12561: Hunger and heroes by Fran Quigley (NUVO) (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: MKarshan@aol.com

Hunger and heroes
Haiti's struggle to survive
By Fran Quigley


Apr 16, 2002, 2:35pm
NUVO staff writer Fran Quigley spent 10 days in Haiti during the month of January, visiting with both Haitians and Americans who are trying to help the people of the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.


Father Valery Rebecca

>From a distance, it is a thing of beauty. It is early morning, and the path leading from the Haitian National Road up the mountain to the village of Belle Riviere features the sounds of roosters crowing and dogs barking, along with people singing and exchanging greetings. At every turn in the path are breathtaking vistas over a mountain range that covers the western area of the country. Some brightly-clothed children carry water from the river, others carry slim notebooks as they begin their walk to school. Women balance on their heads sacks of pitimi, a grain harvested from tall plants that resemble earless stalks of corn.

At a closer look, the view is less idyllic. The path is extremely rocky and rutted, and most of the adults and many of the children negotiate it with bare feet. One man leading a donkey has shoes, but they are ancient Top Siders torn at every seam and flapping against the sides of his feet. The countryside is almost as dusty and rocky as the path, deforested not by massive logging expeditions but by the endless cycle of people cutting down any available tree to make charcoal, one of Haiti’s few cash crops. Women carry water from the river because the nearby well is broken — again. Today’s drinking water will be from the same bacteria-laden source as the place where livestock graze and people bathe and wash their clothes.

The dogs and chickens are strikingly skinny. Often, so are the people, who sometimes flash their sunken bellies at strangers and ask for food.

The children are in good spirits, but a non-Haitian who forgets to factor in a lifetime of hit-or-miss nutrition will consistently under-estimate their ages. A 7-year-old boy looks about 4 by U.S. standards, a 15-year-old boy about 9. Their brightly-colored clothes are U.S. cast-offs. A little girl commemorates a 1995 Philadelphia road race. A teen-age boy’s shirt says “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Jill Long.” The T-shirted collision between U.S. frivolity and Haitian reality produces some grim irony: A thin boy walking up the mountain to school wears a “Personal Trainer” polo shirt. I suppose if you combine three hours of mountain hiking with a low-volume diet, you’re sure to get killer abs.

Some of the children have obvious skin diseases or walk awkwardly on feet that do not point correctly. Often, routine infections go untreated and broken bones are not properly set, as most of the year there is no doctor and only limited nursing service and medicines are available. Just before the path reaches Belle Riviere, it passes by the fresh grave of a 30-year-old woman who died in childbirth. Another woman from the area died recently of a mysterious fever. Neither woman ever got to a doctor.

A few dozen yards past the grave, the sounds of 6:30 a.m. mass come from the church of St. Jean Marie. Attending this morning are four area residents and one of the skinny dogs, which lies down in front of the altar. Lexin Loubert leads the singing in a rich, Creole baritone.

Loubert, at a slightly built 5-foot-7, is a grade school principal and middle school French teacher, but this man with a gentle smile and halting English is also a hero of a revolution.

Loubert was a visible supporter of Jean Bertrand Aristide when the former priest became Haiti’s first democratically elected leader in 1991. Loubert refused to abandon that support when Aristide was ousted by a military coup just eight months later, despite the fact that the regime of Brig. Gen. Raoul Cedras was slaughtering Aristide supporters, mostly unarmed civilians, by the thousands. Loubert was very nearly among them.

In late summer of 1992, Loubert was arrested in Belle Riviere and taken to a jail in the nearby town of Miragoane. There, two soldiers held him while others punched and kicked him in the head, face, stomach, groin and legs. Nearly a decade later, he still feels the pain in his head each night. After three brutal days, Loubert was released with what his captors presumed to be fatal internal injuries.

“They beat me to be died,” Loubert says. “Not right now, but after one month, two months.” Instead, a few months later, Loubert recovered well enough to take the pulpit in this very church, which had become the gathering spot for the local resistance.

“Do not be afraid,” he told the congregation. “They can’t kill us all.”

