Tate Watkins

Eight years of U.N. peacekeeping in Haiti

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 09:12:00 -0400

Today makes eight years since U.N. peacekeeping force MINUSTAH came to Haiti, on June 1, 2004, in the wake of the second coup of President Aristide. In April, The Economist noted that “[t]here has been no serious armed conflict in Haiti since 2006—which can be taken as evidence either of Minustah’s effectiveness or of its irrelevance.” Similarly, there have been no so-called red zones in Haiti—including Cité Soleil, despite some journalists’ inability to refrain from using that descriptor when writing about the neighborhood—for at least the past year.

Whether effectiveness outweighs irrelevance or vice versa, many if not most Haitians lament the blue helmets’ ongoing mission, even if some admit that, because of the lack of a proper domestic security force, the country’s security situation would be much more unstable were the U.N. force to leave tomorrow. Demonstrations are planned for today in Port-au-Prince, some cities in the United States, and elsewhere to protest the mission (fr).

Since the Jan. 2010 earthquake, MINUSTAH troops have been accused of bringing cholera to Haiti for the first time ever, raping and sexually assaulting young Haitians, and supposedly even stealing farmers’ goats.

I first heard the latter from another American journalist—we asked a few Haitian friends about it, and they were all convinced that MINUSTAH stole goats in the countryside on their way to the beach on the weekends and then cooked and ate them seaside. We’d joke about how silly it all sounded. Not much else about the U.N. mission sounds silly.

Uruguay dismissed a navy commander and sent five troops home last September after a video of an alleged sexual assault on an 18-year-old Haitian man was uncovered. That case is still ongoing, but in March, two Pakistani peacekeepers were sentenced to one year in jail for raping a 14-year-old Haitian boy.

Cholera has infected more than half-a-million people in Haiti since its outbreak in October 2010 and killed more than 7,000. Even with sufficient investment—somewhere along the lines of $1 billion, says the CDC—and political will, it would take years to develop the water and sanitation infrastructure Haiti would need to rid the country of cholera. For now, groups like GHESKIO and Partners in Health are left to lobby for funding for vaccinations, a stop-gap measure that can be as low as 60 percent effective and so far has reached only about 1 percent of Haiti’s population of 10 million.

In its April report, The Economist also noted:

Even if the troops do contribute to security, critics of the force note that a single year of its $800m budget might be enough to revamp the country’s decrepit water infrastructure. That might well have prevented cholera from spreading in the first place.

Photo via Wikipedia

Haitian Government announces cash transfer school attendance program

Tue, 29 May 2012 10:06:38 -0400

Cross-posted at Haiti Rewired

The Government of Haiti recently announced the launch of a program that will give cash to mothers for keeping their children to school. Venezuela’s Petrocaribe fund will provide $15 million in funding for the first phase of the project. The AP reports:

The program is called “Ti Manman Cheri,” or Creole for “Dear Little Mother.” It aims to reach 100,000 families in four of the capital’s poorest neighborhoods.

Mothers with children enrolled in the first through sixth grades can receive up to $20 a month if they keep the youngsters in school.

Many countries have instituted similar programs, but the Haitian Government claims that this will be the first such program to use mobile phones to make the cash transfers. Jon Bougher recently reported on efforts to “Make Haiti’s Money Mobile” for Haiti Rewired.

Mexico started the first such conditional cash transfer program, PROGRESA, in 1997. MIT economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo explained how the program works in their 2011 award-winning book Poor Economics:

[PROGRESA] offered money to poor families, but only if their children regularly attended school and the family sought preventative health care. … To make it politically acceptable, the payments were presented as “compensation” to the family for the wages lost when their child went to school instead of working. But in reality, the goal was to nudge the family, by making it costly for the family to fail to send their children to school, regardless of what the family thought of education.

Randomly controlled trials of the program showed evidence that the program worked, especially for secondary school students. As the authors write, conditional cash transfer programs “spread like wildfire all over the rest of Latin America, and subsequently to the rest of the world. Mayor Michael Bloomberg even gave them a try in New York City.”

Photo by flickr user FMSC

Haitian sea cucumbers, the Chinese New Year, and reforming foreign aid

Mon, 28 May 2012 14:20:00 -0400

My latest piece for GOOD is up on their website: “What A Box of Sea Cucumbers Teaches Us About Foreign Aid.” It’s a feature that tries to weave together a story about a Haitian sea cucumber exporter, an NGO that’s working to get more aid money spent locally in places like Haiti instead of in places like Washington D.C., and USAID’s reform agenda that’s largely aimed at spending more money locally. Here’s an excerpt:

[Ernst] Charles, a Haitian-American who grew up in Boston, moved to Haiti in 2005 to build cell phone towers for a telecom company. Once he finished his two-year contract, he decided to stay in his parents’ native country and start Sonac Agricole, a lobster exporting business. He later branched out into cocoa bean exports, and, eventually, sea cucumbers.

He credits Building Markets, an organization that connects local businesses to regional and global supply chains, with much of his export success. The NGO’s database of verified Haitian businesses gave Sonac Agricole essential credibility with Hong Kong importers.

But Charles’ business is an outlier—most of Building Markets’ (formerly known as Peace Dividend Trust) work involves helping Haitian firms apply for contracts from organizations like USAID and the United Nations.

