This is the Justice, Not Charity! Haiti book diary. Allie123 and I are writing these book diaries because we became shocked by the truth of Haiti’s history and what really is needed to help the Haitians after the earthquake.
"It's as if Aristide was put in charge of a house that was falling apart and was expected to fix it. But then his enemies start setting fire to the back door, they send people with guns to attack the front door, and when these people finally manage to break in they said 'Look! He didn't wash the dishes in the sink! He never repaired the leak in the roof!' They made him spend all his time trying to put out the fire and to protect the door, and then once they got rid of him they said he was pushed out because he'd failed to repair the house." (Damming The Flood,
p 131.)
In chapter four, Timothy Schwartz has climbed high enough up his learning curve that he starts being able to do effective work. Each chapter from here on in he'll learn more about what is not going right with NGO work in Haiti.
Chapter Four: The Survey and Chaos in the Court
At this point in his career, Schwartz was hired by three NGOs to do a census-type survey of Jean Makout County. He was to put together a team to locate some 20,000 homes in rugged terraing, and do detailed, 1,000 question surveys at more than 1,500 of them. At first he ran into serious obstacles.
The first was politicians. After Jean-Bertrand Aristide was returned from his first exile, he set up a system of locally elected officials to administer the country. (Schwartz refers to them as Aseks and Kaseks.) Naturally, given the situation of the country, this system was chronically underfunded.
So technically being emplyed by PISANO and ordered to encourage this new democratic system, we sent the Aseks and Kaseks letters and we had meetings with them. But the politicians, still impoverished and frustrated after a year of total powerlessness, responded not by helping us, but by stopping the survey......And the reason they were stopping the survey always turned out to be the same: They wanted money.
The second was the peasants. They distrusted the possible use of the answers, they despised the county officials, and they had some beefs with NGOs, too. They disliked the trees they were given for reforestation efforts (they wanted fruit trees), the German-made irrigation pits were breeding mosquitoes, and they said food aid was destroying the country. (Through the course of the book, Schwartz came to agree with them strongly on this point!)
The third was the survey workers themselves. They were inclined at first to do the job as easily as possible; make up numbers for the house location, get demographic data on whoever was nearby rather than the people they were supposed to check, and so on. It apparently came as an unpleasant surprise when Schwartz insisted on double-checking what he was given, and then insisted on accurate information. He wound up firing some supervisors, which led to the court case in the chapter title. And then there was Arnaud.
Arnaud was his on-again, off-again local girlfriend, in her twenties, well-educated for the County, no kids. She left him for a while when he went through his phase of dressing like a bum (to discourage begging), but when he was put in charge of the survey, she insisted on being hired for it. Actually she turned out to be his best employee, educated, understanding the aim of the survey, hard-working, and motivated. She also presented him with a moral dilemma with some lasting consequences, in the form of her six-year-old cousin, Tobe, who she brought along as a servant. Tobe was hard-working, frequently beaten, and afraid of Arnaud, but she didn't want to go home. When Schwartz asked the family about the situation, he found out they approved of her treatment, so though he was unhappy, he backed off.
Then came the court case, the supervisors suing for back pay and claiming a ridiculously high amount. When he asked the NGO for help, they were going to get him a lawyer - from the same firm representing the supervisors. Nor were they going to pay. He decided to represent himself. At first he floundered a bit, surprised when the judge showed no interest in the evidence he had brought with him. He learned quickly though, and the case was resolved in his favor. I think this was a big turning point for him, where he used what he had learned to take effective action and get the outcome he needed.
After that, he tore into reorganizing the survey, got the peasants on his side by explaining the benefits to them, pressured the politicians by threatening to leave and tell the peasants why their county wasn't surveyed (so they could answer for it at the next election), and got his accurate data. He settled down in a hotel for two months to prepare his report. This survey established a pattern to be repeated into the future; when he was set to look into something, he did, and would not stop until he had real answers.