Reestablishing order in Haiti

Gary L. Close / Culpeper Star Exponent
Published: October 13, 2007

Editor's Note: This is the second part of a two-part series chronicling Gary Close's experiences during a mission trip to Haiti. The first part appeared in the Oct. 7 edition of the Culpeper News. Visit Star Exponent.com, keyword Haiti.

Integrity
Honor. Integrity. Spiritual Values. At Double Harvest, when you talk to the Van Wingerdens or the teachers or the administrators some variation of the subject comes up.

Perhaps it is because the opposite seems to run rampant in Haitian society. Tools disappear. It is a man's entire job at the farm shop to keep track of who takes what tool and when it is brought back. The government is corrupt. Former President Aristiede was penniless when he took office. When he left office he took with him $800 million. Money is donated to build roads. Roads are not built.

"I think Switzerland must love Haiti," VanWingerden joked. "Most of the money that is given to Haiti ends up in Swiss bank accounts."

There is a culture of taking what you can when you can - from the government on down. For government officials it is inexcusable. For the rich it is damnable. For the middle class, what of it there is, it is venial. For the vast poor it is survival. Not right in the developed world's eyes. But what they think they must do to live.

That is the challenge for Van Wingerdeen.  The poor steal from immediate necessity but in the long term the practice only makes their plight worse.  Ultimately a successful society has to believe that more often than not people will not steal, will not lie, will not kill. Otherwise it is impossible to contract for business, to sacrifice the present for a better future, to trust the government to do right.

To be productive people must be honest, work hard, and expect rules to order life. This is what Van Wingerdeen believes and what he hopes to make happen. And it is Christianity that is the change agent to make this happen in Van Wingerdeen's plan.  Christianity's presence runs throughout the compound.

There is a Haitian protestant church on the grounds.  The day laborers gather at the front gate for a Haitian led voluntary devotional every morning. School begins with a prayer and a French rendition of "Amazing Grace." There is no doubt that everyone involved at Double Harvest, Haitian or otherwise, believes that Christianity should be the moral organizing principle that will change Haitian society. Really change it in a concrete fill your belly kind of way.  And it is clear that they believe it is religion, as an organizing principle that hinders Haiti right now.

"These west Africans were removed from their homeland and made slaves in Haiti," Spaulding explains. "They were from different tribes. Different languages. Different customs. They needed something in common to unify the people during the slave revolt."

That something was a religion that blended African spiritualism and Catholicism. The rest of the world calls the religion Voodoo.

And it is a historical fact that on August 14, 1791 at Bois Caiman, Dutty Boukman, a Voodoo priestess, conducted a celebrated black voodoo ceremony. At that ceremony a woman reportedly was possessed by a warrior spirit. The possessed woman prophesized the coming revolt and named its leaders. 

Slaughter ensued across the colony. Whites were killed wholesale. Independence came to the colony in 1804. 

Voodoo's central role in Haitian culture and politics remains strong. The CIA fact book estimates one half of the population practices voodoo. Church workers will tell you that the figure is low.

"Haiti is 80 percent Catholic, 20 percent protestant and 100 percent voodoo," one missionary told me. And it is the opinion of Spaulding and others that it is Voodoo's extreme fatalism and emphasis on power that lies at the root of many of Haiti's problems.

"Voodoo is about gaining power over people," Spaulding said. "It is not a religion of love or giving. It is more about taking and power." 

The upshot is a culture riddled with fear and distrust.
With this fundamental principle in play it is not surprising that Haiti's government has been more about taking rather than serving.

"It really is seen as a license to take as much as you can for yourself and your supporters," Spaulding said of governmental service in Haiti. "People expect it. People expect those with power or wealth to use it to their own benefit."

Voodoo
Voodoo is alive in the countryside. I have heard the drums at night throbbing across the dark plain of cul-de-sac. I have seen the voodoo signs and symbols.

One day I tramped the tracks - they could hardly be called roads - which crisscross the dry silt fields between villages. Peter, a lanky Haitian, is my guide. As we walk Peter answers my questions. And then…….

