by Michelle Chen
–USA–
It’s been weeks since I left Haiti, but the fractured images of the ruined city replay themselves like a battered flipbook.
Speeding through the streets of Leogane, near Port-au-Prince, on a sputtering moto-taxi, you see two-story houses with pointed roofs that look frozen over from colonial times. They are flanked by crumbling edifices, or half-buildings with collapsed top floors. In this cosmic landscape of rubble, rolling in endless peaks and valleys, barefoot children scramble around sidewalk markets. Women hawk popcorn or mangos, their faces staid and of indeterminate age. The constant presence of people—buying and selling, or idling in the heat—makes the landscape seem not so different from a poor seaside neighborhood anywhere else in the world. The low buildings are painted in dull, happy pastels. Pockets of decay peek out from panes of Caribbean color, warding off everyone except stray dogs and a cabal of pasty Americans and Europeans. They pull up in a tap-tap (a hired truck), leap out the back, and march in with sledgehammers, wheelbarrows and shovels, ready to finish the job the earthquake left only half done.
The volunteers literally attack the rubble each morning with excitement—a combustible mixture of extreme passion and delirium. Anyone who says this kind of volunteer work is pure vanity has obviously never set eyes upon 140 sweat-drenched, dust-caked, do-gooders running on fumes and dripping with unrepentant pride at the end of a day of demolition work. That said, there is a palpable sense at the site that we are coming from privilege—simply through our ability to choose to be here.
As perhaps the largest NGO deploying personnel in the earthquake zone, the Hands On Disaster Response volunteers carry a certain obligation to represent themselves in as “modest” or unobtrusive a way as possible. Running on generator power and an internal water system, our quarters are spartan, though bizarre enough to defy easy comparisons. The group is housed in the cavernous unfinished space of a nightclub – the sprawling base camp was supposed to be the new wing of the venue—another unfinished project. Rows of bunk beds are stacked on a rim of concrete, with a flat slab in the middle that looks like the foundation of a dance hall. I was told that the owner is a wealthy Leoganer named Joe who made his fortune driving a cab in the United States.
At night the sweet, fetid scent of incinerating garbage hangs on the breeze. The atmosphere is far from “exotic,” but it is spiritual in a way that cannot quite be expressed except in the rhythm and the pace of life here – Haiti time, where everything has been turned upside down for so long it starts to look upright, until you see it from the outside. Here, it seems people learn to inhale and exhale the air of crisis because they’re tired of holding their breath.
In the white-hot daylight, the Hands On volunteers plow away in the debris, attempting to bring the outside in, to help make one piece of a shattered country whole.
There have been moments of tension. On my first day out, some local folks offered to help and began shoveling the rubble alongside us. They asked about getting paid and were surprised to hear our explanation for not remunerating them—that we were volunteers. I was told that locals often are confused by this, which may attest to both the breakdown of economic development here and the reputation the international NGO establishment has acquired for being predatory and corrupt.
No one understands the ambivalent tension between the foreign helpers and local communities more than the Haitian volunteers. In addition to helping with manual labor at the sites, they provide critical translation services and help maintain the headquarters. The young internationals try to knit together empathy and solidarity as they labor alongside their local peers, yet the different levels of privilege peel open like the cascading sheaths of cement layered around us.
One local volunteer, Shooby, explained to me the curious politics of humanitarianism. As a Haitian who had spent most of his life in the United States before coming back to Leogane after his mother died, he had toed the edge between two cultures for about 25 years. He hoped his relief work with Hands On would be a springboard to a job connection in Canada.
Shooby acknowledged that in the past international and local volunteers had clashed over the management of the base camp, but felt the camp dynamics would always settle, by necessity, back into codependency.
“If there’s any kind of confusion between us,” he said, “we try to resolve our problems the best way that we can because we know that we need each other. And what’s hard about it is that the local volunteers need the international volunteers more than the international volunteers need the local volunteers.”
But he added that Hands On did more to foster mutual respect than other NGOs he had encountered in the aftermath of the quake. “Being in these different organizations … it makes you see that there’s so much other NGOs can do. And [realize] how much [Hands On] can do. … Being a part of it makes me feel so good, deep down inside.”
We are engaged in a complex dance with our Haitian counterparts. We work for free because we can. They work for free because they have no choice. Most of us come from places that will never know anything like the poverty Haitians experience every day. Most of the Haitians know that they are the objects of bittersweet admiration. While their will to survive puts an American like me to shame, we don’t know whether to feel sympathy for the forsaken but defiant nation, or frustration at the folks trying to rescue it.
My fellow volunteer Quinn Zimmerman, who grew up in Mexico and the United States, remains in Haiti on a half-year volunteer stint. He told me about his reluctance to burrow into the self-satisfied cocoon of a savior complex.
“For me, as an international volunteer on the ground in Haiti, I am only too aware of how much needs to happen to help the Haitian people rise and my own limitations in being able to accomplish such a rising in any substantial way,” he said. Countering Shooby’s comment, he added, “Haiti isn’t our country to fix. It isn’t our country to develop. … I think I need the local volunteers just as much, if not more, than they need me. … We cannot and should not function in an international NGO vacuum. If we don’t allow the Haitian people to learn and employ some of the systems and projects we’ve started, then Haiti loses in the long run. The local volunteers give me hope that won’t happen.”
The balance of risk and reward is vastly different on both an individual level and across the local/outsider divide. We all know some barriers cannot be dissolved no matter how much sweat we pour over them. We continue rebuilding a country that isn’t ours, but for which we are in some way responsible. The mostly white volunteers carry a bit of this burden with each rock we move, and as we slowly pile up cement chunks on the side of the road, the rolling hills of rubble seem never to diminish—a testament to the stubbornness of our post-colonial guilt.
We are navigating a very narrow cultural crawlspace. Do we need to paint the clinic walls blue while patients queue below to get basic outpatient care from a mostly empty warehouse of donated medicines? What do we do when young children overrun the worksite and turn it into a playground, gleefully shoveling piles of rocks? This is the closest thing they have to day care and they’d be playing in the street unsupervised whether they were on our site or not. Or should we forbid them from handling the heavy tools to protect them from possibly hurting themselves? What do we do when a domestic dispute in a family’s home next door to the site turns bloody, spills into the street, and causes a stir in the neighborhood? Are we witnesses? Participants? Can we be good neighbors when we reluctantly represent social, cultural and economic forces much more powerful and beyond our control? What is “Stop!” in Kréyol?
The one souvenir I took with me from Haiti is a book of receipts I found at one of our toughest worksites—a collapsed two-story building with a storefront on the bottom. The book was one of dozens littering the rubble, presumably used for playing the lottery, as lotto shops seem to outnumber just about every other kind of business in Leogane.
The tight clump of browned pages spits dust each time I try to unwad it. Inside are numbers with dashes and equal signs—maybe scores, or tallies—often marked with a date: “01/01/10.” I wanted to find a receipt book from the date of the earthquake, but I didn’t find one in the rubble. Maybe business was slow in the few days before disaster struck. Maybe the people of Leogane had a feeling they shouldn’t test their luck.
More resources on Haiti:
Hands On Disaster Response
Haiti Response Coalition
Konbit Pou Ayiti/KONPAY (Working Together for Haiti)
About the Author:
Michelle Chen works and plays in New York City. A former Fulbright research fellow and zine publisher, she has also written for In These Times, Air America, Extra!, and Colorlines. She blogs at Working In These Times and Racewire.org.
Great article! As usual, Michelle Chen manages to weave an indelible picture, helping us understand the many complexities of volunteerism in Haiti and the conflict between helping and empowerment.