In Haiti, USAID awarded only 0.02 percent of contracts for fiscal years 2010 and 2011 to local firms, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research. By contrast, nearly 80 percent of such contracts went to government contractors in Washington, D.C., Virginia, and Maryland. Chemonics and Development Alternatives, Inc., two of USAID’s top six vendors for fiscal year 2011, combined to receive more than $1 billion of the Agency’s $15 billion in global program funding for the year.

Read the entire piece here, which provides more detail about why Asians are so into sea cucumbers.

There were a few things I didn’t have space to delve into in the piece, like recent opposition to USAID’s proposed reforms by some American contractors and large NGOs. They’ve mostly cited concerns about lack of monitoring and corruption. The Coalition of International Development Companies—a group that includes more than 50 American development companies—says that U.S. contractors offer “superior accountability and transparency” to local businesses. As the NYU Development Research Institute recently noted, the group is linked to lobbying efforts that may have helped foster skepticism about USAID Forward reforms by a few U.S. Representatives.

It’s no doubt easier for USAID to monitor D.C. firms than Haitian or Afghan ones, but American development contractors aren’t immune to wrongdoing. In December 2010, the Agency suspended the Academy for Educational Development, one of the nation’s oldest and most venerable development nonprofits, for “serious corporate misconduct, mismanagement, and a lack of internal controls” which raised “serious concerns of corporate integrity.” The suspension led to the organization divesting itself of its assets four months later. And in Haiti, USAID claims to be doing due diligence and vetting local firms it works with—something that work by organizations like Building Markets could definitely help facilitate.

But there clearly are other hurdles to doing more local contracting. Without training like that provided by Building Markets, for instance, how well will many local firms be able to navigate USAID’s procedures and red tape?

Even so, with so little local contracting in Haiti and many other countries, there’s low-hanging fruit that reforms can help pluck—things as simple as using vetted Haitian building materials suppliers instead of shipping materials to the island from Miami vendors.

Maggie Steber's 25 years of photographing Haiti: The Audacity of Beauty

Fri, 25 May 2012 08:11:09 -0400

Maggie Steber first came to Haiti in 1980 to photograph Baby Doc’s wedding. She returned in 1986 to cover food riots and the heat that preceded the deposing of Duvalier. Over the next few decades, she visited the island nation 80 times, trying to capture slices of Haiti that went beyond breaking news and wire stories, as she explained to the The New York Times Lens blog:

“Some years ago when I first started working in Haiti, I realized I had to go when it was quiet, when there were moments of peace, not danger and violence,” she said. “We don’t take the time to see it because, mainly, people are not interested. But you see glimpses of beautiful things in the countryside and the slums. There are moments of beauty that are exquisite. They are profound. But you have to be in tune with things when you see them. Those are the moments where pride lives, where life is lived.”

The Audacity of Beauty is an archive of her 25 years of photographing Haiti. Steber has worked as a photographer for Newsweek, director of photography for The Miami Herald, and has contributed to magazines including The New Yorker and National Geographic.

The name of the archive is tongue-in-cheek, a reference to the fact that you’ll often find anything but beauty in portrayals of Haiti by mainstream media and in breaking news. She told The Times:

“The idea came about in the last couple of years,” said Ms. Steber, who lives in Miami. “This idea of the audacity of these people to have anything beautiful in their lives.”

…

“I was brokenhearted and stunned [after the earthquake of Jan. 2010] by what had happened,” she said. “And then came this onslaught, like flies swarming over a corpse. It was wild being there. Some people did good and important work, but others were looking for one thing: violence, death and suffering.”

Read the entire Lens post here, with an accompanying slideshow of Steber’s work.

Screengrab from The Audacity of Beauty

Haiti links: New water treatment plant in Titanyen; U.N., budget cuts, & cholera; Chan Mas update; more

Thu, 24 May 2012 13:28:00 -0400

1. “Haiti, With Help from Spain, Opens New Water Treatment Plant in Titanyen”

The plant was completed with the help of the Spanish Agency for International Development. President Martelly inaugurated it today.

“The cholera epidemic is forcing us to understand how important and meaningful the implementation of a purification unit is,” Martelly said.

The government said 1.5 million people could directly benefit from the new plant, which contains seven basins.

The plant’s operations will convert both excreta and wastewater into clean water.

2. “UN: Budget cuts causing cholera deaths in Haiti”

3. For Le Nouvelliste, Valéry Daudier reports from Chan Mas: “Life slowly returns to the Champ de Mars” (fr). A translated excerpt:

“My wife, I met her for the first time at this place. I’m sure that I’m not the only one who met my other half here. The Champ de Mars is the meeting place par excellence,” said a man in his forties who is sipping a beer.

“As a highly symbolic place, the Champ de Mars should not have remained occupied by displaced people during this time. For over two years, the nightlife hasn’t had the same atmosphere here because of insecurity. The tents are a hiding place for bandits,” he adds.

Read the entire thing here.

4. “A Dighton [Mass.] man remained locked in a Haitian prison cell Wednesday as his family and friends back home prayed for his release”.

