Ben Tshin

I’ve been here almost 5 days and I’ve been asked numerous times what my impressions are of Haiti: it’s nothing like what I expected. But what did I expected anyway?

I didn’t expect Haiti to be so developed. Haiti has been on the international development radar even before the earthquake; it’s ranked 149 out of 182 countries according to Human Development Index. The next entry on the HDI is Sudan. Port-au-Prince feels decades ahead of Juba and the small towns of South Sudan. I was anticipating decrepit open spaces with people living in huts and makeshift shelters, but instead the streets of PaP are lined with countless shops and homes. And the buildings are generally well built – where I’m staying.

I’m meeting many well-read, well-educated Haitians, as well as seeing communities filled with poverty. Haiti doesn’t have anything average. There are no average middle-class as you would find in Nairobi, or in Kampala. Instead, there are the very rich (include the educated here) and the very poor but no one in-between. Some of the houses I’ve seen are gigantic; the expat hotels are comparable to any I’ve seen.

If you were to average out the entire country, it feels on par with many developing countries. Except that the wealth is not at all distributed equally. Paul Farmer (who I’m beginning to read) lived and worked in Haiti and describes it through his theory of “structural violence”.

I expected to see more damage from the earthquake. Alas, I’m staying in a richer (and better built) area of Port-au-Prince away from the epicentre of the earthquake.

There are so many leftover, hand-me-down goods in Haiti that it makes me embarrassed to have entertained the thought. Second-hand clothes fill the streets. The buses are discarded, “yellow rocket” school buses from Lake and Dade county in Florida.  Most of them are re-welded, patched and look unsafe for anyone to ride. It’s as if we in US and Canada are too righteous to throw out our old junk, so we decide instead to ship it off to an island landfill.

Anyway, that’s enough for now. I visited the Corail IDP camp today. That’ll be a whole other discussion.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 5th, 2010 at 11:56 pm and is filed under Reflections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.