PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI – Haiti resembles nothing so much as sinking ship — lost, exploited, forlorned and abandoned. The desperate passengers fight each other for the few scraps left that could help survival.
My first night in Haiti I sat in the car with my colleague, the resident AP photographer, as we drove up to his house above Port-au-Prince. As it got dark I noticed his car only has one dim headlight. I later learned that the car is missing a functioning horn, windshield wipers, spare tire, tail lights and a host of other essential safety features. But clutched in his left hand and resting on the wheel as he swerved through the crumbled streets was a 9mm pistol. That’s more important in Haiti.
“What the hell am I doing here?”
My colleague has the look and personality of a bear. He is a 250 pound, 6′4″ bearded, black man who always wears shorts, two cameras, and often has his 9mm tucked under his shirt. He survives in Haiti. The protesters, dictators, flying rocks, mosquitoes, burning tires, and pot holes that confront him every day seem to leave him unscathed. Granted, he is about as fun to talk to as a bag of hammers… but he survives. For three weeks I would have to fill his shoes.
After two days of orientation, he departed for his vacation to Miami, leaving behind for me his half functioning car, the AP office full of mice, and some words of advice, “don’t trust anyone.”
He didn’t leave me his 9mm or his mobile phone.
The history of Haiti is a proud one. The story is almost a miracle of events considering the time and opposition of the day. Haiti was the second country in the New World (after the U.S.) to gain independence. It was the world’s only successful slave revolution, and the first black nation. After 400 years of French colonial exploitation, the slaves caught a rumor of the ideals of the French revolution (liberty, equality, fraternity) and toppled the plantation owners and white government in a violent uprising. The country of Haiti was declared in 1804 and the flag was made by literally ripping out the white of the French flag and then sewing the red and blue together.
Before the revolution Haiti was the richest country in the hemisphere. Today it is by far the poorest.
The U.S. has invaded and occupied the country twice. Like elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean, the U.S. has backed and funded harsh dictatorships since the start of the cold war. Abysmal human rights conditions and stratified wealth were ignored in the name of fighting communism.
Part of Haiti’s woes can be blamed on the Haitians themselves. For six generations the Haitians were kicked, spit on, yelled at, and whipped. For 400 years the slave owners told them when to work, how to breed, and not to think. They were treated like animals and today they often treat each other with that lack of respect that hasn’t been unlearned. Greed, power struggles, assassinations and pro-black racism have all been obstacles on the crooked road to peace and prosperity. Today it looks hopeless. The country is in a dire economic crisis and the recent fledgling steps towards democracy have been tainted with corruption.
Hence the feeling of a sinking ship. The best chance any Haitian has for a decent life lies 600 miles over the water. Each year thousands of Haitians attempt an escape in rickety boats only to wash up, face down on a Florida beach or be found alive and returned by the Coast Guard. Already about one million Haitians live in the U.S.
As I would leave the hotel/office each day in search of food or pictures, I was always swarmed by a troop of skinny, sunken-eyed beggars. They wait outside the few hotels in Haiti for the occasional tourist or journalist. They hustle prostitutes, taxis, guides, steal a wallet… whatever. I always tried to slip out the side, but soon they caught on. When they
appeared I would try to look fierce and clutch my cameras tight. If I returned to the hotel with a shopping bag I would dole out a few pieces before they let me dart back in.
One such beggar was Richard Miguel. Richard is the illegitimate grandson of former president Paul Eugene Magloire. His family is part of the mulatto class the descended from matches between slaves and the white owners. The offspring were born “free men” and eventually the mulattos became the elite class in Haiti. They own most of the land and money.
Richard was born in Haiti, but raised in the United States from the age of four. He was brought up by his strict uncle Rene Leon, an exiled colonel in the Haitian army. At the age of 14 Richard’s uncle was arrested by the FBI
for transferring arms over state lines in a conspiracy to overthrow the Haitian government.
Richard snapped. He rebelled, started committing petty crimes and soon was tossed from multiple foster parents to group homes. At the age of 24 he was arrested for shoplifting $2000 worth of goods from a department store. After a year in jail he was deported to the Haiti. He spoke perfect English and very little Creole. Now he is a crack addict that hustles money
from people like me. He is also extremely bright, literate and shifty. He claims to have graduated from high school with honors.
After Richard had bugged me for about a week and a half, I decided to buy him dinner. He told me his life story while shoveling rice in his mouth.
“I would rather have done five years in jail, then one year here. This is hell. It’s my country, but I hate it. I hate being Haitian.”
Richard has abscesses in his teeth and his hair is falling out. He is convinced he is going to die soon from his addiction. He smokes crack every night he can.
After dinner I returned to the hotel, emptied my pockets of all valuables and took my spare camera to the tiny room where Richard sleeps and smokes crack. The cement block house with stained red walls has a filthy sheetless mattress, a rough table, and a candle. He has more than many Haitians.
I don’t often hag out with impoverished junkies in the middle of the night, but I stuck around as he locked the door and took out his crack pipe made from a pen, tin foil, and a vitamin bottle. I shot the picture while trying not to think about the effects of second hand crack smoke in the closed room.
…….
The next day a strike started at Haiti’s largest hospital. The janitors and service workers hadn’t been paid in three months. People need every single meager pay day to survive in Haiti so eventually the workers walked out.
After two days the sanitation was so bad in the hospital that all the doctors and nurses had walked out too. Bandages were left unchanged, the floors weren’t mopped, and the dead plied up in the morgue.