"Look there." Eyes straight ahead Peter nods his head to the left. "See the cross." I see a cross standing alone with an empty long neck bottle leaning against it. "That is voodoo," he said. We walk past in silence. He is clearly ill at ease. Further on…..

"There." He nods towards a house with an open dirt yard in front. Two wooden posts jut from the beaten earth. "That is a voodoo house." We walk on. In silence. Eyes straight ahead. I take no photographs. I see people in the shadowed interior.

Bright eyes shining in the blackness between horizontal wallboards. In the streaming afternoon sun the darkness is all that much deeper.

Later Peter talks to me about voodoo. Americans call him Peter. His real name is Pierre Pierrot. Tall, slender, the 22-year-old student's eyes move about and take in everything. He studies in the Dominican Republic, the other country that shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti. The Van Wingerdens sponsor him. He hopes to be a doctor.

"Voodoo is killing my country," he said to me. I am skeptical. It is, after all, merely a superstition I think to myself. Peter senses my reluctance to accept his analysis.

"Believe me. It is real," he says to me.

Peter grew up in neighboring Roche-Blanche. The villages we walked through he knows like most American boys his age know their own neighborhoods. He described to me how people go to the voodoo priest with their problems.

"They call him papa or father." The priest, according to Peter, will tell them to perform some service or act of sacrifice and the problem is fixed.

"Sometimes he tells them to give their uncle or brother or friend to the devil." Peter says matter of factly.
"What do you mean-" I ask.

"Kill them." 

I am a four hour flight from Washington, DC. Two hours flight from Miami. We sit in a modern apartment above the clinic. Air conditioning blows through the vents in the white ceramic tile floor. This is a conversation from another time, another place.

"You mean actually kill them-"  I ask thinking that he means this in some symbolic way.

"Yes.  Kill them. Just one morning they are dead and the thing is done. Everyone knows why." 

What about police I ask. But of course one day in Haiti is enough to answer that question. There is no real police force. No detectives. No questions.

My reaction must be apparent because Peter becomes emphatic. "Believe me. This is true. I have talked to friends about this because I want to know. It is real." 

Real in the sense that people die. Not real in the sense that there is real power in voodoo spells. Peter agrees. "But the fear is real."

Dr. Elysee Edmond agreed that voodoo is a presence in his country. "It is destroying Haiti," he said to me one afternoon while sitting in his office at the Double Harvest clinic. "Every morning I go to a crossroads and see money and food. This from people who cannot afford to feed their own children but they will leave food for voodoo."

Dr. Edmond, 35, is a general practice physician who directs the clinic. Schooled in Haiti and the United States he has been at the clinic since 1991.

"I am a doctor." He said to me. "I treat their illnesses. I also tell them about Jesus Christ."  An antidote to voodoo. Americans or Europeans would be apologetic. Edmond is matter of fact.

The farm
Missionaries work side-by-side with Haitians. Truth and honesty are assumed. Work is productive on the ground and in the reward of wages paid.

"It is, perhaps, one of the most crucial and most unique aspects of Double Harvest," Spaulding said.

Eighty people are regularly employed. Up to 120 may be employed depending on the needs of the farm. Some work in the machine shop. Some in the fields. Some in the greenhouse. Each morning more arrive at the front gate for work. They bring their hoes in hopes that more workers are needed. Sometime they are. Sometimes not.

The work is important. Income from the farm helps defray costs but it is still heavily subsidized by the Van Wingerdens.

Eventually, Van Wingerden wants the farm to produce more income but there is another purpose to the farm. It brings men and women from surrounding villages into a world of order and structure.

So simple so basic and yet for a society as broken as Haiti's: revolutionary. Here is how it is different. Even though there is poverty and want Van Wingerdeen does not believe it is beneficial to give away food or anything else. Better to create entrepreneurs and markets. So the farm grows food to sell. 

The farm grows house plants for the wealthy. The farm experiments with brick making.  Better to create an equation of work the sum of which is food and prosperity. Why- Because it is self-sustaining. Charity only breeds dependence.

