Faces, Stories

[bcholmes]

After talking to Georges, yesterday, we spent the day continuing at BAI. People representing multiple different organizations came to tell us their stories.

(The guy in the middle of the women is our translator, Daniel.)

One of the first groups that I saw was a group called Favilak. Fanm Viktim Leve Kanpe. Victimized women standing up to rise above. Or something like that. Apparently, Lovinsky helped found the group, having encountered many of these women through his work with victims of the '91 coup. Once again, I became aware of a huge Lovinsky-shaped hole in the community.

Favilak didn't spend a lot of time telling us personal stories. They established early on that they've been telling their stories a lot, and that they're tired of doing it because for all their story-telling, nothing is changing. And they directly asked: what can you people do for us?

One of the delegation members went through a standard spiel about how we're activists interested in international solidarity. He established a pretty clear, pretty safe boundary around what we can offer and what we can't. And seemed comfortable living in the box. Me, sometimes I don't really know what the phrase "solidarity" means. Sometimes what we do looks like the manufacturing model: you victims of violence provide stories of pain and suffering, and we'll use that as raw material for our product... a Compelling Story Of Third World Suffering. And we reassure ourselves that so long as we tell our Compelling Story in the best way possible, those people who provided us with their stories will get some trickle-down benefits down the line.

I don't know if that's enough for me. But do I have better ideas? What can I do?

Favilak gave us an out. They offered to sell us T-shirts. They sell these T-shirts as a way of raising money. They brought six or seven, and sold all of them at USD $20 a pop. They seemed happy to go away with a fair amount of money in their pockets. But I can't say that I was entirely content with the outcome.

I bought one of the shirts. It's not black, so I doubt that I'll ever wear it. Anyone want a XXL white T-shirt in kreyòl? If it were a bit more fannish, I'd donate it to the Tiptree auction.

And we saw more people representing other privatized industries. Téléco, the national phone company. The trash collectors. The same story as yesterday: they've been laid off, severance agreements not honoured, unions co-opted.

Some people wanted to take their time to give us solemn statements about the conditions in Haiti. We'd become more organized in our second day: imposing time limits and making sure that people were better introduced. But sometimes we wouldn't get enough time to really feel the things that the people were saying.

In the two days, we saw a number of groups representing the informal sector (the "ti machann", or little merchants).

Another group came to tell us about the situation for political prisoners. The case of Ronald Dauphin came up again. Dauphin has been in jail since 2004, his due process stalled for much of that time.

Torture is not a large concern -- although they were aware of one case of torture -- but there was bland food, lacking in sufficient nutrients, two meals a day (breakfast and lunch), dirty shower-water leading to skin lesions, and general overcrowding. They key concern, though, is that people are held for arbitrary lengths of time while their cases are stuck in legal limbo.

We talked a bit about how, on a recent visit, Michaëlle Jean announced that Canada will help Haiti to build a new prison. These activists were unequivocal: Haiti needs houses, not prisons.

Eventually, we reached the end of our day. We probably had forty or fifty different speakers over two days.

We came back to Delmas, and had dinner. A much more American-style macaroni and cheese dish. The cooks were busy making metric buttloads of traditional pumpkin soup which is what one has on independence day. (This goes back to the days of slavery: the slave masters would not allow the slaves to have pumpkin soup. After the revolution, the former slaves get to make it for themselves.)