victims.’ ‘False victims’ are those whose lives weren’t fully destroyed by the earthquake and who therefore, apparently, should not be entitled to any benefits. These are people who didn’t lose their own houses but who go hang out at the camps to get whatever aid might be distributed. As I’ve heard it described in an upscale Pétion-ville club and other places far removed from the suffering, these ‘false victims’ are making out like kings from the crisis.

What’s the standard for being a ‘real’ victim? That one lost everything but the clothes on one’s back? That one is a corpse still lying, flattened, in one of many buildings across town that now serves as a mausoleum?

And what would it mean if people’s daily lives were so devastated that they had to go to crowded, muddy, inhumane refugee camps for an upgrade?

Beyond Mills’ and other’s insensitivity around the tremendous needs that all destitute people in Haiti face today, she is flat wrong. Most cannot return home for one of at least three reasons. First, the sites that held most of the cement-block houses that were destroyed during the earthquake remain covered in hills of rubble, so much that no tent can be erected there. Hiring a crew to clear and cart away that rubble can cost upwards of US$50, an impossible figure for most. Second, of those houses that are left standing, many are seriously cracked or otherwise damaged. Third, many families who were renters were kicked out by landlords immediately after the earthquake.

“Aren’t we all Haitians? Is any one of us more a person than anyone else?” one former street vendor inquired. She lost her husband, one-room home, all belongings, and the merchandise through which she made her living in the earthquake, and now lives with three children and a niece in a tent made of four sapling trunks and a ripped blue plastic tarp.

“Since January 12, it’s gotten so serious that we have to make this the focus of our work. Even the Haitian Constitution, Article 22, says that the state has an obligation to provide good housing to people,” said Reyneld Sanon, one of the coordinators of the aforementioned housing advocacy group FRAKKA. Formed two months after the earthquake, FRAKKA is a coalition of about thirty groups, including youth, community, workers’ rights, popular education, and children’s right organizations, plus organizations and leadership committees from camps. While the coalition’s size and strength are still humble, it is representative of a new trend to organize around permanent lodging.

“We’ll take advantage of this moment to remind people that in 1985, Mexico had an earthquake. People organized themselves and forced the state to get them housing to live in,” Sanon continued.

“The problem of housing has always been there. If you look at the slums before January 12, those weren’t houses that anyone should have been living in. As the proverb says in Haiti, ‘These houses can fool the sun, but they can’t fool the rain.’ And the problem isn’t just in Port-au-Prince; it’s a national problem. Peasants need houses, too. If you travel around the county, you can see the status of peasants’ housing. You can see that everyone in the country need better housing.

“People know that we have a state that doesn’t work for them. Generally, the state in this country just works for a small sector who are sucking the people dry, that’s in the employ of the bourgeoisie. The people don’t know they have things like the right to free schooling and to health care, and that the state has to give that to them, since they’ve never gotten these things. But they’ve already paid for them with their taxes and even with foreign loans, because it’s the people who are going to pay those back.

“One of the activities we did on May 1 was a training session with about 30 representatives of different organizations. We gave them two documents, Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 22 of the Constitution. We went into the camps and did meetings with small groups and one-on-one to talk to them about their rights.

“Then we’re doing consciousness-raising on the necessity for people to unify and fight for housing. This leads us to mobilization, where people can take the streets on a regular basis to get their needs met. Sit-ins, too: we already have a calendar of days to do sit-ins in camps and shantytowns.

A press release by FRAKKA from July 27 recognized that, “The definitive solution to the problem of housing is tied to questions of decentralization, management of the nation, and agrarian reform.” I might add a commitment by the government and international community to meet the needs of all. But in the meantime, the statement reads, “We must mobilize… to demand our rights to get good housing and quality of life.”

Thanks to Mark Schuller, Melinda Miles, and Nicole Phillips.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Colette Lespinasse is director of the Support Group for the Repatriated and Refugees (GARR, by its French acronym) in Port-au-Prince. Here are her thoughts on solutions to the crisis in which 1.9 million homeless people are still living in precarious tents and other makeshift structures, six months after the earthquake and almost two months into hurricane season. Colette talks both about the need for the government to guarantee the human right to housing, and how grassroots organizations can create homes in livable communities.

We hear that in the camps there are groups who have started organizing themselves to assert their demands around housing as a right. They’re thinking about alternatives and starting to put pressure on the government to respect those rights.

• Colette Lespinasse says "It’s possible to confront the housing problem if there is political will, if there is mobilization, if there is solidarity." Photo: Beverly Bell.  •

The first thing to do is some education so more people understand that housing is a right. Second is to help people organize to demand these rights from the state. We need a popular movement to mobilize around the question of housing. I think the work that lies before us in the next year is to organize these different groups into a larger movement in Haiti. Because the government isn’t talking about it at all. But a great mobilization of people would make the government prioritize this.

I don’t think there’s a country in this world that can lift itself up if the people themselves don’t mobilize first. We saw this after the earthquake: the group who did the most, who responded and mobilized, was the Haitian people. And they did it without any leaders. Today the leaders of the state haven’t yet called upon the Haitian people, either within the country or in the diaspora. And that’s the greatest resource we have. That’s where the leaders could find solutions for many problems that exist today.

There have been a bunch of [international donor] conferences – at least four - that have been held about Haiti, but the real conference needs to happen here with the people, with all the grassroots sectors: peasant farmers, people from the shantytowns, etc. The government could say, “Look at these problems we have, we can do this, we can’t do this.” And the people could say, “This is what we can do.” This would let us have consensus amongst ourselves.

People need somewhere to live to stay out of the rain, so they don’t get sick, so they don’t get wet, so they can sleep at night. That’s their right. It’s the same as having the right to eat; people need to eat or they’ll die.

This right was already violated in Haiti before the earthquake. When you look at the [precarious] kinds of houses we had, that’s why so many people died during the earthquake. But that right has been even more violated since the earthquake. The situation displaced people are living in, especially in Port-au-Prince and other cities that were touched by the earthquake, is unacceptable. These are not conditions in which anyone should live, like living in the mud after it rains, on top of each other, under a bunch of tents where air doesn’t circulate. There are people in camps right near us who’ve died; they’ve had a heart attack in the night where they couldn’t breathe. Also, the police have been kicking people out from under tents in order to make them go live under [a new set of] tents.

Right now, there’s no social protection for people who’ve lost all their means, who don’t have purchasing power anymore, nor for those people who have become more vulnerable, such as children – there are a lot of children who have lost their parents – nor for people who’ve become handicapped. There are a lot of people who can’t work anymore, who’ve lost a limb, and they’re relying on others now.

Hunger is a big problem, too, since they cut off all the food distribution after March 31. As far as potable water goes, too, there has been a bit of an effort, so people can find a little water to drink - even though they’ve announced they’re going to cut that off, too, that people will have to buy water from now on.

We can also tell you that we’ve recorded many cases of violence, especially violence against women, like men beating their wives and cases of sexual abuse in the camps.

There are camps that have 60,000 people, 70,000 people. That’s a town. The police have to organize themselves somehow to watch over these communities, but they’re nowhere visible. People are complaining that they never see the state authorities visiting the camps.

We need a special program of protection so that those people can live. The government bears primary responsibility because the Haitian people depend on them, and they need to safeguard the rights of their people. The others – the U.N., other international organizations – they can come give support, but they can’t take the place of the state. Sometimes we wonder if the government really exists. You don’t see it, you don’t hear its voice, you don’t see it in action.

At the international level, there are funds that would allow people to find housing without spending a lot of money on interest. For all the money the international community claims they have for Haiti, for all those promises of funds, they ought to invest it in housing.

We in GARR are looking for partners from other countries, like community organizations in the Dominican Republic and other parts of Latin America who have put pressure on their own leaders to fix these problems. We’re learning about the experiences of organizations in other countries, the solutions they’ve found for housing.

For example, there’s an international movement called Desalojos Zero, Zero Evictions. It says that the government doesn’t have the right to evict people, to throw people out of a place if they have nowhere else to live. The same movement promotes people getting homes because that’s their right.

[Beyond what the government and international community should do,] we at GARR want to pursue something called mutual aid housing. It’s cooperative aid, where the very poor pool their money together and pull their internal resources together to resolve their own problems. The Haitian government could also get foreign funds to put land at the disposal of homeless people. Families could contribute to building their houses; they could find financial support to buy building materials so they could begin to rebuild, doing cooperative construction with their own labor. The state could give them means – either low-interest credit, or giving people access to international funds.

Mutual aid housing isn’t just housing. It’s the creation of communities, because we need houses plus the means to live. People would have services like education and health, and the means to start small businesses. We’ve seen places where people have done this and everything is cooperative. People come together to create schools, kindergartens, etc., and you end up with a village in which people support one another in order to live. That’s the idea we’d like to promote.

In Puerto Rico there’s a group that does cultural activities, and they’ve already raised $30,000. With $30,000, we could build three or four houses to serve as a model. We could expand this, with the Haitian diaspora and with solidarity organizations, to show that it’s possible to confront the housing problem. That is, if there is political will, if there is mobilization, if there is solidarity.

And another thing: there are people who want to make their knowledge available to this movement. We’ve found a retired professor in Puerto Rico who goes into communities and helps people create construction plans. Universities here could become part of this movement, helping communities with their knowledge so we wouldn’t have to pay a bunch of engineers. We could pay two or three specialized builders, and then with the strength of the people, we could purchase materials to help solve the housing problem.

Also, people could put the brakes on what we don’t want, for example speculation around housing. We hear there are a lot of big foreign companies who want to come build houses because Haiti has become a huge market. We propose that those mutual aid houses, residents couldn’t sell them or engage in speculation with them.

I hope that organizations that are in solidarity with the Haitian people will begin to mobilize more. People in Haiti can’t take this anymore. We’re hoping for ongoing support from everyone who supported us just after the earthquake. There must be a movement to place more pressure on the U.N., to ask them what they are going to do here, because they have great responsibility for what is going to happen. Everyone, please continue to follow what happens here in Haiti, because now is when we need you most.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan Ayisyen (Heads Together Small Producers of Haiti) is one of Haiti’s two national peasant farmer movements. The oldest peasant group in Haiti, it was born in 1970 under the Duvalier dictatorship.

Annesy Vixama, former member of the national Coordinating Committee of Tèt Kole:

• Caption: Small farmers want both to feed their families and feed the nation.  Photo: Salena Tramel, Grassroots International. •

For a better life for the peasant agricultural sector, we need many things. One thing that’s important in this country is integrated agrarian reform. Most of the land is in the hands of large landowners, the church, the state. Many, many peasants have no land to work, even though land is the base of their lives.

The Haitian state needs to take its responsibility and launch an integrated agrarian reform. That means not just giving peasants a little plot of land, but accompanying it with credit, fertilizer, and transformation of their products, where people can transform their goods from cocoa to chocolate, from corn to cornmeal, from fruit to jam, from manioc to cassava, et cetera. [Among small farmers’ challenges is lack of roads and transportation to get their produce to market, and warehouses to store their goods until they can be sold, all resulting in the spoilage of much of their harvest. Transformation offers preservation of the food as well as diversification of products to sell.] This would give peasants possibilities.

It’s not just that. What chance do peasants have to pay for school for their children? Schools aren’t available for them. They cost a lot and they’re far away from the homes. This causes such problems for small producers, and sometimes they even have to sell land to pay tuition. Sometimes they have to sell land to take care of other obligations like a marriage or a funeral, too.

If peasants weren’t abandoned, if the state assumed its responsibility, all this wouldn’t be happening. An integrated land reform would help get the harvest to market and with what they sell they could take care of their families. We need agrarian reform to guarantee health, education, food, security of their land.

A second question is reforestation. The environment is disappearing. Peasants have to cut trees to live. I’ve passed by the homes of very motivated peasants, but they’re so hungry they have to cut branches off their trees to make wood charcoal. They know it’s not right, but they don’t have any other resource. You go by another day, they’ve cut another branch. You pass by again, the whole tree is gone. They cut it just so they can eat.

I know peasant groups who are planting some trees around them, who are doing soil recovery, but these are little activities, they’re not a national project. It’s not sufficient. If they don’t do reforestation… I don’t know. We’ll perish.

Food sovereignty is very important, too. We’re in big danger today. For a country to remain sovereign, it has to be able to feed itself. Today in Haiti with the neoliberal policies, with the opening of free trade barriers to foreign markets and the invasion of our markets by foreign products, peasant agriculture has declined. This has had big consequences on the peasant sector and our whole country. It’s meant that a lot of peasants have had to abandon agriculture to go to the city or to other countries.

Peasants are struggling a lot for sovereignty, in food and in politics. Food sovereignty would guarantee that the country could feed itself each day.

The project of Monsanto, for example [which has just donated 475 tons of seed to Haiti]… Monsanto invades countries with GMO and hybrid products, and those countries lose their right to conserve their own seeds. They become dependent on these international entities. It’s an act of assassination.

The traditional products of peasants, like corn and peas, have been in development here for more than 200 years. When a company decides on its own, or in complicity with a few politicians, to come in to profit off of peasants, it’s a crime. It’s a crime against food sovereignty, against the peasants’ rights. It’s a crime against humanity.

The state has to change from attending to international businesses that are acting against the majority of the people and start attending to the peasants.

Rosnel Jean-Baptiste, national coordinating committee of Tèt Kole:

Since Tèt Kole’s founding, land reform has always been at our heart. Land reform would let people have land to work and to live on. This is especially true since the drama of the earthquake, that more than anything else in our history has put tears in our eyes. It’s caused hunger and poverty to grow, too.

Right now the rural population can’t survive. People can’t grow as they should because they don’t have any support. Re-envisioning Haiti means investing in the agricultural sector. That’s the only way that farmers can survive and that we don’t have to depend on others. That means land reform, decentralizing the capital, bringing services into the countryside, and supporting agriculture.

The population has no access to social services. If you want education you have to go to Port-au-Prince. If you want health care, or a job, you have to go to Port-au-Prince. That’s why in the neoliberal plank, with the growth of the assembly industry, the whole population has headed to Port-au-Prince.

Decentralizing the country away from the capital isn’t just sending a state representative into each rural section like they do now, but bringing services into the countryside and helping people find jobs there. It means doing agrarian reform so people can live there.

If the government hasn’t been able to do anything after [the earthquake of] January 12 to resolve the problems, I don’t think they’ll do it for us now. It’s up to us to us, social movements, to put our heads together to change the situation of the country.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Haiti during the World Cup is much like my hometown of New Orleans was during the Superbowl. Don’t try to make plans with anyone to do anything during a game. (In the more cash-rich New Orleans, the ban on non-game-related activity stretched back a day or two before a game, because there was food and alcohol to be purchased and a feast to be cooked.) I make the mistake of trying to go to a cell phone office during that time; employees sit hypnotized in front of the big-screen TV, unwilling to be distracted by clients.

When Argentina, a favorite in Haiti, loses the soccer match, I can finally conduct my business and leave the store. People are pouring out from their tents and houses with a thing or two to express about Argentina’s loss. A group of skinny men parades in bikinis and wigs. Noontime drunks shout nonsense at each other. Throngs of mourners dance through the streets of Port-au-Prince, waving Argentine flags and palm fronds. Among them, loyalists still smarting from Brazil’s loss wrap cloths with that country’s flag around their heads.

• An image from lost days in Haiti. What was left of this house, which bore the sign "bienvenue" or "welcome" over its front door, collapsed shortly after the photo was taken.  Photo: Tory Field.•

“Thank God it’s almost over,” my friend Maryse, director of a special education school, said this morning. “Argentina’s the last team in the competition that anyone here really cares about, so all this madness will have to stop.” Four Haitians died in arguments after the loss of the Brazilian team some days prior.

“Soon,” a young construction worker on break from hammering outside my window said, “the [political] demonstrations can resume.” They stopped at the start of the World Cup; people suddenly had more important things to do. Once the World Cup is over, too, the popular educator Ricardo assured me, the electricity that has been guaranteed during the past month will go back to its standard state of irregularity. It’s the same every four years, he said. “We’ll be back in a blakawout, black-out.”

From the cell phone store I catch a taxi to a women’s meeting. Collective taxicabs are identified in two ways: the red ribbon hanging from the rearview mirror, and the decrepit state of the vehicle. They are usually the oldest and most beat-up cars on the road, and it’s not uncommon that a key part gives out or a many-times-repatched tire blows definitively while en route. When that happens, the customers simply patiently climb out and pay the driver, then catch another cab.

I establish up front that I’m not going to be ripped off. “Listen, I know it’s one zone. I’m just paying a fare for one zone.”

“It’s two zones,” the taxi driver replies.

“No, cheri. To Avenue Lamartinière it’s one zone, 25 gourdes. Don’t give me the price you make up for blan, foreigners.

He gives me a circumspect look. “But aren’t you a blan?

As usual, everyone in the cab is sharing stories about evenman la, the event. You hear the word all day long. (In New Orleans, four and half years later, the same is true of ‘Katrina.’ My friend Grant, a writer, said that his dream is to go just one day without hearing the word.) Six months later, with a little distance and a lot of moxie, many of the stories of misery have evolved into dramatic tales, complete with humor. The driver and the four other passengers wedged into the little Nissan are laughing loudly at one such account.

I tell them I am amazed that they can laugh. The man against whom my thigh is jammed says, “If you stay traumatized all the time, it’s not good for you. You have to find joy to diminish it.”

In some ways, everything has changed since the earthquake. Almost one in seven are living in streets or camps in wretched conditions. No comprehensive, or even piecemeal, plan for addressing homelessness has been revealed by anyone in power, except to move them from one tent city to another. Hurricane season is underway, but no preparations have been made to protect those living under bed sheets or pieces of nylon.

Food aid has been suspended except as “food for work.” Water aid is soon to be suspended, too, since Haitian businessmen have complained that it is undermining their profits. Many of the free clinics that were created in the humanitarian outpouring after the disaster have closed up shop.

Imagine that six months after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleanians were still trapped in the Superdome and the Arena. Imagine that they were not given food or even, usually, drinking water. That they shared filthy port-o-potties with thousands and that they had to stand in long lines in the hot sun to get buckets of water for bathing. That they had no electricity or lighting to speak of, not even flash lights. That the government had never announced a plan to get them out of there and back into homes, or even checked to see how they were doing.

Normal conversations are markedly different after the earthquake, so many of them reflecting the loss of hundreds of thousands of friends and family members, and of an even higher number of homes. For example, in a clinic, a little girl I’d never seen before approached me and said, a propos of nothing, “My mother died. My little sister’s name is Timarie. Did your house get crushed?” No. “My house got crushed.”

And this: I was sitting in on a meeting in a refugee camp - the only blan present - when an elderly woman planted herself in front of me. In a flat voice resounding with loss, she said, “I have one son, a strong young man of ten. He lost his foot in the earthquake. What are he and I supposed to do? A ten-year-old with a stump.” Before I could compose myself enough to respond, she turned and walked away.

A commission, half-composed of foreigners, today has formal oversight over Haiti and its reconstruction. (See “Foreign-Led Commission Now Governs Haiti.") It was elected by no one and accountable to no one. It issues no reports, gives no State of the Union address. There is no number to call to learn its position on a given topic or to register one’s opposition. I’ve heard numerous people here bitterly refer to U.N. Special Envoy Bill Clinton, co-director of this Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti, as ‘president of Haiti.’

But in many ways, Haiti is the same as it ever was. The elected government and its associates – what is sometimes referred to here as the political class – are, as always, apathetic in the face of desperate citizens’ needs. One young woman said to me “the Haitian government is deaf, dumb, and mute.” Ricardo commented, “From the first second after the earthquake, the government fled. Not the first minute, the first second.”

As they’ve been for many decades, demonstrations are (excepting, as mentioned, during the World Cup) one outlet for the anger of marginalized Haitian citizens, who have no other advocacy options within the formal system. Citizens regularly take to the streets to demand housing for the displaced, good education, and support of national agricultural production. They have recently protested violence by the U.N. security mission, non-payment of wages to state workers and teachers, and the introduction of toxic Monsanto seeds, among other complaints.

Grassroots organizations still meet regularly to develop their strategies for political change, as they have throughout history. Across the country on any given day, small groups perch on broken chairs under tarps in refugee camps, huddle amidst rubble in the courtyards of earthquake-destroyed schools, or sweat under thatched-roof gazebos. Despite all, they remain convinced that, as the slogan adapted from the World Social Forum says, another Haiti is possible – or at least that they can win more justice than they currently have. They are developing pressure points for housing rights and protection against rape for those in camps. Some plan information campaigns aimed at sweatshop workers, others programs to politicize youth. The agendas are seemingly endless.

Haiti is the same in much more plebeian ways, too. No one on the block where I’m staying can breathe for two days because of the thick and putrid smoke from wood charcoal being made up the ravine. Flies and the mosquitoes change shifts at sunset and sunrise, while sweat pulls 24-hour shifts. Pigs forage in garbage piles downtown. For a few cents, people purchase from street vendors meals of sugar cane, or fried bananas, or cassava bread and peanut butter with cayenne. They wear shoes cracked down the middle of the sole that, most anywhere else, would have been thrown away long ago.

Boys fly homemade kites and girls carry water. Motorcycles zip by with as many as five people on them. Salesmen stand at the front of buses and display jars of dark liquid which they tell their audience will cure fibroids, high blood pressure, and eczema. Little boys stand facing out from the walls to urinate, men stand facing towards the walls to urinate. Women pull thin flowered handkerchiefs from their bras and slowly unwrap them to produce crumpled gourd notes.