In the article, friends and family of the man, Steven Shaw, offer character defenses, don’t really bother to consider whether the charges brought against him might be legitimate:

“We’re devastated that anyone spending all these years doing God’s work would be arrested and put in jail,” said Pennie Shaw of Raynham, whose brother, Dighton resident Steven Shaw, was arrested Friday after allegedly driving demonstrators to a rally in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince.

…

“He is building an orphanage outside of Port-au-Prince,” the sister said. “He loves the Haitian people. … He’s been supporting five street boys, paying for their education.”

…

“These are trumped-up charges,” said Gladie Mitchell, a former Dighton resident who now lives in West Palm Beach, Fla., and has known the Shaw family for decades. “He’s an incredible person.”

5. After nine games, L’America Football Club des Cayes leads Haiti’s first division (fr). Fica, of Cap-Haïtien, is second.

6. “Police in Haiti are investigating the killing of a Swiss woman whose beaten body turned up in the back seat of a Jeep in northern Haiti.”

The Iron Market of Port-au-Prince I spent part of the day today...

Wed, 23 May 2012 16:45:00 -0400

The Iron Market of Port-au-Prince

I spent part of the day today around Chan Mas and downtown Port-au-Prince. Above is a photo I took of the center section of the Iron Market. The earthquake damaged much of the market—much of one hall was destroyed, and this center section was twisted like a wet washcloth—and it was one of the first large structures to be rebuilt after the disaster. I told its backstory in a recent piece I wrote about Haiti reconstruction:

One of the most vivid symbols of recovery so far, the reconstruction of the Iron Market in downtown Port-au-Prince, was led by Haiti’s largest private company and employer, Irish telecom Digicel. CEO Denis O’Brien funded the rebuilding of the wrought iron structure, which features on Haiti’s 1,000 gourde bank note, with $16.5 million from his own pocket. The original incongruous building, complete with four minarets and a clock tower, left Paris in the late 19th century bound for Cairo; it was meant to serve as a train station. But when the Egypt deal fell through, Haitian President Florvil Hyppolite bought it and diverted to the island in 1891.

Hyppolite took office in 1889, hence the date on the line underneath the clock.

Haitians want your old t-shirt

Wed, 23 May 2012 15:33:00 -0400

Today Reason posted a video that Jon Bougher and I produced: “Haiti’s Pepe Trade: How Secondhand American Clothes Became a First-Rate Business”.

There’s been no dearth of recent criticisms of donations to the developing world—they can undercut local producers and vendors and also usually do a pretty good job of perpetuating white-savior complex stereotypes. Charles Kenny said it best and succinctly in Foreign Policy: “Haiti Doesn’t Need Your Old T-Shirt: The West can (and should) stop dumping its hand-me-downs on the developing world.” No one would mistake me for a defender of the practice.

But after researching Haiti’s pepe market—the local name of the country’s secondhand goods market—and interviewing a lot of vendors and consumers of the stuff, it’s apparent that the market is just that—a market—and has all the sorts of price and information signals that one entails. Most of it originates with Haitian-American buyers at U.S. thrift stores and shipping product to Port-au-Prince and other ports. So the market does rely on U.S. donations, but not on direct donations by large NGOs to the masses, as is sometimes portrayed by media and other onlookers (and which surely happens at times, like when World Vision passes out misprinted Super Bowl t-shirts to Zambians). It’s decidedly a business—not a charity.

In my mind, this distinction provides even more supporting evidence to the cases made by Kenny and others against developing world donations en mass, which lose all the market signals contained in a genuine market and are often “stuff ‘we’ don’t want and stuff ‘they’ don’t need.”

Practically everything you read on pepe—this 1996 article, for example, or this 2010 one—will feature quotes from well-off Haitians—professors, textile magnates, big-businesspeople, etc.—decrying the practice and maybe even calling for it to be banned. But every average or down-and-out Haitian we talked to in the streets and markets of Port-au-Prince talked about how much they love pepe. This should not be lost on viewers of our video or people who comment on pepe from air-conditioned offices in Port-au-Prince or Washington D.C. The story about pepe is really about gains from trade, not charity or donations.

In a country where per capita income is about $650, pepe provides access to name-brand apparel at an affordable price, even if it comes in the form of hand-me-downs. (I should also note that not all pepe is actually secondhand—new apparel, from Levi’s to Converse to Walmart-brand button down shirts, is also sold by some vendors and is a slightly higher segment of the market.)

Watch the video, comment and let us know what you think, and send hate mail and hot tips to tate.m.watkins at gmail dot com.

Haiti is much more than tent camps and cholera. For most Haitians, Chuck Taylor’s and Lacoste are a bigger part of quotidian life.

Haiti links: Paramilitary drama on Chan Mas; Mexico pledges to support more reconstruction; "Volunteers hurting Haiti?"

Mon, 21 May 2012 09:49:00 -0400

1. The news of the weekend was the march through town by paramilitaries last Friday, which was Jour du Drapeau (Flag Day). In recent weeks, the rogue forces had demanded that President Martelly officially recognize them by Jour du Drapeau, or they would “take to the streets,” as one paramilitary told me on Chan Mas last week. In recent months, the Haitian Government has repeatedly demanded that the rogue groups disband. During his campaign, and at times since his election, Martelly pledged to reinstate the Haitian army, which Jean-Bertrand Aristide disbanded in 1995.

