Reflections on Haiti: A month later.

I’ve been home from Haiti for about a month now, and I have had a lot of time to reflect on my time there. I still haven’t completed my intended project of transcribing all of my written journal entries to the computer so I can shared edited portions. I have, however, come to a couple of conclusions:

I’m tired of hearing, “Oh, I wish I could do something like that!” I’m also tired of hearing that I’m a good person for going. It was pretty much pure “voluntourism”: let’s go somewhere exotic and poor and help out on our time off! Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great, as it gets work done and educates people about places that are radically different worlds from their own. I went because I needed to feel like I was doing something, I had time, and I had some money available to me. I am glad that I went, but I went for me, to satisfy this urge I had to do something. And anyone can do it, given some time and some money. Many volunteers use their vacation days to do this kind of work; many people who are between jobs take that time to volunteer.

I can’t go back. I thought I would; I wanted to go back, desperately, after I got home. I still wish I could go back. But my responsibilities to commitments at home, to my friends and families, to myself, as I move to a new city and begin graduate school: those stand in my path, in an immediate way. On a deeper level, however, there remains this conviction that anything I can give or do can’t be enough, that it’s like trying to desalinize an ocean with an eyedropper of fresh water. And it isn’t because Haiti needs so much (although it does) or because I feel that my efforts are meaningless (although there are days when it felt and still feels that way).

I feel that Haiti is ill, and its symptoms of poverty and corruption are the effects of psychological scarring left over from the days of slavery: after the rebellion that transformed it from Saint-Domingue to Haiti, it was forced to pay reparations back to France and the United States and rest of Europe refused to trade with it, out of fear of war with France. Like so many struggling former colonies, when it gained its freedom, it was like a teenager, with an idea of how adulthood should look, but with not enough experience to self-govern and achieve that maturity. I think that Haiti’s development has been so stunted economically and its dependence on foreign aid become so strong, that it may not ever gain safe footing, particularly if it continues in the same pattern it has been for years now.

That sounds cold and callous, doesn’t it? I don’t mean to sound so hopeless, so negative, and perhaps part of this is me trying to distance myself from Haiti. It is, however, based on my observations and the observations I have compared with many others, not only volunteers in my group, but friends who have worked there with the military or visited at other times. There’s a sense among many Haitians that I met that one must work hard- but only hard enough to make it to tomorrow. And then one repeats it the next day, every day, until one dies. Not all people, of course, subscribe to that philosophy, and I am not saying it is unrealistic in the conditions in which many Haitians have grown to adulthood. It is simply the way to make it through the day without going insane: its own protective insanity. Jessica Leeder a writer for The Globe and Mail living in Jacmel wrote that she had hired a housekeeper, who quit after day one, believing that she wouldn’t make more money that the 38 dollars Canadian that she stole from Leeder the first day.

Why invest in the future, though, if you live without the certainty that there will be a future for you at all? In my last journal entry, as we left Jacmel, I wrote that Haiti constantly undergoes crises that seem to undo the work previously completed. It’s a recurring cycle of renewal, but it isn’t healing. It only returns Haiti to square one, or even square zero. The cause of the setback can be anything- whether man-made or natural disaster- but the average Haitian seems equally powerless in contrast, no matter the cause, as they are economically (and therefore politically) disenfranchised, to the point that creating something permanent looks, at least to my Westernized eyes, to be a pipe dream.