On Monday, we began travelling to Pòdepè. That morning, we'd attended a funeral for Father Ednea Devaloin, and we piled up into an SUV; seven of us delegates, plus our luggage. It was a tight squeeze, and not without some complaining. We hit the road around ten or ten thirty, and five hours later, we were leaving Gonaives. It was around that time that we saw one of the (very few) road signs that announced that Port-de-Paix (Pòdepè, en kreyòl; the street signs are all in French) was 150km ahead of us. Three hours after that, we passed another sign that told us that Port-de-Paix was only 78km farther. We'd crossed half the distance in those three hours.
You have to understand the roads. In some places, the roads are okay. Near Pòtoprenz (Port-au-Prince) and some other major urban centres, the roads are paved, but not terribly passable. It's rare to see a stretch of ten metres without at least one pothole. Me, I'm not sure how the roads have degraded so much. Coming from Canada, I think of potholes as caused by the alternating freeze/thaw cycle. In a tropical country such as Haiti, I'm unclear about what causes the potholes, here. But they're everywhere. The consequence is that our driver is constantly weaving back and forth on the road, trying to avoid potholes that can be avoided, and slowing down to avoid a tire-blowout is you have to drive through it. In the cities, the streets are two lanes wide, but at times, that squeezes downs to two car-widths wide. There isn't much traffic. While we saw a number of other vehicles, they were few (but usually filled with many people).
The farther north we went, the worse the roads became. In places, the paved roads became concrete, but most of our trip, the roads were packed dirt with some difficult, pointy rocks. Actually, packed dirt is probably not an accurate description; it's more like packed dust. And when it rains, the water digs valleys into the roads, creating misshapen hills and gulleys. We spent a lot of time rocking from side to side, or swerving out of the way of some of the sharper rocks and protrusions.
Shortly after Gonaives, we noticed the skeletal start of an elevated highway. Several supports were in place to have a highway five or six feet above ground level (and in a area that experiences flooding, that's probably a good plan). But no actual highway. *shrug*. Like the street repairs in Gonaives, this was work that was abandoned. The goats seemed to enjoy standing on the lonely structures, though.
We drove over mountains, around rocks, through rivers. We would have made an interesting SUV commercial (this is possibly one of the few times that I don't feel compelled to make snarky comments about SUVs; my Prius would never have made it over those roads.)
Around four and a half hours after Gonaives, our driver, a Haitian-American man who has lived outside of Haiti since he was in his teens, asked, "Does anyone in this car think that this is normal?" It was a question with an obvious answer, but voicing it out loud made us take a moment to reflect on just how insane it is that the main road between two cities is so awful.
I mentioned a point about Paul Farmer: that in Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder describes a key moment in Farmer's life when he saw a tap tap overturned on the road down Morne Kabrit; a woman who sold mangoes had died. Kidder writes:
Accidents happen. Sure. But not every bad thing that happens is an accident. There was nothing accidental about the wretchedness of the road down Morne Kabrit or the overloaded tap-tap, or the desperation of a peasant woman who had to get to the market and make a sale because otherwise her family would go hungry. These circumstances all had causes, and the nearest ones were the continuing misrule of the Duvaliers and the long-standing American habit of lavishing aid on dictators such as Baby Doc, who used money to keep himself and the Haitian elite in luxury and power and spent almost nothing on things like roads and transportation.
I'd always liked this passage, but, y'know, you can read a phrase like "the wretchedness of the road", and nod, and say, "oh, the roads in Haiti are bad, I hear." But driving on these roads, taking six hours to travel 150km, I got a new sense of what that phrase means.
The car lapsed into silence for a bit, and I was lost in thought. For a time, I wasn't thinking about the cramped, uncomfortable SUV, or the rocking back and forth. I was full of thinking I'm Having An Experience™! A moment, in which circumstances forced me to really step outside of the comfortable Canadian life that I think of as normal. I turned to T., and remarked that two months earlier, I didn't know about the delegation. Because of the timing, I really kinda leaped into it without a lot of reflection. "I had no idea that I'd be having this experience," I said.
I like T.; I like the way she thinks and we spent some time on the first night geeking to each other about post-structuralists. And she said to me, "I hope that this isn't just An Experience." She was evoking a conversation that we'd had earlier about disaster tourism -- the trend of people to visit places like Ground Zero in New York or Rwanda. We'd debated what was behind that, and whether or not it was meaningful to look at that phenomenon derisively. T. was clearly tapping in to that conversation when she said (I'm paraphrasing), "if people come on a delegation like this, and have their Third World Experience™, and then go home and treat it like a good story to tell at parties, well...." She didn't have to finish that sentence.
Me, I thought, ohmigod, is that what I'm doing? Treating a human rights fact-finding delegation like a commodity?
Some time later I came back to that conversation. I brought up that passage from Paul Farmer's Pathologies of Power:
I am therefore somewhat uneasy about calling the first half of this volume "Bearing Witness." Some of my anxiety has legitimate sources: the boundary between bearing witness and disrespectful (or self-interested) rooting is not always evident, even to those seeking to be discerning. And, to be honest, writing of the plight of the oppressed is not a particularly effective way of assisting them. As Philippe Bourgois notes, paraphrasing a warning issued by Laura Nader years ago: "Don't study the poor and powerless, because everything you say about them will be used against them." I hope to have avoided lurid recountings that serve little other purpose than to show, as anthropologists love to do, that I was there.
Before coming on this tour, I set up blogs on the THAC website for Roger and me, so that we could record our experiences about coming here. I haven't felt that I've had much Internet connectivity for the last four days, and I'm behind on blogging my experiences. (For space reasons, we're travelling with bare minimum luggage, and I decided to leave the laptop behind. Roger's been a bit more frequent in his blogging). But I think that Farmer quote is an important thing to keep in mind as we're down here.
I think that reporting on our experiences is a Good Thing. Part of the reason that the so-called Friends of Haiti (Canada, France, and the US) have been successful in destabilizing the government, here, is that there's so little discussion about or awareness of what's going on. Haiti isn't on anyone's radar. And that really bothers me. But all that's saying, I suppose, is that I'm seeking to be discerning; I can only hope that blogging about these experiences really does bear witness.
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