The “taking to the streets” entailed a march from Lamentin, a military camp in Carrefour where at least hundreds of commandos had gathered, to the National Palace. Journalist Susana Ferreira, who was following the march, noted that it was peaceful for most of the day. But near the palace, rocks began to fly at U.N. patrols, and the U.N. replied with tear gas, according to the AP. Later in the day Haitian National Police opened fire as people wearing combat fatigues returned to the Lamentin base, according to AlterPresse.

Once the dust settled, 50 arrests had been made, including two Americans who had been serving as drivers for ex-soldiers. They’ve been charged with conspiracy for aiding the unauthorized military forces and are still being held. Two other Americans and one Canadian were detained for about 24 hours but were released late Saturday. They had tried to bring insulin to one of the jailed Americans. The AP recaps here.

2. Mexico pledges more support to Haiti reconstruction via “Memo of Understanding”

Since 2010, Mexico has reportedly spent $23 million in the execution of development projects in agriculture, education and health Haiti, along with providing a number of scholarships to Haitian students.

3. “Volunteers hurting Haiti?”. Jamaica Observer:

A new report on the Haiti earthquake by a French academic at the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in London illustrates just how much damage can be done by these do-gooders. Karl Blanchet, a lecturer in health services management, looked at the 15 charities that provided artificial limbs to new amputees on the island. Only two of them made the list as “very professional”. The rest failed on various criteria, from experience and quality to basic standards.

“The earthquake in Haiti raised a lot of enthusiasm and charitable feeling,” Blanchet said. “Many people stood up and said ‘I want to help’. But you need more than good will. You need the right skills. Otherwise, you can do more harm than good.”

The study is linked here.

4. Sean Penn, who spends “at least half his time in Haiti” and the rest presumably in Malibu and Cannes and wherever else, blasted “the whole fucking world” for its “Haiti fatigue”:

“It’s not only celebrities who went for a day,” he said to a room full of journalists at the Cannes film festival, when asked about his long-term commitment to the country. “It’s the whole fucking world. It’s all of you.”

He added, “The reason we have Haiti fatigue is because there was never a commitment in the first place.”

Photo via Susana Ferreira

Soccer stadium planned for Cité soleil

Fri, 18 May 2012 13:23:31 -0400

For Haiti Rewired, I wrote a post about an effort led by Boby Duval to build a soccer stadium in Cité Soleil:

“You know, the kids don’t come for training soccer,” says Boby Duval, who has trained more than 6,000 players at soccer training academy  L’Athletique D’Haiti since 1994. “They come for the meal you give them.”

The former professional soccer player has no illusions about the realities that help draw trainees to his academy, but he hopes a new project will improve upon and expand the reach of his operations. Later this year, construction will begin on  Phoenix Stadium in Cité Soleil, near the site of L’Athletique D’Haiti.

Read the entire thing here, which includes background about Duval’s work and quotes from an interview I did with him a while ago.

Haiti Rewired was set up under the Wired umbrella shortly after the Jan. 2010 earthquake and is an online community and forum of people inside and outside of Haiti who are involved in or cover reconstruction. It bills itself as “an ongoing conversation about technology, infrastructure, and the future of Haiti.”

Haiti links: Mining law being drafted; Haitian once rescued by Coast Guard now graduating from Coast Guard Academy; Boby Duval's soccer stadium

Wed, 16 May 2012 08:04:24 -0400

1. Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe says that the government is drafting legislation for Haiti’s emerging mining industry. The AP recently reported that the country’s gold, silver, and copper reserves could be worth up to $20 billion:

“The most important thing is to have the correct mining law,” [Lamothe] said. “It ensures that the right portion comes to the state. It ensures that the people living in the region where the mines are, that their rights are protected. It ensures environmental protection.”

On va voir.

2. Twenty-four year-old Orlando Morel, picked up by the Coast Guard as he fled Haiti with his mother at age six, set to graduate from the Coast Guard Academy, prevent other potential immigrants from coming to this country.

“On Wednesday, he will graduate from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in Connecticut,” the AP reports. “Morel will serve on a cutter out of Florida whose mission will include migrant interdiction in the very waters where he was rescued nearly two decades ago.”

After [his own] rescue, Morel wound up being sent to Cuba. His mother was taken to a hospital in the United States because she had cancer and burns on her hands. Morel was reunited with his mother at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. He visited her several times before she died shortly after his birthday.

His mother told him that her translator, a Haitian woman serving in the U.S. Navy, would take care of him. That woman, a single mother named Louise Jackson, wound up adopting him.

…

“To me, that’s a beautiful American story,” Jackson said. “It can only happen in America.”

3. The New York Times Soccer Blog on Boby Duval’s planned soccer stadium

Boby Duval, a former professional soccer player in Haiti who in 1976 was imprisoned at Fort Dimanche for 17 months after speaking out against Jean-Claude Duvalier’s dictatorship, runs a soccer training academy near Cité Soleil called L’Athletique D’Haiti. He’s done so for 18 years now, and has plans for a new stadium (and a new independent soccer league to compete with the badly-run Ligue Haïtienne), which recently received financing. The New York Times Soccer Blog with more:

[Duval] added: “I know this is working. We have more than 2,000 kids we’re serving here. They’ve gone to Brazil, the U.S., the women’s team were champions of the Homeless World Cup. Sports is the universal language. The kids may be poor and barefoot, but when they walk on the field I guarantee you, you don’t know who’s rich. For an hour on the field, they are people who make a difference. This is not rocket science.”

