JUN-B-8
THE CONTRAST
OF POPULATIONS FROM TWO DIFFERENT PLANETS:
THE SQUALOR AND LUXURY OF THE PORT AU PRINCE
CAPITAL OF HAITI—WHERE THE RICH GET RICHER
June 14, 2003
I am sitting at dawn upon the veranda of my first-world hotel, the Villa Creole, overlooking the very pretty tropical explosion of biodiversity in the gardens and steep jungled ravines around me in this gated enclave of a desperate city. Behind that greenery, gloriously crowned with the flamboyant trees scarlet floral show-off displays of the indifference of beauty over squalor beneath it are steep mountainsides crowned not with trees (there do not seem to be any within grasping reach of the coast which is nearly completely deforested, and stripped chalky bare) are villas of a more private type. These are exclusive gated and guarded compounds of the very rich---people far richer than any others you know—within shooting distance of the very poor---people more desperate and destitute than any others you may have encountered. They are of two types—and usually in the same business: drug dealing and corrupt politicians/military generals who steal from the only source of income to the nation now—the voluntary aid donations that are funneled in to this unenviable winner of the title “Poorest People of the Western Hemisphere”—and, I would make the case, contenders for the world wide title as well.
Haiti is poor—not just a little down on their luck, but destitute to the point of total collapse into the bestial anarchy of the barely subsisting. As we left the Central Plateau Province and our convoy of pampered first-world medical students pounded over the rutted and mud-wallowing roads of the rainy season, kids would sprig up from alongside the road and run after our sealed up and locked vehicles with internal fans blowing the dust and mud around keeping the windows shut to avoid not so much the dust or splash from outside but the grasping hands. The hands are outstretched, not so much as a gesture of begging but as a grab for anything that this first world package of another planet may have that is not tightly strapped to itself, to tear away any detachable piece of the haves. We made it without running over any of these aggressive mendicants, and arrived in the capital of this sorry excuse for a nation state, where the panhandling is predatory. We passed through the turnstile of the Villa Creole, where I could wallow in the luxury of A/C and the first hot shower of the week—at the price of more per night than the entire mission costs the students in their room, board and transportation. So, like the competition for the title “The Real Africa” with $175 paid for the room board and transport of all of us in Embangweni for two weeks, versus twice that for a night in Mfuwe Lodge in the bush on the South Luwangwe Safari—I am looking out over the “Vrai Haiti.” Sumptuous wealth here in this first world hotel and indescribable luxury in the private villas up on the hill behind private armies, and, without turning my head, I can see how the “other half” (that “half” constituting more like 99.9%) of the Haitians barely live.
In the hotel lobby there arte the only postcards I have encountered, so I had to pick up a few to send at least one Haitian stamp back as we are preparing to leave this new nation for the philatelists. It shows a luxury cruise ship (“Sovereign of the Seas” I believe it is labeled) dropping anchor off Haiti as some native Haitians are in their fishing boats in the foreground looking out at this gleaming first world spacecraft that has unaccountably landed in this harbor of the much more real world. To begin with, such a confrontation is unlikely, since there would be no tourists’ arrival here in the dangerous squalor of Haiti. There are other Caribbean ports with lagoons and reefs and sandy beaches along lush green coastal island fringes that would not be worth your life to drop the hooks and go out to explore. Even the Club Med that was operational here which gained such notoriety by being a viral spouting volcano of HIV virus early in the IADS pandemic (whereby it was said that the already shunnable black hole of Haiti was the origin of the world’s AIDS pandemic) is a shuttered and guarded ghost town of a long ago playground of the idle rich and sexually promiscuous—a naïve and innocent time when one could take one’s pleasures with a leering nonchalance with no thought for tomorrow. Now, the only place where you can be served an elegant expensive dinner is here in this hotel, whose guests are the first worlders who come to do a unique business—getting some kind of aid into the country without having all of it siphoned up into those cisterns of wealth up high on the hills above us. Skimming the charitable aid money had become such a well-recognized way of getting very wealthy here in Haiti by the well-connected, that an “Aid Embargo” has been in place, to put pressure on the corrupt government officials whose hands are in the till, up to their armpits. Five hundred million dollars worth of aid dollars are held up until the “leak” of the majority of those funds into the coffers of the pampered few is reduced, so that at least a trickle might get to the desperately needy majority—including even those aggressive kids who are not awaiting the aid to come to them, but will reach out and grab all they can get right now. The embargo of aid, of course, does not make the brunch on the patios above me here any less sumptuous, but is designed to annoy those elite with both guns and connections. The only ones who suffer from any policy of any sort whatever here in Haiti (“Quel surprise!”) are those whose full-time job is to suffer, it seems, no matter what.
Creole is spoken in the street, but only elegantly elided French up on the hill and even in their radio stations. After all, if you could not tell by the clothing or the gull-winged Mercedes roadster, or the phalanx of guards, among peoples with the same skin color, we will add a difference in the language spoken so that you will be sure not to make that mistake again, to identify “us” with “them,” simply because we are both called “Haitians.” This is a different species.
The tourists who might once have come to anchor their cruise ships or yachts off the coast no longer do so, since the armada out there consists of working boats, busy shuttling a high demand commodity out of the third world and into the first, with a good deal of money to be laundered in this exchange. What would a tourist off the cruise ship come to see in this “world capital” which is not electrified except by the generators up on the hills, and would they ant to run the gauntlet of the groping and grasping to see this other speices from such an unsafe distance?
As a “bottom feeder” I have had a postgraduate course in squalor in many of the world’s candidates for the lowest common denominator. But, Haiti has to be a perpetual contender for this crown. It is often more like Africa than Africa, and periodically I nod off while being tossed around like a rag doll in the “shake and bake” transport on Haitian roads. When I open my eyes, I see what is exactly what I have seen in Malawi during the starvation seasons, in Mozambique in the civil war era of harsh inhumanity, and in the urban Asian charnel houses of engines of epidemics. It is not important where I happen to be, this “bottom billion” is everywhere interchangeable, and these “citoyenne” have more in common with Jakarta, Cairo, Mumbai, Soweto, and Harare than they do with their near neighbors in any other of those addresses as well, since the great common denominator is the fundamental distinction is not “To Be” or “Not To Be,” but between “To Have” and “To have Not.” I have only glimpsed the “Haitian Haves” from this unaffordable perch on the balcony of my unaffordable hotel looking upmarket at the Mansions on the Hill,” whereas I have wallowed in the Haitian Have Nots, and they are very familiar to me since they are the same as the Malawian have nots from last month or the Indian Have Nots from next month. I told the shell-shocked medical students that if they could take care of these folk, across the barriers of culture, language, religion, technology and economics, then they could take care of anyone anywhere, since these people are the ultimate prototypic patients who must be treated with compassion and efficiency, for larger problems in greater numbers with fewer resources