Why?

Today was a tough day.

I arrived back to work at the clinic this morning to the news that 3 of the 9 children we were planning to enroll in our project next month died over the last month or two.

A little later in the morning an HIV-positive mother of 20-month-old twins who is followed at the clinic came to see me and my coworker. The twins - a boy and a girl - weighed 6.2 and 7.1 kg respectively. (That puts them at the 0 percentile for weight for height). Their faces and hands were covered with sores. The little boy had a respiratory infection. When I asked the mother what the children were eating she said they had no appetite for solid food (a common side effect of severe malnutrition) and she could not afford milk. We offered her the last few bags of rehabilitation manba that we had on our shelf. I do have some hope that the children may recover weight in the months to come....but her family's needs run so much deeper than what I am prepared to respond to clinically….or on any other level.

The day ended with my colleague pointing out the fresh blood stains on the walkway outside our office door. Our nutrition project space is one doorway down from the sexual violence clinic where rape victims can receive the exam needed to submit a police report. This afternoon, just outside the gate to the clinic's compound, a young girl walking down the street with her father was assaulted and raped at random. Her father immediately brought her, still bleeding from the attack, to the clinic.

I’ve been reading a book about family planning policy in Haiti written by an anthropologist from San Francisco who spent several years living in Cite Soliel – the slum community where a good portion of our patients live. She opens one of the chapters with this quote from a resident in 2003:

I can honestly tell you – with no jobs, no food aid, and in the end, no love – life today is worse than death itself. I think I’ll get more respect when I’m dead.

Another woman from the community ended her description of her current situation by saying:

There have been times when I would just stop and ask God, “Why did you make me?”

Today I found myself asking the same question.

Prizeworthy leadership

“Good governance is the single most important factor in eradicating poverty and promoting development” Kofi Annan, Former United Nations Secretary-General

A story worth sharing about this year's Ibrahim Prize winner - Botswana's former president Festus Mogae. I only hope that one day soon my own country will will have a president who exhibits such humble strength as Mr. Mogae who responded being honored with the following:

"One does one's work, one uses one's best endeavours to do a job as well as one could, and if other people then assess it and judge it to be meritorious and worth of recognition it's then honouring and humbling,....I did not create the democracy in my country, I consolidated it and deepened it by practiced, accountable governance, respect of the rule of law, independence of the courts, respect for human rights, including women's rights"

ma galerie d'art haïtien

This round in Haiti I've let myself indulge a little more in the country's amazing visual art scene. I've purchased several paintings by Haitian artists over the last 6 months. In previous years, I only bought art from street vendors or craft shops but recently I've had the chance to learn a bit more about the more established Haitian art scene from the lovely Haitian-Swiss-American family that owns the Gallerie Monnin in the suburb just outside of Port-au-Prince.

After being in and around Haiti for several years now, I have developed deeper convictions about the need to invest and showcase Haiti's incredible cultural resources - both the visual arts and music. They must be capitalized on if this country is going to develop the way of its neighboring tourism-driven economies. (The DR and other neighboring islands actually import Haitian art to sell in their own tourist markets).

My most recent art buying splurge (see pair of paintings on left) was also justified by more selfish motivations - a bit of self-entitlement and even a little self-pity related to the turning 30 in a few weeks. Self-entitlement is a dangerous thing at any time but especially for a graduate student living on a relatively limited stipend....who happens to have a taste for slightly expensive art. I've told myself that I can only purchase one more piece before I go - and only if my bank balance around the time of my departure really allows it. I'm afraid this resolution for restraint in art acquisition might go the sorry way of many of my other resolutions, New Years and otherwise.... but at least there might be some nice art to show for it this time around.

Escape Artist

This Tuesday afternoon I am scheduled to head to Washington DC for a meeting on research agendas in HIV/AIDS and Nutrition. I am super thankful for the chance to go. Professionally it's a great opportunity to stay current on issues/emerging questions in my field and maybe make some helpful connections for post-graduation. I'll hopefully bring back some ideas and contacts that will help the clinic where I currently work with their work. While I'm very interested in the meetings professionally, I must confess to being more excited about the chance to visit good friends in the Philly/Baltimore/Washington area. The meetings are Thursday and Friday but I won't be flying back to Haiti until Monday. I already have lunch/dinner and other social plans in place for every evening and the weekend.

October 15th marked my 1-year mark of working more or less full time here in Port-au-Prince. I've out of Haiti quite a bit over the last 12 months. Every 6-10 weeks or so I've managed to escape for at least a weekend in Miami - thanks to the generosity of my parents who have helped pay my way and other friends who have hosted me. I'm being very intentional about using the term escape - that's pretty much what it has felt like every time I have left. What am I escaping? The poverty? The responsibility of my PhD? The lack of freedom to go out and about? Perhaps - but I've been deeply convicted by the fact that I am trying to escape something much more fundamental. I've been trying to escape who I am in this context.

