HAITI: A Hill Impossible to Climb

By Dario Montero Reprint | | Print |

Darío Montero

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jun 2 2005 (IPS) - Whereas the ”favelas” in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro are set high up in the hills ringing the city, the hilltops around the Haitian capital are home to palatial mansions, and the housing becomes poorer and more and more precarious as the slopes flatten into the sea.

Whereas the ”favelas” in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro are set high up in the hills ringing the city, the hilltops around the Haitian capital are home to palatial mansions, and the housing becomes poorer and more and more precarious as the slopes flatten into the sea.

”I’m going with you. When are we leaving?” the children hanging around the door to the Port-au-Prince headquarters of the battalion of Uruguayan peacekeeping troops ask visiting Uruguayan reporters. The kids show up to get some breakfast or a snack, but above all they come for the friendly treatment they receive.

The few terms and phrases of Spanish that they have picked up include slang words and clichés commonly used by the Uruguayan soldiers, who make up the second-largest contingent in the United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), after the Brazilian troops.

Because of their friendly relations with its soldiers, Uruguay, a South American country 5,000 km away, might seem more accessible to these children than the steep hills surrounding the Haitian capital, which can only be conquered in four-wheel-drive vehicles, like big shiny SUVs or luxury cars, with their dark tinted windows.

The morning procession of thousands of boys and girls, neatly attired in their school uniforms that vary in colour depending on the school they attend, might fool a foreign visitor, because of the apparent contrast with the country’s 50 percent illiteracy rate.

Nor is there oversight or a unified national curriculum, and private education here tends to be a far cry from what is offered by private schools in both the rich industrialised world and the developing South.

The state is largely absent in the educational system just as it is in other aspects of Haitian life.

Anyone can open a private school, without even needing to present credentials or an educational curriculum. The result is, generally, something that passes for an education but actually ends up merely swelling the ranks of the illiterate, Guillaume Devars from France, one of MINUSTAH’s election advisers, told IPS.

The educational approach is linear, he said, and students are not taught to think critically or to reason for themselves. No emphasis is put on reading comprehension, and the children are merely taught by rote, said Devars, who has been in Haiti for over two years, working with a France-based Catholic organisation.

Thus the immense majority of the children are unable to make it up even the first step of the ladder of social ascent, and find it virtually impossible to join the labour market in an economy that hardly functions, and where the most bare bones survival is the norm.

Haiti is the poorest country in the hemisphere. At least 80 percent of the population of 8.5 million lives below the poverty line, and the average age is just 18.

The country has been ruled by a caretaker government and has been occupied by a multinational peacekeeping force since Feb. 29, 2004, when President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was toppled.

Any solution to the eternal crisis, which looks more and more as if it were entering the terminal stage, must focus on narrowing the immense gap between the poor majority and the handful of Haitians living in the walled-in mansions on the hilltops, say the interim authorities.

Street vending is the chief means of survival in Port-au-Prince, a city of four million. Hawkers are everywhere, and the fried fish and a wide variety of other food, covered with flies, is sold in metal containers that sit next to canals carrying sewage or filthy water.

The stands also offer clothing, hung up on long walls, cheap watches, and a wide assortment of goods displayed on tables, under which women and small children sit and wait for customers.

People wait on the narrow sidewalks to flag down a “tap tap” – brightly coloured jitneys whose passengers sit on benches and “tap” on the sides to be let out.

The endless stream of proud, elegant Haitians do not even blink at the passage of the convoy of white U.N. vehicles in which this correspondent rode as part of a delegation of Uruguayan journalists who arrived in Haiti last Saturday on a visit organised by the Uruguayan army.

The reporters are riding in a comfortable, air-conditioned van, escorted by military vehicles, which clear a path through the chaotic, unregulated traffic in the capital. The steep streets, many of which are gravel, have two narrow lanes and vehicles just barely squeeze by each other.

Nor do people seem to be reacting to the coming elections, the campaign for which is glaringly absent, despite the fact that the interim government plans to register all of the voters – half of the population – within the space of three short months.

The local elections are scheduled for Oct. 9 and the general elections for Nov. 13.

There are few if any signs of the international community’s much-touted reconstruction plans. Perhaps the most depressing reminders of the incomplete projects are the shells of half-built houses, many of which are already in ruins, with unfinished walls and apertures where someday, someone might actually place a window or a door.

A big part of the problem is that the promised international financial assistance has failed to arrive, often because the donors cannot find reliable institutions through which to channel funds or because they do not trust the ones that are supposed to administer the aid.

In 2004, the caretaker government, with the help of international experts, estimated that 1.3 billion dollars were needed over the space of two years, for the most urgent reconstruction and rebuilding of the country’s institutions.

International donors, led by the United States, pledged the funds at a July 2004 conference in Washington. Nearly a year later, in March, only 250 million dollars had been disbursed.

The world’s rich countries then promised another one billion dollars in aid at a second conference held that month in Cayenne, French Guiana.

Construction has not even begun on a sewage and water system, the lack of which has turned this Caribbean island nation into one enormous sewer.

The problem is especially severe in Port-au-Prince, whose population has doubled in the past 20 years as a result of the rural exodus of small farmers who abandoned rice-farming, a business that was ruined by the opening up of the Haitian market to subsidised U.S.-grown rice.

The price of the existing potable water, especially bottled water, soars as you move up the hillsides – yet another obstacle for anyone who dares attempt to climb up Haiti’s steep social ladder.