I called the AP writer to ask how we should cover it. He replied that it happened so often that it wasn’t considered news unless it got much worse. He had already done the same story twice.
On Friday I decided to go anyway. The hospital director wouldn’t be able to stop me from entering during the strike. As soon as the patients learned I was a journalist they wouldn’t let me leave.
“Nobody has helped me in five days. Go tell people what they do here.”
One patient after another told me their story of neglect. Even when the doctors were there to write prescriptions, the people couldn’t afford them.
“They keep the the medicines locked in the pharmacy and won’t give them to us, even when we are dying.”
…….
Each day in Haiti involved a personal struggle with conditions unimaginable to those living in the developed countries. Just negotiating though the the daily flat tires, power outages, road blocks, and broken phones can be exhausting.
The AP writer, only has three hours of electricity per day. He lives in the “nice” part of town. Visiting him in Port-au-Prince’s richest suburb, Petionville, I still had to drive down a road that looks like a river wash and usually past a burning tire or two. People who saw me would yell, “Blanc! Blanc!” and often run up to the window and demand money.
Usually I visited Port-au-Prince’s worst neighborhoods.
Having a functioning car was a big problem. The AP photographer I was replacing has two cars. As I was driving the one he planned to leave me, the brakes caught on fire. As a result I was left with his one eyed 4×4 with no horn, windshield wipers, spare tire, tail lights, or mirrors.
My first day alone I covered a trial of 6 police men accused of executing 11 people. (The trial has since ground to a halt after death threats to the judge and jury.) The correspondent for Reuters was also there and his car was parked outside next to mine. When he left there was a man waiting by his car pointing to the front tire. Most of the air had been let out, and the man demanded money to fix it.
Worried that I had no spare tire for such a circumstance, I contacted my boss and told him I needed a safer car.
The only rental car place is at the airport, a one hour drive from down town. I took a Haitian guide named Sam with me to drive the other car back and help deal with problems.
Soon enough we had one. A few miles from the airport the rear tire had a blow out.
With no spare or jack, I had to inch along towards the airport looking for a place to repair it. After ten minutes there was a man with a stack of old tires on the side of the road. He didn’t have a car jack either. So we paid him three dollars to try to inflate the tire with a bike pump.
That gave me enough time to drive half the remaining distance to the airport. After all the air escaped I just continued on the rim.
The first car that the Avis rental agent showed me didn’t have working turn signals and one headlight was out. He took me to the other beaten-up cars, and I settled on the one with only a missing tail light.
I filled out the forms, signed the papers, and had a $1000 deposit authorized on my credit card. Then Sam and I went to find someone to fix the tire. The first three places didn’t have jacks so we settled for a guy who said he could lift my colleague’s heavy 4×4 with the rental car’s little jack and a pile of rocks. The man and his rocks got in the back seat.
Back at the airport multiple attempts with the little jack and rocks failed to raise the car. After 45 minutes the tire man eventually found somebody with a good jack and raised it. Then he carefully stacked the rocks under the axle and returned the jack to the owner. I drove him back to his pile of tires by the road with the wheel where he patched and reinstalled the tube.
It immediately exploded.
Somebody pointed out the large hole in the tire that was the cause. By now it was completely dark. The tire man and some others argued for a while, pointing fingers and raising voices. Then one man jumped over a fence and returned 20 minutes later with a used tire that would fit. He wanted five dollars for it.
By the time the tube had been patched again and we were driving back to the airport it began to rain.
The wheel was installed on the car in a complete downpour. Sam had to launch the car off the pile of rocks.
I didn’t know the way back from the airport, so Sam lead in my colleague’s car with no windshield wipers and one headlight. It was still pouring.
The engine in my rental car faltered and quit on the first hill we went up.
Eventually I made it to the top of the hill by restarting the car, revving it in neutral and slamming it in to drive ten times. Despite having no mirrors Sam miraculously saw me and waited.
There were two more hills before I returned to the hotel and I had to repeat the same shuddering dance to summit both times.
The next morning after shooting my assignment in Cite Soleil, I returned to the airport to trade in the car.
After 30 minutes of arguing, the Avis agent said he would give me a free day and swap the car for another one.
I went to inspect the other cars and they all had more problems, so I told the agent to return my credit card slip which I promptly ripped in to pieces.
Next I tried the Dollar car rental place and after the test drive settled on a car with relatively few problems. Ready to sign the papers and get on with my wasted day, we ran in to another snag. The phone lines weren”t working so he couldn’t take my credit card. With no credit card they needed $800 cash and a passport as deposit.
I went to three other rental agents and they all said the same thing.
I’m not a big enough idiot to carry $800 cash or my original passport around with me in the streets of in Port-au-Prince.
No car.
The Avis guy couldn’t even take back the shreds of my credit card receipt and and give me one of his wrecks.
I had to pay $20 for a taxi ride back to the hotel. After countless snags and abundant waste of time and money, my colleague’s car sat waiting for me in the parking lot. It’s one eyed wink and broken grille smile laughing at my day that Satan himself couldn’t have planned better.
Welcome to Haiti.
After three weeks and 14 stories ranging from AIDS to parliamentary chaos, I had learned a lot more about compassion and patience than I could have imagined. But like any sinking ship, I was ready to get off.
I spent a few days getting sunburned on the on the safe, quiet, palm lined beaches of the Dominican Republic before returning home.
[Copyright Tomas van Houtryve. Do not copy, archive or re-post without written permission. All rights reserved.]