People insist on giving you a cup of coffee as though they had nothing else to do in the world. Women walk through the streets with baskets on their head, chanting in loud voices, “I got peas, I got carrots, I got cabbage.” Pedestrians pause on the sidewalk to wipe the thick dust off their shoes with a little scrap of toilet paper, though the shoes will become filthy again momentarily. Men sit on chairs in sidewalk barber shops, getting shaves. Girls flap down the streets in backless sandals, swinging their behinds. Neighbors break up coupling cats, because who needs more kittens?

As always, to disarm hostile situations, many make their voices supplicatory and call each other cheri. In crowded streets, people anger easily and laugh easily. They engage in gestures of great tenderness and harsh meanness. They show impressive generosity and rip off the most vulnerable.

Now it’s Saturday night, and neighbors do what they do everywhere that is big on community and short on funds: gather on stoops and curbs to talk. Mirlene, who used to cook for a friend of mine, walks up the street to meet me. We haven’t seen each other since the earthquake, so we arrange ourselves on a curb, tuck the excess cloth of our skirts under our knees, and begin with the only possible topic: the event.

While we’re talking, a couple of men come join us. I offer them my condolences for the loss of Argentina. One lifts his hands heavenward and says, “We’re resigned.” Then: “We’ve lost the battle, but we haven’t lost the war.”

“Spoken like a true Haitian,” I tell him.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

This blog was co-written by Tory Field.

One of the many effects of poverty in Haiti is that desperate parents regularly give away their children in the hope that the new family will feed and educate the children better than they themselves can. Instead, the children usually end up as child slaves, or restavèk. In a country which overthrew slavery in 1804, today anywhere from 225,000 to 300,000 children live in forced servitude. They work from before sunup to after sundown; are often sexually and physically abused; and usually go underfed and uneducated. (For more information, see “Slavery in Haiti, Again.”)

The numbers are soon likely to explode due to the hundreds of thousands of children left orphaned or abandoned by the earthquake. Guerda Constant with Fondasyon Limyè Lavi, the Light of Life Foundation, an organization dedicated to ending the child bondage system, said, “I can’t figure out what kind of future this country will have with so many kids in the street right now, without parents.”

• Tens of thousands of children left abandoned and orphaned since the earthquake are at risk of becoming slaves.  Photo: Tory Field.•

Guerda’s organization is among a small but growing network which is committed to abolishing slavery and to ensuring that all Haitian children receive love, care, and education. Many strategies are at work towards these ends.

The first is to get the government to pass a law prohibiting child slavery and prosecuting those who keep slaves. Haitian law outlaws forced labor, but restavèk labor is, in practice, condoned. It is not investigated, prosecuted, or punished. A June, 2009 UN press release concerning restavèk noted the “absence of comprehensive legislation protecting the rights of the child” and “the weakness of the judicial system in ensuring prosecution, fair trail and adequate punishment of perpetrators.”

A bill which would outlaw trafficking of adults and children, both across the border and within the country, has been in the hands of the Parliament for some time. The International Organization for Migration and other organizations worked with the government to ensure that the language of the bill met international norms. But the bill has not yet been voted on, and the Parliament has been inactive since it turned power over to an international commission in mid-April.

Guerda said, “It’s important that the government make a political decision on this situation. We need a law and a national plan [of implementation]. Then many NGOs who want to work on child protection in Haiti could know what to do and how to do it.”

And Malya Villard, co-coordinator of the Commission of Women Victim to Victim (KOFAVIV), a children and women’s rights organization, said, “Everyone who does violence against a girl or a child should be judged and condemned. We have to have a state that has justice so it can put an end to this. If the state doesn’t take responsibility, nothing will change.”

A second strategy includes educating parents about exactly what may happen to the children they give away. Helia Lajeunesse, a rights advocate with KOFAVIV, says, “We encourage parents in the countryside who think they’re doing their child a favor to do everything within their means not to give their child into servitude.”

A third strategy is to change national awareness about the rights of children, which are not universally recognized in Haiti. Malya said, “Children are an object, garbage, for many people.”

Today in Port-au-Prince, a few billboards sponsored by national and international organizations show cartoons of a sad little girl scrubbing a floor; a thought bubble above her head shows her merrily headed to school. Last May, the Restavèk Freedom Foundation hosted a national “I am Haiti Too” conference, which brought together more than 500 people, the largest such meeting to date.

One level at which the awareness campaign operates is with the families who have restavèk in their homes. The Restavèk Freedom Foundation, for example, hosts meetings to dialogue with families who keep restavèk about their treatment of the children, challenging the assumptions that many of them grew up with.

Another level of awareness-raising is happening within communities, encouraging members to involve themselves in the children’s well-being. Helia explained KOFAVIV’s work in this regard. “We’re getting neighbors to know they have a responsibility. We say, if you hear someone beating a child in their home, go tell them to stop. Tell them, ‘This is a human being and you need to treat them well.’ When we can’t confront the person directly because we’re worried about what will happen to the child as a result, we put a tape recorder outside the violator’s window to record them beating the child, then we take that tape to the radio station. The family hears it on the radio and hopefully gets ashamed and gets a different level of understanding about its treatment of the child.

“We’re seeing people change the way they’re treating restavèk children,” she said.

A fourth strategy is to work for improvement of the economy, especially in the rural areas which are home to unmitigated poverty, to undermine the incentive behind giving children away. On this issue, anti-restavèk activists are joined by peasant farmer and allied movements who are working to prioritize rural agriculture so that small farmers can have an adequate livelihood. The movements are also calling for the decentralization of services and budgetary expenditures, in part to create good schooling for children. Although primary school is supposed to be free and compulsory, even before the earthquake 55% of school-aged children were not going to school. And what schooling does exist in rural areas offers notoriously poor education.

A fifth strategy involves direct intervention to nurture restavèk children. This not only restores wounded and neglected young victims, but also helps break the stranglehold of the system. The Restavèk Freedom Foundation, for example, employs nine child advocates who partner and meet regularly with children, encourages the restavèk families to allow these children to go to school, and finances school fees and uniforms.

Changing the national system is a painfully slow process. “We now have more people who consider child servitude a crime.” said Guerda, “But at the same time it’s like there are so many children and there are so many things we [advocates] have to do, sometimes you don’t feel like anything happens in a kid’s life.”

Yet change is occurring, thanks to the small but dedicated organizations. Those groups are increasingly organized and united. The Down with the Restavèk System (ASR by its Creole acronym) network, born out of a 2000 conference sponsored by the Fondasyon Limyè Lavi and the U.S.-based Beyond Borders, is one network connecting the relevant groups.

Helia said, “It’s an enormous struggle, but just like I’ve learned and am speaking out, everyone will become aware this system has to end.”

For more information and to become involved in creating a slavery-free Haiti, check out the following (partial) list of groups.

Beyond Borders (U.S.) and Limyè Lavi Foundation (Haiti) work in partnership for a national child rights movement to demand the Haitian government take a stand against the exploitation of children. They also educate parents about the dangers of the restavèk system, mobilize and connect grassroots groups working on the issue, and address the root causes: the poverty and lack of quality education in rural areas which prompt parents to send their children away. Together the groups have also hosted conferences, marches and, in 2008 and 2009, a National Day against Child Servitude. They also coordinate the Down with Child Servitude Network, or ASR. www.beyondborders.net

The Commission of Women Victim to Victim (KOFAVIV) is an organization of former restavèk and rape survivors who have banded together to ensure that no child or woman ever again experience these horrors. KOFAVIV engages in advocacy; provides support to children at risk; and publicizes the brutality of the system through community meetings, trainings, public marches, and media campaigns. KOFAVIV has no website, but many articles about their work can be found in this column series, at www.otherworldsarepossible.org/alternatives/another-haiti-possible.

The Restavèk Freedom Foundation, formerly the Jean Robert Cadet Restavèk Foundation, focuses on working with the families who keep restavèk to change the way they treat children and to encourage them to send the children to school. The foundation pays for the children’s education and otherwise watching over their needs, and builds awareness of the problem within Haiti and globally. www.restavekfreedom.org

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Tory Field is an organizer, farmer, and Program Associate at Other Worlds.

This blog was co-written by Tory Field.

“I’m struggling to end slavery because I know how I suffered,” said Helia Lajeunesse, a former restavèk, child slave, who is now a children’s rights advocate.

Today there are an estimated 27 million slaves in the world, according to the research of Kevin Bales of Free the Slaves. This is more than at any time in history, even including during the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

In Haiti, the only nation ever to host a successful slave revolution, 225,000 to 300,000 children live in forced and usually violent servitude in a system known as restavèk, literally “to stay with.” The numbers are at risk of rising dramatically because of the hundreds of thousands of children who lost their parents or were abandoned after the earthquake. In addition to likely trauma, hunger, and health problems, unaccompanied minors are at threat from adults who may take advantage of a source of free labor. Unprotected girls are also at risk of what amounts to sex slavery, as rape of restavèk girls by the men and youth in the household is common.

The system usually works this way: A parent who cannot afford to feed or educate a child may give him or her to a better-off relative, neighbor, or stranger who promises to provide care and schooling. The families giving up children are usually from the countryside, where poverty is unrelenting. The children are as young as three, with girls between six and 14 years old comprising sixty-five percent of the population.

Restavèk children toil long hours and rarely go to school. They are regularly abused. They usually eat table scraps or have to scavenge in the streets for their own food, sleep on the floor, and wear cast-off rags.

They are not chained or locked up. One reason the children usually stay is the threat of severe punishment – often including beatings - if they are caught trying to escape and are returned to the family. Another reason is that they have no other source of food and shelter. Survival and safety options for street children in Haiti are not good, though some restavèk do escape to live on the streets.

Alina “Tibebe” Cajuste described her childhood as a restavèk this way: “This is a sad, sad story to the world. A woman who used to come sell in the market told my mother to give me to her. My mother had no support, so she had to.

“What did this woman make me do? I had to get up before 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning to make the food, sweep the floor, and wash the car, so that when the family woke up everything would be ready. Then I had to wash dishes, fetch water, and go sell merchandise for her in the countryside. When I came back from the marketplace, I would carry two drums of water on my head, so heavy, to wash up for her. Then I’d go buy things to make dinner. And I couldn’t even eat the same food as her. If she ate rice, I only got cornmeal. I didn’t even wear the same sandals or dresses as her child. My dresses were made out of the scraps of cloth that were left over from what she sold in the marketplace. I couldn’t even sleep in a bed.”

Among the trials she recounted of her life as a restavèk, Helia Lajeunesse recounted this: “One day I was coming back from delivering food to the child of the house, which I had to carry on my head to her at school every day. There was a man holding a school under a coconut tree. He called to me, ‘Come be part of this school.’ I said, ‘No, I can’t, because when I go home my aunt will beat me.’ He said, ‘You should come.’ I went. Now when I went home, I said, ‘There was a man holding a school, so I attended today.’ The woman said, ‘What? You went to school?’ I said, ‘Yes, and could you please give me a little pencil and a notebook?’ She asked me what I thought I was doing, and started beating me.

“Poverty and misery made me not know how to read and write, or count in my head, until I was a grown-up.

“I escaped three times and went to different homes, four in all. But each time I suffered as badly or worse than before. I was abused so much. Misery was killing me.

Still, many years later when Helia’s husband was murdered and she could no longer feed her five children, she said, “I was obliged to give four away, even though the youngest was only three years old. I only kept one who wasn’t even a year old then.”

Later, however, she went to a child rights training by the grassroots groups Commission of Women Victim to Victim (KOFAVIV). “That gave me consciousness and I went and got my children back. I said to myself, no matter what, I am going to keep my children. Now I’m with my four children [one of her five died in the earthquake]. I’m their mother, I’m their father.”

The system has long been widely socially accepted, and its neutral-sounding name has rarely been replaced by the more appropriate term of slavery. But efforts are underway to change this.

Today Tibebe and Helia are part of a group of restavèk survivors who are raising visibility of and opposition to the system. Their group, KOFAVIV, is among a small but growing child protection network. The two women have traveled as far as Washington, D.C. to speak out. They conduct trainings in children’s rights and have helped organize two marches where thousands of women wore T-shirts saying “I oppose the restavèk system. And you, what are you waiting for?” They are also part of a diverse global movement of people working to supplant commercialization and degradation of human life with dignity and rights.

For more on the work to end child servitude in Haiti, and how you can help, see the upcoming blog post “A Second Slave Rebellion in Haiti,” on July 15th.

Tory Field is an organizer, farmer, and Program Associate at Other Worlds.

Jean-Jean, six, is part of the pack of kids that races to meet me each time I arrive at one internally displaced people’s camp in Port-au-Prince. Jean-Jean is usually at the front, all flashing eyes and big toothy grin, out-shouting the others or engaging in some ridiculous antic for my attention.

On one visit, Jean-Jean’s mother appeared dragging by the arm a very different little boy, slow and sad. Jean-Jean feebly raised his eyes to me; the whites were just one shade this side of mustard-yellow. Hepatitis.

• Jean-Jean, right, nearly joined the statistics of fatalities from easily treatable diseases - easy if one has the money, that is. Photo: Tory Field.•

“How long has he been like this?” I asked, trying to mask my panic.

“Five days.”

“And what have you given him?”

“Nothing. I know he’s supposed to be drinking a lot of water, but we don’t have any money just now.” Of course, that also meant no medication and little food – or perhaps, on some days, no food. Many of the people in these camps can go days without a single small coin touching their palm. Some have asked me if it’s true that Haiti has received billions of dollars in aid.

“Have you taken him to the doctor?”

I knew the answer before I asked. There are a few free clinics around town, but even then the tests and medicines usually cost money, and there is bus fare to be paid. “No, but I will,” she said. I bought a shopping bag full of small water sacks, two for a quarter; asked Jean-Jean’s neighbor, my friend, to keep an eye on him; finished my business at the camp; and moved on with the day.

Three days later, I returned. Jean-Jean had still not gone to the doctor. An all-too-familiar look on the mother’s face – some combination of shame and desperation - let me know that that had not been an option for her. This time we worked together and devised a way to get medical care.

This story has a happy ending. Jean-Jean is now well and back to being a heart-stealing mischief-maker.

But I’ve known it to go the other way, many times over. At one point, decades before the earthquake when I was living in a Haitian village, an unofficial part of my job description was to transport to the hospital babies and little children who were sick or dying, effectively, from poverty. Another part of my de facto duties was to collect from the morgue the bodies of some of those same small patients.

Late one night, someone knocked on my door. It was a woman I didn’t know, clutching a baby to her chest. The child’s wizened face, loose skin, distended stomach, and thin hair made it clear that she was in the final stages of dehydration and starvation.

Not having a car to drive her to the Leogane hospital forty minutes away, I instead wrote a note to the staff. By virtue of my knowing many of them through repeated visits there with children such as this, and of my U.S. citizenry and white skin, this note was all but guaranteed to give the infant quick access to health care.

The next morning, a neighbor came to tell me the baby had died. “Died?” Her admission was good to go and the treatment was free. “Didn’t they connect her to an IV?”

“No,” the neighbor said. “The mother didn’t go to the hospital. She couldn’t come up with the gourde” – at that time, twenty cents – “to take the bus there.”

An estimated 62 Haitian children out of each 1,000 die in the first year of life, and 85 of those 1,000 never made it to age 5. A Haitian child under 5 dies every hour from hunger, according to the World Food Programme, while chronic undernutrition of children under 5 is 24%.

The U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, says that there exists enough food worldwide to feed 12 billion people, almost double the number of the global population. Yet hunger is growing. And according to Ziegler, none of its causes are natural; they are all human-made. “Every child who dies from hunger is assassinated,” Ziegler commented.

Similarly, the World Health Organization's Commission on the Social Determinants of Health credits the “grand scale” of death from illness and disease to “social injustice.” The Commission attributes the fact that the majority of the world’s inhabitants do not have the good health that is biologically possible to “a toxic combination of bad policies, economics, and politics.”

If the government or more rich citizens of Haiti and other low-income countries, or the governments of wealthy countries, or the World Bank and IMF, valued the fate of poor children over profits and were willing to better share wealth and other resources, a lot more babies and children like that starving one who showed up at my door would be alive today. (See Paul Farmer’s excellent The Uses of Haiti for more on the role of the U.S. and other powers in getting Haiti to its current state.) More would be alive, too, if the international financial institutions and World Trade Organization did not strong-arm low-income counties into accepting policies that promote so-called free trade at any cost. The costs have been borne by an unknowable number of children.

The roots of profound suffering on the western portion of the island of Hispañola go back to 1492, when the Spanish colonists who arrived with Columbus enslaved the Arawaks and Caribs, and worked almost all to death, literally, within 27 years. This led the Spanish to replenish their labor force with captive Africans, which the French later imported at much higher numbers.

After the 1804 revolution, large Haitian landowners replaced the French landowners and the slaves became serfs. Neglect and exploitation by landowners and other wealthy classes were backed by successive regimes, whose raison d’être was to serve that small elite while keeping profits flowing to government officials. Violent security forces helped accomplish the job.

Social abandonment and economic exploitation by the Haitian government and elite have been mirrored in foreign policies. Their roots go back to Haiti’s beginning as a free nation, too, when the U.S. imposed a trade embargo so that word of the successful slave emancipation didn’t spread. Moreover, France kept Haiti in debt until it paid off the former colonist for lost income due to the revolution.

Post-earthquake politics offer new twists on the same theme. The IMF, for example, is apparently still considering whether it will convert a $100 million post-earthquake loan to a grant. (Surely the IMF doesn’t expect to ever collect this debt, but its creditor status gives it a lot of power over Haiti’s economy.) As another example, the disaster food aid which the U.S. procures from domestic agribusiness has further crippled local agriculture and the national economy. The U.S. and U.N.’s plan for reconstruction is based on a sweatshop model, a ‘race to the bottom’ in which the lowest wages, the fewest health and safety standards, and the worst possibilities for unionizing are considered advantages for the industry.

All of these historic and global forces converge to affect whether a child like Jean-Jean survives.

But alternatives do exist. As the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food and the World Health Organization indicate, the suffering with which Haiti and other low-income nations are branded is not inevitable. It is the result of economic and political choices by a few. But other choices can be made that will yield different outcomes. Progressive Haitian social movements – the grouping of women’s, youth, student, farmer, street vendors, and many other sectors – are advocating those other choices. They are urging the Haitian government and international community to adopt policies and programs which can produce a more just and equitable future. They are demanding that all citizens, not just a few wealthy ones, be active participants in the process. (For more about alternative redevelopment options in Haiti, see other articles in this series, including: Post-Disaster Reconstruction: Putting Haitian Citizens into the Equation; A Future for Agriculture, A Future for Haiti; Haiti: “Post-Disaster Needs Assessment” - Whose Needs? Whose Assessment?; and Raising Up Another Haiti.)

I have thought about the baby girl that died that fateful night in the village hundreds of times throughout my life. She is an indicator of the failure of our global society.

I have also wondered about the woman she might have become. I have always imagined that she would be fighting to create a new world in which no one dies for lack of twenty cents. Today, I like to think, she would be out there working hard to ensure that the Haiti that is reconstructed doesn’t look anything like Haiti before the earthquake. She’d be making sure that the rebuilt Haiti is based on equity, rights, and democratic participation in a world in which all, not just a few, stand a chance.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

The international community (here referring to nations and international organizations) has pledged or given $9.9 billion in relief and reconstruction aid to Haiti, since the earthquake on January 12, 2010. Citizens and non-profit agencies of foreign countries have provided billions more. The aid is many times the size of Haiti’s annual budget, which was $1.97 billion for the 2009-10 fiscal year.

• One use of aid in Haiti: boxes for vegetable oil and soldiers' meals are re-purposed as refugee housing.  Photo by: Julie Dermansky©2010, www.jsdart.com..•

If one looks close to the ground, in certain refugee camps and community organizations, one can see the donations of citizens and non-profits at work, supplying tents, food, and medical aid. A handful of progressive foundations are funding community, peasant, and advocacy organizations, as they work for an alternative rebuilding process, based on economic justice and the fulfillment of social needs. Social assistance and rebuilding projects are working best when communities are engaged in the planning and implementation.

Yet, for the most part, the impact of the dollars is imperceptible. Where is it going?

Much of the aid pledged has not yet arrived, and may never. A lot of it has gone straight back to donor nations, as with the $.40 on every US government aid dollar that paid for the US military presence in Haiti for, at least, the first two months after the quake. Untold dollars more go to US firms, like the agribusiness corporations whose surplus rice is being purchased by USAID to deliver as aid. Then there are fees and expenses paid to a small army of consultants working for foreign governments and international agencies. Many UN consultants, for example, slept until mid-March in a luxury cruise ship (the Love Boat), which the UN rented. Then, there is graft, corruption, and poor planning, all of which further redirects aid dollars away from desperate earthquake survivors, up to 1.9 million of whom are left homeless, hungry, and wet in tents during the rainy season.

What would Haitians like to see happen with the aid? We asked for opinions; here are a few.

Christine Miradieu is an unemployed mother of nine who lost her husband, one of her children, and her home in the earthquake. She now lives with six of her children in two tents in a field outside of the town of Gressier.

They tell me the international community gave $2 million dollars in aid. Where is it? [We suggest the figure is actually $9.9 billion.]

What? [Turns to her family behind her.] You hear? Nine point nine billion in aid. Now, who’s getting that? We haven’t seen any of it.

Lucien St. Louis is an agronomist by training who worked for many years with farmers through the Ministry of Agriculture. Now, he is employed by a European NGO, helping to direct disaster responses in several earthquake-impacted towns to those who most need them.

