Marie's Beauty Studio - part of Hait's micro-economy. Photo by Oxfam International.

Toronto – How can Haiti move from crisis to active reconstruction?  Last weeks’ article on micro-lending from the New York Times demonstrates the basic infrastructure challenges that are still keeping the country’s recovery in limbo.

Daniel Costello’s “Can Microlending Save Haiti?” explores the economic challenges that are still facing the country almost ten months after the earthquake.  Not only is the economy expected to contract a massive 9% this year, but only 15% of the $8.75 pledged to Haiti’s reconstruction has arrived.

The article asks whether micro-lending could spark Haiti’s economic recovery:

MICROCREDIT banks, or microbanks, were pioneered by Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank, which started 40 years ago by giving loans of a few dollars each to poor entrepreneurs in Bangladesh. In 2006, Mr. Yunus received the Nobel Peace Prize for this work.

In most cases today, microcredit clients start off with loans of as little as $25 to start a small business. The loans are often given to women who tend to spend their earnings directly on their families and communities. Many borrow in groups of five or more, and all members of the group work together and are responsible for repayment.

Some microlenders provide only loans, while others also offer education and health services. Partly because costs are so high, effective interest rates are often significantly steeper than those at traditional banks. In Haiti, rates range from 30 percent to 55 percent a year.

The micro-credit model has become a global success story, but faces unique challenges in Haiti.  One of the largest groups, Finca Haiti, “wrote off almost a third of its portfolio after many clients died in the earthquake or lost their homes and businesses. A staggering 53 percent of its borrowers were late on their payments”.

Overall, 18% of microcredit clients in Haiti have defaulted or are at risk of doing so — more than double the rate of a year ago, and far higher than the international standard of 2 to 3 percent.

Despite the challenges, some micro-credit banks are doubling down on their investment in the country.  One of the biggest, Fonkoze, wrote off 10,000 lost loans with funds from the Red Cross and others: “The bank then gave each client a new loan and a one-time cash payment of $125, at a total cost of $8.5 million.”

Will these small loans be able to kick-start the massively-damaged economy?  Unlikely, but they are playing a crucial role in Haiti by allowing thousands of small-business owners to stay afloat during a time of crisis.

I tried in vain to interview some of the merchants today. Some of them pretended to be too busy to be interviewed, while others complained about being interviewed too many times without ever seeing any changes from it. Because nobody wanted to be interviewed, but would permit me to photograph, I took some pictures in the morning, hoping they would tell some of the story for me.

When I came back in the afternoon to try the interviews again, my eye was caught by a little boy on the street. He had bare feet, dirty clothes on, and was begging along the street where fast cars were passing by. At first I thought he was crazy, or homeless and orphaned from the earthquake.

I followed this boy for a little bit, because I couldn’t understand what was going on. It’s not that there aren’t lot of kids in the streets, but they’re usually in squads. As I kept on following him, I realized he was really all by himself.

I decided to talk to him, even though I doubted he could provide any information. The first thing he said to me was “Gimmie some money, I’m very hungry, I’ve been walking and begging for hours and nobody gave me a thing”.

I gave him ten Haitian dollars, and asked his name; he told me “Ti Je” (”Little Eyes”). I asked him where he was going to, and he said “home”. Since I wanted to tell his story, I decided to follow him to his home nearby, a place called “Place Boyer”.

Once we arrived at his tent he earlier had called “home”, I met the woman who is in charge of him when his mother is selling goods at the market.

Knowing that she had neglected her responsibility, she did not want to be photographed with him (she told me he was a “wanderer”). But she allowed me to take pictures of him and answered all my questions.

This woman told me she was the family’s neighbor, which is why she had to keep an eye on him. She said that people call him “ti je” due to the deformation of his eyes, and that before the earthquake, he and his family were living in a slum village not too far from Petion-ville, but away from the city centre.

Because now it is possible for anybody to build a cottage in the street, or in any public place, the mother moved the family to Place Boyer; Ti je’s father disappeared during the earthquake.

Before I left, Ti je bought some plain rice and pea soup with the money I gave him in the camp and started eating.

I had to ask myself: in the years to come, what’s going to keep Ti je from all the downfalls of the streets: drugs, theft, prostitution, and all the lessons that come with them?

Port-au-Prince student, fixer and researcher Emmanuel Midi is blogging for Inside Disaster from Haiti. You can learn more about him in these blog posts, or connect with him on Facebook .

Emmanuel volunteers with the youth organization Fonds D’Actions pour le Développement, profiled by Nicolas Jolliet earlier this month.

Port-au-Prince – As street life starts again, so is the oldest profession of the world. And there’s a lot of new apprentices coming up town to work.

