Stories of Aid

[bcholmes]

1. Threatening my charities:

I got this letter from one of the charities that I support:

Dear <bcholmes>

I received your letter today regarding your concerns about CIDA and its influences on <Our Fine Charity (OFC)>. Thanks for taking the time to write us, it is always encouraging for us to see such a deep level of engagement from our donors.

I took a look at your account's communication log and see that last June you actually spoke with our former Program Officer for Haiti, <Former Employee>. She has since left <OFC> for a senior management position at <Another Organization> (we miss her!). As such, I'm not able to refer you back to her.

I can reiterate what she may have relayed to you last year, namely that <OFC> receives very little funding from CIDA. The majority of our funds are raised through our generous donors (like you). We deal with CIDA only on a project to project basis. Less than 2% of our program revenue is obtained through CIDA grants. We have no plans to grow that number. In fact, we have a very cautious approach when dealing with CIDA. We are all too aware of the capricious nature of its policies and grant processes. We only partner with CIDA in cases where a grant would clearly benefit the people whom we serve in the field -- as was the case with our Haiti relief programs.

[...]

I'm sure that many of my colleagues in THAC would challenge me for giving to CIDA-funded charity. I like being able to have these conversations with organizations like this.

2. Let me study you in your native habitat

On my last trip to Haiti, there was a guy named Jim staying at Matthew 25. He was a grad student, studying education, and he was in Haiti looking for a research subject. He had a grant to start a study of incentives and education. He was sending lots of emails to organizations operating in Haiti, looking for a group that had 30 or 40 schools so that he could try some experiments in incentive.

I got to hear him describe this a few times. He wanted to determine if some kind of structured reward system would keep kids in school. If, say, they gave the parents money for every month the kids stayed in school, would school attendance rise?

For my part I told him that, in my experience, kids want to get an education. Families can only afford school on a month-to-month basis. If a kid's parents can't afford school on a particular month, the kid will borrow a friend's homework so that they don't get behind. He seemed to be describing "the school problem" in terms that didn't match my experience of the matter.

He listened to me and nodded politely, and changed nothing about what he was doing. I saw him over several days, both at the beginning of my trip, and the end. I heard him repeat this story of his purpose several times. Many of the people who were familiar with school systems in Haiti raised similar objections. Jim listened to the objections, but didn't seem to change anything.

Over dinner one night, Sister Mary said to me: "I'm trying to figure out how to get through to Jim. He's got this research grant that he's serious about, but he's trying to study a US inner-city problem that doesn't translate to Haiti."

"Maybe we should hook him up with Rea?" I suggested. "She might be able to give him a better idea of how the schools work, here."

"Problem is, he wants someone who works with 40 schools. He's not going to be interested in talking to Rea, because they're just one school."

As far as I could tell, Jim stayed at the guest house for weeks, at a cost of $35 a night. On a good day, he'd arrange to have a meeting with some charitable group to talk about his project. But mostly, he'd hang around the house, sending emails and watching his "Teach Yerself French" software.

Labour theory of charity

One of the jobs I did, working for HODR, was to move some storage rooms.

Apparently Leyogàn has the only accredited nursing school in all of Haiti. Two plots from the HODR base was the big space that housed the inflatable hospital, where I spent several days tarping a field clinic. One of the buildings in that space was a large dormitory for the nursing school. It was a modern and well-constructed building that was also providing some space for the hospital.

One dorm room had been converted into the on-site pharmacy, and some other spaces had been converted into storage rooms that housed a large number of medical supplies. Bandages, dialysis equipment, IV doohickies. A ton of stuff. One long hallway was one of the spaces converted into a storage room, and there was a metric buttload of stuff.

The problem was that the dormitory was funded by USAID (the US equivalent of CIDA). At the end of the month, a USAID inspector was due to arrive to determine whether or not to approve funding for the next year. And everyone involved in the dormitory was concerned that they would lose marks for using the dormitory for non-dormitory purposes. So they asked the folks who ran the hospital to move their storage room and pharmacy. The hospital people turned to HODR. I was one of the volunteers.

This was not the first time that HODR helped out. Much earlier in the process, someone had built big, solid, sturdy shelves to hold all of the medical supplies. These shelves were big and heavy and were not fun to move.

Everyone kept telling us how important this job was, but many of us had problems with morale. The thing is, it was a stupid task. Essentially, everyone expected an intransigent administrator to arrive and be unwilling to make allowances for a category 7 earthquake having forced some people to improvise a bit on USAID-funded property. If USAID could be trusted to be reasonable, there'd be no need for us to move the stuff. But everyone was certain that the USAID people weren't likely to be reasonable. So there we were. Half a dozen or so people for two days hauling stuff from a perfectly fine storage room to a far-less-secure tent. This was an "important" job.

I worked in the hallway/storage room for much of the first day. Some of us were pausing a bit after we'd cleared a bunch of stuff, and dragged some shelves out to be loaded in a truck.

Maria was kvetching at me in the storage room. "This is stupid. They must have known that this day was going to arrive at some point. Why did they build all these shelves in here?"

"Yeah," I conceded. "It does feel like a bit of a waste of labour power."

"Oh, shit," she said. "Did you know that was there?" She pointed down toward my shoe.

That's when I learned that Haiti had tarantulas.

4. Strike

So we went on strike for about a day or so. The strike began on Saturday morning, but I didn't find out about it for a few hours. My group was working at the field hospital just a few lots over from the HODR base. Because we didn't need to wait for Tap-taps, we wandered over to the site before the local volunteers arrived to ask the international volunteers to strike with them.

Around 10:45, Mel showed up at our site. "I'm gonna join you guys," she said.

"Okay," we said. "We're just finishing up these tarps."

"I slipped away. I wanted to get something useful done," she said.

"Oh?" I asked. "What do you mean?"

She explained how none of the rubble crews went out to their sites. The whole base was shut down. We only had another 45 minutes to go before breaking for lunch, so we finished the stuff we were doing.

That afternoon, nobody planned to work: there was a World Cup event and the base had previously decided to take an afternoon off to watch the game. And Sunday isn't normally a working day. By Monday, the HODR management had relented and everything went back to normal.

But I found myself really surprised by a lot of the opinions expressed during the time that we were officially on strike. People would often express this idea: "I came all this way; I just want to do something productive." As if the most important thing was that they felt that they were doing identifiable "work", regardless of how the local people were being treated.

I tried to have this conversation with some people, but it was really hard to get them to see the point. They came to shovel rubble. They wanted to shovel rubble and then go home and tell their friends that they shovelled rubble to aid rebuilding in Haiti. Striking in solidarity with the local people isn't part of that narrative.

I do think that HODR is doing good stuff in Haiti. I think its genius is precisely in its ability to channel so much volunteer labour in a way that can be put to good use. But I look at some of these moments and wonder to what extent I'm seeing a microcosm of way aid organizations operate in Haiti.