The News North Americans Don't See

[bcholmes]

Last night, two folks from New Jersey showed up at the guest house. I arrived very shortly after dinner had started, and I wandered in to find these two new guests at the dinner table. Sister Mary has gone back to the States (taking some kids with her for some medical treatment) and she'll be away for the rest of my trip.

So now the guest house is under the supervision of Pat and Vivian, a couple from Massachusetts who've been involved in Haiti activism for years and years, and Sister Mary Alban in here as well. Pat and Vivian appear to have known the two new guests for some time, and as I wandered into the kitchen, there was enthusiastic political talk going on around the table. This is one of the things I love about the guest house -- dinner conversation, hearing different people talk about programmes, events, politics, etc.

Conversation went in a lot of different directions. About what Haiti was like under Duvalier. About how there's still an odd admiration for Duvalier among some parts of Haitian society. One thing to be said for the brutality of the Tonton Makout: they certainly kept crime down. (If I were up for it, I'd make some snide comment about RNC policing. Meh.)

But ultimately we got into a conversation about news reporting about Haiti and how certain messages make it out and others don't. I'm feeling a bit demoralized about how important it is, on the blogs I read regularly, to talk about how horrible Ike appears. Hurricanes are more important to discuss when white folk are in danger, it seems. Hundreds of people dead in Gonayiv hasn't seemed to get any mention anywhere except for the Haiti-specific mailing lists I see. The mainstream news has had a bit more to say. But the blogosphere has pretty-much let me down, I must confess.

And we're talking about what news actually makes it out to the outside world, and how it's reported. Pat and Vivian actually had some of the mud cookies that were the topic of news reports that were forwarded to me endlessly. They had them stored in little plastic bags: yellow little disks. They'd gone to Site Soley and bought some around the time every news agency in the world decided to pick up the horrific story of people eating mud. Why that story, we wondered? Is it the grossness factor? Part of me can't help but wonder if it's also a "safe" story. As in, "Wow, that's just so horrible. Clearly things are so bad there that there's nothing useful that someone can do, so it's okay if I don't even try."

And we talked about Labadi, and how Royal Caribbean has a 99-year lease or something, and the cruise ships stop there and everybody disembarks. For years, travel companies were careful to leave you with the impression that Labadi is a private island, rather than merely a peninsula of Haiti. Pat and Vivian talked about conversations that they'd had with people: "Do you know what country Labadi is in?" Often the conversations would end with, "I don't want to think about the problems of a place like Haiti when I'm on vacation."

Then we were talking about the incident at the Hotel Montana. Shortly after the 2006 election, as the ballots were still being counted, news reports started to emerge that Préval was not going to get the necessary "50% plus one vote" majority to win the first ballot. Haitians began to suspect (probably correctly) that the vote was being tampered with (there were several reports of Préval-marked ballots appears in trash dumps that were helping to fuel these speculations). And so, one day, a bunch of Haitians decided to head on up to the Hotel Montana, where the foreigners who were in charge of coordinating the elections were staying. This was Monday, February 13th, 2006, and the election had taken place six days earlier. And when I say "a bunch of Haitians", I mean about 6,000.

(For the record, the Government of Canada is very proud of the $30 million dollars they spent coordinating the election.)

Pat and Vivian were in the country, then. They heard people talk about this incident. There was a mob. They shouted Préval's name. Some of them took swims in the hotel pool. I've heard that some people took food off of plates. But Haitians are quite pleased that the demonstration was civil, peaceful and successful. After this incident, Préval's standing in the vote count started improving.

But in the foreign press, this was repeatedly described as an angry, violent mob. The New York Times ran the headline, "Haitian Election Protest Grows in Size and Hostility." It helped the story that UN troops were flown on to the Montana's roof by helicopter, but unfortunately Bishop Desmond Tutu didn't read his script and he refused to be airlifted out, stating instead that he wanted to talk to the protesters.

News reporters love their little anecdotes. Here's the one I hear. Once the crowd decided it was time to leave, they filed out. One protester grabbed a towel off of a chair to take as a souvenir. Another protester confronted him: "Is that yours?" he demanded. "No," came the reply. "Then put it back!" Haitians are proud of this moment, and view it as part of the struggle to maintain democracy. Foreigners get to hear about an angry mob of black people. Surprise, surprise! That conjures up a very different impression of the event.

The recent food riots were portrayed in much the same way. Last February, when there were riots over food prices, the news media made a big deal about the chaos and violence. And surely some of that must have happened: a member of MINUSTAH apparently died in the conflict. Part of the local lore, though, that I don't hear about in the North American press, is that although a lot of Haitians took part in the protests, once it became clear that a segment of the protesters intended violence and property damage, the majority of the protest disengaged. As Pat says, the news shows you lines of MINUSTAH soldiers at the front of the protest, but don't show you kids playing several metres away. It ruins the image. And the image is always of a country out-of-control.

Comments

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

*nod*

As I've come to understand more about the relationship between kreyòl and French down here, it's become more and more important to me to use kreyòl spellings for things. Thus, unless I'm quoting, I tend to use "Gonayiv" or "Pòtoprens."

[redbird]

I have no argument with that, was just noting that they did it the other way. Oddly, their spellings give me some not-really-useful etymology (on portoprenz, for example), because French looks more like Spanish that kreyòl does, but I think I'm getting a better idea on pronunciation from the kreyòl spellings. On the other hand, I may be achieving certainty rather than accuracy. (I know that my French accent is abysmal, on the level of having trouble making myself understood in Montreal.)