04-JUL-B-7
OUR “OFF DAY” SATURDAY, BEGINS WITH A
RETURN TO REFUGEE CAMP # 2, TO SEE THE LAST OF OUR 750 PATIENTS IN THE DR SIDE
OF OUR MISSION’S FIRST WEEK,
THEN A SCRAMBLE WITH AN ABRUPT CHANGE IN
PLANS TO LEAVE IMMEDIATELY FOR THE “LONG WAY ‘ROUND”
TO CROSS THE DR/HAITIAN BORDER NEAR
BELADERE
July 24, 2004
Today, if
you were to consult our schedule, is a day with a regular agenda, then an
afternoon free to explore and pack up for early departure in the morning to
make a long circuit of the big lake along the border here nearby to bet to a
distant place for a border crossing, as opposed to the one within sight of us
here to which we walked yesterday. Just
why we are going to a crossing five hours away is unclear. Also unclear is why, abruptly, we have
changed from this plan to another, which is in the middle of an afternoon when
some of us had made other plans, and one of us had gone off on a trip to a
Baptist mission border town in Haiti to see patients to return in the evening,
we have abruptly switched again, now, packing up in a hurry and leaving at
three o’clock and staying in a place on the DR side of the border (as close to
the border as we are here and now, but on the northern side of the lake we can
see from here) and we will be in a hotel called Casa Teo. This may be an upgraded hotel with a shower
that functions and maybe even electricity, so I should not complain.
However, complaining
is what some people are doing, since we hold in our hands a very structured
itinerary for our visit with every hour marked down with little room for
flexibility. It was written up by Ulrick
Gaillard, who is a lawyer and CEO of BRA, but he is off in Canada
just now fund raising. So, the person he
has on the ground here is Maria Virtudes who speaks only Spanish, which she
relates to me to translate to the group.
As soon as it is transmitted and everyone, particularly the fifteen year
old in a gawky teenage way has to have it repeated four times, it is changed
before all people are on the same page.
So, I have not looked at our original schedule again since it was
emailed to us, but my guess is that there is not one part of it that has been
held to. I understand contingencies
changing things, but the changes here are made not for any extra reason than
for arbitrary capriciousness, like moving clinic out of the hospital where we
had set it up, and into the hot sun of a street because it was closer to the
people—the same block we had just walked carrying our boxes of vulnerable
medicines which can get re-distributed just by being flaunted. Some people are unhappy about being jerked
around, but I am more annoyed at the terrible waste of the down time where we
are caught waiting between plans A B and C, as they change with at least an
hour of waiting around in between each change. Now, I have leisure for this
note, since the group is off trying to find a “spring-fed basin” in which they
have been promised that they might go swimming—with no clue as to whether this
is true or not, nor whether the other rumor that it is still filled with body
parts is also true. But, it was
postponed, and I had intended to go when it was part of our “free afternoon”
but first we had to gather in three places for the forthcoming lunch that was said
to be coming up in one of three places.
It turns out that it was being served back in the hospital—the only
activity there today—and we are supposed to be packed up and moved out in two
hours at three o’clock. That means I remain behind to notify the
Hotel Jimani where Serge Geffraud made his way by accident in catching up with
us, and he is now gone to border towns in Haiti
as a refugee mission run by Baptists has made him aware they would like to see
him there. So, we have scattered our
man-power, as those leaving were muttering about how this takeoff time would no
doubt be on “Haitian time” and be more like six
o’clock, and that they could not take off without the majority of
the people missing anyway. So, the
irrationality built in to t eh schedule makes sure that it is perpetuated as a
scramble. I am just going with the
intermittent flow, and always called upon to explain why something totally
inexplicable just happened.
We slept in
this morning for the first time. My
waking early does not accelerate any forward progress, it just keeps any
further procrastination from extending further then it might already. We had a breakfast of pbj and then went to
the Cruz Roja Domincana where we loaded up, again, on the flat bed truck of the
Dominican Red Cross, and drive to the border camp we had visited on our first
clinic day, filled with people in the vacuum of being illegal aliens, here by
crossing from Haiti illegally, and made homeless a second time by the floods
which washed them out of squatters camps along the once and now again dry river
bed. They are not political
refugees---there is no recognition of the political persecution that would
afflict them in Haiti,
since they would just have come over as those seeking a better life near paved
roads in the DR. So, they are not the
citizens of the world that the UNHCR protects, but have a barbed wire fence
around the camp guarded by the Dominican
Republic army—most of that barbed wire being
to keep DR or other Haitians from crawling into the camp of 43 families and 126
persons. There is a Cruz Roja Domincana
presence here, but clearly all their funding comes from international
NGO’s. So, the people in the hot neatly
spaced tents on sterile gravel are just parked awaiting the passage of time,
during which someone—like Oxfam here—is feeding them, like us, giving them free
health care, and like the army, making sure no one sneaks in or out. The US
is involved only as a source of donor aid.