Duval told me a few months ago that he started the academy back in 1996 because he wanted his son to have a place to train, and a place to befriend kids who weren’t part of the Haitian elite who hardly leave the isolation of posh houses above Port-au-Prince:

“I had to juggle my personal interests, and also my personal interest, my son,” said Duval. “I wanted him to grow up with the kids around his neighborhood or his age that are not behind golden gates. Prison. Like rich prisons. I had to juggle all of that, and that’s what I came up with.”

Here are some photos of L’Athletique D’Haiti, which is down the road from where the stadium will be built. Boukannen Dlo episode 7 covered soccer in Haiti and mentioned Duval’s work.

4. Le Nouvelliste covers the upcoming Cannes film festival, which will include a one-night party for Haiti fundraising called “Carnival in Cannes” and feature RAM and Raoul Peck (and, yes, Sean Penn) (fr)

Boukannen Dlo Episode 8: "How's Haiti?"

Mon, 14 May 2012 11:14:57 -0400

This week’s pod, which, for now, will be the last in our Boukannen Dlo series since life is taking Jacob away from Hispaniola, is about aswering the question, “How’s Haiti?” The post description:

On the final installment of Boukannen Dlo, we discuss the question we inevitably get when we return home to visit with friends and family: “How’s Haiti?” We’ve used the podcast to try to answer that question by presenting a few small slices of our own lives in Haiti, and this week we tackle that question head-on in our eighth and final episode.

Listen to the episode on the podcast website here, and you can find all eight episodes in iTunes here.

Haiti links: Martelly year 1 recaps; gold in them hills; "Haiti's military mess"

Mon, 14 May 2012 09:01:10 -0400

1. In a President Martelly year-1-in-office overview, the AP says that “Modest Gains Mark Haitian Leader’s 1st Year”. It notes that even though the president was without a prime minister for much of his first year and spent much of year one butting heads with legislators, “six of the most visible displaced-persons camps that sprang up after the 2010 earthquake have been cleared and several are back to being public plazas; renovations are far along at the international airport; a sprinkling of new hotels and shops have begun to emerge across the capital’s otherwise ruined landscape; and in a country where free education is rare, the government, for the first time, has covered school tuition for 1 million children.”

Asked to grade himself on a 1-10 scale, the president, who isn’t known for modesty, grades himself high.

“I would give myself an eight, eight-and-half, a nine, because everything I did I did without a government,” Martelly said in an interview with The Associated Press. “Everything I did, I did at a time when I had so many problems, when so many people tried to stop me. Everything I did, I did whether the money was there or not.”

2. In Jacqueline Charles’ analogous Martelly-year-1 article, she describes his first year has as “uneven at best.”

Martelly’s year-long tenure has been uneven at best, with both critics and supporters agreeing that he will not be fully judged until his five-year term is over. Still, his governing style, political naivete and circle of influential advisers have put him in conflict with parliamentarians who as recently as Friday were blocking a final vote on new Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe’s government because of disagreements over its composition.

International observers say that if Martelly wants to move beyond slogans, and have his many announced initiatives go beyond public relations, the focus in the coming months must be on political stability.

3. The conquistadors finally find their oro?:

A flurry of exploratory drilling in the past year has found precious metals worth potentially $20 billion deep below the tropical ridges in [Haiti’s] northeastern mountains. Now, a mining company is drilling around the clock to determine how to get those metals out.

…

“Ultimately, I think mining is going to dwarf anything else in Haiti,” says Michael Fulp, an Albuquerque, N.M.-based geologist who visited the drill sites. “Usually you’ve got about a one-in-1,000 chance of making a mine from the exploratory stage, but those odds are much better in Haiti because of the lack of any previous modern-day exploration and very, very promising samples.”

4. Via The Globe and Mail, a Reuters video on “Haiti’s military mess”.

In defense of expats playing polo while riding on Rwandans' motos

Fri, 11 May 2012 12:05:00 -0400

The New York Times ran a piece the other day about moto polo, a polo-like game expats play in Kigali in which they substitute horses with motos driven by locals:

Instead of horses, of which there are few in Rwanda, players drive and ride motorcycles, of which there are many. Along the slick roads here, in Rwanda’s capital, they are commonly used as taxis, and a growing number of young Rwandan motorcyclists turn up at competitions to show off and practice their skills.

Apparently the game has taken off in Kigali and has even been exported to Kampala by peripatetic expats. According to the piece, most people in Rwanda make only about $3 per day, but moto drivers can make about $20 for an hour-long game of polo.

Chris Blattman blogged the article as “Your neocolonial moment for the day,” adding, “I am pretty sure the expats do not wear spurs, but perhaps it is only a matter of time.” Bill Easterly tweeted along with the link, “Expats play polo substituting Rwandans on motorbikes for the horses — what?!”