The vultures and amateurs of young, clean flesh are having a good time. The street prices are at their lowest, and there are plenty of women to choose from.

I found some of the new girls in mini-brothels, set up in court yards that look just like any camp.

Away from the bustle of the main streets, I wouldn’t have guessed that behind this rusty galvanized fence, school girls were learning their new trade.

All I see is a dog chewing on some garbage, and an old lady selling Tafia (homemade, high-proof rum) by the entrance.

All is quiet, except for a few Johns doing their shopping in darker corners.

As I have to do is wait for the place to be less busy, to wait for the Johns to finish their glorious deeds, to find a girl willing to tell me her story. We join the “party” sitting by a Tafia stand, where we could chat with the “street bosses”.

Tafia is a high proof home made rum containing tree bark and leafs that will “make da man strong”.

Tafia will intently lobotomize the rotten parts of your brains containing these memories and images you don’t want to carry with you.

Tafia will sweat the smells of the earthquake right out of your skin.

Tafia will free you from this tenacious diarrhea constantly reminding you that you are just a white boy and should stop eating out of side street food stalls.

It is a perfect choice to accompany the suffocating smell of burning trash that fills the neighborhood.

This is not a street party, just a dark and gloomy reflection of one. As you walk these dark streets, you watch your step so as not to stumble on families trying to sleep on side steps and hidden corners. On these streets, it’s hard to differentiate the “working” mothers from the ones that haven’t given in yet.

As things slowed down, I got to talk to “Johanne”. She barely had the energy to understand my questions. Her scorched voice, red eyes and already fading youth made me question what I was doing here.

But she had to tell her story, even though I could write it just by looking at her.

As we started talking, it seemed like she was waking up from a bad dream. She told me her story like she was hearing it herself for the first time. Johanne became more and more emotional, as if her mind had shut down since the 12th and now the numbness was wearing off.

Her story is a classic. At 19 (older than the others), she was still at school and working from home by doing laundry and cooking for people. When her house collapsed her and her two babies found themselves sleeping on the streets (where she still is today).

She used to live with her brother and her cousin, but now she doesn’t know where they are.

After she kept failing getting food in the early line ups, she started to sell herself to get money for food.

She charges from $3 to $6, the higher price for the richer clients driving a car. To give you an idea of what that will buy – a beer or a bottle of water is $1.50; a meal is $4 to $8.

Johanne tells me this is just temporary, that working the streets will allow her to save a little money to maybe go back to school, feed and send her kids to school, get a job, build a new life. But even though she is very pretty, business has been tough until tonight. There is lots of competition on the street, and prices are dropping.

“Johanne”, I wish you all the strength you will need, and I hope the whack of dollar bills I gave you won’t go to your pimp.

I hope you and your girlfriends can get out of this very soon.

Port-au-Prince – The city has changed a lot since the 13th of January. Downtown still looks like a war zone. But as the food lines become routine, and help starts to arrive, life seems to grow back towards a sort of a “normality” at least a street level.

Drivers honk each other in the crazy traffic, women bargain at the markets, backhoes and workers clean up the rubble, young men chat up the girls at bus stops, banks and stores reopen slowly.

Journalists recycle stories and UN soldiers seem as sleepy as ever. You can even have a conversation without being interrupted by army helicopters flying low.

This ruined city is swarmed by people hungry to live. The old inequalities and social order are starting to show their face again. The pain and misery seem to be covered by the sheer will to move on. Mothers will remember their lost children in silence.

People didn’t have time to grieve, they are hungry, they need to find work and rebuild their broken lives whether they still have a family or not.

For the professionals, there isn’t much left to do as all major businesses are down. The main industry is now the aid industry.

But the “street” economy is back at work. Even in the “well off” camps you can have your laundry done, buy cooked meals. You commonly see “phone charging” spots, where someone will charge your phone out of a car battery. In a country were 80% of the population lived with less than 2 dollars a day, people know how to survive. Within poverty, people create “micro” markets.

Edgar Royal restarted is bicycle repair shop that he runs on the side walk.

Bicycles waiting their turn with Edgar:

Fede Wousmail is carving car parts out of old tires.

Every where people recycle things, build coal stoves with scrap metal. “Business is not as good since many people have left town”. Like most of the people I meet, Fede accepted this new reality, “it is much harder to get by, but we’ll be fine”.

The distinction between these two kinds of crises is useful in understanding what types of humanitarian and political responses are appropriate to different kinds of emergencies; but it can also lead to an oversimplification of how natural disasters are presented and understood.

The 7.0 earthquake that rocked Haiti on January 12th was a geological phenomena that would have caused damage in any country.  But oversimplifying the events as a “natural disaster” alone conceals the complex political, social, demographic and economic conditions that contributed to the magnitude of destruction.