First, we want to say how much we appreciate all the citizens of the world who have paid attention to Haiti after January 12 and who have given whatever they could, whether money or solidarity. They make us know we’re not alone in this fight to reclaim our lives and rebuild our country.

This aid could be a marvelous thing, giving us the assistance we need to get back on our feet. It could help us build a different country, a country where everyone is recognized as a human being, a country where all children go to school, and no one dies for lack of decent medical care. It could help strengthen peasant agriculture, so farmers could stay in the countryside, where they could have work and feed the nation, instead of having to migrate to Port-au-Prince. It could help women do marketing and form cooperatives, so they could have an income for their family. It could provide decent housing for all, especially those who lost their homes in the earthquake, in communities that are close to all the services people need to live. It could strengthen the people’s institutions that are trying to build a new society and economy.

We haven’t seen any of this yet. But, we’re going to keep on fighting for it.

Ghislene Deloné (a pseudonym used at her request) is a health promoter at the clinic of the Center for the Promotion of Women Workers (CPFO). Prior to this job, she worked for eleven years as a seamstress in a multinational textile factory.

Now, we have the international community which came to Haiti, which is helping workers and CPFO get medicines. They’re distributing medicines; they’re doing free exams for the women at CPFO. Workers can now come and get the medical care they need, without having to pay anything. We are satisfied.

Marlène Jean-Pierre lives in Cité Soleil. She is a student in civil engineering and an organizer with women's and youth grassroots groups in Cité Soleil.

We don’t need more than social support. We need collaboration with all the foreign citizens who want to come help us Haitians, who want to give their support. We don’t need money coming into the country to create huge projects to bring about change, no. When that money comes, the population itself doesn’t receive it. It doesn’t ever get to the community.

They should find people within the community and divide it among them. But, the foreigners who came after the earthquake, they don’t know a single person. They come to this country and want to take action. They say, “I’ve brought you water! I’ve brought you food! Look at all I’ve brought for you!” But, they don’t know who to contact. So, they work through the government, or else, they choose someone to work with them, and that person gets to direct the aid whatever way they want. But, with someone who knows the country well, that work would be better supervised, they’d be able to see that the population is really receiving the aid directly.

We know there are billions of dollars coming to the NGOs now. It’s from that money the NGOs are paying their employees, that they’re buying gas for their cars; it’s with that money that they’re paying for their own security. The only thing we ask is that, whatever is left for us, that the work they do with it is done well. That’s all we ask for.

Carolle Pierre-Paul Jacob is a coordinator of Solidarity Among Haitian Women (SOFA). Among other things, SOFA provides health care and anti-violence support to women now living in refugee camps.

This is an international parade. The aid has been given in total chaos. The way it’s been run represents economic and political domination. It’s being done in a context where the symbols of state power are gone, and the government is basically nonexistent.

There are lots of ways we could have taken advantage of this moment, to create a minimum of social, economic, and political transformation. But, we haven’t had that chance, because of the domination of the foreigners.

Josette Pérard is the director of Fon Lambi, the Haitian-run branch of the Lambi Fund of Haiti. Josette has a long history of providing funding and technical support to women and peasant groups in Haiti and, prior to that, in the Congo.

The people want another system, so they can be treated as citizens in a country that belongs to them. They want their rights as human beings to be respected. But, with all the aid and programs, they’re treating people like children. It’s not possible. Who knows better than the people? They want to make decisions with themselves; they don’t want anyone to make those decisions for them.

What plan does the country have five months after the earthquake? People can’t sit in the mud in the camps all day; they can’t live like that. Now, they’re kicking people out of the tents to send them to other tents, without water or shade. There are no changes. The government is totally irresponsible.

We’re very happy that people are coming to help us, but there is no one to sit down with them to coordinate. This is because the state is inexistent. It doesn’t take its responsibility. People are saying, “Here’s what we need in the way of aid; here’s what we want to happen so we can have results.” But, each group comes up with its own program for reconstruction. If no one sits down together and comes up with one coordinated program, will there be one?

What makes me most angry is to see people sitting under the hot sun to get a half-sack of rice and a bottle of oil. Where are they going to cook food? They don’t have a stove to cook food with, and they can’t eat rice and oil only. They’re saying that aid recipients are selling the food, in order to buy a piece of bread with peanut butter, because they don’t have any way to cook the rice.

People are very dissatisfied. For weeks, there have been demonstrations in the streets against Préval.

Presto Deroncil has lived in Cité Soleil since 1977, where he is an informal (unelected) community leader.

Cité Soleil is a place where lots of money is spent, but nothing ever happens. It’s the place where everyone comes to make money, to get rich. After January 12, it got even worse. After January 12, everyone mobilized, the international community mobilized. Me, I thought that things were finally going to change. No way! I see things getting more difficult. I see there’s a lot of food distribution happening. At the beginning, it went well, but after a while things started getting looser, people started making money off it.

What hurts the most is that people from Cité Soleil have been working to have political representation, to have people who will represent them in the government. But, now, it’s those same people who are making a business [out of aid]. Imagine, really imagine – when a person is the leader in a community, there are a lot of things that person shouldn’t do. But, there are people who take those cards [aid vouchers] and make a fortune with them. They buy cars with them; they buy motorcycles. Something that was meant to help the people, and now they’re selling them. I think this has to change.

People are sleeping in the mud; they’re sleeping in garbage. When it rains, they don’t have anywhere to sleep. I think that the most important thing now is a public housing project within Cité Soleil.

I think that everyone, the international community that wants to help Cité Soleil, they must sit with the community leaders, with the population of this community. First off, they should listen to people, so that they know what they should work on. We know what we need.

Jacqueline Cherilus is a fourth-year medical student at Université Lumière in Port-au-Prince. On January 12, her school collapsed, killing many of her professors and classmates. Her home was damaged, and now she and her family sleep under a tarp, because they are afraid to be inside.

Americans and everyone who’ve sent tents, we’re tired of that stuff, those same tents and tarps. We need construction. You see how strong the rains are becoming? Tents can’t resist that rain. How long can we live in tents and tarps? You can’t live for two or three years under a tarp. We need houses. We’re going to have hurricanes soon and flooding.

The aid is poorly organized and poorly divided. There are lots of people who don’t receive anything. To have real aid, we need social change. Right now, they’re just giving us tarps, tents, and food.

We need health care. You see, in Briztou [a tent community in Pétion-ville] they only have one doctor for 25,000 people? And, there’s no educational reform. Children are still paying to go to school. Like my little brother, who still has to pay. How can other children, the ones who lost their parents in the earthquake, pay for school?

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Doudou Pierre is on the coordinating committee of the National Haitian Network for Food Sovereignty and Food Security (RENHASSA). He is also a member of the International Coordinating Committee for Food Sovereignty, organized by Vía Campesina, the worldwide coalition of small farmer organizations. In addition, he is a member of the National Peasant Movement of the Papay Congress and the Peasant Movement for Acul du Nord. This week he will be heading North to the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit.

In the June 4, 2010, article, “Groups Around the U.S. Join Haitian Farmers In Protesting ‘Donation’ of Monsanto Seeds,” Doudou commented on the damage that Monsanto and other agricultural corporations could wreak on Haitian agriculture. Here, he speaks about how government investment in small farmers and in food sovereignty could impact Haiti’s future.

• Ten thousand Haitians, most of them peasant farmers, marched against Monsanto's recent donation of seeds and for food sovereignty on June 4. The banner reads in part, "Defend food sovereignty in our country and the planet." Photo credit: Alice Speri.•

We’re putting together a national network, RENHASSA, to show what our alternatives are today. The whole peasant sector is coming together to tell everyone about the policies we want. Our mission is to advocate for Haiti to be sovereign with its food and to promote national production.

We’re mobilizing politically for the policies we want. We publish articles and do community radio programs about our positions. We’re also doing media campaigns and having meetings to educate people about growing for local and family consumption as much as possible, instead of buying food from other countries. People are starting to recognize and change their habits to just buy local goods.

Now, what must be done: the state must exercise its responsibility toward its people. When we talk about reconstructing Haiti, we can’t just talk about houses. It’s got to be a whole plan. We have to talk about reconstructing land, about total reforestation.

First, we have to decentralize the Republic of Port-au-Prince, which got created during the U.S. occupation of 1915 to 1934. Services now exist only in the capital. People died during the earthquake for an identity card or a copy of a transcript, because they had to come to Port-au-Prince to get them. Services must be in all departments [akin to states]. All the people who are in the countryside have to have the resources to stay there.

Second, and this is the essential element, is the relaunching of agriculture in this country. We were almost self-sufficient until the 1980s. We have to fight and pressure the state, so it prioritizes agriculture. Otherwise, we’ll always have to depend on multinationals and non-governmental organizations for our food. The government has to take responsibility for that.

We’re not in favor just of food security, which is a neoliberal idea. With food security, as long as you eat, it’s good. But, we only produce 43% of our food; 57% is imported. We need food sovereignty, which means that so that everyone can eat, we produce it here at home. We could produce here at least 80% of what we eat.

You can’t speak of food sovereignty without speaking of ecological, family agriculture. We need that and indigenous seeds. We need for peasants to have their own land.

We have threats from multinationals, mainly to grow jatropha [whose seeds produce oil which can be used for biofuel]. The Jatropha Foundation is lobbying hard to start growing. Jatropha puts us at risk, because we don’t have enough land to be able to divert some toward biofuel. Haiti is only 27,760 square kilometers. Their plan would have us produce even less food and would force peasants to be expropriated. Plus, they’d be using a lot of water, which could create an ecological disaster. It’s a death plan against the peasants.

We’re mobilizing people against growing biofuel. Last October, when the government was considering giving contracts to grow jatropha, we held a big march and sit-in; we gave a petition to parliament. We said, “No, Haiti’s land is for growing food.” We met with the minister of agriculture and the World Food Program.

We’re also mobilizing against GMO seeds, and we’ve just declared war against Monsanto. This battle has just begun.

Besides food sovereignty, our other main priority is integrated land reform. We can’t talk about food sovereignty, if people don’t have land. They have to have land to be able to market; that’s the only way we can get away from food aid. Our plan is to take the land from the big landowners and give it to the peasants to work. And the food has to be organic, without any chemical fertilizers which destroy the land. We don’t use anything [unnatural in our cultivation process].

Now, even if people have a little handkerchief of land, they don’t have the technical support to let them plant. The state has to give us credit and technical support and help us store and manage water. Préval said he was doing agrarian reform in his first term. We called it agrarian demagoguery. He just gave out a few parcels, divided into very small plots, to his political clientele and political party, even to people who weren’t in Haiti. And, his government didn’t offer any technical support.

That’s not what we need. The agrarian reform we want is for those who work the land to have the right to that land, with all its infrastructure.

The cultural reality of Haiti is that peasants each want their own little piece of land to produce their own food. But, there has to be cooperative land. Peasant organizations can create collectives to produce food for export and make money, but for that there has to be integrated land reform with technical support, credit, water, everything. We must have government support.

Right now, the government doesn’t even exist for us. It’s saying to the international community, “Here’s our country. Come take it.” They’ve given away the whole country, and now we have [U.N. Special Envoy Bill] Clinton, who is a tool of the big multinationals. So, on top of all our other fights, we have to fight to change the state.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

A slogan of Haiti’s popular movement – a grouping of many organized sectors, from community-based journalists, to cooperative street vendors, to children’s rights advocates – is ‘Another Haiti Is Possible.’ Most Haitians we speak with, whatever their sector or political persuasion, have very clear ideas of what a different Haiti could look like and what would be required for its construction. Here are some of those ideas.

Jean Jores Pierre is student of economics at the State University of Haiti and an intern at a policy advocacy organization. An orphan, when Jores’ home collapsed in the earthquake, he began sleeping in a tent in the yard outside the office of his organization. He is now living with relatives in Port-au-Prince.

• It's not just Haiti's infrastructure that needs to be reconstructed, but its economy, society, and polity as well. Photo by: Julie Dermansky©2010, www.jsdart.com•

The catastrophe of January 12 showed clearly how poorly the country has been managed. At the core of the problem has been the complete exclusion of those who have always dreamed of a Haiti which is based on solidarity between people. We’re talking about all those who have decided to fight to change the conditions of their lives and their compatriots’ lives.

Today, to get past the problems, we have to envision another Haiti, based on the participation of everyone, where women, peasants, and marginalized people have a place in society. Where solidarity serves as the basis of all national decisions. A sovereign Haiti that can take its destiny in hand, with a clear perspective of how to raise up all Haitians without distinction.

Rosnel Jean-Baptiste is a member of the national coordinating committee of Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan Ayisyen (Heads Together Small Haitian Peasants), a national organization of agricultural workers. He goes back and forth between his home in the countryside and the organization’s headquarters in Port-au-Prince.

We have to deconstruct the capital by supporting agriculture in the countryside and doing land reform, so that people have land to work and can live there. We have to bring services to the countryside, too, not just have a government representative in each rural section, like we do now.

Re-envisioning Haiti… it’s not houses which will rebuild Haiti, it’s investing in the agricultural sector. If the country doesn’t produce, our farmers won’t be able to survive. And we’ll always have to depend on others.

But if the government hasn’t been able to do anything after [the earthquake of] January 12 to resolve the problems, I don’t think they’ll do it for us now. It’s up to us, social movements, to unite ourselves to change the situation of this country and to change the model our state.

Jacqueline Cherilus is 22 and a fourth-year medical student at Université Lumière in Port-au-Prince. On January 12, her school collapsed, killing many of her professors and classmates. By sheer luck, she wasn’t there. Her own home did not collapse, but it was damaged. Now, she and her family are afraid to go inside, so they sleep under a bright-blue tarp instead. Her university has since re-opened in a new location, and every day, she and her surviving classmates spend money and hours taking several buses across town. But, the professors haven’t shown up yet.

You’ve asked the wrong person. I’m not a political person, I don’t know a lot about these things. If you want me to think like a good Haitian patriot, then I’d say we need social change. Social change that can bring about political change. We need a revolution in the political milieu. I don’t mean an armed revolution or anything like that, but we need to demand what we really need. Life is too expensive; we need to bring prices down. Everyone should have access to what they need.

It’s the people first who can bring about change. They can make demands of the government, so the government can put pressure on the international community.

Yannick Etienne has been a labor rights organizer with the grassroots group Workers’ Struggle (Batay Ouvriyè) for many years. She speaks perfect English, having attended university in the U.S. in the late 1960s, where she also engaged herself in the anti-Vietnam war and Black power movements. She moves a lot around industrial zones in Port-au-Prince and elsewhere.

In re-building Haiti, the people are not being consulted. Yet, they have lots of ideas about what they don’t like and what kind of Haiti they would love. They say, “We would like it to be totally different.” We have to change social relations, change exploitation, change rural environmental degradation, change the control by the big land owners and the capitalist class, all those involved in import-export commerce. Those people have been ruling the country, and look what’s happened to it.

We need workers’ rights and social support in the factories, and workers have to be able to determine the environment they want to work in. We need to get rid of peasants working on halves [sharecropping where the farmer gives half of his produce to the landowner]. We have to have land reform. It’s very important to make sure that small peasant get land to work and get the technical assistance they need. We have to offer peasants alternatives in the rural areas and the cities, so they don’t have to cut trees to make charcoal.

People are saying, “If we don’t organize ourselves, these camps could become permanent places to stay.” We know that provisional things in Haiti always become permanent. People have to mobilize to make sure they build real homes, dignified places.

We have to know what we’re fighting for. The earthquake gives us an opportunity as a movement, to continue our organizing, to push for social justice, and to unify the people to take change into their own hands.

Nixon Boumba is an organizer with the Democratic Popular Movement (MODEP by its Creole acronym) and with students at the School of Social Sciences at the State University of Haiti.

He prefers to be called Boumba, because of the political associations with his first name.

This wasn’t a natural catastrophe, but a social catastrophe. It just reproduced the pre-existent castastrophe, with so much exclusion and exploitation, where you have the “country inside” and the “country outside” [as Port-au-Prince and the rural areas are known], where you have [differential power for] men and women. We propose more egalitarian relations.

We propose a rupture with the crumbling state, instead leading to a state that’s at the service of the people. The rupture must first be with dependence, which has been reinforced since January 12, with the imperialists who are further militarizing the country.

We want the school system to be nationalized. We want the government to dedicate money to take the school system in hand and consecrate schools to the service of the public.

We think that the state has to provide housing. We’re in favor of cooperative housing, to give people decent housing at an affordable price. We talk about ‘villages of life’, with a whole plan administered by the state. Maybe you don’t have a hospital in each village, but at least you have health center, so kids can get health care. You create schools, so that no child lacks an education. You have professional centers, recreation centers for youth, in these villages of life. We’re working out the details now.

We need another country, where everyone has the chance to live as a human being, where nothing is reconstructed the way it was prior to January 12.

Yves-Rose Jean-Juste is 22. Her mother, who worked as a live-in servant in a middle-class household, died on January 12. Her mother worked hard to create a better life for her only daughter, despite never learning to read or write. Yves-Rose now lives in her uncle’s modest home in Delmas, where she sweeps the floor, cooks meals over charcoal, fetches buckets of water, and waits for the U.S. Embassy to tell her if her application for a visa (to join her father) has been processed. On Sundays, she dresses up and goes to the Kingdom Hall to pray.

This country didn’t offer people anything in the first place, and it’s become even worse after the earthquake. Many things in the country are broken, and perhaps those people who could have helped the country realize its goals lost their lives in the earthquake.

When you look at all these disasters, we have to ask ourselves: Where is the world going? Is the world going to end soon? There is only one person who knows the answers: Jesus.

I would like the government to concern itself and take responsibility for reconstructing the country, offer young people more means to live, and take kids off the streets. For our country to be beautiful, for tourists to come visit and invest in our country. For us not to die in boats trying to seek life in other countries. But, for now, all of this is just a dream.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book, Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

“We’re for seeds that have never been touched by multinationals. In our advocacy, we say that seeds are the patrimony of humanity. No one can control them,” said Doudou Pierre, national coordinating committee member of the National Haitian Network for Food Sovereignty and Food Security (RENHASSA), in a recent interview. “We reject Monsanto and their GMOs. GMOs would be the extermination of our people.”

• These farmers belong to one of the organizations sponsoring today's demonstration against the arrival of Monsanto seeds in Haiti. Peasant organizations are adamant that their production involve only local, organic seeds.  Photo: Salena Tramel, Grassroots International.•

A march is being held in Haiti today for World Environment Day, called by at least four major national peasant organizations and one international one. The march’s purpose is to protest the new arrival of Monsanto seeds. The day’s slogans include, “Long live native seeds” and “Down with Monsanto. Down with GMO and hybrid seeds.”

Several U.S. organizations are planning simultaneous events to protest the entry of the controversial multinational in Haiti.

Last month, Haitian citizens learned the news that the giant agribusiness Monsanto will be “donating” 60,000 seed sacks (475 tons) of hybrid corn seeds and vegetable seeds. While the seeds are free this year, peasant organizations see a Trojan horse, with Monsanto seeking to gain a foothold in the Haitian market. Hybrid seeds typically do not regenerate, so that farmers would have to buy them again each year, and they generally require large quantities of fertilizer and pesticides (two products that also fill Monsanto’s annual coffers). And while the Ministry of Agriculture rejected Monsanto’s offer of genetically modified [GMO] seeds this year because Haiti does not have a law regulating their use, there may follow a push to get GMOs approved, in which case Monsanto would be well-positioned. Moreover, the Calypso tomato seeds contain the pesticide Thiram, whose chemical ingredient is so toxic that the Environmental Protection Agency has banned it for home use in the U.S.[1] (For more information, see “Haitian Farmers Commit to Burning Monsanto Hybrid Seeds.)

Monsanto representative Kathleen Manning commented on Huffington Post on May 20, “It’s disappointing to see people encouraging Haitian farmers to ‘burn Monsanto seeds,’ especially when the ones hurt by that action will be Haitian farmers and the Haitian people—not those of us watching on the sidelines.”

Yet the call to burn the seeds is based on a strong commitment of the Haitian peasant movement to food and seed sovereignty, which is the ability of local farmers to support themselves with local seeds for local consumption. Amongst the thousands of peasant organizations which exist among millions of peasant farmers, from village-level groups to national networks, food and seed sovereignty is a key principle. It has formed the basis of their national advocacy since the catastrophic January 12 earthquake. The lynchpin of the reconstruction model that small farmers and many other sectors advocate is developing the country’s agricultural potential. This would provide stable employment for the 60% to 80% of the population who are small farmers. It would improve prospects for food security, with an increase in consumption of domestic crops replacing the current dependence on imports, which now compose 57% of food consumed. Critical elements in strengthening peasant production include: government investment in agriculture, including technical support; the procurement of local food by USAID and other international agencies’ food aid programs, instead of the products of foreign agribusiness; and restriction on the dumping of foreign food and seeds.

Doudou Pierre said, “If Haiti isn’t sovereign with its food, if the government doesn’t promote national production, we’ll just always be opening our mouths to seeds and food aid so multinationals can make money off of us. We’re for family agriculture which respects the environment.” The coalition which Doudou Pierre co-coordinates represents 54 organizations from different sectors and regions throughout Haiti.

Below are some of the U.S.-based events which will protest the Monsanto seeds today. Also below are a few of numerous U.S. initiatives which are helping Haitian farmers get organic, creole seeds.