I’ve never been to Rwanda, and while the images of white dudes wielding mallets while clinging to the backs of Rwandans’ motos are a bit jarring, the game strikes me as something that young male moto drivers anywhere where you could make in one hour more than six times the average daily wage, all while playing what looks like an insane and awesome extreme sport that probably boosts testosterone like Jose Canseco let loose in the A’s clubhouse, would go apeshit over.

Sure, a lot of expats living in Rwanda are probably stereotypical expat dooshes who don’t really get out of the capital-city foreigner bubble, but if the Rwandan drivers are down with it and doing it voluntarily, then I don’t think it should strike anyone’s anti-neocolonial nerve too much. And for what it’s worth, one guy who used to play the game and knows some of the people from the Times article says that everyone, drivers included, has a good time.

Naturally, the American expats divide into North and South teams. (They’re not talking about regions of Rwanda.)

Josh Kron, who wrote the Times moto-polo piece, also wrote a good recent Times article on Mormon missionaries in Uganda.

Photo via Flickr user Rachel Strohm

Haiti links: Martelly, again, tells rogue armies to disband; Haitian testifies in Uruguay in U.N. sexual abuse case; more

Fri, 11 May 2012 08:40:06 -0400

1. WSJ: “In Haiti, Ex-Troops’ Bid for New Army Threatens Stability”

President Martelly has repeatedly told the rogue militias that have assembled in recent months to disband and leave the camps and barracks where they’ve gathered around the country. Le Nouvelliste interviews Martelly about it (fr). He says, in part:

If it was [actually] the army, they would obey, because the president is supreme commander of the army … I won’t speak about the army as they won’t leave the camps they occupy. And like it or not, they will be forced to leave. It’s disorder and chaos …

2. “A 19-year-old Haitian man who has accused six former U.N. peacekeepers from Uruguay of sexually abusing him in the poor Caribbean country presented evidence to a judge Thursday, and authorities now have about two months to decide whether the case merits a trial.”

3. The NPR interview I blogged about below: “Aid Worker Leaves Haiti With A Sour Taste”

4. Matt Barkley and his USC teammates are (still) going to Haiti for about four days. I’ve been reading about this story for like a month and am still not sure why it’s a news story that an outlet as prestigious and highly-regarded and known for hard-hitting journalism as ESPN feels the need to cover.

The unremarkable sour taste for an aid worker in Haiti

Fri, 11 May 2012 08:02:00 -0400

Yesterday, NPR interviewed Quinn Zimmerman, an “aid worker leav[ing] Haiti with a sour taste,” as the radio outlet put it. Zimmerman had recently written a blog post in which he outlined many of the frustrations—locals seeing his white skin as little more than dollar signs, locals giving him shit merely for being a foreigner in Haiti, locals expecting him to dole out cadeux all the time—that he’s felt while working for an NGO in Leogane over the past couple of years.

“I came down here with kind of rose-colored glasses,” Zimmerman told NPR, “and this belief that intention was enough, that my desire to want to help people was enough.” In the blog post, he noted, “I knew a bit about the idea of the white savior industrial complex, but didn’t know enough to realize I was playing right into it.”

The interview and post are a glimpse into what it’s like for someone to have his or her idealism chastened. Most Peace Corps Volunteers can probably relate, as I’m sure many aid workers can. While serving in Peace Corps Senegal I went through many of the things Zimmerman describes —similar frustrations, the gradual hardening—even if I limited my outlet to venting with fellow PCV friends when I was out of my village, rather than doing it online or in a national interview with NPR.

Historian Laurent Dubois commented on the Zimmerman interview yesterday on Twitter. Dubois’ Avengers of the New World is a fantastic if a little dense account of the Haitian Revolution, and his Haiti: The Aftershocks of History garnered oodles of praise when it came out in January and is possibly now recognized as the best broad overview of Haitian history, for a layman and English-speaking audience, at least.

A string of four tweets by Dubois about the Zimmerman interview read like this:

Post/interview is good in a way for honestly and openly saying what many aid workers in #Haiti feel and say privately. At the same time, there’s a great deal of confusion between the self-criticism and deeply patronizing vision of #Haiti. The lesson should be, I think, that that matrix of #Haiti volunteer/NGO structures clearly provides too little preparation for people. One wonders how different the experience would have been if he arrived with language/knowledge of #Haiti rather than just good intentions.

Zimmerman’s story isn’t remarkable; the remarkable thing is that so many people who ship off to Haiti or Senegal or wherever on do-good missions in the world of internet and Twitter and instantaneous communication have such warped expectations about the people they will find at their destinations, about the work they will be doing, and about the work of “saving” or “fixing” a place or people that they’ll never be able to do. Just look at a few quotes from people recently-returned from short-term volunteer or missions trips. (Most people, on Tumblr (on Tumblr!), do not seem to get the irony of the site.)

Even though he says he never thought he was here to “fix” Haiti, Zimmerman admits that his expectations before coming were out of line with reality. You can tell how much that’s changed by the way he talks now:

When we [westerners] come down here, we assume that people in poverty must be suffering. And surely, there’s a lot of suffering, and I’ve seen it firsthand, but I also would have to say that the vast majority of the town, it looks like people kind of go about their daily lives. And, you know, it’s not as horrific as the scenes that you see sometimes in articles about Haiti from people that have only been here for, maybe, a week in a post-disaster situation type of a thing.

