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In Haiti there are two problems : everyone wants to be a Chief and secondly the white man has too many interests in the country so if they don’t kill you for the power, they will kill you for the interest of the blan [foreigner]!

The elections are a distraction.    Leaders have the power to bring change but no one believes any leader will do anything for the poor.  Everyone I asked about Aristide wanted him back because they believed he was one leader who could change their lives for the better.  Right now the only way is for communities to reach out to each other and create alliances which is what SOPUDEP is beginning to do.  Rea’s vision is one I share.  We cannot fix Haiti, but we can fix our community and help others fix theirs.  Eventually as all these communities build alliances amongst themselves, they will become strong and then maybe begin to fix Haiti.

I have spent two days at the school with the freedom to roam.  I came across a class whose teacher was absent and I ended up teaching English for 45 minutes followed by the students giving me a lesson in Kreyol.   Now I have been asked by them  to teach the same class for the next couple of weeks till they break uap for holidays.  The school is truly like  family. Since the Micro-credit scheme, parents and school staff have all been encouraged to open savings account.  

The school was the victim of a NGO scam whereby they were offered money to start but very soon the monies dried up and the Haitian contact person could not be found. The school started with 260 children. All the teachers have left and just 60 children remain.

And neither here nor in Nigeria or most other places is sanitation  given the priority it requires.  Rea tells me refuse collection and sanitation is used by political opponents to discredit one another for example in 2002 she was in charge of a cleaning crew in.  They would go out at night clean the streets but the next day the streets would be full of refuse again.   One particular day they hid and were able to catch the rubbish dumpers who were working for a political opponent in the area.

The great white stomping  tanks and trucks guzzle the streets.  Young men with brown and black faces, their blue helmets bobbing up and down – Brazil, Guatemala, Nepal, Nigeria – holding the grey steel of their weapons in one hand and their crutches in the other, they gaze blankly at the streets below their high top perch.   In her 2004 novel, Memories of an Amnesiac describes the 1915 invasion by and subsequent occupation by the US  until 1934 as “the boots” – “the boots” returned in 2004 and remain today….

Six weeks ago the international media was full of reports on the outbreak of cholera now it has largely been forgotten but for the people of Haiti it remains a daily reality.  The second week I was here, a neighbour, an elderly woman died and the other family members were all sick but fortunately they have recovered.   Last Monday I walked just 10 meters across the path to buy some soft drinks from a young man and his wife and of course we exchanged money.   24 hours later he was in hospital with cholera and now no one will buy drinks from his wife so in addition to the illness the family have lost their very meagre income.    I had exchanged money with him and could not remember whether I washed my hands before touching my mouth.   Someone gives a kiss – the passing of affection becomes the passing of infection as  few days later she discovers the woman has cholera.    The young children all play together so of course they are especially vulnerable even if they wash their hands before eating.   So the cholera is passing from person to person and is very very real for all of us.  On Wednesday and Thursday last week I visited a family member in hospital and on both occasions whilst waiting outside someone arrived with a cholera victim.  In the early hours of Friday people were seen in Martissant 25 running with wheel barrows carrying cholera victims.    More of the women from Bobin who I was supposed to meet my first week have fallen ill together with their families and there is no doubt in my mind that these stories are replicated throughout the country.  Everyone is at risk.   Outside of Port-au-Prince the problem is worse.  In Jérémie the hospitals can no longer cope and for those small villages with no hospital or clinic people just die.

Recently I received an email from a tent spammer who must have picked up I was in Haiti and sent me a list of tarps and tents at discount prices.  This is not how people should be forced to live even for a short period let alone a year and there is no hope of change on the horizon.  I think of other refugee camps like the Palestinian camps in Beirut and the Saharawi’s of Tinduff in the southern Algerian Sahara both of which have been in existence for thirty odd years.  What passes through your mind passes mine…. It cannot be possible.

Two days later she cooked me fish.   That is the nature of this wonderful family.  In  my own silence like a voyeur of the mind, I wonder what tragedy lies behind the faces of the people who survived. 

In Champ Mars  lies the remains of the  crushed palace looking like a broken wedding cake along side which there are thousands and thousands of tents.  The ones on the outer parameters facing the main boulevard have set up shop providing, barbers, beauty salons, seamstresses, vendors of food and other necessities.  Rising above the devastation of Port-au-Prince in  twisted irony, the three heros of the revolution remain standing – Toussaint L’Overture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe.  Do they speak of a fallen people or to a people on the verge of rising once again?  The weirdest structure still standing is the “2004” cone tower soaring above the whole city and built by President Aristide.  No one seems to know what exactly it represents but I take it to be a symbol of the “2nd Haitian revolution” – the flood of Lavalas.  It speaks, you are trying to kill us but we are not dead yet, there is a 3rd revolution to come.  In the now infamous recitation of Toussaint L’ Ouverture on his forced exile to France, Aristide spoke on his similar forced exile in January 2004 “In overthrowing me they have only felled the tree of Negro liberty…..It’ll shoot up again, for it is deeply rooted and its roots are many” [quoted from “Create Dangerously by Edwidge Danticat]

All we have to do is struggle and wait for that moment which in turn will become a history of this great Black country.