Eight years of U.N. peacekeeping in Haiti

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

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

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.

Read More

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

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

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.”

Haitians want your old t-shirt

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?”

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

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

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)