I think that actually, one of the things that might get … the Haitians very frustrated is this stigma that they get, like these poor, poor, desperate people. … We have to go in and do something. That’s so demeaning, and they’re people just like anybody else. Just because you’re poor doesn’t mean you don’t pick up on what other people perceive you to be. And I know a lot of Haitians who are very proud of being Haitian. They’re very proud of where they come from and, yeah, they might not have a lot, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re miserable and suffering constantly.

In my piece that ran yesterday for The American Interest, “Rebuilding Haiti: Why is it taking so long?” NGO-founder Sasha Kramer alluded to some of the frustrations Zimmerman talks about.

Kramer says that she’s sensed tremendous frustration among international employees working with large NGOs who feel disconnected from the people they’re here trying to help.

“I also think it results in huge staff turnover,” she says, “because people are really unhappy here. …

Read the entire piece here.

Why is it taking so long to rebuild Haiti?

Thu, 10 May 2012 11:16:00 -0400

Today a sort of big-picture Haiti reconstruction piece I wrote for The American Interest ran online. The headline it ran under is, “Rebuilding Haiti: Why is it taking so long?” Two years-plus isn’t so long in the context of the enormous task of rebuilding much of Port-au-Prince and its environs. But there are systemic reasons that progress has been hard to come by. Here’s an excerpt from the piece:

“Can any good news come out of Haiti?” [U.N. humanitarian coordinator Nigel] Fisher asks in the introduction of the U.N. 2011 report on Haiti. “Not if one listens to the eminent person who travels from the airport to the hotel and promptly pronounces that no progress has been achieved, or if you believe the TV correspondent who stands in front of a collapsed house and states that almost no rubble has been removed since the earthquake.” As Fisher goes on to point out, more than half of the estimated twenty million cubic yards of rubble that once littered Port-au-Prince has been cleared—enough to fill five Louisiana Superdomes. And while nearly half a million people are still living in tents, that figure is about a million fewer than in the months following the quake.

But beyond the simple enormity of the task, there are other reasons that reconstruction will continue for years, even decades, to come. Those reasons, which derive from the nature of aid work itself, help explain why the glass remains 90 percent empty despite the unprecedented international attention directed to Haiti after the disaster, the good intentions of foreign organizations working toward reconstruction, and the billions of dollars of aid inflows.

Many international organizations working in Haiti are disconnected from the people they’re here to help, which directly affects their ability to aid those people. Additionally, compared to locals and Haitian institutions, foreign organizations usually work on much shorter timelines. Both factors hamstring their ability to effect progress in recovery and reconstruction.

Read the entire piece here.

Haiti links: MPs accuse colleagues of taking bribes for PM ratification; crackdown on would-be soldiers; Kenbe Prestige Ou

Tue, 08 May 2012 11:28:00 -0400

1. Several MPs denounce colleagues, accuse them of taking bribes to approve the nomination of Laurent Lamothe as Prime Minister, whose appointment was ratified last Friday

2. “Haiti police, UN crack down on would-be soldiers”

3. Le Nouvelliste profiles Ivorian aquaculture expert and owner of the Caribbean Harvest fish hatchery Valentin Abe, who was the 2011 Digicel Entrepreneur of the Year. The paper’s headline dubs Abe “The man who multiplies fish” (fr). I talked with and blogged about Abe back in January, who hopes to bolster domestic fish production so that Haitians do not have to rely on so many fish imports, which are relatively expensive.

4. Prestige, Haiti’s only domestic beer, won the gold award for American-style ~~Cream or Ale~~ Cream Ale or Lager at the Brewers Association World Beer Cup in San Diego. ~~Which is kind of weird, because Prestige won gold in 2000 for American-style Lager, an honor that’s plastered on its bottle labels.~~ “Kenbe Prestige Ou” was our Creole phrase of the week for episode four of our podcast, which was about tourism in Haiti.

5. Whole Foods looks to increase number of Haitian mangoes carried in its stores

6. The Government of Haiti signed a $250 million agreement to construct a waste processing and power plant that will reportedly produce of 30 megawatts of renewable electricity for the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area.

Photo via Prestige Facebook page

Boukannen Dlo Episode 7: The Great Haitian Pastime

Mon, 07 May 2012 17:52:54 -0400

This week’s pod features us discussing how, whether attending local matches or religiously watching Messi and Ronaldo, Haitians are crazy about soccer: The post description:

Thanks to Haitians’ love for soccer and the late rounds of the Champions League featuring top European clubs like Barcelona, Chelsea, and Bayern Munich, life in Port-au-Prince seems to stop and start with the whistles of matches being played thousands of miles away. This week we bring you to a small soccer stadium in our neighborhood to discuss Haitians’ love for the game, talk about how the sport manifests gender divides, and get a sense of Haiti’s sports culture.

Listen to the episode on the podcast website here, and you can subscribe in iTunes via this link.

Haiti links: SEC sues 11 in illegal stock-selling scheme partially related to Haiti reconstruction; Martelly ruffles feathers in Miami politics

Thu, 03 May 2012 11:51:32 -0400

Three stories from The Miami Herald:

1. Securities and Exchange Commission files civil suits against 11 people in illegal stock-selling schemes, “one that took advantage of the dire situation in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake.”