Somehow Loubert finds optimism in the grim scene outside the church door. It requires strength to survive those days of repression. And it takes a certain faith to forgive the local informant that Loubert knows led the military to arrest him. Loubert finds reason for hope in Haiti, even though it is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, with 80 percent of the population living in poverty, two-thirds without formal employment, a sky-high infant mortality rate and only one doctor for every 10,000 people. The military coup was reversed, Loubert points out, and subsequent efforts to push out the enormously popular Aristide have failed. People are still hungry in Belle Riviere, he admits, “but the people are respected much better than before.”


Father Valery Rebecca

Port-au-Prince: Viv Aristide

People find their way around heaping piles of rotting and sometimes smoldering garbage. Children climb on top of stripped, abandoned hulks of cars and trucks. Stoplight-free streets with names like John Brown Boulevard and Martin Luther King Jr. Street are choked with cars, pickup trucks and “tap-taps,” colorfully painted trucks with religious sayings on the front (“Bon Dieu, Fidel,” “Merci, Jesus”) and dozens of Haitian commuters piled in the back. Horns honk continuously as the vehicles and pedestrians jockey for position with goats, dogs and the occasional cow.

>From wall to crumbled wall, seemingly every inch of available sidewalk space is taken up by the displays of the ti machann — street vendors — selling goat meat, fried bananas, T-shirts, sandals, schoolbooks, soap. One four-block-wide area features hundreds of free-lance auto repairmen, most of them sitting on oily car parts and waiting for a customer.

Experienced Port-au-Prince drivers are careful to lock their doors to prevent carjacking, especially at night when neither the streetlights nor the electricity are likely to be turned on. In the city’s poorest areas, heavily armed gangs roam freely, and have taken to robbing and shooting relief workers.

But even in the most desperate neighborhoods, it is common to see the words “Viv Aristide” spray-painted on the concrete walls. Good wishes for Jean Bertrand Aristide are widely held here, as evidenced by the over 90 percent of the vote he received when elected to his second term as Haiti’s president in November 2000. That level of support is difficult to comprehend through the cynical prism of U.S. politics, where in the same month as Aristide’s most recent election, we chose among two major party presidential candidates who grew up as sons of politicians. In contrast, Aristide rose up from these Port-au-Prince slums and became a national hero long before he ever ran for office.

Aristide was a scholarly and diminutive Salesian priest, highly educated and multilingual, when he returned from studies in Israel and Montreal in 1985 to an assignment at a parish next to the poorest section of Port-au-Prince. The core of Aristide’s intellectual background was in liberation theology, the belief that Jesus Christ’s teachings are based on a “preferential option for the poor” and require struggle for economic and political justice. Soon after his assignment began, Aristide began speaking out on behalf of the many poor people in his parish and throughout Haiti.

His activism soon earned him the enmity of the brutal Duvalier regime that had controlled Haiti since the 1950s. In January 1986, Aristide survived the first of what would be several assassination attempts. “Baby Doc” Duvalier was finally removed later that year, only to be replaced by an equally repressive military junta that attacked demonstrators and murdered political opponents. Aristide continued to protest, and organized the area youth to join him. Even when the bodies began to pile up in the streets of Port-au-Prince and other opponents of the military government went into hiding, Aristide still spoke out in sermons, speeches and radio broadcasts.

Aristide somehow survived multiple assassination attempts — including two in one day — and the firebombing of his church while he said mass. To his growing legion of supporters, Aristide’s courage and improbable survival lent him the aura of a mistik, someone who is supernaturally protected. After being expelled by his religious order for being too political in the pulpit, Aristide announced in November 1990 that he would be a candidate for the next month’s presidential elections. He won with an overwhelming 67 percent of the vote.

After his election, Aristide began to put into practice what he had preached. He declined his presidential salary, disbanded the military and held his first breakfast at the National Palace with hundreds of homeless street kids. Aristide raised the minimum wage and began an adult literacy program. Just eight months later, he was ousted in a coup and forced into exile until his triumphant return to Haiti in September 1994.

The overwhelming election victory followed by a violent coup illustrate how Aristide seems to inspire either fervent support or equally dedicated opposition, both within and outside Haiti. Aristide guaranteed himself both the continued affection of Haiti’s poor and resistance from the country’s traditional power brokers by imposing a tax structure on the nation’s previously untaxed wealthy and by disarming the military. Haiti is one of only a handful of countries not to have a standing army. At the same time, the CIA and conservative U.S. figures like Sen. Jesse Helms have branded Aristide as an unstable communist.


