22282: (Craig) NYT: Bringing Relief to Haiti's Poor, on the Backs of Mules (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Dan Craig <hoosier@att.net>


Bringing Relief to Haiti's Poor, on the Backs of Mules
June 6, 2004
By TIM WEINER

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Only one government holds true
power over life and death in Haiti today.

Not the Haitian government, a group of penniless,
powerless, provisional appointees; nor the United States
government, whose military forces are pulling out after a
three-month occupation, having landed hours after the fall
of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti's first and only
freely elected leader.

The true government of Haiti is a confederation of sweaty
men and women in T-shirts, from South Dakota, Stockholm and
a hundred other places: the stateless nation of aid
workers, flying many flags but pledging allegiance only to
the poor. By an off-the-cuff but conservative guess, aid
workers help keep a million of Haiti's eight million people
alive - and that was before the flood that struck this
island and swept so many lives away.

Government by nongovernmental organizations has gone on in
many failed or faltering states, from Afghanistan to
Zimbabwe. (Such groups often face danger: Doctors Without
Borders suspended operations in Afghanistan on Thursday
after five of its workers were ambushed and killed.)

Though the United States government donates money and food,
and the United Nations, a pale shadow of a world
government, plays a crucial role through its many agencies,
big bureaucracies have a hard time helping little villages,
imposing top-down strategies on places needing help from
the ground up. Washington's will changes with the political
winds; the United Nations' wallet is thin.

So Haiti is in the hands of aid agencies and church groups
working to ease the pain of flood, famine and political
folly. The United Nations troops that are set to replace
the American military as a security force have barely
arrived. The troops have no transport helicopters and
little money, and providing aid is not their priority.
Haiti's provisional government has proved incapable of
helping its people.

The flood, by this weekend, had left 2,600 people dead (or
presumed dead) in Haiti, and at least 700 more (many of
them Haitians) across the border in the Dominican Republic.
The town of Mapou was hit the hardest. The flood took the
lives of 1,600 people and left perhaps 10 times that number
bereft in Mapou and the isolated hamlets surrounding it,
though the true toll may never be known. Last week in
Mapou, Prosper Baptiste, 39, who lived in the small village
of Bois Tomb? - Fallen Forest - said he lost 33 members of
his extended family.

Mapou is named after a sacred tree in voodoo tradition. But
almost all the trees of Haiti are gone, cut for charcoal
sold for a few pennies a pound. So the hard rain swept down
from the hills and the rivers burst their banks, taking
everything in their path.

Last Sunday, five days after the rain let up, the aid
agencies saw that the disaster was far worse than feared -
roughly three or four times as bad, with 75,000 to 100,000
people needing long-lasting help.

On Monday, the United States military stopped using its
heavy Chinook helicopters, the only such craft in Haiti, to
ferry tons of United Nations food to the flood victims. A
military spokesman here said that the crews and choppers
needed rest, and that the immediate needs of the victims
had been met. The American soldiers had orders to begin
withdrawing from Haiti starting Tuesday, preparing to turn
over the country to United Nations-led peacekeepers on June
20.

The aid agencies, furious at the American pullback, started
seeking bulldozers to fix the washed-out roads to the
cut-off villages and their own helicopters. The cost, they
learned, would be staggering.

The only way to Mapou was on foot.

At 4 a.m. on Monday,
Tammie Willcuts, 33, a native of Sioux Falls, S.D., who
works for Save the Children and has labored in Afghanistan,
Iraq and Sudan, awoke in a mud hut on Haiti's southeast
coast and laced up her hiking boots.

With her were colleagues from Catholic Relief Services,
bringing food, cooking pots, cups and spoons, and workers
from World Vision, carrying clothes and blankets. They had
arrived at the fishing village of Anse-?-Boeuf on Sunday
afternoon on a rickety wooden boat, after hearing that a
footpath led from there to Mapou.

No outsider had visited at least a dozen flood-stricken
villages along the way, where tens of thousands of people
had received no aid in the week since the flood. Ms.
Willcuts and her colleagues would be the first to reach
some of these places, where deaths remain uncounted but are
reported by villagers to be in the hundreds.

How word travels in Haiti is a mystery. When Ms. Willcuts
awoke on Monday she saw "a corral of mules that the people
of Mapou had taken down to the coast," she said in an
interview. "They were there because they knew there was aid
coming. Somehow word had spread to Mapou that these goods
would land."

So the villagers had saddled up their mules and walked to
the sea.

Ms. Willcuts set out north on the trail, nearly five hours
of walking, "hotter than blazes, and no source of fresh
water along the way," she recalled.

"There were mules coming down the trail from Mapou,'' she
said. "Every fourth family had a mule with them. And there
was this parking lot of mules at Anse-?-Boeuf. They loaded
up the mules as best they could and started back home."

On the path to Mapou, the aid workers learned that the
deliveries wouldn't begin to meet the need.

"First, there's Cibao, which has about 2,500 families,
maybe 12,500 people,'' Ms. Willcuts said. "They had
received no assistance. There were still areas totally
covered with water. They said they didn't know how many
people were dead. They'd received no aid, nothing.

"I got the names of nine other villages, where maybe 15,000
people lived, that had received no aid. These are extremely
poor people who were barely hanging on before the flood."

With most roads still in ruins, and tons of food, water and
medicine warehoused in the capital, word got out about the
Mapou mule train. Haiti's mules would have to do when
Chinooks no longer flew.

Kieron Crawley of Concern Worldwide, a charity based in
Dublin, said he planned to carry supplies by truck to the
town of Thiotte on Friday and use mules to reach "little
towns that lie in a trail of destruction from Mapou down to
the coast."

Yolette Etienne, Oxfam's coordinator in Haiti, said: "We
can use mules to reach the most affected people in the
countryside. We will truck water to Fond Verrettes," the
second-hardest-hit town in Haiti, "and use the mules to
take it to the little villages."

"The mules will come from the people," she said.

In 1821,
Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote that "poets are the
unacknowledged legislators of the world." In Haiti today,
aid workers are the unacknowledged leaders of the nation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/weekinreview/06wein.html?ex=1087521117&ei=1&en=5953d4d97a328de0
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company