(Originally published March 6, 2009)
The New York Times has revisited Gonaives, Haiti more than six months after the wave of hurricanes that sent a sea of mud pouring down onto it, and much of the rest of Haiti. Conditions seem to have improved slightly since August, when I travelled to that isolated city along barely passable roads, finding thousands of Haitians living on roof-tops and in abandonded schools, with sections of dirt streets impassable, trucks and cars digging trenches that became obstacles as much as allowing traffic to flow.
The Times report and the accompanying images by Lightstalker and UN prize winner Alice Smeets reveal just how little things have changed in Gonaives, but the problem in Haiti goes much further than the plight of one city, isolated in the north of Haiti, where mudslides like this have become almost a way of life.
The big picture is that the entire nation of Haiti is an environmental disaster waiting to happen; in which not only a thousands, but perhaps a hundred thousand die.
To set the backstory, Haiti’s environment has been compromised by centuries of unyielding poverty, forcing Haitians to life off the land, and exploiting the precious wood for cooking charcoal. Its most probable that Haiti was never blessed with the resources of its Dominican neighbors. Between Arbitonite, the lush rice yielding valley and Gonaives is a desert, complete with cactus trees. It rarely rains in Gonaives, which makes the hills above the city even more vulnerable to flooding when it does.
The Haitian mountains are slowly eroding, due both to the erosions of storms and the hand of man. Houses in Haiti are made of concrete and the stacks of slum houses in Port au Prince, built on mountainsides serviced by twisting roads, are the repository of what is carried from the mountains. There is no environmental policy in Haiti. Regulation does not exist, and the collapse of a concrete slab school in Port au Prince, and the death of dozens of children, brought that reality tragically home.
The question is not if, but when. It may be an earthquake, like the one that recently devastated Sichuan, or a Katrina-like hurricane, but overpopulated Haiti is in line with an environmental disaster of a inconceivable magnitude.
Exacerbating the danger is an transportation infrastructure that has grown worse since the Duvalier days, when at least Baby Doc, who enjoyed driving a sports car so much that he insisted on keeping the roads paved so he could speed down it. Whatever aid that might need to be administered here would have to be brought by air, and apart from the UN helicopters, and pilots operating out of the Dominican Republic, there are few resources available.
Although one would never guess it from the number of shiny relief agency SUVs motoring up and down the streets of Port au Prince, much of the country is left on its own, with many towns existing outside the meagre network of roads. Doctors from the Medicins sans Frontieres hired Dominican pilots to carry their doctors to areas of the country not accessible by road after the last series of storms.
Read More
Although this time the Haitian rice crop wasn’t decimated as has been feared in August, there isn’t a lot of reason to be optimistic. Even with the exploitative possibilities of millions of hard working and educated Haitians laboring for pennies a day, there are only a few factories making goods for the the world’s consumer societies. Even the factory that made baseballs for the major leagues has been shuttered. Short of a miracle, it seems that Haiti, a country of marvelous artists and hard working people, will continue on its untenable path, until the next disaster comes. Limiting the threat to Gonaives is short-sighted. Certainly that city is in the cross-hairs, but in Haiti Mother Nature and her daughter Disease are threatening with a sniper’s rifle, but a loaded shotgun.
The photo below taken in Gonaives in September of 2008 links to a slideshow of my images:
This SlideShowPro photo gallery requires the Flash Player plugin and a web browser with JavaScript enabled.
And here is a link to the recent NY Times story and Alice Smeet’s slideshow:
Gonaïves Journal – Living in a Sea of Mud, and Drowning in Dread – NYTimes.com