AGRA Watch in Seattle plans a march today which will end outside the Gates Foundation office. AGRA stands for A Green Revolution in Africa, which is a multinational corporation-driven, GMO-driven program now being launched in Africa. The Gates Foundation has been a key promoter of AGRA. The group says, “The dumping of toxic seeds in Haiti is the latest in a series of unsustainable solutions that Monsanto has pushed on farmers around the world. If the Gates Foundation wants to support a truly sustainable agricultural system in Africa, they must divorce themselves from Monsanto. Haitian farmers and African farmers have said NO! to corporate control of their food systems. The Gates Foundation and AGRA must say no to Monsanto.”

Rising in Solidarity with Ayiti in Chicago urges, “From Haiti to Chicago, reclaim our right to control our food and sovereignty!” Today a group of urban farmers and community members will join in a rally to burn GMO seeds in protest of Monsanto’s “donation” to Haiti. Participants in the event will also plant organic and heirloom seeds, and sign letters to USAID to protest the distribution of Monsanto’s seeds in Haiti. The event will also feature testimonials about the lack of access to food security, particularly fresh fruits and vegetables, in neighborhoods in Chicago, and how this connects to the right to food sovereignty in Haiti.

Community Action for Justice in the Americas, Africa, Asia, in Missoula, is hosting a protest this evening. “Bring posters, signs, or just come. Wear black /white, or lab coats, dust masks, goggles or Tyvek suits or creative costume! Bring drums, pots & pans...” A personal email from a member of the group says, “The people in Missoula, Montana are paying attention and taking action for farmers in Haiti.”

The Organic Consumers Association's network sent more than 10,000 emails to USAID and President Obama. Two dozen members have donated to the Seeds for Haiti project.

A coalition of U.S. churches and foundations are supporting Fondation FONDAMA, a Haitian federation of farmers and local NGOs. The coalition has sent down several million dollars to purchase 86,000 kilos of local corn seed and 59,000 kilos of local pea seeds. (Seeds are available in Haiti, but small farmers have not had the money to buy them.) All of the farmers who belong to member organizations in Foundation FONDAMA have gotten seeds, allowing them to proceed with planting their spring crop. The donations have also purchased 13,300 machetes and 9,200 hoes. The U.S. coalition has, moreover, sent a Massachusetts farmer to the village of Papay for today’s march, and will host the leader of the Peasant Movement of Papay in New York and Washington for public, media, and Congressional meetings next week.

Like numerous other supportive groups in the U.S., Groundswell International’s approach to seed sovereignty in Haiti pre-dates Monsanto’s announcement. Through its Haitian partner Partnership for Local Development, Groundswell is strengthening the capacity of peasant organizations in Haiti to sustainably improve their agricultural production, income generation, food security, health, and natural resources management. A Groundswell staffperson writes, “A key thing we'll be working on is trying to promote the alternative, which is Haitian production of 100% of their seeds so they don't need imports.”

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

The U.S. and U.N. have based their plan for Haiti’s redevelopment on the expansion of the assembly industry. Toward this end, the U.S. Congress passed legislation last month which would expand benefits and income for U.S. investors yet again. Haitian workers will continue to earn $3.09 a day.

• "People in the factories are sweating hard and working hard and they don't get anything," says labor rights organizer Yannick Etienne. Photo: Charlie Kernaghan, National Labor Committee.•

Worker rights groups and other sectors of Haiti’s social justice movements are adamant that a sweatshop-based development model cannot advance either the country or its workers. First, the investments are unstable, and companies can and do pull out at a moment’s notice. Second, the work does not offer a living wage, benefits, possibilities for advancement, or skills training. Third, with the primary products and the machinery imported and the finished products exported, assembly does not stimulate Haiti’s economy.

Here Yannick Etienne, an organizer with the labor rights group Batay Ouvriyè (Worker’s Struggle), talks about the assembly sector and why it is neither a sustainable nor humane development model. Alternative models of development exist, ones that are not premised on the exploitation of some for the profits of others. Yannick talks about Batay Ouvriyè’s work to help Haitians participate in determining what redevelopment after the earthquake should look like. (Many articles in this series discuss some economically just options; see www.otherworldsarepossible.org/alternatives/another-haiti-possible.)

We are at the crossroads. What happened January 12 put the traditional way of doing things under the debris of the earthquake. Haiti has to move from where it is, as the poorest country of the hemisphere with people feeling sorry for us.

This earthquake was one of the worst things that could have happened, but we have to turn it into something positive. We have to make sure that people are agents of change and right now this is a good opportunity, positive in a political sense. There are so many things that can be done to shake up the traditional way things have always worked here.

HOPE II [Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement Act of 2008; which removes tariffs on importing certain types and quantities of Haitian-assembled garments into the U.S.] is supposed to help Haiti in the assembly industry. Actually, what you have is U.S. companies benefiting by getting stuff assembled at a very low price for the U.S. market without paying taxes or customs. They’re saying, “More people will get jobs because of preferential trade access,” but the workers who are making those factories’ profits are not getting anything. No one even remembers them.

People in the factories are sweating hard and working hard and they don’t get anything. They have to have union rights. They need other forms of social support and social insurance. They need meals in the factories and funds for when there are problems.

The legal minimum wage for assembly plants that manufacture for export is 125 gourdes ($3.09) per day. If you are earning by piece rate [paid per unit, such as a sleeve, instead of for the amount of time worked], they often set a minimum that you have to meet that day, but sometimes it’s higher than what a worker can do in eight hours. Then the workers have to work longer but [instead of paying overtime] the bosses say, “No, they’re just finishing their work.”

Most of the piece rate quotas have gone up since minimum wage increase [in 2009], and again since January 12. They have different gimmicks to make sure that salary isn’t paid. Now some factories are rushing people, raising the piece rate quota [so people have to work faster or longer to make minimum wage]. I’ve heard of factories where they say they can’t pay the minimum wage because they have problems. Some factory owners are saying, “If you don’t want to stay with less pay, we have 50 people to replace you.” People need the jobs; most of them have lost their homes and are living in refugee camps.

Another problem is that many of the workers never got their salaries for the first two weeks of January [payday should have come shortly after the earthquake]. Some workers have been going back and forth to get their money but the factories say, “The banks were closed, we lost everything,” all kinds of excuses not to pay them.

As for rights and benefits: The law says you get 45 minutes of break a day, but that’s not always respected. If you go to a doctor for a work-related injury, they’ll reimburse you, but workers don’t always have the money to pay up front. Otherwise there’s no health care. You get a little retirement money if you reach 65, but no one can stay working in factory conditions that long. There are no other social benefits. There has to be political processes to push this government to do things.

We understand that it’s a process to get rid of the assembly plants, but they have to be organized a different way, they have to be more than decent work. We need better jobs, not more sweatshops. Workers should participate in designing their working conditions and salaries and the whole environment. The people will have to say, “This is what we want,” and things should be upgraded according to what they say.

People have to fight back against those anti-change forces who were ruling the country before January 12. This is an opportunity because some of the people didn’t want to get involved in any political or social action before because they were so busy taking care of their children.

Some people say Haiti has not been built, now it has to be built. We have to understand what happened in the past and change things radically, including the people who are at the top. We have to build not only awareness but also mobilize people to action. We need to shake the state, to make sure that the people really take things into their hands and get a state that will really work in the interests of the masses. The people have to be able to make decisions democratically that are in the interest of the masses.

We have found camps that have many factory workers, people who used to live in shantytowns. So some members of Batay Ouvriyè and other groups in the camps have started organizing to raise the political awareness of the situation, to make sure that things are dealt with democratically, to have discussions and debates to see what should be done to change this country and to allow people to better their lives. People can’t just work to get the food and water they need; they also need to see about the future. This is our job right now: to raise consciousness to make workers believe in their ability to change things.

In places like Ouanamenthe [a town which hosts a free trade zone and several factories], we are gathering ideas for regular citizens to say what kind of political structures and redevelopment they want. We’re getting different sectors – university students, teachers, professionals, street vendors – together. Our first question is, “If you are a worker in the factory, if you are a doctor, a teacher, an engineer, what are the things you don’t like?” Then we say, “Okay, you don’t like this, how do you want to change it?” We’re having workshops and social forums.

Haiti is a very small country. As Haiti alone, we can’t get to the radical solutions that Haiti needs. It has to be a worldwide movement, in America, Europe, and Africa; this is why solidarity is so important. You have countries like Venezuela that want to bring their support to the Haitian people. One hand has to give to the other.

We are a people that resists what we don’t like; this is one of our trademarks. We fought against one of the biggest powers [in the late 1790s and early 1800s] and got rid of the French colonists and had an anti-slavery revolution. We have that experience as an example. We can use it and see how far we can go.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Last week, the United Nations peacekeeping mission fired tear gas and rubber bullets into a crowded refugee camp, leaving at least six hospitalized and others suffering respiratory problems. Citizen organizations plan demonstrations for today, the sixth anniversary of the U.N. armed presence in Haiti. The march is part of growing protests against the military forces which have amassed in Haiti since the January 12 earthquake and the lack of attention to displaced people’s needs.

• Today is the sixth anniversary of the U.N. military presence in Haiti. Mistrust of that presence runs high. Photo: Tory Field.•

On May 23, students at the School of Ethnology of the State University of Haiti held another in a series of protests on the central Champs de Mars Boulevard. The U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH, by its French acronym) and Haitian police went into the school, firing tears gas and rubber bullets while the students threw rocks.

Then at about 3:00, MINUSTAH troops began firing in the internally displaced people’s camp in the downtown parks around Champs de Mars, where many thousands of people are crowded into tight quarters. The firing continued for hours, according to residents interviewed for this article and other reports. Camp residents reported that babies and small children choked on the gas and passed out, as did at least two women with preexisting heart conditions. Three doctors with Partners in Health at the University Hospital reported treating at least six victims of rubber bullet rounds. Two children were wounded in the face, one of them requiring about ten stitches, according to one of the doctors.

When the attack began, camp residents, including many elderly and infirm people, and babies and small children fled. “I saw one woman running with her twins that are three or four months old,” said Eramithe Delva. “She had one in each arm, and with every step as she ran they banged against her chest. Is this what they want for us?” Many spent the night in the streets, for fear of returning to the camp. Residents interviewed said they had no idea why MINUSTAH fired on them.

MINUSTAH has since issued an apology for entering in the School of Ethnology. The statement did not mention the attack on the camp.

Demonstrations in Port-au-Prince and other areas of the country have become a daily occurrence. Most of them protest the government’s handling of the disaster and the heavy political and military presence of foreign powers since January 12. Within days after the earthquake, 12,600 U.N. troops, 20,000 U.S. troops, 2,000 Canadians, 600 French, and more from other countries amassed there.

Rural organizer Selina Pierre-Louis said, “We don’t know what these soldiers came to do. They have batons and guns in their hands. They zoom up and down in their huge vehicles all day. We’re not at war and we’re not armed. We need technical support, we need reconstruction, we need psychological help. They’re not doing anything to help the rebuilding. They’re just adding to our trauma.”

Troop levels overall have abated since the first months after the earthquake. The most recent figures on MINUSTAH’s web site show that just over 9,000 MINUSTAH forces remain there. The mission’s cost for the current fiscal year is $611.75 million.

The Security Council-approved MINUSTAH was established on June 1, 2004 with a triple mandate of ensuring a “secure and stable environment,” promoting a constitutional political process, and strengthening human rights. Francky Etienne Remy, who owns a small craft shop in Jacmel, said, “The Haitian police are totally ineffectual so MINUSTAH fills a vacuum.”

Yet MINUSTAH troops have repeatedly been accused of killings, arbitrary arrests, and human rights violations throughout the duration of the mission. (See, for example, the reports of Harvard Law Student Advocates for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch.) These charges include an attack by MINUSTAH forces in Cité Soleil on April 15, 2005, killing several; an attack on July 6, 2005, resulting in an uncertain number of deaths; the killing of at least five, and possibly many more, people in Cité Soleil in December 22, 2006; and the shooting death of a young man at the funeral of a prominent priest on July 14, 2009.

In February, 2008, the U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Services released its findings from an investigation into accusations against Sri Lankan MINUSTAH troops. It found that acts of sexual exploitation and abuse of children were "frequent" and occurred "at virtually every location where the contingent personnel were deployed."

MINUSTAH forces have also been shot at and killed. MINUSTAH claims it has suffered 152 troop fatalities.

Beyond charges of unnecessary force, others like the student, small farmer, worker, and popular organizations who are organizing today’s march, oppose MINUSTAH because they claim the mission undermines Haitian sovereignty. The May 26 press statement for the march, signed by ten organizations, states, “After the January 12 catastrophe, the occupation has been strengthened with other foreign soldiers and MINUSTAH, on the pretext that they are helping us… [T]hey did nothing to help prevent more than 300,000 people from dying under rubble… Now on the sixth anniversary of the occupation, we are taking to the streets of Port-au-Prince to get the country out from under the rubble of MINUSTAH.”

Community organizer Nixon Boumba with the grassroots organization Democratic Popular Movement said in an interview, “We’re asking for Haitians to be the true actors in their future, and for an end to the occupation to allow the country to have dignity and autonomy for the development and transformation of the country. We need schools, we need people in the camps attended to. After January 12 there have been a lot of opportunities to resolve the problems in the country. Instead, Canada, France, the U.S., Brazil, and others have acted like imperialists, strengthening their power and trying to undermine our chance to change the quality of our country. The U.S. wants Haiti to serve as a military base for the Caribbean, to control resistance from Latin America. And they want to prevent a massive emigration toward the U.S. and Canada.”

“If we rural women can organize ourselves together to form a bloc, we could accomplish a lot of things,” says Yvette Michaud, founder of the National Coordinating Committee of Peasant Women (KONAFAP by its Creole acronym). The committee is a first-ever effort to unite, on a national basis, the voices and interests of this large and excluded sector of the population.

KONAFAP was formed two years ago by women from the 56 member organizations of the Haitian National Network for Food Sovereignty and Security. KONAFAP is still in a building stage, and to date only a few organizations are active within it. Those members are excited about the future potential of the group.

• A new national organization of Haitian rural women opens up possibilities for women to participate in shaping the direction of their country. Photo: Salena Tramel, Grassroots International.•

Here, three organizers within KONAFAP discuss the status of rural women, challenges they face to organizing as women, advances they have made toward gender justice, and what they hope for in a rebuilt Haiti. The women are Marie Berthine Bonheur from Croix des Bouquets, Bertine Petit from Cabaret, and Yvette Michaud from Grand Goave.

Please talk about rural women in Haiti, and why you are organizing a national committee.

Yvette Michaud: As peasant women in Haiti, we saw that all the activities focusing on women always happened in Port-au-Prince. The coordinator for women from the [non-governmental organization] Action Aid in Brazil invited me to Brazil to learn about women and natural resources. When I returned to Haiti, we in the Haitian National Network for Food Sovereignty and Security passed a resolution to say we were going to establish a national women’s peasant organization.

The coalition is so young and we have budgetary problems, so we haven’t reached out to all the women’s groups yet. And everything we do in still in cooperation with mixed-gender groups.

Bertine Petit: An organization of peasant women means a lot. Even Haitians in the government reject peasant women, even the Ministry of Women. They don’t remember peasants or our culture at all.

Michaud: We know there are more women in Haiti than men, and more people in the countryside than the city. We already work in agriculture, we work preserving fruit, we do the marketing and sell the food, we plant, we raise the children. What women do, we don’t say that the men can’t, but they can’t do the things that are necessary for survival without us.

Marie Berthine Bonheur: Women are the poto mitan, central pillar, of society. Where there are women, there are many sacrifices made, and a real development of the possible.

What challenges do peasant women face, and what changes are you advocating?

Petit: What are called rights, I don’t think Haitian women, especially peasant women, know them.

Bonheur: Like little maids.

Michaud: More like slaves. On paper they say that all people have rights. In reality that’s not what happens.

In the mountains, the state hasn’t established any social services for us. Women don’t have health care and don’t have hospitals to deliver their babies. You can’t even get a birth certificate in the countryside. Women need good education for themselves and their children.

You used to see boys going to schools more often than girls. Only men had the rights to education and leisure. Things have started to get better. But even today, women have to cook the food, wash, iron, get the water, raise children, and take the children to school.

One of our main objectives is for women to know their rights from their homes to the society. We’re ready to do everything possible to get our rights respected. We’re ready to hold demonstrations, do sit-ins, circulate petitions, and do advocacy, to demand services from the state. The state owes us; it’s not a gift. It’s their responsibility to give services to everyone, especially peasants.

Petit: We need a state that, when they see something that needs to happen, follows through. There is no action. No leadership.

Bonheur: Women experience violence, too. And when we go to court, the men are usually the judges, and they tease and mock the women, especially in cases of rape. They receive women very poorly.

Michaud: Rape happens a lot especially on little girls, 12 or 14 years or so. But in the past ten years or so, there’s been an improvement in the violence. Now that men know that women can denounce them, they temper themselves a little. But that doesn’t mean that the violence has gone away. And it’s not only physical, it’s verbal, sexual, emotional, all sorts. We know that other kinds of violence can be just as damaging as physical.

That’s one of the reasons why we’ve started to organize as women, apart. In a mixed-gender group, if a woman’s husband beats her, she can’t say anything about it. But in all-women’s groups, she can get support from others and advice.

What has been your experience of organizing women, especially in women-specific groups?

Michaud: There are some violent men who prevent women from attending women’s meetings, because they know women can speak freely and badly about them. Sometimes the men use violence to stop the women from going, but it’s much less these days than it used to be. Usually women are prevented de facto because they have so much work in the house.

Or what often happens in mixed-gender groups is that women are there, but they don’t get to participate. You don’t hear women’s voices. They have to bring the water, make the food, clean the rooms. They are almost there for service instead of as members.

Why a group like this one is important is that women’s organizations give space where we can think about ourselves and our future. In women’s groups, women are more comfortable to speak. They participate freely. We want to create more of these spaces so women aren’t servants while men think and talk.

Bonheur: They have more force.

Michaud: For example, the MPP [Peasant Movement of Papay] has three branches: mixed, women, and youth. The women have special activities they do, like preserving fruit. The women have a cooperative, and a popular credit bank that charges 2% interest. We do big activities, big demonstration to put our demands forth, big demonstrations about the non-governmental organizations who say they are giving aid and then don’t. The women of MPNKP [National Peasant Movement of the Papay Congress] have held demonstrations to put out their demands, especially about the reconstruction.

We have a lot to say about the upcoming election. We want women to participate, both in voting and as candidates. We want to have our own representation in the parliament.

For International Women’s Day [March 8], we had a big demonstration that left [the village of Papay] and went to Hinche. Women came from everywhere. It wasn’t a celebration because our country is in a disaster, but it was a day of reflection.

What are your hopes for the post-earthquake reconstruction?

Bonheur: The reconstruction plan the foreigners have is no good.

Michaud: Right; their agenda doesn’t correspond with ours. We have things to say about the reconstruction plan. The country depends on Haitians. It’s true that we have a government without a plan, and the international community is imposing what’s good for it. If Haitians want Haiti to have a better future, we are the ones who must decide what that future is and construct it.

I know there are a lot of women who are working with men in civil society toward proposals about the reconstruction of the country, alternatives so that everything isn’t left in the hands of a small group which doesn’t really have the will to change the country: corrupt government officials, the international community giving orders, the elite who doesn’t want change because it’s against their interests.

There is a lot of chance to develop agriculture. We produce the food that is healthiest, without GMOS or chemicals.

Haiti is a mountainous country. We can’t say that all the mountains will get irrigated, but they could do more irrigations canals, mountaintop catchment lakes, and cisterns. That way, the country could produce so that its children can eat.

We especially need a decentralization of services. A lot of parents lost children because they had gone to Port-au-Prince to learn skills or go to university. If we had decentralization, all those people wouldn’t have died. All the services in Port-au-Prince must be out in the countryside, too. We are people, too.

Petit: They could put universities in the countryside for peasant children, plus give us recreation, schools, health care. The government needs to address the needs of the peasant sector.

Bonheur: All the state offices that are in Port-au-Prince, there should be branches in the countryside. We need to be able to stay on our own land.

It would be good to have a fund to buy local seeds. It would best favor the Haitian peasantry to plant our own seeds on our own lands. It’s up to us to say what type of seeds we want. We can’t accept these foreigners giving us GMO seeds which aren’t good for health or land. GMOs will do us harm and aggravate the problems of our agriculture.

Petit: All Haitians have to put their heads together to reconstruct the country.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

In part II of an interview, Chavannes Jean-Baptiste discusses the role that agriculture can play in Haiti in addressing both the environmental and food crises. (See “The Clock is Set to Zero” for the first part.) Jean-Baptiste is the Executive Director of the Peasant Movement of Papay (MPP by its Creole acronym) and the spokesperson for the National Peasant Movement of the Congress of Papay (MPNKP). Until this year, he also sat on the international coordinating committee of Vía Campesina, a confederation of organizations of peasant, family, indigenous, and landless farmers from more than sixty countries.

• Fast-growing plants and used tires in a demonstration garden of the Peasant Movement of Papay. Haiti's movement of small farmer advocates ecological agriculture as well as policies which protect both the environment and local production. Photo: Roberto (Bear) Guerra.•

The solutions Jean-Baptiste and many other Haitians propose reside in part in one set of policies and programs which can restore land and other riches of nature, and another set which can protect small-scale, sustainable agricultural production from agribusiness. An additional part of the solution rests in agro-ecology, a model of agriculture based on environmental health. Developed as an alternative to the Green Revolution, agro-ecology urges local production of healthy, organic food for local markets. It values biodiversity and traditional knowledge, and opposes genetic modification and patenting of seeds. Haiti is among the many countries with thriving movements of organized farmers who are advancing this model.