The Dominicans already have two million Haitians in their population of
ten million people, and if the poorest of these desperate Haitian border
crossing refugees were included as citizens, there would be an enormous
political problem, as with a black voting block in the US
or a disenfranchised people getting quite powerful and demanding satisfactions
of their own needs.
There are
about 8 million Haitian in Haiti,
about as many as are in the Diaspora among the Caribbean
and South and Central American countries.
So, the island of Hispaniola is divided in two thirds and one third, the
fertile third given to the DR, and the desperate poor of the Haitian Central
Plateau belonging to the hard scrabble subsistence farmers who try to make a
living while carrying an enormous “slave plantation” legacy of a corrupt
military government replacing the colonial one overthrown by the force of arms
the first and only time slaves ever rebelled and took control of their nations
and won it with armed insurrections. That
happened two hundred years ago this year, in 1804—the world’s nightmare, a
black poor nation making its own laws and self-governing. It took little time to run the economy down
to zero for the poor, and to concentrate all the power in the well connected
military elite. And they have had
several US
supported dictators, one a Doctor of Public Health from the University
of Michigan---Papa Doc Duvalier,
and his son, President for life also Baby Doc—first put in place by US
aid and then pulled out by the same US
aid. There have been Duvalierists
without Duvalier, such as the fellow that was married to the imperious woman
who runs this place in which I am squatting, who treats here slaves no
differently now than when she was in Haiti and commanded scores more of
them. Her “darling” granddaughter sat on
the porch, at age seven, and summoned the servants to come all the way across
the courtyard to fork the food off her serving plate and onto her own dish—an
observant copy of her grandmamma who will summon them with an angry bark or blowing
of a horn at any hour, up to and including two o’clock AM. I am living in a “bateye”.
We were
supposed to be in another place here in Jimani, but it got changed, again
inexplicably, which is why it took so long for us to find this place after we
had rolled into the correct place at two o’clock
AM on our Monday morning arrival.
We will some time sit for an hour
awaiting what should have been clear on our schedule, and then, rather
bizarrely, pack up everything to move it a second time 180*--meaning we are
back where we were before---a little like the capricious whims of the Grand Dam
here who issues orders from her balcony that keep sullen and very depressed
teenage girls who cannot escape from this illegal alien refuge. “The Uses of Haiti” continue here just over
the border with Haiti
inside the DR. We are here within sight
of the nation-state of Haiti, again without an elected president after the US
flew the only elected President this second oldest new World republic has ever
had was first flown out, then restored with US marines, then flown out into
exile again this spring. No wonder this
former priest can only utter I amazement that he was kidnapped by the US after
entering a struggle with powers much greater than the Haitian state in a
paramilitary drug cartel which has much more money than the US aid budget to Haiti
and can call all the shots.
AND NOW, WITH AN ABRUPT CHANGE OF PLANS YET AGAIN,
WITH HALF OF THE GROUP OUT SWIMMING IN SOME BASIN,
AND WITH ME PACKING UP A BUS AND SEARCHING FOR OUR
LOST PEDIATRICIAN, WE PULL OUT IN A BUS FOR A SIX HOUR RIDE TO CROSS A BORDER
WE CAN SEE FROM HERE AS A WALK TO A BORDER CROSSING ADJACENT TO US
The reason, as it was lamely
explained, is that the road on the west side of the lake is unpaved, which
should have us at the border crossing we had planned to use in an hour. So, we are loading a bus and riding for six
hours around the east side of the Lake Reid Cabral—the name of a long dead president,
shared by the hospital in which I had worked in Santo Domingo—and stay the
night in a superior hotel called the hotel Teo in Elias Pina 9 kms from the
Haitian border crossing we had intended to use.
All of this did not make sense, until we dropped Octavia Comus off four
fifths of the way—our diversion was essentially to get him a free ride a lot
closer to home. We then road on until
dark, playing word games and other silly things largely to see how gawky and
awkward a fifteen year old Persian son of a donor friend of the Director Ulrick
whose parents are going to pick him up and carry him back to Santo Domingo
later as we go across to Haiti to enter the managerial expertise of Project
MediShare. The word on whether Maria
Virtudes is going to continue on with us across the border changes as often as
have the plans thus far, but we will see each new event as and after it happens.
For now, we are loading the bus, having packed stuff the others left, since, of
course, they are over a half hour late for our absolute must-depart time of
three o’clock PM