Matthew (M.G.) Olson The Alternative Politics of Local Solidarite and Accountable International Aid in Post- Earthquake Haiti Summary of 2012 Stone Center Summer Field Research Grant September 2012

My summer research field experience provided incredible opportunities for me to engage in the ethnographic practice of participant-observation on solidarity aid in two projects in small country towns of Haiti. These projects were both grounded in humanitarian visions of a sustainable Haiti, but their differing focus, approach and structure provided valuable models for comparison. One project is a small hospital that assists residents of

La Vallee de Jacmel, a mountainous region in the south outside of the renowned cultural city Jacmel. The other organization is a long-standing agricultural assistance, teaching and post-earthquake housing reconstruction center located in Gressier, about one hour west of Haiti's capitol Port-au-Prince.

Port-au-Prince was the third planned research site, which was based not on extended participation- observation but instead on more informal conversations with staffs of non-governmental organizations and human rights activists. They are organizing to achieve accountable and sustainable programs for post-earthquake survivors now living in tent cities or in unstable homes who face increased vulnerability to gender-based violence, inaccessibility to clean water and unemployment among other issues of dispossession and depravity that certainly did not originate with the 2010 earthquake, but expanded with it. Conversations with people involved in post-earthquake social movements, and with middle- and upper-class Haitians attempting to assist their country with “progressive” aid and job opportunity projects, offered valuable insight into the layers of

Haitian politics, economics, development and ideologies of “progress” that emanate out from the capitol.

Despite my inquiries to sources about distinguishing features of post-earthquake

I arrived in Haiti in late June 2012 with a two-week medical humanitarian mission consisting of nearly

50 volunteers. Association Haitien de Developpement Humain (AHDH; Haitian Association of Human

Development), a New Orleans-based and Haitian Diaspora-run group, organizes three medical missions per year to the same hospital in La Vallee de Jacmel. The sister relationship between the Hopital St. Joseph and AHDH has existed for more than 20 years and is finally reaching a level of success where there is a full-time year-round nurse and nursing assistants at the hospital. The medical missions bring in not only U.S.-based doctors (OBGYN, Pediatric, Ophthalmologist) and medical students, but volunteer Haitian doctors, nurses and nursing students.

The functioning of the hospital during the two-week mission trip was a seemingly significant addition to the daily life of the small town and surrounding region. Banners were put up over the few roads weeks before to announce the mission's arrival; long lines and ti machann (small street merchants) formed outside the hospital from the first day; and there were frequent interactions between young Haitians, especially boys, and the volunteers. As the only hospital in the region able to offer surgery, there were considerable material positive effects from the presence of the local and international medical professionals. For instance, 32 cataract operations occurred in the first week. However, for the length of relationship between the hospital and AHDH, there were many organizational challenges. Much of the leadership inhered in the two doctors affiliated directly with AHDH, which became problematic when the flexible process of patient intake, record keeping and the leaders' duties unrelated to the hospital converged during the work day, occasionally paralyzing the other volunteers or at the least leaving them to apply their own ethics to myriad new situations. Despite the new cultural context of the Haitian countryside, there was no orientation to volunteers prior to working with Haitian patients, which created a number of awkward, confusing or unsettling moments for volunteers and Haitian patients alike.

The model of international aid in this case resembled an encompassed and limited solidarity, in which there existed an unequal chain of decision-making and power from AHDH to the hospital's director to the full- time nurse to the hospital's patients and local residents. However, it differs from a charity model in that it is not static and satisfied with this relationship but working on shifting the power toward the operators of the hospital and financing the education of young Haitians to become the nurses and doctors who will stop the “brain drain” and stay to work in the country.

In Gressier, I observed and learned from the pragmatic, but visionary Haitian NGO Institute of

Technology and Animation(ITECA), which acts as a peasant advocate and negotiator with international aid agencies for support of sustainable agricultural training and projects such as their tree seedling greenhouse for reforestation or the hen raising project that involves local youth. In the post-earthquake context, ITECA assumed responsibility to defend the human rights of Gressier residents, fighting for replacement housing funds that would allow for dignified houses for the remote community, rather than simply accepting blue tarps for shelter.

Among civil engineers, foremen, ITECA staff and a concrete block-making facility, I evaluated the various actors in this single long-term disaster recovery project that attempts to provide a just, free reconstruction for peasants and landless rural workers in this region of Haiti. While present, intense negotiations were occurring between the donor organization, the foreign firm that designed the houses and ITECA that further illuminated the layers of solidarities and frictions present in the contemporary aid “development” process.

My concentration on these two organizations allowed me to gain a greater understanding of the second of my previously stated research interests: “international aid projects that commit to a politics of solidarity, ensuring control of aid planning and distribution by survivors [residents] themselves.” I saw from the perspective of a nascent alternative international aid perspective in AHDH and the perspective of a Haitian NGO which leverages greater solidarity from international aid partners for peasants, but also must meet demands for accountability and solidarity from the less networked residents. I achieved some anecdotal success regarding my other research interest—“the mutual aid exhibited among local residents as a means of survival in disaster contexts, such as sharing resources like food, shelter and medicine that place the community above the individual”—through informal conversations with La Vallee de Jacmel, Port-au-Prince and Gressier residents.

All my sources pointed to the fact that Haitians were first responders, saving peoples lives by pulling them out of rubble, taking them to the hospital, or offering water and food to those who could not retreive it themselves.

Some sources deemed it necessary to remind me that the supposed chaos depicted by TV cameras was unrealistic and occurred in very isolated incidents . No one I talked with witnessed any violence in the direct aftermath of the earthquake.