AJS--Rebuilding a failed state (iii)

Street scene, Haiti

A friend, a development worker in Haiti for decades, once told me how he had reacted when a work group, a relief group from a church in the States who'd thoughtfully taken a bag of soccer balls along with them when they came to Haiti. They'd be building a church or some kind of building, but they knew Haitians loved soccer, so they brought along--and used--that bag of soccer balls at night in the compound where they were staying and working.

When they were leaving, the crew boss told him that they had no good reason to take the soccer balls back to the States--"why don't you just keep them here?" he said.

My friend, who'd been in Haiti for a long time, declined. What the people of Haiti didn't need, he told the crew, was more gifts. Haitians, black folks all, don't need white people from the States giving them things. They just don't. The work group took the soccer balls home. 

My friend is no fascist, nor is he racist. I couldn't help thinking that, as unfeeling as he appeared right then, he knew what he was doing. He'd been in Haiti for years.

We'd read some things, lots of things actually, before we left for Haiti. From a distance, the descriptions are can be so critical that they don't easily register to a Yankee imagination. To say the country is combustible might suggest that it hasn't already a disaster. The 2010 hurricane left 300,000 casualties, according to the government; but who really knows? Hundreds of thousands of the Haitians were displaced, their homes--such as they were--destroyed. 

Ten years have passed. I'm guessing if you'd go to Port au Prince today, masses of brokenness would still litter the steep mountainous hillsides. 

Some people call Haiti a "failed state," even though such an expression seems pompous. Things don't work in Haiti. They just don't work. Buildings--even the seat of the government--didn't stand up to the quake, in part because building codes either didn't exist or were rarely used or enforced when major building projects were mounted. Five years after Hurricane Hazel, downtown Port au Prince had no stoplights. Getting across the city required endless jockeying, most vehicles adorned with crash bars mounted out front of their headlights for inevitable bruises. 

Yet today, Haiti slumps at the confluence of major societal problems: political dysfunction, dismal economic outlooks, and a combustible political climate capable at any time of igniting violence. What's there doesn't work, and, worse, most often there's nothing there.

It's impossible to estimate the amount of money and goods other nations have given in an ongoing attempt to bring relief. But nothing seems to matter. That's why some say, simply, Haiti is "a failed state."

Of the books I read before going, one of them stays with me because of the preposturous nature of its point of view, a book with an unwieldy title: The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster by Jonathan M. Katz. I am no expert, but I couldn't help think that Katz's answer to making Haiti into something other than a failed state was the only viable option--and that is, he says, to support the government.

It's a laughable notion really. After all, the government is the very heart of national deceit and chaos. National corruption begins with the Haitian government. Jonathan Katz says when the next horror arrives on shore--hurricane, earthquake--immense relief will be needed, relief that has to be done. Someone must leave soccer balls. If there are babies in the water, the very first action that must be taken should be to lovingly pull them out. 

But Katz says the really difficult job in Haiti is the one that has to be done between disasters: rebuilding, or building anew, a functional, caring government. Katz says if people want to help Haiti, they need a government; and that's a job that's seemingly impossible and even more difficult than putting up a building, leaving fishing poles behind, and even--yes--taking babies out of danger. Building a government that works from the ragged mess of failed state--now that's an impossible problem.

We spent some time in Honduras a few weeks ago, a country that functions many, many times better than Haiti. The two are hardly comparable. And yet, there are parallels--or were. 

Or were. In many ways, in the last decade Honduras was suffering badly. Today, they're not out of the water, but at least, it seems, they've been able to get to their knees and draw some needed breath. The government, which was failing--the highest murder rate in the world--is coming back. No one claims Honduras is out of the water. But it's coming back.

How did that happen? 

 (More to come)