Essay: Learning From Haiti's Recent Past

GONAIVES, Haiti (Feb. 12) -- This is the sort of dusty, dead-end town that most people would be happy to walk out of with nothing but the clothes on their back and the vague notion of a better life. At least it used to be. Since the earthquake, 40,000 people have relocated here.

Just a few years ago, a lot of people thought Gonaives should be relocated. But now it also may represent hope.

I visited Gonaives a few months ago but decided to see it again with fresh eyes. These days, Haiti's earthquake seems, most of all, like some exhaustive spiritual lesson. We learned that the future is unpredictable: Good things won't always stay good, bad things won't always seem bad. And progress? Sometimes we can't see progress until the rest of the world starts moving backward.

Hurricanes twice destroyed Gonaives, in 2004 and 2008. Some people call it "Haiti's New Orleans." Before the earthquake set a new standard for despair, this city was the first stop for public officials and journalists, including me, who were reporting on Haiti's "situation." It is a vast, deforested watershed, with no jobs and no clear future.

Yet, because this city already has been through so much, Gonaives stands ready to show us how Haiti, and Haitians, can recover from disaster.

My first morning in town this week, I popped in to see Jean-Marie Vanden Wouwer. Jean-Marie recently led a big project with the International Labor Organization, United Nations Development Program and the World Food Program to improve the watershed around Gonaives. The program paid locals to build retaining walls on the hillsides, using a program tool called "Food for Work."

For a five-hour day of manual labor, they offered $2.50 in cash plus $2.50 in food, which is more or less the market rate for work. The food included a small bag of rice, beans, oil and salt; the good foundation of one family meal. It's a very small example of the sort of public works projects that will soon be under way in Port-au-Prince.

But the program leaders faced one dilemma that stuck with me:

"We only had a certain amount of money," Jean-Marie said. "So at some point, we had to decide: Do we pay people to work for 90 days? Which would give them enough money to do something else with, like start a small store. Or do we give more people an opportunity to work, each for only 30 days?"

In Gonaives, where people are nearly universally unemployed -- and hungry -- this seemed like an impossible and heartbreaking choice. Is it better to spread the money around? Or to focus it, and hope that people invest in a better life? They decided to allow people to work 30 days, giving more jobs to more people.

The effects were clear. We drove out to the edge of town and stood beneath two hillsides -- on the first, we saw dozens of people building beautiful new terraces of sand and stone; on the second, we saw dozens of people destroying the hills to harvest sand and stone for sale in the city. The idea behind the project was to create a hillside where trees and bushes could once again grow, and slow down water when it rained. But the sand diggers were tearing holes into the hills.

"They do this work for 30 days, then when the money runs out, they go back to digging up the sand," Jean-Marie said in December. People are happy to build retaining walls, but they don't care about the watershed.

Other public works projects also produce mixed results. The biggest infrastructure project in Gonaives was the building of a complex canal system through downtown. This tremendous accomplishment was coordinated by the Haitian government, the United Nations and the European Union. Streets were cleared of 3 million tons of mud. Then they were rebuilt, wider and stronger, with huge gutters leading to the sea. Even the river was widened.

The problem now is that the project isn't finished, but the gutters already are filled with trash. The next rains will clog the canals, rendering them useless.

People see this as two separate problems: The first is building the infrastructure; the second is educating people on how it should be used.

Clearly, it's more than two problems. But they are problems to be dealt with by different initiatives, different contracts, different experts, different agencies. Perhaps, even, different generations.

The people need trash cans, trash trucks and trash collectors. They need a place to take the trash, like a recycling center. Then they need the materials and the expertise to build and run the center. They need business people to rise up to the occasion. The government itself needs to support the new enterprise. They need schools and teachers to tell children how to throw away their trash.

Right now, they have gutters.

I grew up in a place where everything important was already built before I was born. When it rains in my hometown, the water travels miles and miles through a drainage system that opens up far away, in the sea, at a point I will probably never lay eyes on. My world was given to me by previous generations, so I am a bad judge of the effort required from people -- and what it means to them -- to build a road.

At the end of the day here, I stopped to speak to some of the sand diggers. The men have been homeless since the hurricane in 2008. Working alone, it will take each of these men two weeks to sift the materials and fill up a pickup truck, for which he might earn $10.

I asked them, thinking of course of Port-au-Prince, and the fact that Gonaives is no longer a priority, "What's your plan? What if there is no more paid work?"

"God has a plan," one man responded.

"What if God's plan is for you to make a plan?" I asked. "How will you receive the message that it's your turn?"

"The only way to know that is through prayer," he said.

I didn't intend to question his spiritual disposition, especially since it seems like all that's left, even for me some days. But to be fair, it was the question I was asking everyone. After the retaining walls, what about the sand diggers? After the canals, what about the trash? After God, what then?

The future, in Gonaives and everywhere else in Haiti, is still up in the air.