Jean-Baptiste gave this interview from Papay, where the MPP has created ecological demonstration gardens. The farmers maximize the productivity of small pieces of land in ways which sustain, rather than exhaust, it. They use all natural resources efficiently in bio-loops. They germinate seedlings inside of discarded tires and use other inventive gardening methodology. They are growing fast-growing plants which yield harvests in six weeks, in addition to other organic vegetables and medicinal plants. Their goats, rabbits, and chickens consume kitchen and garden waste and, from it, produce manure which is then used as fertilizer. Compost serves as additional fertilizer. The operation also involves draining gray water from kitchens and showers, and running it through several ponds filled with sand, gravel, and charcoal; with the cleaned water that emerges, they breed fish and irrigate gardens. MPP also employs cisterns, gravity-fed irrigation, and other catchment and watering systems to conserve and maximize water during dry season.

This interview predated the news that Monsanto has donated 60,000 seed sacks (475 tons) of hybrid corn seeds and vegetable seeds to Haiti. For Jean-Baptiste’s and the MPP’s response, see “Haitian Farmers Commit to Burning Monsanto Seeds.”

“In contrast to the destruction that the industrial sector is causing around the world, Vía Campesina and other groups such as Friends of Nature have done studies that show that peasant and family agriculture can combat climate change. I’m in a Vía Campesina commission on climate change, and there we’re clear: to impact climate change, we have to change the mode of agricultural production. Peasants around the world are very vigilant about this. In Haiti we have an advantage, which is that the majority of peasants grow only organically.

“We see the development of Haiti through the production of local, organic food; the conservation of that food; and its transformation into products for the cities. The peasants have said, ‘Let’s talk about storage and transformation and commercialization in local and national markets. Let’s develop an economy where peasants have control.’ This could really develop the riches of the country while bringing Haiti back environmentally.

“We see reforestation as extremely important. Haiti has less than 2% tree cover. Two years ago we asked for each rural section to plant 10,000 trees each, or 56,000 trees each year. That would allow us to cover the country.

“Also, if we could plant fruit orchard plantations, that would have three objectives. It would protect the environment. It would give peasants income so that wouldn’t have to cut down tress to make wood charcoal. It would also mean that we wouldn’t have to depend any more on the Dominican Republic for the lemons, the coconuts, the oranges and other food we consume.

“I talked with an exporter who told me that 200,000 cases of Haitian [Madame] Françique mangos are sold in five square kilometers in Manhattan. That means that there is an enormous market for mangoes in the U.S., which could also help us combat deforestation.

“One thing we need for that to happen is integrated water management systems. Now because of deforestation, when it rains, we get floods. Maybe an earthquake comes every 50 or 100 years, but floods are each year, and hurricanes almost every year. Houses get washed away, animals get washed away, land gets washed away, people get washed away. I was talking with a peasant who said we used to have two seasons: the dry season and the rainy season. Now we have two seasons: the dry season and the flood season.

“With good irrigation systems we could produce a lot of food and we could help the environment. In Haiti, we have 300,000 hectares of land that could be irrigated, but we have maybe 30,000 or 40,000 that have a good irrigation system now.

“We’re developing different irrigation systems with wells that you pump with solar panels. You can use cisterns that catch water on the roof. We’ve had great experiences with one or two families capturing 15,000 liters of water that have carried them through the dry season. We have other, more advanced systems of mountaintop catchment lakes, which let you to hold rain in lakes that you make with bulldozers or abundant peasant labor, so that when the dry season comes you can have water and you can still grow food. You can also treat gray water, like in the MPP center; we treat the water that comes from the shower and kitchen with a series of lakes with gravel, sand, and charcoal.

“One of the things we’re doing is creating solar energy, because peasants should have electricity. One member of MPP has two lightbulbs run from a solar panel. He can play his radio, charge his telephone, even watch television.

“All our public positions are clearly against genetically modified seeds and against agro-fuels.

We’re in a heated battle against the introduction of GM [genetically modified] seeds and against jatropha plantations. We’re especially against jatropha, the plant that has a seed that gives oil which you can make agro-diesel from. We don’t call it bio-diesel, because we in Vía Campesina are clear that ‘bio’ means life and that you can’t mix life with diesel and big business. They say jatropha is a miracle plant, but from other studies and my own, I know it’s a catastrophe plant. One thing we want is a law against jatropha and a law against the introduction of GM seeds. Last year we marched to the parliament, and we were well-received. In October we met with the parliament again, and we were going to meet them again in January but now we’re in a national crisis. But peasants are very vigilant about this.

“We in Haiti are committed to staying a county where organic, biological agriculture dominates.

We know that Clinton and the multinationals, the IMF and the WTO, have another plan for us – one based on the import of GM seeds and food aid, one based on making us grow for export, including growing for agro-diesel. But we’re putting on pressure to say: no, that’s not what Haiti needs, here is what popular Haitian organizations want, here is our agenda.”

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

This article is co-written by Beverly Bell and Tory Field.

The U.S. Congress has passed bi-partisan legislation, the Haiti Economic Lift Program (HELP) Act, that would extend and expand current trade law with Haiti to increase U.S. imports of Haitian assembled textiles. Passed May 5 and 6 by the House and Senate, respectively, the bill is part of the push by U.S., U.N., other international leaders, and businesses to expand the low-wage assembly industry as the linchpin of Haiti’s post-earthquake recovery. President Obama is expected to sign the bill into law.

• Caption: Mirlene Joanis in front of a poster stating the rights of women factory workers.  Few of these rights are respected.  Photo: Beverly Bell.•

“This important step responds to the needs of the Haitian people for more tools to lift themselves from poverty, while standing to benefit U.S. consumers,'' said a statement by former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton about the bill.

The benefit of cheap imports for U.S. consumers is one matter, sweatshops as Horatio Alger tool another. To date, the assembly industry in Haiti has not provided poverty alleviation. Most factory workers live direly impoverished lives on the industry minimum wage of 125 gourdes (US$3.09) per day, without the opportunity to raise their pay, learn skills, or advance professionally. The right to unionize is protected in the constitution, but prohibited in practice by the standard management response of firing workers who attempt to form unions. The jobs are insecure, as factories can and do leave without notice to find cheaper labor or other conveniences elsewhere. The Canadian apparel manufacturer Gilden Activewear, for example, decided to quit Haiti within one day of the January 12 earthquake, shifting its Haiti- based operations to the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Honduras instead. The factories offer little in the way of health or safety protections. Repetitive motion injuries and failing eyesight are only two of common occupational hazards.

Nor does the assembly industry offer a model of sustainable or sovereign national development. The products made in Haiti’s textile factories are not generally made out of Haitian fabric or on Haitian-made machinery. Once assembled, the goods are not consumed in Haiti but are shipped abroad. Haiti’s only role in the process is as a stopover in the production process, where cheap labor keeps profit margins high.

The HELP Act expands on the Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement Act of 2008 (HOPE II), which removes tariffs on certain types and quantities of Haitian-assembled garments into the U.S. HELP would increase the volume of fabrics that are eligible to be imported into the U.S. from Haiti duty-free, from 70 million square meter equivalents to 200 million. It would also extend to 2020 the time frame of the trade relationship.

The U.S is joined by the U.N. in placing sweatshops at the forefront of the post-earthquake rebuilding plan. The textile industry had already been given a leading role, prior to the earthquake, in the U.N.’s development plan for Haiti. The blueprint, written in 2009 by an Oxford University professor, Paul Collier, said, “The garments industry has the scope to provide several hundred thousand jobs to Haitians… It is truly important that this opportunity should be taken.”

In a speech at a donor conference on Haiti in April 2009, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said of his trip to Haiti with U.N. Special Envoy to Haiti Bill Clinton: “We saw children, well-fed by the World Bank and the World Food Program, happily going to school… We visited a textile factory, employing thousands of people that could easily become a prototype for many others…We friends of Haiti must work with the government and the private sector to create jobs and spur economic growth by taking full advantage of openings to international markets.”

Other development models exist, based on promoting human capacity in conditions where poverty can truly abate and workers can take greater control over their lives. Haitian social movements have insisted that post-earthquake redevelopment must lead toward a just and equitable economy. For specific proposals, see “Haitian Led Reconstruction Development” and “Raising Up Another Haiti”.

The Haitian government is on board with assembly sector as priority, too. Discussion at the recent international donor conference on Haiti in New York on March 31 featured textiles, together with agriculture and tourism, as the basis of its post-earthquake recovery plan. According to the plan, “the Hope II law provides an initial framework for using Haiti’s comparative advantages, to benefit from its workforce…”

The proposal submitted by the Haitian government to the March 31 donor conference called for building “regional development centres” for displaced people whom the government hopes to relocate outside of Port-au-Prince. Textile factories will play a critical role there. It claims that the success of these areas will “depend largely on incentives for industrial, commercial, and tourist development.” President René Préval has said that an assembly factory will be constructed at the site of the tent camp Corail Cesselesse that the government has created near the town of Croix-des-Bouquets. On March 24, the Minister of Commerce announced the creation of three new free trade zones in and around Port-au-Prince.

Mirlene Joanis, the Director of Communications for the Center for the Promotion of Women Workers, has a different view of development. She spoke from the Center’s office, which is surrounded by factories in Port-au-Prince’s industrial park.

“What’s bizarre is that, while they say they count on the subcontracting [assembly] sector most for the creation of jobs, they can’t count on it for development. This industry can’t lead to development in Haiti because it’s so unstable. That’s the mark of this sector: instability. Today people find a job, tomorrow the factory goes somewhere else and they no longer have their jobs.

“Also, it’s one of the sectors that’s most marginalized, where the state least takes into account the rights of people. Regardless, the factories gets franchise privileges and tax privileges.

“These jobs can be a relief for people who have the illusion that they are working. The minimum wage is so low; it can’t resolve anyone’s daily problems. And it’s not just money; the workers have to have social advantages, such as the right to housing, right to health care, right to hygiene, to take transportation, right to food…. The totality of these social rights would add a lot to the value of minimum wage, but not one of them is respected. They don’t even give people potable water. They just buy tanks of untreated water in trucks; people have to buy their own little plastic sacks of water out of their 125 gourdes. I give this example as the most basic of rights, the right to drink water, but they don’t even offer that.

“They’ve been talking about HOPE II as though it’s Haiti’s salvation. But in a context where people’s rights are not respected, it can’t relieve the misery of the people.

“If union rights aren’t protected, there’s no way this sector will improve. People must be able to raise their demands and say, “Respect my rights.” That doesn’t exist. Even the movement for the minimum wage to be raised to 200 gourdes… people took to the streets to demand it at the last minute, but it ended badly for them. Many lost their job as a result. The state must enforce people’s rights so they have a vehicle for making their demands. We have to have a government that considers people’s rights.

“Our biggest problem in this sector is that we’re in an anarchic situation. The boss has money, he can call the minister. When the worker goes to ask for her rights to be respected, that means nothing. She can organize a union, but the boss will fire her immediately, and then there’s no more union.

“Marginalization is one of the biggest complaints in this country. Some groups are considered human beings, others aren’t. Some have rights, others don’t. As long as that is not resolved, they can come in with all the billions of dollars in reconstruction they want, but without the principle of respect for rights, we’re not going anywhere.

“But as for development from this sector, that’s got nothing to do with it. It’s just going from bad to worse, with no relief of the workers’ misery in sight.”

Tory Field is an organizer, farmer, and Program Associate at Other Worlds.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds,www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

“A new earthquake” is what peasant farmer leader Chavannes Jean-Baptiste of the Peasant Movement of Papay (MPP) called the news that Monsanto will be donating 60,000 seed sacks (475 tons) of hybrid corn seeds and vegetable seeds, some of them treated with highly toxic pesticides. The MPP has committed to burning Monsanto’s seeds, and has called for a march to protest the corporation’s presence in Haiti on June 4, for World Environment Day.

In an open letter sent of May 14, Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, the Executive Director of MPP and the spokesperson for the National Peasant Movement of the Congress of Papay (MPNKP), called the entry of Monsanto seeds into Haiti “a very strong attack on small agriculture, on farmers, on biodiversity, on Creole seeds…, and on what is left our environment in Haiti.” Haitian social movements have been vocal in their opposition to agribusiness imports of seeds and food, which undermines local production with local seed stocks. They have expressed special concern about the import of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

• Jonas Deronzil from Verrettes has been farming since 1974. Like small producers throughout Haiti, his meager income from corn, rice, and beans is threatened by new competition from Monsanto. Photo: Beverly Bell.•

For now, without a law regulating the use of GMOs in Haiti, the Ministry of Agriculture rejected Monsanto’s offer of Roundup Ready GMO seeds. In an email exchange, a Monsanto representative assured the Ministry of Agriculture that the seeds being donated are not GMO.

Elizabeth Vancil, Monsanto’s Director of Development Initiatives, called the news that the Haitian Ministry of Agriculture approved the donation “a fabulous Easter gift” in an April email. Monsanto is known for aggressively pushing seeds, especially GMO seeds, in both the global North and South, including through highly restrictive technology agreements with farmers who are not always made fully aware of what they are signing. According to interviews by this writer with representatives of Mexican small farmer organizations, they then find themselves forced to buy Monsanto seeds each year, under conditions they find onerous and at costs they sometimes cannot afford.

The hybrid corn seeds Monsanto has donated to Haiti are treated with the fungicide Maxim XO, and the calypso tomato seeds are treated with thiram. Thiram belongs to a highly toxic class of chemicals called ethylene bisdithiocarbamates (EBDCs). Results of tests of EBDCs on mice and rats caused concern to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which then ordered a special review. The EPA determined that EBDC-treated plants are so dangerous to agricultural workers that they must wear special protective clothing when handling them. Pesticides containing thiram must contain a special warning label, the EPA ruled. The EPA also barred marketing of the chemicals for many home garden products, because it assumes that most gardeners do not have adequately protective clothing. Monsanto’s passing mention of thiram to Ministry of Agriculture officials in an email contained no explanation of the dangers, nor any offer of special clothing or training for those who will be farming with the toxic seeds.

Haitian social movements’ concern is not just about the dangers of the chemicals and the possibility of future GMO imports. They claim that the future of Haiti depends on local production with local food for local consumption, in what is called food sovereignty. Monsanto’s arrival in Haiti, they say, is a further threat to this.

“People in the U.S. need to help us produce, not give us food and seeds. They’re ruining our chance to support ourselves,” said farmer Jonas Deronzil of a peasant cooperative in the rural region of Verrettes.

Monsanto’s history has long drawn ire from environmentalists, health advocates, and small farmers, going back to its production of Agent Orange during the Vietnam war. Exposure to Agent Orange has caused cancer in an untold number of U.S. Veterans, and the Vietnamese government claims that 400,000 Vietnamese people were killed or disabled by Agent Orange, and 500,000 children were born with birth defects as a result of their exposure.

Monsanto’s former motto, “Without chemicals, life itself would be impossible,” has been replaced by “Imagine.” Its web site home page claims it “help[s] farmers around the world produce more while conserving more. We help farmers grow yield sustainably so they can be successful, produce healthier foods… while also reducing agriculture's impact on our environment.” The corporations’ record does not support the claims.

Together with Syngenta, Dupont and Bayer, Monsanto controls more than half of the world’s seeds. The company holds almost 650 seed patents, most of them for cotton, corn and soy, and almost 30% of the share of all biotech research and development. Monsanto came to own such a vast supply by buying major seed companies to stifle competition, patenting genetic modifications to plant varieties, and suing small farmers. Monsanto is also one of the leading manufacturers of GMOs.

As of 2007, Monsanto had filed 112 lawsuits against U.S. farmers for alleged technology contract violations or GMO patents, involving 372 farmers and 49 small agricultural businesses in 27 different states. From these, Monsanto has won more than $21.5 million in judgments. The multinational appears to investigate 500 farmers a year, in estimates based on Monsanto’s own documents and media reports.

“Farmers have been sued after their field was contaminated by pollen or seed from someone else’s genetically engineered crop [or] when genetically engineered seed from a previous year’s crop has sprouted, or ‘volunteered,’ in fields planted with non-genetically engineered varieties the following year,” said Andrew Kimbrell and Joseph Mendelson of the Center for Food Safety.

In Colombia, Monsanto has received upwards of $25 million from the U.S. government for providing Roundup Ultra in the anti-drug fumigation efforts of Plan Colombia. Roundup Ultra is a highly concentrated version of Monsanto's glyphosate herbicide, with additional ingredients to increase its lethality. Colombian communities and human rights organizations have charged that the herbicide has destroyed food crops, water sources and protected areas, and has led to increased incidents of birth defects and cancers.

Vía Campesina, the world’s largest confederation of farmers with member organizations in more than sixty countries, has called Monsanto one of the “principal enemies of peasant sustainable agriculture and food sovereignty for all peoples.” They claim that as Monsanto and other multinationals control an ever larger share of land and agriculture, they force small farmers out of their land and jobs. They also claim that the agribusiness giants contribute to climate change and other environmental disasters, an outgrowth of industrial agriculture.

The Vía Campesina coalition launched a global campaign against Monsanto last October 16, on International World Food Day, with protests, land occupations, and hunger strikes in more than twenty countries. They carried out a second global day of action against Monsanto on April 17 of this year, in honor of Earth Day.

Non-governmental organizations in the U.S. are challenging Monsanto’s practices, too. The Organic Consumers Association has spearheaded the campaign “Millions Against Monsanto,” calling on the company to stop intimidating small family farmers, stop marketing untested and unlabeled genetically engineered foods to consumers, and stop using billions of dollars of U.S. taypayers' money to subsidize GMO crops.

The Center for Food Safety has led a four-year legal challenge to Monsanto that has just made it to the U.S. Supreme Court. After successful litigation against Monsanto and the U.S. Department of Agriculture for illegal promotion of Roundup Ready Alfalfa, the court heard the Center for Food Safety’s case on April 27. A decision on this first-ever Supreme Court case about GMOs is now pending.

“Fighting hybrid and GMO seeds is critical to save our diversity and our agriculture,” Jean-Baptiste said in an interview in February. “We have the potential to make our lands produce enough to feed the whole population and even to export certain products. The policy we need for this to happen is food sovereignty, where the county has a right to define it own agricultural policies, to grow first for the family and then for local market, to grow healthy food in a way which respects the environment and Mother Earth.”

Many thanks to Moira Birss for her assistance with research and writing.

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

On April 15, the Haitian Parliament ratified a law extending by 18 months the state of emergency that President René Préval declared after the earthquake of January 12. The parliament also formally ceded its powers over finances and reconstruction, during the state of emergency, to a foreign-led Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti (CIRH). The CIRH’s mandate is to direct the post-earthquake reconstruction of Haiti through the $9.9 billion in pledges of international aid, including approving policies, projects, and budgeting. The World Bank will manage the money.

• The Unknown Slave in Port-au-Prince's central park, now surrounded by a refugee camp. The monument commemorates the successful uprising against French colonialists and slave owners. By formal parliamentary vote last month, Haiti is once again under the control of foreigners.  Photo: Tory Field.•

The majority of members on the CIRH are foreign. The criterion for becoming a foreign voting member is that the institution has contributed at least $100 million during two consecutive years or has canceled at least $200 million in debt. Others who have given less may share a seat. The Organization of American States and non-governmental organizations working in Haiti do not have a vote.

The CIRH is headed by U.N. Special Envoy Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive. The only accountability or oversight measure is veto power by Préval. Few expect him to employ his veto option, both because his record is not one of challenging the international aid apparatus and because of possible repercussions, in terms of the dollar flow, by the CIRH.

The Parliamentarians further abrogated constitutional process when they granted Préval and other elected officials the right to extend their terms in office until May 14, 2011, (five years to the day from when Préval was inaugurated) if new elections do not occur before the end of November. The constitution was approved in 1988 by a population which had just emerged from the 30-year dictatorship of ‘presidents-for-life’ François and Jean-Claude Duvalier, and as such contains curbs against concentration of power by the executive. The possibility of extension of Préval’s term, combined with Préval’s right to rule by decree through the extended state of emergency and Parliament turning its power over to the CIRH, has brought Haitians into the streets in repeated demonstrations.

Antonal Mortiné is a journalist, legal expert, and executive secretary of the Haitian Platform of Human Rights Organizations (POHDH by its French acronym). POHDH is an eight-member coalition promoting justice and peace; civil and political rights; social, economic, and cultural rights; the rights of women and children; and disability rights. In an interview, he expressed himself on Haiti’s reconstruction, the role of the international community within it, and the fact that Haiti has just legally ceded its independence to a body determined in large part by levels of aid dollars given.

“Despite the difficulties, we recognize that the earthquake offered an enormous opportunity to construct Haiti with new values. We talk about construction instead of reconstruction, because we don’t need the old Haiti or the old Port-au-Prince to be reconstructed. We want a new Haiti. Unfortunately, we’re not moving in that direction.

“Shortly after the earthquake, the Haitian government came up with the Post-Disaster Needs Assessment [the framework for reconstruction]. This is a technical plan which has no vision of a new Haiti. It was done without the participation or even the consultation of Haitian actors from different social sectors, from the diaspora, or even from parts of Haiti besides Port-au-Prince. It doesn’t take into account that the country was constructed on a basis of inequality, lack of respect for fundamental human rights, and widespread exclusion.

“Social movements, especially the human rights sector and the POHDH, had proposed, first, that the government host a national consultation process, including people in the refugee camps. We wanted to build a consensus, with participation and vigilance by different sectors, about the life and construction of the nation after the earthquake. We also proposed, second, that there be a consultative body, including different sectors and different branches of power, to develop the construction plan. No one paid us any attention.

