Tag: Haiti

  • What would it have felt like to live through the Haitian Revolution?

     

     Islandbeneaththesea

    The story of the Haitian revolution is a bizarrely twisted tail. The revolution began as an uprising by the slaves, became a civil war between the French and the mulatos (mixed race, free people) to a slave revolution. General Toussaint Louverture fought first for the French, then for Spanish, then for Haiti. Then when Haiti finally won its independence, its new rulers put the former slaves right back to work on the plantations. I tried to make sense of the convoluted story through a series of posts on the Our Border website. Isabel Allende has done a beautiful job of painting a picture of life during these turbulent times in her book, Islands beneath the Sea.

    Island Beneath the Sea is the story of life in Haiti before and during the revolution and later in New Orleans as seen by a handful of different characters. The beauty of the story is how each of the different narrators shows how they view the world and what happens: the slave girl who stays with her master even though he repeatedly raped her because it is best for her daughter; the plantation owner who finds ways to justify owning and even beating slaves even though he knows it is wrong; a doctor who is outspoken against slaves but unwilling to admit that his mistress is colored. I was fascinated watching how each character saw and related to the outbreak and spread of the revolution.

    My interest was in what happened in Haiti. I was disappointed when the characters all moved to New Orleans. The book kept me interested, but I was sorry that they never returned to Haiti.

    Island Beneath the Sea is a great addition to the fictional narrative of Haiti’s history along with Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones. 

     

  • Video on House Repairs in Haiti

     

    We just put together this video that explains what a green, yellow, and red tagged building is and what we mean by house repairs. Let me know what you think of it.

  • Rebuilding communities, not just houses

    This is the text of the speech that I gave at the Earthquake Symposium on January 11th in Port-au-Prince. Although I am very proud of the work that we have done to repair houses in Port-au-Prince, I hope that we are able to move beyond just repairing houses to rebuilding communities.

    Ladies and Gentlemen, good afternoon.

    The Pan American Development Foundation has been partnering with the Haitian government for over thirty years. We remain committed to helping Haitians to rebuild their homes, rebuild their neighborhoods and rebuild their lives.

    I have lived on this island for more than a dozen years. I was living in Santo Domingo when the earthquake hit and drove here bringing the first load of relief supplies the next day.

    We have heard of the progress being made on repairing houses, removing rubble, and building transitional houses. These are important steps on the path towards rebuilding communities.

    I would like to finish these talks by discussing what it takes to rebuild a community and how we have succeeded in involving both the local community and the Haitian government.

    (more…)

  • Haiti’s reconstruction lessons are found on the other side of the world

    I had this article published today in the Miami Herald:

    Haiti's reconstruction lessons are found on the other side of the world

    BY DANIEL O'NEIL

    WWW.IMUNITEDFORHAITI.ORG

    As I rushed relief supplies from the Pan American Development Foundation through the streets of Port-au-Prince just after the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake, I could not fathom how Haiti would recover from the worst humanitarian disaster in the history of the Western Hemisphere.

    Nearly a year later and on the other side of the world, I saw what could be Haiti's future.

    In October, I traveled to Indonesia with a World Bank study group to see how that country recovered after the post-Christmas 2004 tsunami, which killed in excess of 200,000 and leveled some 139,000 homes, and the 2006 Yogyakarta earthquake, which took the lives of more than 5,700 and damaged 175,000 buildings.

    (more…)

  • STUCK…the Haitian Elections Part 3

    The Haitian elections are at an impasse with no clear path out. I was in Haiti last week when the rioting broke out over the elections results. I had been asking my Haitian friends what they thought would happen.The most common response was, "I don't know what will be announced, but I don't think the results they announce will have anything to do with how people voted on the 28th." Like most organizations, we closed our office early on the day that the results were announced to allow our staff to get home before the storm broke.

    That night, the CEP representative was shaking as he read the results that put Preval's Unity party in a strong lead for controlling the parliament and then announcing that their candidate had made the cut and would be part of the run-off for the presidency.

    I spent the next days and a half holed up in our guest house as we listened to the reports of the protests that spread throughout the country then fled out through the Dominican Republic when a light rain kept the protesters home (it was a bit odd being the person from Washington who had to be evacuated out of the country rather than the one was expected to hold down the fort!).

    (more…)

  • The View from Washington

    DSC_0993

    Back in Haiti–touring the Delmas 32 housing repair project with the OAS Secretary General and the PADF team.

    Over four months ago, I drove away from Haiti thinking I was finished. I didn't make it very far. I know support PADF's Haiti operations from our Washington office. Although I spend a good bit of time in Haiti–next week will be third visit in two months–the view from Washington is quite different. 

    The biggest difference is distance–both geographic and personal. I am typing this in my Rockville, Maryland house far from the hassles and stress of Port-au-Prince. Although I spend a good part of my days working directly with our Haiti office through phone calls and emails, I don't live the experience any longer. This geographic distance makes things much more personal. I was talking with our Country Director when the storm went through last Friday. It was an immediate threat to him and to those around him. For me, it was a logistics question–how could we mobilize any support to help.

    (more…)

  • Completing my work in Haiti

    Four months after the earthquake, there is still so much to be done
    I drove away from Haiti yesterday, having finally been relieved of my role as the Acting Country Director. I chose to make the five-hour drive to give myself time to reflect on the last four months. I am both wonderfully relieved to be done and sad to leave my team. In my farewell speech the day before, I had stressed how proud I was of everyone. It was the hardest four months of my life. We had great successes–reopening the office within days of the earthquake, developing a logistics chain that delivered 50 containers of supplies to our most needy partners, restarting and accelerating all our programs so that we could help as many people as quickly as possible. 