Lexin Loubert

Aquin: Bondye Bon

It is a warm Sunday afternoon in a parish rectory outside the town of Aquin. Over lunch, a priest from Massachusetts who has spent most of his adult life in Haiti reflects on the hundreds of parishioners who had just attended the mass. Many of them likely walked several hours to church barefoot, the priest says, carrying their shoes so they would not get dirty or scuffed before the service. Duly attired in their Sunday best, the Haitians sing and dance their way through a joyful three-hour-plus ceremony.

The priest is asked: How do you reconcile that spirit with the fact that most of those people have no jobs in the withering economy here? How are they growing any food when the soil is so arid and rocky? How do you explain the sense of community in the face of the lawlessness, the corruption, the unchecked diseases? How, really, are Haitians surviving?
The priest shakes his head. “I have spent 37 years here, and you ask me how they make it,” he says. “And I still can’t tell you.”

Others will venture an answer. They look to the faith of a predominately Catholic population, or to the heroic history of a people who in 1804 completed the first and only successful slave rebellion against a colonial power. Explanations for Haitians’ improbable survival always seem to wind their way back to an unusually strong sense of community. U.S. visitors marvel at seeing obviously under-nourished children in the poorest sections of Port-au-Prince take a single biscuit and carefully break it and divide it amongst their friends. Beverly Bell, the author of Walking on Fire: Haitian Women’s Stories of Survival and Resistance, quotes the oral history of Haitian women on the solidarity they feel in their mutual struggle against poverty: “If I go to someone’s house … if she has a can of rice, she won’t hide it. She has to give me some, so I can go feed my children.” A Creole adage is Mizé yon fanm se mizé tout fanm: The misery of one woman is the misery of all women.

Perhaps part of the secret of living without necessities is found in the definition of what is necessary. No Haitian will minimize the importance of clean water, enough food or access to health care, but there are few complaints about no electricity or telephones or the need to walk for miles along crowded and crumbling roads. Instead, Haitians rig up car batteries and inverters to power a single flashlight bulb to light a home. They greet friends on the streets and wonder, if they visit the U.S., why there are no neighbors out in our beautiful sidewalks and lawns talking with each other. When Haitians can’t get a job, they erect a stand on the sidewalk and sell anything that is sell-able. When they don’t have a home, they know they have friends and family who will give them a place to sleep.

In his book Survival Creole, Kansas University professor Bryant Freeman includes a section on the many Haitian proverbs. The most common is the simple “Bondye bon” — God is good. Freeman says it also translates into “It’s God’s will,” or even, “What is, is good.” Freeman thinks the saying’s popularity is revealing. “It’s Haiti’s eternally optimistic fatalism,” he writes. “Good for mental well-being, terrible for national development.”

L’Asile: No peace in the belly

Dusk is approaching, and it seems that every one of the 40,000 residents of the village of L’Asile are out on the streets. Children chase each other; women cook over roadside charcoal fires. A cockfight is breaking up just as a drum and horn rara band begins to play. Dancers gather around.

Father Valery Rebecca slowly maneuvers his white Hyundai through the crowd, pausing to talk with an old man, honk at a teen-age girl or to point out the two fine homes of his friend, the local voodoo priest. Tall and broad-shouldered, Father Rebecca flashes his gap-toothed smile and exchanges private greetings with seemingly every other person on the street. Between those brief conversations, Rebecca talks about his thriving L’Asile parish school, which teaches hundreds of children in several locations, and of the after-school sewing classes and vocational training he operates for young adults. Once Rebecca finds the money to fix a broken transmitter, he’ll be reviving his radio station, which features young DJs and youth-oriented programming.

Like Lexin Loubert, Rebecca was jailed during the 1991 military coup, and he is both an adviser and a distant relative of President Aristide. Perhaps not surprisingly, Rebecca looks at the vibrant community scene that engulfs his Hyundai and he sees the Haitian glass as half-full. Compared to the Duvalier and coup years, when people like Rebecca were forced into hiding, things have improved in Haiti.