“On top of that, we have the international community, which didn’t respond to the crisis by promoting the interests of the Haitian people. Instead, they took advantage of the situation to further entrench their own power. Since 1804, when Haiti became the first black republic, the international community has always used strategies to get their hands on Haiti. For example, we’ve had three military occupations in less than one century: the one by the U.S. from 1915 to 1934, the multinational force that brought Aristide back in 1994 and then stayed until 1998, and then an interim multinational force that started on February 28, 2004, and that they reorganized into MINUSTAH [United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti] of that same year.

“There are examples of help that’s come that’s been meaningful, like solidarity from international social movements and from Haitians throughout the country. Cuba is giving health aid [through 1,600 volunteer doctors], and Guadalupe and Martinique have offered space and health facilities for people to go heal there. Other countries and peoples have come to help us, too, and we appreciate that a lot.

“But the US and Canada came militarily. Notably, 20,000 US soldiers arrived without any authorization, either through the U.N. or the OAS or CARICOM [Caribbean Community]. We didn’t need that; we weren’t at war. We didn’t need tanks; we needed engineers, tractors, nurses, doctors, architects, and psychologists. We needed geologists who could talk about possibilities for future earthquakes. We didn’t need soldiers; we needed people who could help free those who were trapped in the rubble and pull out those who had died in the rubble.

“Now they’ve developed the CIRH, which has moved the military occupation we had to a new level of economic and political occupation, though we already had an economic occupation with the lowering of trade barriers and the destruction to local production.

“The CIRH only gives power to the Haitian executive branch and the international community. This doesn’t respond to constitutional norms; it’s illegal. The constitution talks of three branches, but only one is involved in the CIRH. Only those close to the president, plus a commission of which majority power is foreign, have power. This has made Haiti a rèstavak [child slave] and opens the doors for the dictatorial powers we used to have to return. This is not the path to democracy.

“The CIRH has no accountability to anyone, especially to the parliament which voted it in. The only body to whom it is accountable is the World Bank, which holds and controls all the aid. This will give it the chance to have even more of a diktat than it has in the past thirty years. We have an expression that says, ‘Who finances, controls.’ There are no internal controls, and Parliament doesn’t have to receive reports, nor does it have any oversight.

“The CIRH is only for the rich. All it takes to belong is to give $100 million in cash. It’s the commercialization of the country; we’ve become merchandise. Haiti is just a space for others to come use their economic and political power. They’re transforming a natural catastrophe into an opportunity to occupy our country, to use it as a base for addressing other problems in Caribbean basin, to invade Haiti with their products, and to put national production even more on its knees. And our government isn’t resisting this at all.

“We’re against the large international NGOs and governments which are taking advantage of the situation on the backs of the people – especially the people who are sleeping in the streets under huge rains and winds, who have such insecurity and vulnerability and danger, who are now at risk of another natural catastrophe with the hurricanes coming.

“We’re against the extension of the executive’s mandate. Since last week, there has been a lot of resistance mounting against the president, the CIRH, and the emergency law. Those mobilizations are called by organizations with no credibility with the population. Many people believe that there needs to be movement for change, but not led by those people. But tomorrow there could be a social explosion.

“We send a call to those in solidarity and social movements in all regions of the world: stand with Haiti in its struggle to defend democracy.”

Beverly Bell has worked with Haitian social movements for over 30 years. She is also author of the book Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. She coordinates Other Worlds, www.otherworldsarepossible.org, which promotes social and economic alternatives. She is also associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.

“It’s a nightmare from which you never wake up,” said a coordinator for Partners in Health in Port-au-Prince, referring to the January 12 earthquake and its social aftermath.

The ‘nightmare’ has long roots in structural violence, the set of national and international systems and policies that have left the majority in Haiti (and the world) neglected and resource-poor.

Survival in Haiti often balances on a razor-thin wire. The catastrophe which began with the earthquake has, for many, tipped the balance, sending them over the edge.

• What will the future bring them and other earthquake survivors?  Many Haitian women are trying to influence the outcome. Photo: Julie Dermansky©2010, www.jsdart.com.•

The tip can happen with a seemingly small, non-dramatic action: a family’s house was damaged in the earthquake, so it moved elsewhere. But the new home is too far for Dieusel, who used to wash their clothes, to walk, and she has no money for the bus fare. She can’t find anyone else wanting her services, as belts are tightening down the line. She earned about $4 a week before and, while it was always a struggle, she felt she had a reasonably good chance then of keeping her four kids alive. Now Dieusel has no more income with which to feed her children. She refers to their constant hunger as her ‘Calvary,’ a reference to the site of Jesus’ crucifixion.

Dieusel told me the above story on the same day that a driver told me about losing his job when his boss relocated to the U.S. after the earthquake. He, too, has been unable to find anyone else who can offer him a job. Similar stories are playing out across the nation with wearying repetition. Dieusel and the driver, and others like them, had no safety net before the earthquake, and today all bets are off.

A collection of Haitian groups is promoting the social and economic rights of earthquake survivors and others whose vulnerability has grown in the crisis. Having been excluded from all formal processes of consultation and decision-making, grassroots civil society groups are using what tools they have to push their agenda to the center: circulating position papers, mobilizing popular resistance, accessing the media, and promoting international solidarity. A central demand is that the rights to decent housing, jobs, food, water, education, and medical care be fulfilled.

Speaking for Haiti’s social movements, Camille Chalmers of the Platform for Alternative Development in Haiti (PAPDA) told me, “We have to project ourselves into the future. We’re pushing to open space so that the Haitian people can determine their future, and can impact international processes. We’re developing political alternatives about the conjuncture, for a different development. We’re taking these ideas out to discuss with grassroots groups, and also reaching out to the diaspora and solidarity groups in other countries. We’re promoting a culture of resistance.” (For statements and positions of popular movements and the Haitian diaspora on their priorities to guarantee social and economic rights and on the reconstruction, see http://www.grassrootsonline.org/sites/grassrootsonline.org/files/Haitian_Led_Reconstruction_and_Development_-_A_compilation_3-2010.pdf)

The Haitian constitution guarantees “the right to life, health, and respect of the human person” and recognizes “the right of every citizen to decent housing, education, food and social security.”

The U.N. International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights recognizes “the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions; …to be free from hunger; …[and] to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.”

Ricot Jean-Pierre of PAPDA said, “The government has to take responsibility for the lives of its people.”

But, as community organizer Louisnor Gilles told me in a comment I’ve heard stated many times in many ways since the earthquake, “From the first second, the government went deaf, dumb, and mute. Not the first minute – the first second.”

The Haitian government does not bear sole guilt for the failure to guarantee the well-being of those left devastated, or for the failure of the billions in aid money to help stabilize the population in any substantive way. Haiti is now governed an Interim Committee for the Reconstruction of Haiti. Thirteen of its 25 members are foreign, and it is co-led by Special Envoy Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive. This formalizes the reality since January 12, which is that policy decisions and program implementation are being led by international governments, the U.N, and large foreign NGOs. They share culpability, through commission and omission, for what was intended as disaster aid instead becoming an aid disaster.

The Haitian and international response to the dire needs of 1.3 to 1.9 million who are living on the streets or in camps is to relocate them to other tents in other camps. “The state owes us a place to stay with security,” said college student (at least until the time of the earthquake; her school is now closed) Edithe Jean-Jacques, who now lives in a tent in the neighborhood of Babiole. Edithe reports that she spends every night wet under the crashing rains.

Hurricane season begins in three weeks, on June 1. At that point, Edithe and all those in her circumstances will be protected by no more than a thin sheet of nylon or cloth. I could find no plan of any Haitian or international government or agency to address this risk in any way, including through the clear first step of providing permanent and sturdy housing.

The displaced people’s camps are a portrait in social neglect and poverty. People are wedged in among strangers, often at no more than an arm’s length away. Residents speak to me regularly about feeling violated by the noise, overcrowding, and constant proximity to hundreds, if not tens of thousands, of strangers. They have nowhere safe or private where they can relieve themselves, bathe, wash clothes, relax, or – for the kids – play. Sometimes wash water can be hauled in from public spigots or from giant plastic bags provided by agencies; sometimes not.

The risk of rape to women and girls in the camps is constant. Abandoned children are at risk of being swooped up in the restavek, child slavery, system by neighbors.

Poverty in the camps is so great that some young girls whose parents have died or are elsewhere resort to prostitution to survive. Malya Villard of the Commission of Women Victim to Victim (KOFAVIV) says, “You pass by tents and see orphaned girls under a man.” The going price is anywhere from US$2.50 to US$5.00.

As for education, following its post-earthquake suspension in Port-au-Prince, schools are now reopening. The conditions in which earthquake victims have been left excludes many, if not most, of those left homeless. “It’s only for the high-ups this year. It doesn’t exist for the poor,” said one woman in a camp. In one spontaneous discussion in a narrow dirt corridor of a camp, mothers reported that none of their children can return to school either because they are too exhausted – “they are sleeping in the mud,” as one said - or because their uniforms were crushed under falling houses and they cannot afford new ones.

Obtaining food is another collective source of stress. The same caveat that applies to all other social basics applies here: few have money to buy it. Food is all too rarely distributed (and then mainly consists of rice) and is given under tense conditions, according to hundreds of interviews I’ve done. Getro Nelio, who was living in the downtown soccer stadium until police destroyed his and others’ shelters and threw them out, described how hundreds of neighbors spent the entire night on the sidewalk when word went out that rice would be distributed at the stadium the next day.

Food has become even less available now that some international agencies have suspended distribution. One is the World Food Program of the U.N., which claims it “is now transitioning its program to support recovery effort though long-term food security and investments in human capital.”

One woman said to me as a U.S. military helicopter passed overhead: “That’s the only thing they give.”

Medical care is, judging from reports, another source of constant worry. Camps are full of sick people, the result of lack of sanitation combined with poor nutrition, stress, and lack of sleep. While some clinics – like those of Partners in Health, the Cuban medical team, and Doctors without Borders – are free, they may require bus fare, which is well out of reach for many families. In the informal research I have conducted by necessity on behalf of friends and allies, I have also found that it is quite common to wait all day and never get seen, because of the volume of people in line. It is also common that, while the first consultation might be free, the specialist or the lab tests to which the patient is referred are not. If all those things are free of charge, in some cases the family still has to purchase medications, there ending the hope for medical relief.

The 57-year-old Sylvanie Sylvain, Getro Nelio’s mother, is one small demonstration of the failure of the medical system. She is ill and needs surgery for her throat. A doctor at the university hospital scheduled her for surgery, but when she went back on the appointed day, she was told that the necessary machine was broken. She was referred to another hospital, but there she would have to pay for the procedure. She has no money.

I hear stories that should never have to be told, such as from a young volunteer nurse from the U.S. whom I encountered in the bathroom of a fancy hotel where I snuck in to wash my face after a sweaty day in the camps. Wide-eyed, she explained that she had just come from delivering a baby at a hospital; her only supplies had been a pair of plastic gloves that she had supplied herself and a cloth that had been used to deliver another baby a few minutes before. She had passed the night before with a young boy who was dying from cerebral malaria; he breathed two times per minute. She had nothing to give him the entire night except one bottle of water.

Some sound and committed international organizations are at work in Haiti, as are foreign foundations and community groups which have come to support the priorities that Haitians have defined for themselves. Haiti is much better off for their help. There are far too many other examples, though, of foreign actors who have sidelined Haitians as decision-makers, project participants, and staff. As for the yawning chasm that exists between the billions in aid and the population in need, four months out is far too late for the excuse of ‘problems in coordination,’ the rationale that several associated with U.N. and other weighty agencies have given me.

Despair is growing. The mother of a teenage girl who had been raped asked, “Can you help us find a psychologist? This whole nation needs a psychologist.” I learned of one 17-year-old who tried to slit her throat. A volunteer from the U.S. who was working at a refugee camp in the town of Jacmel told me about an 18-year-old girl who was so despondent over her and her one-year-old’s life situation that she threw the baby in the garbage. (Volunteers recovered the baby and are now offering the mother psychological help.)

But survivors have also told me repeatedly that they are resigned to do whatever it takes to keep going. They appear, for the most part, tough and strong and stoic. Carolle Pierre-Paul Jacob of the women’s group Solidarity Among Haitian Women (SOFA) characterized the situation this way: “People are despairing but they’re still not hopeless.”

“Hold strong” is the national salutation, the exhortation that ends most human interactions, phone calls, and emails.

“We Haitian people have to carry on,” Ricot Jean-Pierre said. “We are going to continue to demand accountability from our government, the international financial institutions, and the international community.”

And Elitane Athelus, a leader of the street merchants’ group the Women Martyrs of Brave Ayibobo, said, “We won’t stop struggling until the conditions of our lives change. Remember that we already led a revolution with our own two hands. We haven’t lost completely. The water is still running in the canal.”

“Everything we owned got smashed. We lost everything.”

Getro Nelio was not referring to the devastating earthquake of January 12. The unemployed, 24-year-old Haitian was speaking about losing his home a second time in three months, on this occasion due to the government. Since late March, armed Haitian police have been closing camps and destroying the shelters that quake victims created out of whatever supplies they could scavenge, from cardboard to small strips of tin. U.N. troops sometimes aid in the evictions.

• Getro Nelio, top right, and his family in their home in an internally displaced person's camp in a soccer stadium in Port-au-Prince. Haitian police have since smashed the dwelling and all its contents. Photo: Roberto (Bear) Guerra.•

The expulsions and renewed homelessness come at a time of growing urgency for permanent, sturdy housing, with water, utilities, and sewer, where people can stabilize their lives and rebuild communities. “Decent housing” is protected by both the Haitian constitution and the U.N. International Declaration of Human Rights.

Haitian government officials and international aid agencies have revealed no plan to meet these needs or fulfill these rights of the 1.3 million left displaced - one in nine citizens. Instead, rare public statements evidence conflicting strategies for limited, temporary initiatives.

In the aftermath of the earthquake, government officials spoke of moving people to well-planned camps in advance of the rainy season. In March, officials suggested that people should resume residence in their former homes, many of which they said were still habitable. (Survivors, some of whom watched the walls of their cracked houses lean more with each major aftershock, demurred.) The government’s official reconstruction plan, presented to international donors in March, asserts that it will set up temporary shelters in five locales which will become long-term housing “with sustainable infrastructure and basic services,” but gives little detail of how this is to happen. The government has apparently acquired land to house 100,000 people, but some of it is far from jobs, schools, health care, and food markets, as well as family and community.

International agencies speak of constructing 130,000 “semi-permanent” shelters, some of which will have walls made of tarps. Some international agencies suggest that Haitians will convert their transitional houses into permanent ones, through such additions as chicken wire and plaster. Monetary resources and material aid are in critically short supply among earthquake survivors, and it is not apparent how they will come by such construction materials. Some have not even found their first tent after a three-and-a-half month search, and remain sleeping on sidewalks and in cars.

Hurricane season begins June 1. This month, a Miami branch chief of the National Hurricane Center said that early signs suggest the 2010 season will be “busy." One factor is warm water, and waters in the tropical Atlantic are at their warmest in recorded history. A second factor is that El Niño, which disrupts hurricane formation, is likely to dissipate this season.

Four storms that hit Haiti in three weeks in 2008 killed 793 people and left more than 310 missing, according to Haitian government figures.

Homeless Twice in Three Months

After the earthquake killed Nelio’s father and destroyed the family’s home in Carrefour Feuilles, Nelio spent weeks trying to obtain a tarp or tent for his family to live in. His hopes rose and fell with various promises of agencies and friends. Finally, a foreign photographer whom he had befriended gave him money, and he bought a tent, plus wood and a tarp for a second structure to house his family. The nine members include a child as young as 15 months and his 57-year-old mother. They took up residence in the Sylvio Cator soccer stadium along with about 7,000 other people.

On April 9 or 10 (Nelio was unsure, and press accounts differ), Nelio said that “the director of the camp told us that the next day everyone had to leave the field.” The owner had allegedly demanded the stadium back so that the soccer teams could recommence their practices and games there. “They said they were going to give every family 1000 gourde (US$24.84) and a little three-person tent. The next morning, they started throwing people out. When it happened, I had already left, and my mother had gone out to look for another place to live. People organized a demonstration to demand the aid they promised us.

“When that happened, they sent in CIMO [anti-riot squads] to crush our houses and beat us with sticks as though we were dogs. By the time my mother and I got back, they had already destroyed our little house. One CIMO officer beat me on the head, cutting it open. He beat me on the chest and the back, he pushed me, he pulled his machine gun on me. People were shouting for help. My mother was crying. I told her to relax,” Nelio said.

Nelio reported that at least some of those were present when the eviction started were given small tents. Neither his family nor many others got new housing supplies or assistance in relocating. His family has had to separate. Nelio is living in another internally displaced people’s camp, while other family members are dispersed across town.

Few Options for Those Evicted

Similar expulsions have occurred at a handful of other sites, and more are threatened. As schools begin to reopen throughout Port-au-Prince, residents of some of the 79 camps on school grounds have been evicted.

“The parents and MINUSTAH [the U.N. mission] say that the families have to leave. We understand that, but where are they going to go? They have to give us some alternative,” said Micheline Sainvilus, an unemployed mother of six children who has been living in a cluster of tents filling a small street close to the center of town. Her own children are not in school because they lost their uniforms when their house collapsed.

The U.N. mission announced that the Haitian government declared a moratorium on forced evictions on April 22, but the government itself has remained quiet.

In April, the government opened a large camp called Corail Cesselesse near the town of Croix-des-Bouquets, just under an hour’s drive from downtown Port-au-Prince. Three thousand people have already been relocated there from other camps, and 3,000 more are supposed to join them in the long rows of white tents on white gravel, with no trees or other shade. “It’s a desert, nothing but sand. What are they supposed to do in the sun in the middle of the day?” Nelio asked.

Residents of the camp in the Champs de Mars park have been hearing rumors for weeks that they will be forced to evacuate and move to Corail, but they claim no one has told them anything definitive about their fate. “Croix-des-Bouquets? I don’t know anyone there. How will I work? Where will my kids go to school?” said one woman from her open-air residence under a tarp. “I hear that it costs 100 gourdes ($2.48) to take the bus there,” said another. That is more money than most homeless survivors see in days.

The government has opened a second tent settlement, and several others are under development. Josette Perard, director of the Haiti office of the Lambi Fund, said, “The Haitian people are rebellious. If they don’t want to be there, they won’t stay.”

Uncertainty and Anger over the Future

Most who lost their homes in the earthquake were renters, and have no way to reclaim either their former lodging or the rent which they typically pay in six-month installments. Of those who own their home, several reported in interviews, their land is now buried in rubble and they have no money to pay to clear it so that they erect a shelter. Port-au-Prince is an extremely densely packed city with little open land. Those who choose not to stay in one of the new settlements may be forced to reconstruct substandard houses on steep hillsides and ravines – exactly what caused such a high toll in the recent earthquake.

Anger is growing among the displaced and their allies, with demonstrations following suit. The Support Group for the Repatriated and Refugees (GARR, by its French acronym) is one of many to denounce the action, releasing a statement on April 28 calling on the Haitian government to “assume its leadership in caring for the displaced,” in accordance with the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement by the U.N. Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Those principles include the following (excerpted):

-National authorities have the primary duty and responsibility to provide protection and humanitarian assistance to internally displaced persons;

-All internally displaced persons have the right to an adequate standard of living;

-Authorities shall provide internally displaced persons with food and potable water, basic shelter and clothing; essential medical services and sanitation;

-Authorities concerned shall ensure [that] displaced children receive education which shall be free.

From the camp where he now lives, this time in the Champs de Mars park beside the decimated National Palace, Getro Nelio said, “I’ve been abandoned without any help. The Haitian state isn’t doing anything for anyone. I have nothing. I just sit here with my two arms crossed.”

The 7.3 earthquake which struck Haiti on January 12 was only the start of Haiti’s most recent catastrophe. It has been followed by an ever-deepening social and economic crisis for those whose survival was precarious before the quake, especially among the 1.3 million who were left homeless or displaced. For this group, who are now packed into camps or squeezed into the most marginal of open spaces, some daily elements of life include the following:

• Haitian women and girls in tent camps have no defense against violence and crushing poverty.  Once hurricane season starts, threats to their lives will increase. Photo: Julie Dermansky©2010, www.jsdart.com•

-Rape and other violence against women and girls, at high levels since the earthquake, appear to be rising;

-Poverty and social destabilization are worsening. They find no relief in an environment where people lack dignity, privacy, the fulfillment of basic needs, or control over their lives;

-The Haitian government has recently commenced violent evictions of internally displaced people from their camps, with a plan to relocate them in other vast and sometimes distant tent camps. Some survivors have now lost everything a second time, this time due to police smashing their belongings. Others live in fear that this will soon be their fate;

-While drenching, all-night rains have been a constant since the earthquake, the rainy season commences in earnest in June, with hurricane season just behind. In this context, the tarps, tents, and rickety housing which internally displaced peoples have scraped together become life-threatening.

All of these social crises require the same first redress: housing. Deeper structural solutions are imperative, especially if Haiti is to have a future based on justice and equity, but in the immediate, earthquake survivors must have permanent, sturdy, and dignified homes. These must offer water, electricity, sanitation, and proximity to services.