    (more…)

  • Signs of Progress in Haiti

    IMG_0728
     
    I had a rare chance to get out today and see the good work that my team is doing. It is so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day hassles of managing that I lose sight of the great changes that are happening around me. 

    Five weeks ago, I visited the Delmas 32 neighborhood. It was a tough visit. the area had been hard hit by the earthquake and still looked bad. Many of the roads were impassable and the area looked unlivable. I noticed a fire burning inside one of the buildings and made the mistake of asking what it was. I was told there was a body that they could not recover and were burning it. We put together a proposal to do demolish the buildings that were falling into the street and to remove the rubble from the roads. We were given a couple of grants to put 1,300 people to work in this neighborhood. We began working just over two weeks ago.

    A Delmas 32 street as it looked in February

    A month after the earthquake, the streets in Delmas 32 were still blocked by debris.

    The change that I saw today was incredible. The streets were filled with yellow and green shirted workers that were working hard to remove the debris. many sections of the streets were already cleared and many of the partially collapsed buildings had already been demolished. However, the most impressive change was in the people. As the workers moved through the neighborhoods, street vendors set up stalls and life returned to the neighborhood. 

    IMG_0694
    Today's visit reminded me that we are making progress. Sure, we might end up rebuilding the chaos, Haiti might not have elections this year, and no one knows what tomorrow will bring. But we are working hard to recover from the worst disaster to ever hit the Americas. We might not have the answers, we are making life better. Petit à petit l'oiseau fait son nid–Little by little, the bird builds its nest

  • The Haitian Election Question

    Should Haiti hold elections this year?
     Should Haiti hold elections this year for the parliament, mayors, and president? Are elections a key step to ensuring honest, transparent governance or are they a dangerous distraction from the business of rebuilding the country? 

    Although the international consensus seems to be that Haiti needs to hold elections to maintain a credible government, I believe that the opposite is true. Holding elections will just maintain the status quo and contribute to rebuilding the chaos.

    The Haitian government is based on the 1987 constitution which was written to ensure that another dictator like Duvalier could never dominate the country. The Constitution sets out a strongly decentralized government with numerous checks and balances. Unfortunately, the structure is so complicated that Haiti has never succeeded in electing all of the required officials. As per the 1987 Constitution, the government is composed of the following levels:

    The nation is divided into ten departments which are divided into 133 municipalities (communes) and 533 rural sections (sections communales). Each rural section is to have an elected three-person council (Article 63) and an assembly (Article 65). The municipality is governed by a three-member council (Article 70) plus an assembly composed of representatives of each rural section assembly (Article 66-1). The department is governed by a council and an assembly composed of representatives from each municipal assembly (Article 80). 

    With all the chaos in Haiti over the last 25 years, Haiti has never managed to elect all of these different levels. There have never been functioning rural section assemblies and therefore never municipal assemblies and never departmental assemblies. 

    Unfortunately for Haiti, one of the responsibilities of the departmental assemblies is to propose the candidates for the Permanent Electoral Council. Without a permanent electoral council, each election is run by a provisional one created for that purpose. To make these councils "fair," they are normally composed of members of each political party. Just imagine how hard it would be to hold elections in the United States if they had to be organized by a board composed of an equal number of Democrats and Republicans with a few independents thrown in for good measure!

    Another critical problem with the Haitian government system is the division of power between the President and Prime Minister. In theory, the President sets the overall vision and the Prime Minister manages the day-to-day affairs of the government. Although the President proposes the Prime Minister to the Parliament, the candidate must come from the majority party in Parliament. Additionally, the Parliament, not the President, has the power to revoke the Prime Minister. This split seems to inevitably result in conflicts and power struggles.

    The Constitution was ratified in 1987 and Haiti has struggled unsuccessfully for over 23 years to implement the envisioned government. It is time to try a fresh approach. What if, instead of holding elections amid the current chaos in Haiti to elect officials to an unworkable form of government, Haiti started fresh. The government admitted the obvious–it is impossible to campaign for office during this reconstruction and the jockeying for power and position hampers this important work. Instead of holding yet another round of elections this year, a new national assembly would be called. This new assembly would begin meeting on January 12, 2011 to write a new Constitution. In 2011, Haiti would hold a national referendum to accept or reject the new constitution (which will hopefully provide for a more streamlined government) and then to hold whatever elections are called for in the new constitution.

    I met with one of the UN consultants working on the Post Disaster Needs Assessment. He said that hardest question that their team faces is, "To what state do we rebuild Haiti?" If the goal is to put Haiti right back where it was on January 11th, then Haiti should go forward with its elections. However, if the goal is to build the foundation for sustainable growth, then Haiti needs a fresh start and a new constitution.

  • It all changed in an instant

    DSC_0076

    Last Monday, my job was to run a small cross-border conflict program. Today, I am running a relief program for the largest disaster to hit the Americas. Last week, I was actively looking for a non-profit that I could direct.  Now I don't know what I want to do. It is hard to remember life before the earthquake.

    I have worked a number of disasters, but mainly floods and hurricanes. Earthquakes are much harder. They come without warning and change everything. I'm not ready to write about the impact on people. It is just amazing that everyone's life was changed in an instant.

    I don't know where we will go from here. I don't know how Haiti will change. I don't know what will happen next. I do know that everything can change in an instant.