Six Months After

Something filled up

My heart with nothing

Someone told me not to cry

-Arcade Fire, “Wake Up”

In the beginning it was surreal. To be in the snow, in Massachusetts. To see Haiti on the television everywhere I went. To be leaving my son for the first time, to go back to Washington, DC after having been away for five years. To call everyone I’d ever met who might be able to help, and getting called by everyone else who wanted to help.

It was brutal. Unimaginable. It was the worst pain, so many people dead at once. And the horror stories, the smell of all the bodies rotting under the rubble of the city. I watched the Hope for Haiti telethon in disbelief, all the people who had never thought of Haiti before, picking up their phones and texting to donate. The coverage, the overwhelming media focus, the last live victims coming out from under schools and houses. Piles of concrete and death. Where before people had responded with surprise and uncomfortable, “why Haiti” to my life’s work, suddenly my connection to Haiti began to illicit “God bless you” from strangers everywhere I went.

My first trip to Haiti after the quake broke my heart, as I knew it would. Block after block of destruction. Everyone outside under sheets, not many tents yet, airplanes flying low over the city all night. I waited at the UN logbase for hours, to depart on a humanitarian flight to Santo Domingo, watching everyone around me chain smoking, listening to Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up” over and over again, loud enough to drown out the helicopters.

I had ridden around the city on a motorcycle that morning, particle mask to keep out the dust and the smell of rotting bodies, camera in my hand. It was worse and not as bad as I thought it would be. People were doing all their normal daily stuff, carrying heavy loads of food, selling candies. Except now they were doing it in a place that looked like it had been bombed, trying to keep the smell of death from getting into their hair and clothes. I couldn’t keep my mask on my nose and mouth because it felt so wrong to not be able to smile at people, to say hello as we slowed down to get around the debris in the road, a pile of rocks and blocks, a plastic tarp where a baby was sleeping. When my driver took me up to visit his father at his home in Christ Roi, I saw these vistas where everything on the block where we passed was completely destroyed, and we could see across a small valley to a hillside where nearly every building was tumbling down. We passed on narrow paths under tarps pulled across the road, loud trespassers in someone’s makeshift living room.

I thought: it’s always been hard to make a case that Port-au-Prince isn’t one of the worst places in the world. Now, it is impossible. It’s harder to be in the U.S. now in some ways, but there is a tangible relief that comes from not living near a camp, or having to pass the mound of rubble that once was an apartment building bustling for life.

Is that the worst part? That we are all living in a cemetery, driving around mass graves every day. That we get stuck in traffic for hours, forced to stare at the remains of what was. That the help never really came – the disaster industry came and spent a lot of money setting up their staff in apartments with cars and drivers and curfews. They fortified and sanctified the UN log base, they even brought a cruise ship to ease the stress for humanitarian aid workers. They talk endlessly about transitional shelters and give progress reports filled with self-congratulatory pats on the back for essentially weak and shameful results.

The worst part is that they don’t know what to do next. They talk about transitions but without acknowledging the plan of what comes next. The worst part is the plan already exists. And with all the millions of dollars donated by people from all over the world, somehow they still don’t have enough money to put the plan into action.

The process of moving people out of Port-au-Prince’s tent cities is inevitably going to be ugly. The reality is that a terrible tragedy occurred in Haiti, beyond anyone’s immediate control. The other reality is that the crisis is far from over. It wasn’t just a 35 second earthquake and that’s it. The crisis is right now, and the suffering continues. A representative of a large non-governmental organization circulated an astounding email the week before the six-month mark, saying that the problem of forced evictions of IDPs was bad and the solution isn’t violence. She went on to say that trespassing is not the solution either, and that private property is a human right, too. She admitted – in writing – a debate that has been going on between “humanitarian agencies” and government actors. There is a myth in Haiti right now that private property is somehow a human right that is on par with the right to life, to shelter and safety, for internally displaced people.

Right now people are living in cramped dangerous unhealthy camps because the government won’t push the issue of land policy so that the can claim private lands and make them available for even transitional shelter, never mind long-term housing. It is not in the GOH’s interest to take away the land of the elite, the most powerful class in the country that continues to wield its influence on a government that is overwhelming representative of that very elite. If President Preval is going to make lands available to the survivors living in camps, it is going to be because those people organize and put pressure on the government to do it.

Is the right to life more important than the right to property? It never has been in Haiti before. For decades, no centuries – for centuries Haiti has been ruled by a small minority that treats the poor majority like less than human. The first members of this minority were the French, and imported African labor was the majority. And today this system persists to an unparalleled extent in Haiti, the chasm between rich and poor as stark as the SUV with dark-tinted windows and air conditioner on full blast driving past the people living on the median of the highway behind Carrefrour. Private property has always been more valuable than human life in Haiti, and the right to own, to exploit, to make profit from the land has been granted highest priority protection. There are stories that farmers still cringe to tell, in almost every corner of the country, about the military and landowners working together to protect that most sacred of rights in Haiti: private property.

The earthquake threatens the elite with a crisis much more frightening to them than any that has come before. If the world can keep its attention on Haiti for long enough, and the people in the camps organize themselves to demand what they deserve, the elite will be faced with having to give up some of their power, an earthquake may force them to finally begin to redistribute what has been their greatest hold over the poor majority for the centuries Haiti has existed.

There is no other way. Unless we resign ourselves to Port-au-Prince becoming the city of slums, with escalating violent crime and terror in the night. The only solution is for people to leave Port-au-Prince, and they must be given a place to go. The international community can follow the Haitian Government’s own plan for reconstruction, and if they do they will invest outside of Port-au-Prince, a territorialization of the country.

It means that the elite, the majority of whom have retained their wealth and their homes in the suburbs above Port-au-Prince, who stand to benefit the most from the disaster relief industry, have to suffer, too. An earthquake doesn’t choose its victims based on their relative poverty. The earthquake affects each and every Haitian, making each one both victim and survivor. Now the elite, the rich, must become victims, too, because they must give up their land to save their neighbors.

This is the change in the status quo, it is the earthquake obliterating that gap between rich and poor the way it does when an aftershock wakes everyone at four in the morning and suddenly we find we are all together, every one of us, in the earthquake.