Instead, three and a half months after the earthquake, housing construction is almost absent among the initiatives of the Haitian government, aid agencies, and international donor community. Relief organizations are planning the construction of 130,000 ‘semi-permanent’ shelters, in which category they include homes made of plastic tarps, according to the Associated Press. This would only marginally address the needs of only one-tenth of those now homeless. National attention is instead focused on moving survivors to new tents in a few, densely populated camps, introducing other extreme problems. (See part II of this article on May 6 for more detail.)

Housing is a guaranteed human right according to both the Haitian constitution and international conventions. The Haitian constitution declares, “The State recognizes the right of every citizen to decent housing.” The U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights includes, “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including… housing.” The Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement of the U.N. Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs declares that “All internally displaced persons have the right to an adequate standard of living [with] safe access to… basic shelter and housing.”

Marie Paul, a now-unemployed street merchant who lives with her mother and two young children in the middle of a narrow street, explained, “If people’s rights were respected, we wouldn’t be living under these sheets today.”

Rising Rape and Violence

Members of the grassroots group Commission of Women Victim-to-Victim (KOFAVIV) tracked 230 rapes in 15 camps, or 15.3 incidents per camp, between the January 12 earthquake and March 21. This figure is based on the findings of a few camp-based outreach workers without any transportation, other research capacity, or sometimes even cell phones, so it surely reflects only a percentage of the actual figure. KOFAIV coordinator Marie Eramithe Delva said that the women’s and children’s rights group now comes across at least one case of rape each day, which she recognizes does not capture the true number. Other, more methodical tracking efforts by Haitian and international organizations are now underway.

Girls and women have the right to be free from rape wherever they are; the problem is not just where they live. However, the conditions of their current residence in internally displaced camps substantially heighten their risk. All are in densely packed and public spaces, while some live in shelters much less substantial than even a tent. Some women and girls are in plain view, under strung-up tarps or bedsheets with limited or no walls. In the absence of private space, females must often bathe outdoors within full sight of all. In camps with gender-segregated outhouses, men sometimes hide in dark women’s bathrooms at night, awaiting a victim. Without the ability to lock themselves in at night, often without male accompaniment, and in tight quarters with up to thousands of men, women and girls are easy prey.

Once they have been raped or attacked, they have nowhere to relocate to be secure from their assailant. In an extensive investigation over two weeks, this writer could find no women’s shelter in Port-au-Prince for survivors, except one that offers a three-day stay. If the survivors report the attacker, they are in even greater danger. Some women have fled town after reporting their rape to the police, for fear of retribution. Others have neither the bus fare to leave nor anywhere to relocate.

The vulnerability is aggravated by the fact that neither Haitian nor international police offer any measurable protection in the camps. In many interviews, women reported that they have never seen Haitian or U.N. security forces in their camps, notwithstanding U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s March 13 statement that the first priority of the U.N. is to protect women.

Some camps have organized all-volunteer security brigades, usually of men, which can be a help. In other camps, women have complained in interviews, men join simply to be able to enter tents and steal with greater ease.

Delva and her family were subject to their third post-earthquake attack on April 26. Two men entered under their open tarp whose boundaries, in today’s reconfigured reality, signifies ‘home.’ By chance, members of the camp security brigade were in the area. While one of the intruders ran, brigade members caught the other and brought him to the police station. “We don’t know what happened to him then,” Delva said.

KOFAVIV co-coordinator Malya Villard Appolon reported that the group knows of only one case where a perpetrator was arrested, in a case which reveals some of the challenges to cracking down on the violence. In a mid-March attack against a woman who wanted her name withheld, two men entered her tent in Camp d’Application in the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Martissant. They raped and beat her, inflicting her with a head wound. One of the men then escaped, while police arrested the other. The judge later threw out the case, stating that the doctor’s certificate did not contain the proper stamp, though this is not legally necessary. Relatives of the rapist told the survivor that they would come kill her. The woman went into hiding.

In one of many similar stories, a 15-year-old girl was gang-raped by five men in the last week of April, according to a delegation of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. With no father and a mother in great difficulty, the girl lives with a young friend in a tent in a camp.

Women report living in constant fear for themselves and their daughters. One woman in a meeting of rape survivors in a downtown schoolyard recounted that she and others sleep with machetes under their beds for protection, while another woman said she tries to sleep lightly so she can stay alert to danger. In interviews, residents of several camps across Port-au-Prince said that they hear women being beaten almost every night.

The problem of gender-based violence, in Haiti as everywhere, requires deep solutions, including more effectively stigmatizing, prosecuting, and penalizing it. Haiti faces a further challenge of a weak justice system which is neither upholding laws or protecting citizens, especially vulnerable ones. For now, Haitian and international women’s groups are urging the U.N. and the national government to step up violence prevention measures, such as increasing security in the camps, providing private bathing areas, and providing gender sensitivity training to Haitian police.

As more females become victims, and as hurricane season approaches, the massive international plan to simply move homeless people from to other tent camps is as dangerous as it is nonsensical. It is also a human rights violation. “Do they think we’re animals?” asked one elder woman as she sat on a crate in the mud in front of her tent.

Female Haitians deserve to live out of sight and out of reach of would-be perpetrators, and to bathe, use the toilet, and sleep without terror. Housing will not end the problem of rape and other gender-based violence, but it is the first imperative through which women and girls can begin to protect themselves from harm’s way.

Humanitarian aid initiatives organized by Haitian communities offer respectful, democratic contrasts to the multi-billion dollar aid effort of the international community, much of which is wasted at best and destructive at worst. “Embedded in the local humanitarian responses is the model of a society premised on generosity and dignity,” says a report released today by Other Worlds, “From Disaster Aid to Solidarity: Best Practices in Meeting the Needs of Haiti’s Earthquake Survivors.”

• This earthquake-displaced family is housed and fed through the solidarity of strangers. In this case, the Peasant Movement of Papay is helping underwrite the costs, in one of many humanitarian aid projects run by grassroots Haitian organizations. Photo: Roberto (Bear) Guerra.•

The report examines the problems of the U.S.- and U.N.-dominated aid operation in Haiti and documents ten effective alternatives created by Haitian community and peasant groups and by ally organizations throughout the world. The cases are just a sampling of many more. The report then offers ten recommendations for how international allies can be most effective and respectful in supporting Haitian-led recovery and reconstruction.

One core problem of the international aid operation is that it strips away national sovereignty, since the already weak Haitian government has been effectively sidelined. Other problems, as discussed in the report, are that it robs people of their dignity and leaves them no say-so in how they get the food they need. In the worst case scenario, the operation could turn people from agents of self-recovery and change into mere victims. Perhaps worst of all is that, at a time when Haitians must have confidence and social organization to reconstruct their lives and their country with equity and justice, the aid operation risks substituting their power for bags of imported rice and a tent.

Aid does not need to be given according to that model. In fact, most of it is not. Though their efforts have not been recognized, everyday Haitian citizens, acting on their own, have comprised by far the largest force of first responders, relief workers, and aid providers. Their labors are based on the long tradition of solidarity, or mutual aid, that has kept this people alive for centuries. The organized survivor assistance projects of grassroots groups are run on the same principles.

The outpouring of support from the community is a reminder of the collective resilience and resourcefulness that undergird the Haitian culture. As foreign powers, international agencies, and the national government marginalize the people from decision-making about aid and reconstruction policies, the initiatives are a living testament that people are neither passive nor victims.

The operations are run by diverse entities, from student groups to the Cuban government. Each provides at least one of the following: shelter, medical care, community mental health, food, water, children’s activities, leisure activities, security, or support for growing much-needed food. Some of the efforts also offer education and a platform for organizing and advocacy to shape the country’s future.

Together they serve as a guide through which Haiti can rebuild with a more mutual aid, people-before-profit economy and society. All the guiding principles toward a new, just, and equitable nation exist here, in practice.

Five of the programs have already been covered in this series. See “Putting ‘Humanitarian’ Back into Humanitarian Aid,” “Country Hospitality,” “Where Solidarity Means Survival Part I and Part II,” and “Healing Body and Heart, Cuban Style.”

Below are three more innovative programs. Each meets needs of survivors while contributing to - not undermining – the resilience, autonomy, and dignity of individuals and the community.

* Coordination to Rebuild the Nation (KORE N, meaning in Creole ‘support us’): The contribution of this Port-au-Prince-based activist group is medical care, based on a model of 24/7 accompaniment of the community’s health needs, located in their own neighborhoods.

KORE N opposes the idea of mobile clinics which show up at camps once or twice a week, staffed by doctors who do not know the community - or often even Haiti - and leave people sitting in long lines in the heat. As an alternative, KORE N has created four centers based on the idea of permanent accompaniment. KORE N sought out neighborhoods where there are shelters or camps and where KORE N members have influence. It located people in those neighborhoods with basic medical knowledge, like nurses and auxiliaries – ten in all – and gave them training. It set up shop either in a tent or in the medical staff’s home. Next, it solicited medicines from citizens’ groups, and identified doctors who serve as an information resource to the primary team.

According to KORE N member and doctor Rudy Prudent, community members know and trust the health workers, both as neighbors and as committed social activists. The ten workers go out each day for their jobs and their personal needs, but are otherwise generally available at any time of the day or night. “These are not just people who come do consultations and then run,” says Prudent.

KORE N says that what’s important for them is not to accompany many people, using the logic of many NGOs who need to show that they are servicing large numbers of clients in order to justify their funding or win new grants. The quality of the solidarity, not the quantity of patients, is what counts.

* School of Social Sciences, State University of Haiti: In the post-earthquake context, the School of Social Sciences relies on its faculty, students, and knowledge base, plus minimal funding, to educate the community, provide social psychology to survivors, and help the population respond to today’s political challenges. It also uses social psychology to ‘rebuild the house,’ meaning to help Haitian people rebuild themselves, their homes, and their country in ways which reinforce their strength and capacity, as individuals and as a people.

Thirty-five students from the school are offering social psychology to about 350 people in roughly ten shelters in metropolitan Port-au-Prince. The team calls its support ‘promotion of collective resilience.’ “We’re building off of what we have that is positive, to encourage people to reclaim control of their lives, to reconnect their ties with others, to find their confidence so they can resolve their problems,” says psychology professor Lenz Jean-Francois. The philosophy uses a five-step process to draw out in survivors the strong cultural values of resourcefulness and dignity.

The school also hosts discussions in camps and shelters to mobilize community members, help them organize, and help them understand the risks in the current context. All the school’s work carries the implicit and explicit message that to succeed, Haitians must have control over their lives and their environment. Reliance on aid, they insist, will only cause Haitians to lose their belief in their abilities.

* Lambi Fund of Haiti: Like so many institutions around the world which has raised money for Haiti’s earthquake survivors, the Lambi Fund has been inundated with donations. Unlike most of those institutions, though, the Lambi Fund’s response is based on reinforcing the strength and autonomy of Haitian community organizations. Based in both Haiti and the U.S., the Lambi Fund shows how the international community can give urgent assistance in a way that allows the peasant and women’s group to strengthen their production or commerce, their advocacy, and their organizations themselves.

Lambi’s post-earthquake work is based on its long-standing philosophy of providing financial resources, training, and technical assistance to peasant-led and/or women-led community organizations to strengthen people’s social and economic power. Its current collaborations build off of relationships of trust and respect.

Within days after the earthquake, Lambi staff convened regional assemblies of local peasants to define immediate needs and prioritize rebuilding. Lambi’s post-catastrophe work is to meet its partner communities’ self-defined needs for the immediate, while helping them rebuild and expand sustainable rural development and agricultural production for the mid- to long-term. The urgent aid involves cash disbursements to 43 grassroots groups in areas where large numbers of internally displaced people have relocated. The money helps the community groups organize themselves; provide clothes, food, medicine, tents, and other essentials; and fortify the local economy.

Haitian women have been increasingly vocal and active in social, political, and economic issues since the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship in 1986. Though it has not come easily, their progress in changing gender relations of power within the home, within social movements, and within the nation has been steady.

Women’s organizations have been key to these advances, helping create the space to foster and protect women’s activism. One network is helping women gain voice, literally: the Haitian Women’s Community Radio Network (REFRAKA by its Creole acronym).

The importance of radio cannot be overstated in a country where 45% of men, and 49% of women, are illiterate. Nor can the significance of women taking the microphone, in a country where aggressive patriarchy in the home and society, as well as violence from male partners and the state, have tried to keep them silent.

Founded in 2001, REFRAKA includes 25 member stations in nine of Haiti’s ten geographic departments. The network has trained about 150 women as journalists, program hosts, and production technicians.

Moreover, REFRAKA helps women in various radio stations make programs about local issues, while also producing national-level shows which are then aired on member stations. REFRAKA staff produces a special radio-magazine each month, one hour each, on specific gender-related topics such as women’s political advocacy, gender relations, Haitian women’s social realities, violence, HIV-AIDS, and news about women from around the world. They also produce 30-minute shows especially for girls aged 11-15 in community schools, called Own Your Body, Care for Your Body which discuss issues including girl’s bodies and health, and relations between girls and boys.

REFRAKA’s office was destroyed and all their archives, materials, and supplies were lost in the January 12 earthquake. Their work is temporarily on hold as they reestablish their institution. Soon they will resume their programs, this time with a sharp focus on the status of women in this catastrophe phase and the participation of women in the reconstruction.

Marie Guirlene Justin, program director of REFRAKA, tells more.

“When we started working, it was very hard because of the machismo from men who couldn’t accept women’s voices getting out like this. Before it was hard to find women speaking on the radio; now it’s not. Now women are advancing. More women are trained in reporting and production. There are more women on the radio, and there are more women’s radio programs. Now we have women who are directors of radio stations, though there are still no women owners. Men are starting to understand, and gender issues are crossing over into other radio programs.

“More women are speaking their own truth. For example, you have CONAP [the National Coalition to Advocate the Rights of Women by its French acronym]… When CONAP hosts something in Port-au-Prince, REFRAKA does a radio program on it and gets it out into the countryside. That way rural women don’t feel alone. We cover what groups like SOFA [Solidarity Among Haitian Women] are doing, which gives the women’s movement a lot of strength.

“We’re taking small steps. Today on the radio, you hear less music and proverbs discriminating against women. This has to be reinforced so that we don’t go backwards. You know that relations between women and men are fragile today, especially with all the displacement since the earthquake.

“One of the new concepts following the earthquake is reconstructing another form of participation, where women can participate in everything, in the big debates about reconstruction, in planning national development for another Haiti. A process where women and men put their hands together to build something new in this country will be very different than one where men are making decisions for everyone. When we have a society where women have a say in what they want and need, we’ll be closer to having a society based on social justice, an equitable society. Then we’ll have balanced relations, with the possibility for everyone to live in peace.

“Popular communications is a big part of this. It’s an important form for people to have their own voice to speak about questions that impact their lives with the reconstruction. Community stations are close to the people, and they give people a chance to understand what’s happening and insert themselves in it.

“In the context of Haiti’s reality today, we really need solidarity. In the earthquake, our office was smashed and we lost everything we had collected over nine years: our computers, records, cameras, office furniture… It’s all gone. Myself, I was trapped inside the office alone and I thought I would die. My ear was sliced open when a cement block fell on it. My home was destroyed.

“We don’t want the kind of international ‘help’ that we’re seeing throughout Haiti today, much of which is about domination. We want an exchange of experiences in the North and South where we each bring our own contribution. Today we need that type of solidarity, especially globally in the women’s movement.”

For most Haitians, when health care is available at all, it all too often treats the immediate problem only. Given the conditions under which the vast majority of Haitians live – dire poverty, malnourishment, and lack of access to water or sanitation – the next illness or physical challenge is an ever-present threat.

Advocacy for a more just and equitable political economy is required for Haitians’ health to prosper. So, too, is health care which addresses structural impediments to well-being. The Association for the Promotion of the Health of the Family (APROSIFA by its French acronym) is that type of health care. The multi-faceted program in the extremely low-income Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Carrefour Feuilles both offers a clinic and addresses social determinants. APROSIFA founder and technical advisor Roseanne August tells about the work.

There’s no social security system in Haiti. When you intervene in the health of a neighborhood, you have to identify the social programs that underlie the state of health.

Health is not just medical care. Health depends on many factors. It’s about people becoming responsible actors, questioning what’s happening in their neighborhood, improving the community. But health is something larger still. Health is the right of people to eat, to have a place to live, to love – yes, love, because love is part of people’s physical and emotional equilibrium – and to have a clean, healthy environment to live in.

We built APROSIFA with the support of Paul Farmer from Partners in Health in ‘93. From the beginning we gave priority to those who were most in need. We focused on women, youth, and children. We opened the clinic and we’ve accompanied them ever since. We refuse to become a big organization with a lot of money and a bureaucracy, which can intimidate people who are very vulnerable.

We struggle to provide services that respect the dignity of the people. During 17 years, more than 300,000 people have passed through APROSIFA. We’ve closely accompanied about 600 to 700 kids from the cradle on. We see about 200 people each day in the clinic. We have 40 staff, some in the clinic and some doing outreach in the region. We have doctors, nurses, nurse-midwife, auxiliary nurses, lab technicians, social workers, health outreach workers, and administrators.

In the beginning, we operated in the classic public health schema. You have a clinic, you provide contraception, you do vaccinations, you teach protection against AIDS, etc. But we’ve realized that’s not what health is. We had to reflect with the people to better understand what health really means. They’ve taught us to question the dominant model of health provision.

Our clinic is always open, but our work of social programs on the ground, we reevaluate and renew that every two years to reflect developments in the neighborhood. For example, there’s been a lot of violence around here in the past couple of years, so we’ve worked hard with youth for violence prevention. There aren’t any recreation centers in the area and the kids have nothing to do. We started an art program for them so they can transform themselves into responsible actors.

People say, “You’re a clinic. Why are you involved in painting, sculpture, photography, videography?” These people in conventional public health, they don’t know the relationship between painting or sculpture and health. They don’t know that when someone has a paintbrush in his hands, when he’s involved in something meaningful, he can free his mental state from being constantly burdened with problems. Plus he has can make some money and change the conditions of his life. We’ve seen good results from the youth we work with. We’re proud of them.

It’s not just to teach the kids and then send them away; we’re here to help them reflect on social issues. We have a crafts program for kids with recycled garbage, for example. The kids think, “I shouldn’t just throw my water sack or empty spaghetti bag on the street. In fact, I could reuse it, sell what I make, and help out my mother.”

When babies and little children come into the clinic, we weigh them. If they’re underweight, we put them into our program for six months. We embrace that child and help their mother out. They get enriched milk two or three times per day and a bowl of hot food in the afternoon, like soup enriched with peanut butter or porridge with enriched flour. We normally take between 25 to 35 malnourished children, from birth to three years. Since the earthquake, given the precariousness of the lives of women who’ve lost their homes, we’re up to 49 children, and we want to go up to 75. As soon as a child is better, we let him or her go and take in another.

We do literacy classes with the mothers, though we’ve had to pause since the earthquake. We also do workshops with them about sexual and reproductive rights, violence against women, and all issues related to women’s health. We give them a little financial support so they can run a little business, but we don’t do micro-credit because we don’t believe in it.

But we’re just a neighborhood association. We are neither an NGO nor the state. We work a lot with the Ministry of Health on tuberculosis vaccinations, for example, but we’re not the ones who are going to change the social conditions of people’s lives. We don’t delude ourselves.

What we do, we do with very little money. We can do it thanks to the support of our partners: Christian Aid, Oxfam Great Britain, ICCO, Partners in Health. Some agencies can’t understand our approach because they have a rigid schema in their head of what public health is supposed to be. They see us as rebels because we’re always reminding them that the reality isn’t how they understand it, though we always work it out.

I’d like to tell the international agencies that they have to work in alliance with the state. And that, after the earthquake, it’s important for them to connect with organizations whose philosophies correspond to the needs of the population. It makes me suffer to see how much money is wasted, going to programs that don’t do any good for the people. The agencies should learn from these small organizations that have developed different models for working with people. AFROSIFA isn’t like any other group, but there are other good models that the international agencies can use as a school.

Patrick Elie has long been a democracy activist. Moreover, during President Aristide’s administration-in-exile during the 91-94 coup d’etat, Patrick was coordinator of the anti-drug unit of the National Intelligence Service, where he was key to exposing the collusion between the U.S. government and the military coup leaders. He subsequently served as Aristide’s secretary of defense. Here Patrick discusses how the ‘shock doctrine’ is working in Haiti, why equality is essential to rebuilding the nation, and why Haitians need to break from the vision that the international community has for its reconstruction.

The Shock Doctrine, the book by Naomi Klein, shows that often imperialist countries shock another country, and then while it’s on its knees, they impose their own political will on that country while making economic profits from it. We’re facing an instance of the shock doctrine at work, even though Haiti’s earthquake wasn’t caused by men. There are governments and sectors who want to exploit this shock to impose their own political and economic order, which obviously will be to their advantage.

One thing to watch is a humanitarian coup d’état. We have to be careful. Especially in the early days, the actions weren’t coordinated at all and they overtook the goalie, which is the Haitian government. The little bit of state that’s left is almost irrelevant in the humanitarian aid and reconstruction. What is going to happen is that it’s not Haitians who will decide what Haiti we want, it’s people in other countries.

This doesn’t make sense from a moral perspective, and it also won’t work. A people can’t be developed from the outside. What’s more, in Haiti we have a very strong culture. If you ask people if they want the U.S. to take over the country, even among those who say yes: come back in ten years, and you’ll see that the same people will rise up against the occupation.

We know the Haitian government is weak, and we can’t count on it alone to lead the battle. We all, organized Haitians and our friends, have to stomp our feet and say, “No, this can’t happen. Haitians have to develop their own country.” We need help and support from others, as they say here, to grow the plantains. But they’re our plantains. Haitians have to be the ones to construct the country we need. We have to be in charge.