This is a bit more personal than the direction most of my blog entries head, but if I am trying to give an honest window into my experience here, this has been the underlying current through all of it. I do not think I have ever lived through another season where I am more fundamentally discouraged by my own thoughts and feelings as I have been during this this past year (although the entire grad student endeavor has been challenging in this regard). Closer to the start of this season in Haiti, there were several months there when I was disconcertingly depressed and totally overwhelmed - when I would wake up every morning at 5 am and call my parents in tears. I am thankful to no longer be in that place.... but I also know that part of the way I've gotten beyond it is by creating a pretty tough shell around myself both physically and emotionally. I have gone days without leaving the basic confines of our apartment as the effort that would need to be extended logistically, emotionally, relationally, and sometimes financially did not seem worth the effort. I have become incredibly critical of some of those around me and find myself actively trying to avoid others. Just yesterday I had someone come up to me and (quite bravely/kindly) tell me that something I said had really hurt their feelings.

What is this change of personality (and hopefully not character...though sometimes I worry it is) rooted in? I think it's rooted in loneliness - not aloneness or boredom- but a deeper kind of loneliness that is in a way a testament to how much I have actually been blessed. Over the years, I have developed and sustained an incredible family network - both biological and extended by friendships. These are people with whom i feel totally safe - free to express my greatest joys, my fears, my questions. They are my home - my mobile home - that has been added on to everywhere from Chicago to Kenya to Charm City to Ithaca.

For some reason though, Haiti feels like an exception to that trend. Please don't read this and take it as an accusation of the people I have encountered here in Haiti. There are many truly wonderful people who I do enjoy getting to know and be with when I have the chance. There have been a series of people who have come and gone who have taught me tremendous lessons - many of them hard but important. There are several other people who have passed through and offerred a small taste of home and hope. Many people from my more distant home communities have been there to listen to and love me through calls, emails or visits.

I have had plenty of moments when I find myself blaming those around me for my loneliness and frustration, but I know it is simply not true. I wish I could say that I have reached out to God in my loneliness - but instead I've just managed to get pretty pissed and doubtful - not something I am particularly proud of and definitely not something that seems in any way productive. It feels like a bit of a vicious cycle - a need for community to build and sustain faith and a need for faith to recognize and have the strength/hope to build community. There could be potential family-like friendships all around me right now, but I do not seem to have eyes to see them or a heart ready to receive them.

So where do I go from here? In the short term I will happily get on another plane out of town...but I know in my heart that I have to go back to the fundamentals - back to core issues of who I am and what I believe is true. I really want to embrace the image of the beloved captured by Henry Nouwen's beautiful essay Moving from Solitude to Community to Ministry - a reflection on Luke 6:12-19.

"Your freedom (from fear/guilt/loneliness in my case) is anchored in claiming your belovedness. That allows you to go into this world and touch people, heal them, speak with them, and make them aware that they are beloved, chosen, and blessed. When you discover your belovedness by God, you see the belovedness of other people and call that forth. It's an incredible mystery of God's love that the more you know how deeply you are loved, the more you will see how deeply your sisters and your brothers in the human family are loved....... If we do not know we are the beloved sons and daughters of God, we're going to expect someone in the community to make us feel that way. They cannot. We'll expect someone to give us that perfect, unconditional love. But community is not loneliness grabbing onto loneliness: "I'm so lonely, and you're so lonely." It's solitude grabbing onto solitude: "I am the beloved; you are the beloved; together we can build a home."

Regaining a sense of my identity as beloved by God is the only way that Haiti - or anywhere in this world for that matter - will ever feel like home. I am a bit overwhelmed by the idea of adopting the disciplines of prayer, meditation and thought control that will be needed to get there. A PhD seems simple to earn by comparison. But I know I need to be hopeful - hopeful that there may be a day when my plane ride out of PAP is no longer an escape but rather an extended commute between the many places I happily call home.

The Money Meltdown

Check out The Money Meltdown - a very easy to navigate site compiled by a financial journalist with a selection of well-organized links to key articles, podcasts and studies about the current financial crisis.

I must confess that between living in Haiti and thankfully not being in debt, I have been largely ignorant of all that is happening on the global economic scene. I am excited to work through some of the links on this site - starting with the This American Life podcast this afternoon as it's already on my i-pod.

Kore Pwodiksyon Lokal

Kore Pwodiksyon Lokal (Support Local Production) is a small but growing advocacy movement in Haiti that encourages people to buy local products. Check out this commercial produced by some of my friends at KPL - it has been airing frequently on national television for the last several months. (English subtitles included)


2008 has been a particularly difficult year for the stability of Haitian food system. Protests against the high price of food spread across the country mid-April. Hurricane-related rains in September destroyed a significant percentage of this season's harvest - likely the foreshadowing of further price increases in the months to come.