"There was an Israeli businessman who wanted to operate a tomato paste plant just down the road. He asked my father to talk to other farmers to supply tomatoes to the plant." Van Wingerden waives his arm over his head in a circle. "There were 2,000 acres of tomatoes being grown here in the mid 80s."

Over five years the plant supplied an estimated 80 percent of tomato paste used in Haiti.

"Then an American company decided to donate tomato paste to Haiti."

According to Van Wingerden the local tomato paste economy collapsed. The plant closed. Jobs disappeared. Now Haiti is dependent on tomato paste donations.

"There was not bad intent," Van Wingerden said. "But they are killing Haiti with kindness."

With each handout, each donation, Haiti loses productivity.
"Productivity is how to measure economic health."  Van Wingerden said to me. His eyes glinting with fervor.  Double Harvest, through the farm, through the school, through the clinic, through the Christian underpinnings, all working together, is about creating Haitian productivity. About creating Haitian prosperity.

But Van Wingerden's project does give. It may not be apparent to the Haitians but not one of the three projects is self-sustaining. The most apparent of the three, in terms of outright charity, is the clinic. Director Dr. Edmond and his wife are the resident doctors. A dentist compliments the staff of nurses and pharmacist. Patients must pay for the care and drugs but it is affordable - even by Haitian standards. And, in my conversations with patients, it is clear that the clinic imparts a sense of caring for the whole person. I found patients that had traveled for hours to get to the clinic. On any given day they begin to arrive by sunrise. They dress in bright reds and blues and yellows. Some wear fancy hats. Some come with umbrellas. I saw one woman, in a dress, stoop to wipe the dust from her shoes before walking to the outside waiting area. It was clearly a place to dress for.

Men and women, mostly women, sit or lie on aluminum benches under a green metal roof at the entrance to the building. Above a television play religious and health instruction programming. Outside the gate the life of Double Harvest plays out. Cows on rope leashes amble by towing their masters behind. A woman sells food to the farm workers while sitting next to her wood cook fire. Smoke drifts by as day workers march off to the fields.

Inside doctors and patients fill the halls and rooms. The average day sees 50 to 70 patients come through the clinics doors. Most illnesses stem from poor hygiene and dirty water: diarrhea, scabies, typhoid, infections, and malaria.

Medical teams arrive from the United States regularly.  Those things that Dr. Edmond cannot handle are referred to the visiting surgeons. The clinic has two fully equipped surgery rooms and one large recovery room.
"We treat them with respect," Dr. Edmond says with pride. And the result is saved lives and prevented disease.

The last day
In the early morning I sit under a mango tree.  Before 8 a.m. and already the September air is hot. On the grounds the school children line up to march off to class. The hum of men working in the fields drifts under the trees and across the playground. Engines start and stop. Metal clangs on metal. And yet amid this beehive of activity there are shouts of anger. In Coupon the water has been turned on. Perhaps 40 or 50 people crowd around the broken concrete cistern. It has long stopped working. Now it acts as a point for Double Harvest to pipe clean water for the community to use. Men and women stand, sit or squat in the dirt, on the concrete, on 5-gallon plastic buckets. They shout and gesture and push and shove to get the water. Pigs, burros, cattle, chickens, naked children, women with washtubs all add to the chaos: yards from the school wall. All within hearing distance of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" being played on the recorder.

It is easy, I think, for Americans or Europeans to feel somehow superior in Haiti. It probably is in any Third World country. It is easy to shake your head at the squalor and filth and unruliness and think I would never live like that. Or to hear the stories of petty theft and believe that you would be better than the temptation. I must admit, to be honest, that certainly I have shaken my head and thought not I, not my family, not my country. But I am reminded of Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables." 

Jean Valjean stole bread for his children. He knew it was wrong. He knew his family was hungry. He stole.  Poverty does not make thievery right but Hugo's story should give one pause while surveying the mess that is Haiti. Who knows to what lengths one would go if the situation were dire enough.