We have to speak of the role the international community played before the earthquake, and how that role contributed to the destruction of the earthquake: why there were so many victims and so much damage. The politics of certain foreign countries - especially the U.S. since the beginning the 20th Century and, before that, the French – have accentuated the inequality and impoverishment of the people, especially the peasantry.

The soul of the country is the peasantry, and that’s where the true resistance to attempts to put the country under foreign power lies. So foreign policies have focused on undermining the peasantry, as well as weakening the Haitian state. They [the U.S. government] destroyed the Creole pigs [on which peasants depended as their savings bank]; they destroyed local rice by putting Haitian producers in unequal competitors with American producers. That’s why small producers couldn’t survive in the countryside. That’s why the population of Port-au-Prince swelled so much, and why the houses were so poorly constructed and in places where people should never have constructed them in the first place. The result was an earthquake which should have killed some thousands of people, but which instead killed more than 200,000 people.

The peasant migration to the capital: it’s part of our history, in which Haitians are meant to be the lowest paid manual workers. Slavery was the cheapest labor force you could get. Afterward, following the U.S. occupation of Haiti of 1915-1934, Haitians were supposed to provide the hands to cut sugar cane on the plantations. Now it’s no longer sugar cane, it’s manual labor in the textile factories. For that, it’s important to have the political regime you want, but also a peasantry who has to go to work in the factories for the lowest price possible after they can’t any longer produce enough food even to support themselves, let alone feed the nation.

I’m afraid that this vision for Haiti exists from many sources, and that this is the plan that our new friends have for Haiti. We must be very vigilant, and our friends must be very vigilant.

Politically, Haiti’s situation today is like the one after November 18, 1803. That was the big, last battle that finished the war. Haiti was a devastated country, but in that case the devastation was caused by a war of liberation. Then as now, the people were contemplating how they would construct a new political structure amidst the debris.

Independence was proclaimed on January 1, 1804. The people were confronting very powerful enemies inside and out, who opposed their building the society they wanted, which was to be built on three rocks [on which Haitian cook stoves traditionally sit]: liberty, equality, and fraternity. As soon as they took away the rock of equality, fraternity became impossible. Since there was no cohesion, we lost liberty, too.

Today, we have to put the three rocks back under the stove, or it will tip over. What this new Haiti needs today is what Haitians wanted in 1804: equality. The riches of this country are distributed in an imbalanced way. I don’t say that everyone will have exactly the same riches, but everyone has to have the same chance in life.

One thing is land. I can’t believe how some people have such a quantity of land while others have none at all, even though we are all the inheritors of [revolutionary leader Jean-Jacques] Dessalines. I don’t say that we should cut up Haiti into many tiny pieces so each person has some; that would be stupid. But it has to be used in a way that gives others a chance to live.

Look at access to education, too, where inequality manifests today as historically. Education is one of the main tools which can bring equality between citizens. For centuries, the elite didn’t let people have education. Now we’re making progress in the number of children who are going to school, but still the quality isn’t good; it’s not equal.

A country with this kind of inequality doesn’t have a chance to survive this shock.

We have to highlight these questions and insist they get addressed forcefully, so the Haiti we’re rebuilding doesn’t look like the Haiti that the earthquake just ravaged.

You know that often earthquakes provoke tsunamis, huge waves that come after the quakes that sometimes cause more damage than the quakes themselves. I’m afraid that there may be a social tsunami after this earthquake. There are people – Haitian and foreign - who, for their own reasons, can use the frustration of the Haitian people to create disorder, and then use that to pursue their own agenda. I’m not scared of the plots of Haitian politicians, but when they marry them with other governments or businessmen, it’s always very dangerous for Haiti.

I can’t accept that there is no alternative. I see one, but it will take a lot of work. It will require the Haitian people to begin organizing themselves again. It will also require a new political class to enter the scene. This political class is finished; their capacity to propose valid things is spent. For this new political class to emerge, we need youth, but youth with training – not just formal education, but political education that can take from their minds the idea that we can model Haiti on the vision of other countries, and in which we have to play catch-up. The idea of our adopting the model of supposedly more advanced countries like the U.S., that’s a choice, too, but it’s a choice of death. I would rather see us, instead of always trying to catch up, break away and make another path for our own development.

Lenz Jean-Francois is a social psychologist. He is also a professor and provisional head of the psychology department of the School of Social Sciences of the State University of Haiti. He talks about how local organizations and institutions are using social psychology in Haiti’s post-earthquake context to help survivors heal.

Haitians’ humanity is threatened today. If there is a battle that Haitians don’t want to lose, it’s their humanity. Each one is looking for recognition that he or she is present, that he or she is among the living.

The difficult situation that Haitians are going through today makes them more fragile. But it can also be a force.

How do we encourage people to reclaim control of their lives [after the catastrophe]? How do they rebuild their control, reestablish their ties with others, and find their confidence so they can resolve their problems?

In Haitian families, the way they socialize their kids, they give a lot of importance to the capacity for endurance. They teach kids to always be ready for a tough situation, to struggle to hold onto their dignity.

In this adversity we’ve been living under since January 12, many people have been having the experience, individually and collectively, of realizing “I didn’t know I had all this strength, all this capacity. I thought I would crack. I thought I would collapse.” When people realize that they have a government which is extremely weak, and that they have together - with their fingers, with their little hammers, their machetes, their sticks – saved so many neighbors, so many family members… they realize that they have so much strength.

We say that what’s positive within the population, build on that. We’re saying that we’re not only rebuilding ourselves, we’re rebuilding our nation. Our slogan is ‘Rebuild Our House.’ We’re promoting collective resilience and tying it to a political vision.

We in social psychology are saying: Let’s recognize our strength, individually and collectively.

We have the strength to continue, to construct our country, to do it ourselves. Gandhi said, certain things have to be done by Indians. When they do something with their own hands, they come to believe in themselves. The Haitian people have to do things with their own hands so they can know they have the strength and the capacity, so they can say, “This was my dream.”

As long as people are depending on others, that’s going to challenge them. There are certain organizations that live off of victims; they have to have victims to survive. We say, instead, that Haitian people have their strength, their capacity: reinforce it.

If you do something for someone who has the confidence to do it him or herself, you make them more dependent, you make them lose their self-confidence. Let them valorize themselves. If people have the capacity to make their food, let them do it. It allows them to have control over their lives, over their environment.

The social psychology that we’re using [in today’s context] has five steps. First is verbalization. Haitians like to talk. We let people express themselves and talk about their experiences. Second is understanding and expressing their emotional reaction. Third is discourse about the false explanations of causes behind the event, that religious people are putting out. We objectify the earthquake as a natural event, historicize it, let people recognize its prior existence in their own history, and do comparison with other earthquakes that are happening all over. The next point is acceptance. You can’t change the earthquake, but how do you change your relationship with it? This is not resignation. Humans have an extraordinary capacity of adaptation. Last is what we call ‘Rebuild the House.’ This is projecting ourselves as actors into a positive future that we ourselves will construct.

That’s where this psychological approach sits: letting people retake control of their lives and letting them know they are the actors in advancing the people. We say to people, “Believe in your strength. In your capacity to rebuild this country.”

Their point of resistance is in conserving their humanity. They prove that capacity each day, the way they’re surviving since January 12.

Thanks to Gina Vrignaud and Ricardo Toussaint for their help with this interview.

Laura Wagner, a U.S. anthropologist who survived – barely - Haiti’s earthquake in January, writes, “Social scientists who study catastrophes say there are no natural disasters. In every calamity, it is inevitably the poor who suffer more, die more, and will continue to suffer and die after the cameras turn their gaze elsewhere. Do not be deceived by claims that everyone was affected equally -- fault lines are social as well as geological.”

It is doubtful that anyone of any class was spared the horror of the 7.3-scale earthquake. In a country where one in every to 18 to 30 people died (no one knows the fatality figure), everyone knows someone no longer amongst the living. No one is sheltered from the jarring public visuals of catastrophe: rampant displays of wounds and freshly amputated legs; mountains of rubble on every city block; tents and improvised shelters clogging streets; houses and walls looming ominously over sidewalks. No conversation appears to veer long from the earthquake and its aftermath.

But the direct impact of the earthquake varies markedly between class. The solidity of housing construction was the primary variable in whose home stood and whose did not. The toll of lost family and friends is a direct result of that, too, as most died due to buildings collapsing on them. Income lost is also largely class-dependent, since the poor’s job security and access to the informal sector earnings are much more precarious.

For those in Haiti’s middle- and upper-income strata, before-the-earthquake privileges are returning. Lines are long in Port-au-Prince’s few grocery stores, where one can buy an array of imported goods and where one need not sweat, haggle over prices, or stand next to fly-filled garbage piles while shopping. Jazz clubs are reopening in tony Pétionville. Easter celebrations were, for some, lavish.

For most, though, post-earthquake ‘normalization’ means adaptation to even higher levels of social and economic precariousness. Life was somewhere between unsustainable and miserable for most Haitians before. Then - in what were, inconceivably, better times - 80% lived below the poverty line and 54% lived in abject poverty. Then, Haiti was the third hungriest country in the world, after Somalia and Afghanistan, and ranked 149 out of 182 countries on the United Nations Human Development Index. Life expectancy at last count was 55 years for women and 53 years for men, while adult literacy stands at about 62%.

For those already exiled to the absolute margin of survival through government neglect, unchallenged concentration of land and other resources by a few, and foreign economic policies, the effects of the earthquake ripple in ever-expanding circles. These survivors lost not only family members, homes, and all their personal belongings. Many have also lost the merchandise they were selling, their informal sector jobs, and whatever else might have given them a little protection from hunger, suffering, and accelerated death.

No reliable statistics exist to demonstrate the socio-economic impacts of the earthquake. And no metric can measure how poverty has increased the emotional and psychological suffering of Haiti’s defavorize, disfavored, as they are called. For now, anecdotes will have to do.

* In a collective taxicab, I ask the driver the same question I ask all day long. “Did you lose anyone?”

He nods. It was his 8-year-old daughter Wesline, named for him, Wesner.

“She was playing in the yard and a big house fell one her. I had to pull her out from under the house.”

Wesner lifts up a swatch of carpet covering his dashboard, and pulls out a miniature Bible. He rifles through the pages to find a postage-stamp-sized snapshot of Wesline, a slim girl resting one hand stiffly on a table, surely under instructions from the photographer.

“You know no morgues or hospitals were working. I wanted to bury her in the countryside but I didn’t have money for transportation. I tried to get the money, but after three days she started to rot so I couldn’t wait anymore. I had to put her beside the road.

“The tractors came with their buckets in front. But I couldn’t stand for them to scoop her up. So I wrapped her up tightly in a sheet – two sheets, in fact – and placed her in the scoop in front myself.”

Do you know where they took her? “They dumped her.” He flicks his hand out, away.

I ask how he’s faring with this loss. His stoicism gives out, and his face crumples like a balloon when the air rushes out. “I’m resigned to it. But I never stop thinking about her for one minute.”

* An elderly woman lives in a small maroon tent in the middle of a courtyard. She spends her days sitting on a wooden stool under an almond tree, listening to a little radio in her lap. I don’t know her name, as she’s rarely during the two months in which I have passed her on the way to and from my apartment. One day, she began returning my smiles. Yesterday she suddenly informed me, “It’s so hard. Sometimes my courage gives out, and I don’t know what to do.

“I rented a house before. It wasn’t destroyed, but now the landlord took it back. I don’t have any money to rent another one. I used to work, I sewed for people, but my sewing machine got destroyed during the event. I’m old, I don’t have any other way to make money.

“Shabim [another neighbor] gave me the tent, but I can tell the owner of this place doesn’t like me being here. I used to bathe in the courtyard” – I have seen her washing from a tin of water behind a tree, trying to shield her bare top from public view – “but now I’m too ashamed.”

“I can’t see what I’ll do or how this will end.” She whispers, “It’s hard, it’s hard.

“This morning I went to church. I didn’t have anything to say to God so I just lifted my arms up” – she does this now, straight up toward heaven – “and I said, ‘God, I’m here. Please see me.’”

* Getro Nelius gives a tour of the stadium, on whose field his family now lives with more than 700 others. Do they feed you? “They gave us a bag of rice, nine big cans, when we first got to the stadium. They haven’t given us anymore.”

They don’t give you any food?

“I think they don’t want us to get too comfortable here, thinking we can get food and water and a tent.”

“Well, once they gave us a card to get cans of Spam. But otherwise we have to find it.”

Find it? With what money? Not one homeless person that I know is working. Even if they came upon something to sell – a few pairs of shoes donated from the U.S., say – who has money to buy?

* The sociology student Fito Beaubrun talks often about his daughters, 8-year-old Vanya, who died in the earthquake, and 2-year-old Lexia, who did not. His wife Rosette and Lexia have gone back to the countryside to be with family, because Rosette could no longer take living in the street. Fenelon worries aloud about the problems that have come between them due to the separation and the anxiety, and fears that he will soon lose Rosette to another man.

He also worries about Lexia. He had difficulty meeting her 2-year-old needs even before the earthquake, but now the situation has become dire. Take milk which, Fito claims, is Lexia’s main passion. “The quality of the milk I can give her corresponds to the quantity of the money I have.”

Lexia now gets the lowest quality of milk available. Even that her parents give her with twice the standard ratio of water.

* My old friend Alina “Tibebe” Cajuste is, inconceivably, even skinnier than last time I saw her.

Her life has been hard ever since her enslaved mother birthed her in the middle of an intersection, but it has just grown harder.

Tibebe used to live in a 15’ x 15’ house next door to her landlord on the noisy, polluted, stinking Carrefour road. The walls of her house collapsed during the quake, leaving nothing but a cement floor and a tin roof. Tibebe, one of her daughters, and two other families – eight people in all - now sleep on the slab. One family has gotten hold of a Coleman tent; another has a thin single mattress. Tibebe and her daughter sleep on the cement. They own nothing except one suitcase of clothes that they managed to rescue from under the rubble.

Blocks fell on Tibebe during the earthquake, breaking her toe and injuring her back. She mentioned in passing one day that she was spitting up blood. Another of her daughters was badly injured when a cement wall fell on her during the earthquake, but it was weeks before Tibebe was able to get money for her medical care. She worries constantly about the daughter, but doesn’t have the bus fare to go visit her.

Tibebe says, “It’s only the heat of the sun keeping us alive.”

“The way you saw the earth shake, that’s how our bodies are shaking now,” said a member of the grassroots anti-violence group Commission of Women Victim-to-Victim (KOFAVIV by its Creole acronym). She was speaking at a meeting about violence against women and children since the earthquake January 12.

The venue of the meeting was KOFAVIV’s new headquarters: a tarp in a displaced persons camp in Port-au-Prince. All the women of KOFAVIV lost their homes in the disaster, while more than 300 lost their lives.

Though there are no statistics on rape during the 10 weeks since the earthquake, reports abound. The following one was relayed by Helia Lajeunesse, a child rights trainer with KOFAVIV. Lajeunesse’s granddaughter, four-year-old Timafi Youyoute (not her real name), lives outside the town of Jeremie with her mother, her mother’s boyfriend, and her newborn baby sister. On March 14, Timafi’s mother sent her to the neighbor’s house to buy a jar of rice. As she was leaving the neighbor’s yard, 17-year-old Dekatrel Jacqué offered to take her back home. Instead, he took her to the cemetery. There, he covered the little girl’s mouth with his hand and proceeded to rape her.

An elderly neighbor, Merlise Louis, saw the incident and tried to grab the boy. He ripped the woman’s shirt and threw her down on the ground. When she shouted for help, he threw a rock at her and ran.

Timafi’s mother went to the police and filed a warrant for the rapist’s arrest. He reportedly fled town.

Photos of Timafi show a short, chubby girl with full cheeks, round eyes, a serious expression, and a head full of colored barrettes. Following the rape, she bled heavily and ran a high fever for two days. She ate almost nothing for more than a week.

In the absence of any official tracking of women and girls raped, except for a United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM)-led effort just initiated in 10 displaced persons camps in Port-au-Prince, KOFAVIV keeps its own tally. As of March 21, KOFAVIV outreach workers had tracked 230 cases of rapes in 15 camps, or 15.3 incidents per camp. Hundreds of such camps dot the city, their size varying from hundreds to more than 20,000. The ages of those raped in this sample range from 10 to 60, the majority of them teenagers.

Post-earthquake Haiti is plagued by high levels of anxiety and frustration among the population; hundreds of thousands of newly homeless females sleeping on the streets and in tent settlements, many of them alone; disorganized and inadequate policing; and a nonfunctioning justice system. For women and girls, this is a deadly combination.

The danger is compounded by the fact that thousands of prisoners, including convicted rapists, are now at large after escaping from the National Penitentiary. And the majority of police who were trained in gender-based violence were reportedly killed in the quake.

KOFAVIV members keep watch in the camps for women and girls who are at risk. They listen and, if they hear what sounds to be a beating or a rape, they intervene. They pay special attention to girls who have been orphaned or abandoned since the quake, who may fall prey to rape or, out of desperation, prostitution; KOFAVIV then helps those girls get back to their relatives in the countryside. They take the testimony of rape survivors and try to get them medical assistance. KOFAVIV also conducts ‘know your rights’ trainings in the camps, including information on human rights, children’s rights, how to protect oneself against violence, and psychological care.

Their advocacy has come with a price. A man whom some KOFAVIV members caught in the act of beating a woman pulled a gun on them. And KOFAVIV co-coordinator Marie Eramithe Delva’s daughter very nearly became part of the group’s statistics. At 8:00 on March 2, a man came under the tarp which is home to Delva, co-coordinator Malya Villard Appolon, their 13 combined children and grandchildren, and other family members. The man threw Delva’s 17-year-old daughter Merline on the ground, dragged her outside, and prepared to rape her. Merline beat him off. An hour or so later, the man returned with three other men and a pistol. They beat four of Delva and Appolon’s daughters.

Delva ran to the police station at the edge of the camp, but the police told her that this was [President] Preval’s work and had nothing to do with them. Police told her to watch out for a patrol car with a certain number license plate; if it should pass by, they should flag it down. (It never did.) They also said that if Delva and her family find the perpetrators, they should catch them and bring them to the police station.

The two families quickly packed up their belongings and went out to the sidewalk, where they held an all-night vigil for human rights. They spent the next day looking for another location that could hold their group of twenty but could not, so they returned to their original tent site.

This writer made more than a dozen phone calls to potential sources of alternative lodging, from UNICEF personnel to Haitian women’s groups. In an all-too-familiar story about the dearth of options for at-risk girls and women in Haiti today, her request was turned down by all for almost three weeks. (American relief workers have just offered a locale.) Reasons cited for the rejections ranged from the fact that KOFAVIV allegedly supports former president Aristide, to twenty being an impossible number to find shelter for.

As a result, the women and their families have continued sleeping where their attackers, who know that the women reported them, can easily find them.

A few of the recent cases that have either been reported to this writer, or where she interviewed the survivors herself, include:
- A 24-year-old man raped a 2-year-old girl in a refugee camp in La Pleine during the week of March 8, according to the UNIFEM-led outreach team. Some members of the management committee (camp leaders elected by camp residents) told the parents that, instead of going to police, they should just demand some money from the man.
- In a case that KOFAVIV encountered in a hospital, a one-and-a-half-year-old girl was raped by her mother’s boyfriend on March 22. Her own father died in the earthquake.
- A 2-year-old was gang-raped, her body then tossed away by her assailants, according to a second-hand report. The toddler survived and was later rescued by a woman who now wants to adopt her.
- A 12-year-old girl, whose mother was wounded and whose father died in the earthquake, was raped in a camp in the national stadium. Neighbors caught the man and attacked him with rocks and sticks, killing him.
- An 18-year-old who said she was “a good girl, I never talked to boys” was raped by four men, so violently that she could not walk the next day. She was left with a severe vaginal infection.

In the last two cases, this writer checked with numerous women’s organizations and advocates for options for free medical care and testing. With each clinic or hospital suggested, either a doctor was unavailable or, while the consultation was free, the tests were not. Only after eight days of taking public transportation and sitting for hours in line did the 18-year-old finally receive care. One can only speculate how those without well-connected allies, money for bus fare, or a cell phone, have been able to access post-rape medical attention.

On March 15, more than two months after the quake, UNIFEM and seven other women’s groups began investigating rapes and violence against women in ten camps around Port-au-Prince. To learn of the rapes, all-volunteer outreach teams speak with the camps’ management committees. According to Gina Vrigneau, the chief of one team, should they find rape cases, they are to call UNIFEM or one of the Haitian organizations. That entity will then call the police in the hopes that they will arrest the perpetrator. One of the groups will begin a legal process, though it is unclear how that may proceed given today’s dysfunctional government. The operation will also, goes the plan, obtain free representation for the accused. The team will, furthermore, give the rape survivors a listing of free medical opportunities. According to Vrigneau, the operation will end June 30.

The greatest urgency remains prevention, which in turn requires security and a functioning justice system.For now, women are largely left to fend for themselves and hope for protection and support.

Says KOFAVIV co-coordinator Marie Eramithe Delva, “We did so much to advance women not being victims. We’ve taken a big step backwards, but we will struggle from where we are and move forward.”

This past Monday, police in Jeremie located and arrested the rapist of 4-year-old Timafi. When asked what will happen from here, the child’s grandmother Helia Lajeunesse made a clucking sound in her throat that in Haiti signifies doubt or resignation and said, “We’ll see.”