According to the SEC, the Recycle Tech scheme was a “pump and dump” scenario — using a promotional campaign to pump up the price and volume of the company’s stock in the wake of the Haiti earthquake, so that those involved in the scheme could then sell the shares and earn profits.

The SEC alleges that the campaign touted that Recycle Tech signed a binding letter of intent to build up to 50 container homes in Haiti following the earthquake. However, Recycle Tech failed to disclose to investors that it had no funds, no finished container homes and minimal operations, the SEC said.

2. President Martelly ruffles feathers in Miami, Washington by informally endorsing Haitian-American candidate for South Florida Congressional race

“It is very important for Haiti to stand behind [Haitian-American candidate] Rudy Moise,” Martelly said in Creole [on a Miami radio station]. “When I say Haiti, Haitians in Haiti; Haitians in the diaspora.”

…

“I am going to support him, someway, somehow,” said Martelly, a popular musician who was elected president almost a year ago. “I am going to put my friends with him. I am going to put people who do fundraising with him.”

3. New Haiti Ambassador to the U.S. Paul Altidor takes office. Altidor formerly worked for the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund helping bring investments to the country. He’s also worked at the IFC branch of the World Bank, and he studied economics at Boston College and international development at MIT.

His goal, [Altidor] said, is to help transform Haiti from a charity destination to one for investments by pushing business diplomacy.

4. Le Nouvelliste reports that “the dream of 20,000 employees will form very slowly” for the Caracol industrial park planned for the North of Haiti. (fr) It also calls the project’s billboards that line roads in the North propaganda for saying that the 20,000 jobs would come by the end of 2012—it will reportedly take until 2016. The newspaper reports that the project will yield 1,600 jobs by the end of 2012.

U.S. advisors still helping Ugandan troops look for a warlord who might be a ghost but at least Invisible Children are happy

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 15:16:00 -0400

A Jeffrey Gettleman New York Times piece posted online yesterday updates the effort by Ugandan military forces and American advisors to track down the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and their leader, Joseph Kony, who featured in the insanely popular “KONY 2012” YouTube video released in March.

For Reason, I wrote about the interventionist propaganda that permeated the video shortly after advocacy NGO Invisible Children released it:

Like a campaign commercial, Kony 2012 provides rhetoric in lieu of substance, appeals to emotion instead of reason, and frames partisan decisions in the language of universality and collective purpose.

…

Invisible Children’s call for international intervention to bring Kony to justice clearly aligns with the decision of the Obama administration last October to send about 100 “advisors,” mostly special forces troops, to Central Africa to help track down the LRA.

Today’s Times piece quotes “one American official” acknowledging the connection between Invisible Children’s lobbying efforts and the U.S. intervention in Central Africa:

“Let’s be honest, there was some constituent pressure here. Did ‘Kony 2012’ have something to do with this? Absolutely.”

The “KONY 2012” video itself can’t have a lot to do with the decision to send advisors, since that happened last October. But, as the Times notes, groups including Invisible Children “pressured Congress to pass the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act in 2010, which paved the way for President Obama to send in the special forces late last year.”

For people who wondered, “What could be the harm in ‘raising awareness’ about the LRA through ‘KONY 2012?’”, the piece is just the latest to refer to a previous effort four years ago involving U.S. advisors trying to help stamp out the LRA, and the unintended consequences of that mission:

In December 2008, the new American military command for Africa, known by the acronym Africom, helped plan an attack on Mr. Kony’s camp in Congo, dispatching a team of military advisers to Uganda. But Mr. Kony escaped before the Ugandan helicopter gunships even took off — apparently he had been tipped off. Worse, his army slaughtered hundreds of nearby villagers in revenge, leaving behind scorched huts and crushed skulls.

Gettleman wasn’t the only reporter to follow troops around in the jungle in Central Africa in recent days. Ugandan journalist Rodney Muhumuza reports for the AP about how irrelevant and unnecessary all the hubbub over Kony and the LRA may be these days:

Ugandan army officials say the Lord’s Resistance Army leader is alive and hiding somewhere within the Central African Republic. Rank-and-file soldiers, however, say intelligence on Kony is so limited that if he dies, or is already dead, his foes might never know and could wind up chasing a ghost through this vast Central Africa jungle.

In interviews last week with an Associated Press reporter who trekked with them in the jungle, soldiers in one of many Kony-hunting squads said their task in the Central African Republic could no longer be described as a manhunt. The soldiers, who requested anonymity for fear of punishment, said for years there has been no LRA presence in the areas they patrol.

The soldiers are growing increasingly disillusioned, complaining of boredom and having to carry around heavy guns they never expect to use.

“Our commanders don’t want you to know the truth,” one of them said on the banks of the Vovodo river, his colleagues nodding in approval. “They want to keep us here, but up to now our squad has never come across any rebels.”

Another soldier said: “We are bored. We have nothing to do. We are mobile every day but we never see the enemy.”

Muhumuza’s piece also notes that Ugandan officials say the LRA comprises “no more than 200 men scattered in small groups all over Central Africa” and that Ugandan troops kill time by watching porn on cell phones and eating sour wild yams called abato.