The situation is beyond dire. It is worse than Hugo's France. Haiti is at the breaking point. Things get worse. Not better. Ten years ago electric service reached to the compound and surrounding villages. Then it became sporadic. Then it stopped.  Now the utility wires are gone. Stolen and sold for the metal.  Double Harvest runs its own electric generator. The villages are dark at night. And sitting in the dark, gnawing on whatever they can, you can sense that the people are desperate. They do not know what to do so they beg.  They beg for money, for candy, for clothing, for anything anytime they see a white face. There is a loss of dignity in that. At what point does the shame, the desperation, and the hopelessness become so unbearable that they strike out- I do not know. But surely it is not far away. Armed gangs now roam Port-au-Prince kidnapping foreigners and Haitians alike for money. Sixty persons were kidnapped in the month before I arrived. The week I was there three missionaries were taken.

But there is a glimpse of something different.  People are starting to notice. At the U.N. At the various ministries which deal with Double Harvest. People think differently at Double Harvest. Not all of them. Not even most of them. But some of them.

Peter is representative of a new generation coming out of the Double Harvest culture. He is studying in the Dominican Republic so that he can come back to change his country. He thinks differently. He sees beyond the present poverty. "Only Haitians can change Haiti," he said to me echoing what Van Wingerden and the teachers at the school teach. "Haiti must learn to be productive." And, there is a sense in Peter that he believes that Haiti is a place worth saving, a place worth leading.
In the fields of the compound there are irrigation lines. They lay on the ground underneath the plants. In the early morning sun, if you look along the field, you can see glimmers of light, sparkling and dancing among the seedlings. Each sparkle a small drop of water. Alone nothing. But over time and across a big field, the drips of moisture nourish the seedlings into a healthy crop. It seems to me that Double Harvest is like the irrigation lines - delivering living water of hope to a desperate people. And it may be, I think as I sit under this mango tree, and see the men working the fields and hear the children reciting their lessons, that they too, finally, might have the chance to grow and prosper under the bright Caribbean sun.

Postscript 2007
Since returning to Virginia my mind continues to wander back to the brown bleeding island set on the azure sea.  I troll the Internet reading of one disaster after another in Haiti: drug smuggling, gangs, killings, promises to stop corruption. U.N. action. U.N. inaction. World Bank credit concerns. It never ends.  And yet one item seemed more telling, more symbolic of Haiti's plight.

May 10, 2007.  A sloop carrying at least 160 people capsized and sank.

People with hopes and dreams like you, like me. People who were desperate.  People who would rather chance the wind, waves and whims of a leaking ship than live one more day in Haiti. In Hell.

The Caribbean is breathtakingly beautiful. The blues are surreal to eyes used to the angry grey-green North Atlantic. And yet the azure blue can hide danger, like sharks. They swarmed around the mass of people spilled into the water. There were 78 survivors.

Americans and Europeans were probably frolicking nearby unaware of the tragedy on the sea. The sloop tried to land on the Turks and Caicos Islands. You've seen the brochures. The British Protectorate is a paradise for stressed office workers pasty white, eyes glazed, limbs slack, minds numb, credit cards hot.

And yet that is not the whole tragedy. The coast guard or its equivalent for Turks and Caicos intercepted the sloop before it could land-before it might perhaps spill its cargo of misery on the white sandy beaches.  Some Haitians claim the cutter rammed their sloop. The authorities deny this charge. They claim the cutter was towing the sloop back out to sea when it broke up and sank. It really matters not. They were unwanted. In the currency of human value Haitians are worth little except perhaps the cost of a tow out to the deep blue sea. That is all.
Why care- Why should we, in a world of video-taped decapitations and suicide bombers care- Haven't we enough to worry us- Haiti is small. Its wounds self-inflicted.  Its misery not unique in the world.

I asked Van Wingerden that very question. There on the flat alluvial plain of Cul-de-sac. In the sweltering September heat he paused. A trickle of sweat dribbled down the side of his face as he pondered a response.

"We can't just let Haiti hang. We know about it now. And now that we do know we are accountable to God in how we respond: as individuals and as nations." 

In VanWingerden's mind the equation is simple. Knowledge brings responsibility.

And so Haiti haunts my world. It is a brown scab that does not heal. And now you know.  

Gary L. Close has visited Haiti twice. He is the Commonwealth's Attorney for Culpeper County.