The artificially low cost of imported food (due to the policies of the US and other governments to subsidize their own farmers to overproduce) and environmental destruction have contributed to the decline in local production of staple foods like rice and peanuts. The lack of a strong stable government means there is little to no leadership in the realms of trade policy or development of infrastrcuture that could help counteract these factors. (Another very pertinent issue is that donor funding follows trends. Agriculture projects were very popular among international donors during the 70's and 80's in the wake of the green revolution. In the 80's, 90's donor attention moved on to other initiatives like family planning and building schools and most recently microfinance and HIV/AIDS, leaving development of the agricultural sector in donor-dependent countries underfunded. When I visited USAID Haiti a couple years ago, they told me that they no longer had a single agronomist on their staff).

Per the law of supply and demand, low supply of locally produced food translates into higher prices. A year ago it was US$2 more per tin to buy Diri Peyi (rice grown in Haiti) than Diri Miami (Miami rice - imported). For families living on less than $1 per day, price inevitably wins out over other perferences. Urban families are particularly prone to purchasing imported food because much of what is produced Haiti's rural agricultural provinces is also consumed there as poor infrastructure makes it logistically difficult and financially costly to get locally grown food to urban markets.

Declines in local production are more than just economic losses. Local food systems deeply reflect cultural identity. Local foods simply taste better to many Haitians. One particular variety of Haitian rice grown in the Artibonnite Valley has a very distinct almost ammonia-like smell and strong taste compared to the bland imported white rice. The first time I cooked with it I actually thought that something had gone terribly wrong and I was really apologetic to the hosts of the dinner party about the bad smell of my rice and lentils. Since then I've grown to really like this uniquely fragrant rice.

One of the exciting things to come from the April food riots was a lot of discussion in the Haitian media about the need to support local production for the sake of Haiti's national food security. Everyday Haitians are able to eloquently articulate fundamental issues of global trade policies and their effect on local food prices. There is a renewed appreciation for the importance of local food systems - and more recently what seems to be an awakening among some international donors for the need to reinvest in national production.

Prophetess(n.): one gifted with more than ordinary spiritual and moral insight; especially; an inspired poet.

If I were to list those people I consider prophets of my generation, Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai would be near the top of my list. An incredibly accomplished Chinese/Taiwanese American spoken word artist / author/ choreographer / multi-media producer Kelly just put out her latest video project BLACK, WHITE, WHATEVER on Youtube and Facebook. It's a timely call demanding that the presidential candidates acknowledge that the mosaic of the US population is composed of more than just black and white pieces.

I was privileged to share in some of the early days of Kelly's journey as an artist and an activist. We went to school together starting in 5th grade and became good friends in high school. I was able to get a front row seat at some of her earliest forays into performance poetry - facilitated by our beloved English teacher and forensics coach Mr. Sampson. (I also played the secretary/treasurer role during her tenure as class president). Several years ago I got to see Kelly perform at a theater festival in Chicago and have followed her work online ever since.

While it's truly incredible to see how far she has come so fast - it's not surprising in the least.

Hurricane recovery update

It's raining tonight in Port-au-Prince, but gently compared to several weeks ago when the series of 3 storms (Gustav, Hanna, and Ike) passed through.

Estimates of the destruction from those storms continue to rise. CNN and the AP report a current death toll of nearly 800. Road damage makes it difficult to reach the most affected areas. Last week, I watched US Marine helicopters on aid runs take off and land from the Port-au-Prince airport. We've seen the cost to transport our latest batch of manba (the fortified peanut butter) double. It comes from a factory in the northern city of Cap-Haitien and damaged roads have contributed to longer transport times at higher gas prices.

Flood damages to crops has caused losses of 20-30% of rice production and 10-20% of banana production. Recommendations are for emergency food distribution to continue until the next harvest cycles in March and June 2009. It's doubtful whether those recommendations will followed through on. The current combined aid appeal of US$107 million is less than 20% funded and it is expected that world attention and relief agency efforts will move on sooner than later.

I haven't been outside of relatively unaffected Port-au-Prince since the storms but I've been hearing lots of stories from friends working for organizations involved in the relief effort. People working up north in hardest hit Gonaives talk about the mud that's everywhere - blocking streets and flowing through what is left of homes. Schools are scheduled to reopen tomorrow after a nationwide delay in the start of the new school year. Up north, this requires clearing out not only the mud but also the families taking refugee in the school buildings.

In the South, roads between the captial Port-au-Prince and Les Cayes, Haiti's second largest city, remain seriously damaged. Right now it's impossible to make the trip without crossing part of the road in a boat. Fuel trucks are too heavy to cross on the small boats and so gas must be carried in a barrel at a time. As a result, gas stations are running out of gas. My friend B called me from Les Cayes on Friday night saying he was cooking in the dark since power lines had still not been repaired and gas shortages meant he couldn't run the generator. Several of my Canadian Embassy friends spent time on a Canadian Naval vessel that came to help with distribution of relief supplies. One of them loved the experience but the other said it was really hard for him to see how people fought over the supplies as soon as armed guards left the scene.

In the wake of the storms, my opinion of Digicel, the Irish-owned mobile phone provider that dominates the Haitian market, remains as high as ever. The company donated $1 million to relief efforts including replacement phones and $400,000 in free phone credit for affected families.