The human choices that contributed to this catastrophe are an essential part of how this story came to unfold in Haiti. In the onslaught of media coverage about  the earthquake, it is worth questioning how “natural” the disaster really is.

Photo Credit: BBC 2004

The reality that Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere has been regularly highlighted by journalists and aid workers, but what does this fact actually mean? The truth is that the structural inequalities in Haiti run far deeper than the foundations of it’s fallen buildings.

Two centuries ago, Haiti became the worlds first independent black republic following a rebellion that ended a brutal period of Spanish and French colonization and enslavement. A legacy of poverty, exploitation and political instability has continued to plague Haiti, and the consequences have been compounded by recurring natural disasters such as the 2008 hurricane, the 2004 and 2007 tropical storms and the 2004 floods which together have killed thousands.

Photo Credit: BBC 2004

Like most developing countries, there is an enormous gap between the rich and the poor in Haiti. Approximately half of country’s wealth is controlled by 1% of the french speaking population, while 80% of the Creole speaking population lives below the poverty line.

Over half of the population lives in conditions of abject poverty. A recent article in the Globe and Mail quotes pre-quake surveys showing that just over half of inhabitants had variable access to electricity, and only 1 in 5 residents had access to piped water in downtown Port-au-Prince.

Haiti’s political history is equally grim.  The country endured a brutal dictatorship under Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son, Jean-Claude, or “Baby Doc” whose oppressive 29-year “kleptocracy”  killed thousands. American occupation, rebellion, UN intervention, and continuous military and foreign-backed “regime change” (most notably of democratically elected Jean-Bertrand Artiside), round out the recent political history of the country.

The economy has not fared much better. Haiti’s agricultural and manufacturing sectors have been adversely affected by corruption, mass deforestation, trade embargoes and unequal incorporation into global trade networks. Add on the imposition of neo-liberal economic reforms, debt repayments and weak or non-existent social security programs and you’re left with a series of seriously unfortunate human-induced events and a long list of responsible parties.  However just because Haiti has a history filled with political and economic challenges not not mean that the country is destined to remain fragile and poor.

Photo Credit: BBC 2004

It is easier to think of the crisis in Haiti as a result of an uncontrollable force of nature, but a closer look at the situation indicates that there is much more to the story. It is certainly simpler to talk about “rebuilding” Haiti back better- but how far will the Haitian government and the international community go to tackle the structural problems at the roots of this crisis to ensure that the outpouring of foreign aid  and assistance amount to more than a short-term band-aid solution?

I was supposed to accompany Stefan and Simon to Jacmel that morning, where international relief was supposed to reach today, but our driver didn’t show up (gas is hard to find).

Stefan is not a guy to waste time, so he starts to conduct interviews with people in the waiting crowd.

People still believe the rumour that Canada is giving temporary visas to Haitians… and there is no good information telling them to think otherwise. All you can see from the crowd is soldiers keeping people in line. How hard would it be for the government to have someone out there talking and explaining things to them? To have signs written in Creole? Why have them spend days in the sun in the hope of getting out of the country?

Beside me, the frustrated soldier tells me: “they won’t listen and stay in line”.

I get frustrated too, and say: “Well, could it be because they don’t speak English? Or that they are hungry and making them stand in line in the sun for hours without water would make them impatient? Could it be that after losing their families and houses standing here is the only hope they have?”

“Sir, wait on the side of the gate please, you’re not supposed to stand here.”

When I came back today, the soldiers made me pay for it by letting me wait for an hour before letting me in. That big mouth is costly sometimes.

The city has changed in the last two days. Before, people were in shock and walked around like zombies. But now life is picking up again: you can see women selling food in certain areas, and people starting to move to the country with what’s left.

I saw a few piles of bananas for sale:

With money, can still buy flour (at a high price):

You see signs like these all over town; the neighborhoods are organized:

People are getting hungry and thirsty. The streets are filled with people looking for help, trying to find someone, trying to figure out what to do. In the first days you could pull your camera out and do your thing.
But now as soon as you do that, people circle around you. They ask you: “do you have some water, is help coming soon?”. They ask about the outside world: “will they help?”; “Do you think the country will recover?” After talking for two minutes, you have fifty people around you. People are desperate for information, solutions.

Overall the vibe is just calm and sad, not mad or violent. People are helping each other and getting organized. But I fear that this could change as the people grow more separate. Help is coming though: today the Canadian military (and others) arrived in Jacmel, and it’s already making a difference.

While driving home we came across people salvaging goods from the rubble of a store being flattened by a back hoe. Is this looting or recycling?

What do you think?

Next: Surviving in Haiti: Camp Ste-Therese