“Aristide has two goals: Peace in the head, and peace in the belly,” he says. “For peace in the head, it is better now.”
As even his supporters acknowledge, Aristide’s return in 1994 did not magically solve Haiti’s belly problems. When Aristide took office for his second term in February 2001, he inherited a crumbling 19th century economy. Less than half the population has access to potable water, the HIV/AIDS rate is at 4 percent and climbing. One-quarter of the country’s young children are malnourished. On the United Nations Development Program’s Human Development Index, Haiti ranks below such countries as Bangladesh and Sudan.

Just as critically, Aristide has not yet overcome a Haitian culture of political violence that has prevailed ever since Jean-Jacques Dessalines was murdered two years after leading the country into independence in 1804. Two anti-Aristide Haitian radio journalists have been murdered, one last year and one in 2000, and their killers have not been arrested. Three dozen armed attackers invaded the National Palace in December, apparently bent on staging yet another coup. The attack was repelled by police and mobs of angry Haitians, some of whom then retaliated by burning opposition party headquarters. Aristide has not been linked to any of the violence, but human rights groups criticize his government for failing to control politically-motivated attacks. Amnesty International criticizes the Haitian police and labels the country’s judiciary as “largely dysfunctional.” Vigilante justice holds strong.

In search of the elusive peace in the belly, not to mention clean water, health care and law enforcement, the Aristide government has turned to the international community for help. Haiti has received approval for $500 million in loans to rebuild the country’s infrastructure and bolster the crippled health care system. The money includes a $146 million loan from the Inter-American Development Bank, on which the country has already paid almost $10 million in interest.

But when the funds were ready to be distributed early last year, the U.S. State Department and Secretary of Treasury exercised their veto power at the IDB and stopped payment on the loan. The reason given was the disputed May 2000 Haitian Senate elections, where Aristide’s Lavalas Family party was accused of improprieties in seven senate districts. In response to the loan freeze, the seven elected senators have stepped down and the Aristide government has assented to negotiations with the minority Haitian parties. Aristide’s plan to resolve the controversy was approved by the Organization of American States (OAS), and the organization of Caribbean nations recently urged that the funds be released to Haiti. But the U.S. continues to block the much-needed loans.

Washington, D.C.: fiddling through the fire

Many Haitians remember well the U.S. support for the democracy-allergic Duvaliers and other Haitian dictators. For them, it is bitterly ironic that the U.S. is citing election problems as the reason for blocking aid to a Haitian government that, by all accounts, is supported by the vast majority of the population. In fact, the U.S. has always been a highly influential player in Haiti, and not often for the good. As is well-documented in AIDS physician Paul Farmer’s 1994 book, The Uses of Haiti, the U.S. has cited its financial interests and/or the goal of fighting communism to justify, in the 20th century alone, a brutal military occupation of the country (1915-1934), the bankrolling of dictators (Duvaliers, 1957-1986) and direct CIA support for the junta which violently overthrew the Aristide government.
Of course, it’s not fair to say U.S. involvement in Haiti is always counter-productive: The Clinton administration helped return Aristide to power in 1994, and several Haitian charitable organizations, like the micro-credit operation Fonkoze, receive crucial support from U.S. donors and organizers. The Congressional Black Caucus and several non-government groups have been outspoken supporters of Aristide’s government. But the Bush administration’s policy on the loan freeze has led to a familiar accusation that the U.S. is treating Haiti like a misbehaving colony. As Congressman John Conyers (D-Michigan) says, “When you look at some of our allies [like] Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Israel, you begin to wonder what the differences are that account for some countries receiving sizeable quantities of assistance and others receiving nothing until they quote, straighten up and fly right, unquote.”

One of the differences between Haiti and countries receiving generous U.S. aid is that Aristide’s poor-empowering policies are labeled as leftist by Republicans in control of both the U.S. House and the White House. Many Latin American observers say the current U.S. approach to Haiti echoes the sad legacy of 1980s U.S intervention in the governments of El Salvador and Nicaragua, when the U.S. simultaneously imposed economic sanctions and supported right-wing opponents in a regimen theologian Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer calls “low intensity warfare.”

