Throwawayhaiti

I have had people working at the Ministry of Education ask me for bribes. I have seen ministers embezzle funds. My life has been threatened twice. The first organisation I had worked with had asked me to allocate certain funds designated to the purchase of ringers lactate (necessary for cholera treatment) to a supplier that was across the globe instead of in the US because the transportation costs would have been higher and we could say more money was spent that way.

The weirdest situation I ever found myself was probably when being invited to a meeting at a restaurant at night. The restaurant was bursting with music, imported steaks, tons of alcohol. Meanwhile, across the street from the restaurant was an IDP camp. This was during cholera too, so as you left the restaurant you could actually hear the moans of people who were being treated at the cholera treatment centre nearby. It was surreal.

Thank you for your kind remarks.

It is depressing work. For a long time I would drink myself to sleep. For a month or two I was punching the wall next to my bed in my sleep as well. It is crazy, I think many people see those who are in my line of work not as human beings. There are always negative comments about how aid workers whore, drink, and do drugs. How they have loud parties while people are starving/dying/suffering and how they go on wonderful holidays and generally seem to be having a good time. I would have to say that we are all human beings. Doing some of these things is in some cases the only way to cope. One cannot be in constant despair, and in fact, that is exactly one of the reasons we choose to do this work, to get people out of constant despair. We cannot do good work if we are constantly thinking of horror. So what happens? We become desensitised, we drink a lot, we smoke a lot, we may become belligerent, whatever.

With me, I lost my girlfriend after a few months of being here. I had trouble following conversations. I could not sleep unless I had a drink in me. I hated this place for a long time, and maybe I still do. But things are better with me now. In part I have gotten used to it (desensitised it enough), and in part I have changed my surroundings.

I do, however, think that seeing a therapist after I leave here will probably do me a world of good.

This is going to require a long answer:

Short term:

There were tons of organisations coming in in 2010. At one point the Ministry of Interior was saying that about 4000 different organisations (NGOs, church groups, international businesses, etc.) were working in the country. The immediate response was therefore very hectic. There was very little organisation. The UN held (and still holds) what they called "cluster meetings". These thematic meetings tried to coordinate the various activities of all the different actors (so there'd be an education cluster, a shelter cluster, a WASH cluster, etc). Unfortunately many of the smaller NGOs would not participate, making true coordination efforts impossible. You would have large NGOs such as Samaritan's Purse or Save the Children trying to build schools with the coordination and "assistance" of the Ministry of Education, but then some church group from Kansas would come in and would build a school in the areas where the large organisations were meaning to work, thus ruining projects that would probably have had a larger impact and would be managed better.

Tons of money was thrown away in this way. There was also lots of corruption and profiteering. Port-au-Prince, for example, became one of the most expensive cities in the world. Materials for construction, medication, essentially anything that was needed to carry out projects was so expensive that the money allocated for certain activities was barely enough to achieve what had initially been planned out. The opposite thing would also happen, some organisations were unlucky enough to receive far more money than they could spend, and so tried to get rid of it in any way they could, consciously making bad investments, making little effort to protect their warehouses and doing anything when things were stolen, thus forcing them to spend more money buying the material that was stolen. That sort of thing.

Long Term:

There are all sorts of beautiful, wonderful strategies for development in Haiti. They have been drafted using money from all sorts of organisations and countries and they make for nice meeting platforms. They are essentially useless, though. Very little effort has been taken to make coordinated moves towards developments. Most of the action from government, NGOs, UN, and the other different actors has been uncoordinated and disorderly. You can think of it as a school children. They will all acts as "friends" make wonderful plans to work together, publish amazing reports with distorted figures about the achievements that have been done, while at the same time stabbing each other's backs and wanting to take as much credit as possible for the small positive outcomes. Thus the government claims that the building of 200 new schools in 6 months was their achievement, the UN will say that these same 200 schools could not have been built without the aid of the MINUSTAH (Mission des Nations Unis pour la Stabilisation d'Haiti - peacekeepers), the European Union will say that they put in the money and have therefore contributed to Haiti's education, and meanwhile there are no desks or chairs at the school or, as I've seen it, the owners of the land where the school has been built have decided to make some changes to the building and turn it into a private residence.

The chaos was evident since I arrived, but I had hope that it would get better. It seemed for a while that true coordination efforts were under way to actually come up with a central plan to develop Haiti. In fact, I believe the government had even created an organisation to do this. With time, though, especially around election time in 2010 (November, December and then again in beginning of 2011), we all lost focus. The chaos became the status quo, it was accepted, this is Haiti, there was really nothing that could be done about it. Apathy in one person or in a group of people happens all the time and is easily overcome, but apathy in a government and all its supporting branches and external structures is really a depressing thing that is almost impossible to overcome.

I am not sure if that answered your question, but there you have it.

Let me tell you first what the worst way to donate is: donations in kind. Sending clothes, water, food, whatever. That is amazingly annoying and mostly unnecessary. Most of the donations in kind will sit at warehouses for weeks and months and will cost much more to store and transport than if it was bought separately.

The easiest way to donate to Haiti would be to give money to a reputable, maybe non-religious organisation. It is true that a lot of the money does not reach the projects themselves, but that is unavoidable. You have to see your money not as equalling a brick in a school, but as something that helps that brick being put there. NGO offices, the cost of guards, even having coffee for a meeting, these all come from donations (mostly) and are in some way necessary to making it possible to put a brick in a school. Still, I understand your frustration with this.

I chose to go to Haiti because I needed work. I got an interview through a friend of mine for an NGO and was sent over very shortly after the earthquake of 2010 (in January). I did it because at the time it was the highest paying job I could find, and because it was vaguely related to what I wanted to do career-wise. I never intended to stay as long as I have. One month turned into three more, which turned into six, and next thing I know I've been here for years. For a while I tried convincing myself that I came to help people and to respond to the disaster, and I suppose that made my job easier, but with time I realised that it is really a dirty and disgusting business (yes, a business). I plan to leave in December of this year.