To Father Rebecca and many other Aristide supporters, the historic analogy for the current U.S. policy goes back farther than the days of Oliver North and the contras. They say the Bush administration opposes Haiti’s 21st century government for the same reasons the U.S. opposed the 19th century Haitian government led by rebellious ex-slaves: Uppity Haiti sets a bad example for other countries, this time because of Aristide’s resistance to global corporations exploiting the Haitian workforce. “Haiti is a symbol because our solidarity, our revolution — even our use of the language Creole — is all of the people, not the powerful,” Rebecca says. “The U.S. wants to control little countries like ours, they want a product in Haiti the U.S. can control. They don’t like Aristide because he asks bourgeoisie and corporations to pay taxes. They don’t want to see leaders who are fighting against misery.”

Robert Maguire, who directs the Georgetown University-Trinity College Haiti program, says there is some truth to the idea that opposition to Haiti is a relic of the Cold War era. He notes that the Bush administration’s ambassador to the Organization of American States is a longtime Aristide critic and former staffer for Sen. Jesse Helms. Maguire says that Aristide’s policies, such as trying to impose a tax on Haiti’s traditionally unencumbered wealthy, are not as radical as some conservative U.S. politicians portray them. “I mean, enforcing a tax code is not exactly socialist,” Maguire says.

But Maguire does not absolve the Haitian government of all blame for the loan freeze, saying it waited too long to address the election problems that derive from a long history of “winner take all” politics in Haiti. Maguire also criticizes Aristide for failing to accept any responsibility for situations like election fraud and human rights abuses. “It’s kind of the antithesis of Harry Truman’s ‘The Buck Stops Here’ position,” Maguire says. “Aristide sometimes seems to be saying the buck stops everyplace else but with him.”

That said, Maguire’s view is that Haiti has now proposed remedial measures that should justify the U.S. releasing the desperately needed loans. If closely monitored and spent wisely, Maguire says, the loans could lead to private and public investment in Haiti. Maguire talks about the enormous daily struggles endured in places like the mountains of Belle Riviere and the slums of Port-au-Prince, and he concludes that it is past time for the Bush administration to put aside its political opposition to Aristide.

“The bottom line is that the people of Haiti are suffering because of all this controversy,” he says. “The old saying about fiddling while Rome burns certainly applies here.”

Belle Riviere: Jolise in Wonderland

My trip to Haiti has been in the company of Indianapolis resident Joe Zelenka, founder of St. Thomas Aquinas parish’s 10-year relationship with St. Jean Marie parish in Belle Riviere. In addition to sending a medical team to the mountain town for an annual week-long triage session, St. Thomas parishioners helped build a school here, along with a well and a moulen, a mill for grinding the grain raised by the area’s residents. The salaries of the school’s teachers are paid for by Indianapolis contributions.

The 63-year-old Zelenka has been to Belle Riviere dozens of times, and he prepares for these visits by spending countless hours hustling donations of over-the-counter medicines and bandages, then packing them in plastic bins to carry on the plane. He has spent much of this trip delivering multivitamins and meeting with the Belle Riviere priest and community leaders about local problems. The well is broken — again — and there is a chronic shortage of both nursing services and medicine for the community. Fretting about the hunger and sacrifice of the Haitian people and admittedly weary of too many meetings, Zelenka decides one humid January morning to visit the primary school classrooms.
Children from first through ninth grade, the highest schooling available in this area, are gathered in the dark cinder-block rooms where they learn French and reading and math. When he enters the rooms, Zelenka is immediately recognized and enthusiastically greeted by both teachers and students. He exchanges jokes with third-graders, gives a coin to the second grade child who walked the farthest to school this morning (three hours, barefoot) and dances with the first-graders to a traditional Haitian song.

In the last classroom Zelenka visits, he asks the students who among them wants to be president of Haiti when they grow up. A thin sixth-grader named Jolise Celange tentatively raises her hand. At first a little embarrassed, Jolise soon is coaxed out of her seat to the front of the class. She smooths out her peach skirt and her white T-shirt, a U.S. hand-me-down commemorating a grade school production of Alice in Wonderland.

She gives a nervous sidelong glance to the teacher, then takes a deep breath. “As president, I’m going to build a hospital for the people, and a school, too,” she says. “And I’m going to make sure the people have enough food.”

The class bursts into applause and Jolise grins from ear to ear. Zelenka smiles, too, and nods in her direction. “What better response?” he asks. “Those kids know. Boy, do they know.”

fquigley@nuvo.net