Daniel O'Neil

A Sad 10th Anniversary of the Haiti Earthquake

A first responder stands near the rubble that was a children's hospital in Pétion -Ville. The Royal Oasis Hotel is in the background.

I am sadden that so many of the articles on the 10^th anniversary of the Haiti earthquake seem to blame the mess in Haiti today on the earthquake response. Sometimes I feel that Haiti is like a drug addict. You can provide them with all the help in the world, but in the end, they have to take responsibility for the choices that they make.

I’m a civil engineer and had worked on disaster management in Haiti before the earthquake. The engineering community knew that Haiti’s building code was not only decades out of date, but never being enforced. A couple of years earlier, a school had collapsed killing scores of children. There were plenty of warning, but nothing was done.

During the earthquake response, I was overwhelmed by the outpouring of generosity. The US was just coming out of its financial crisis, but both private and public donations were incredibly generous. Of course the response was messy and inefficient. But the response to a large disaster is always messy and inefficient. The goal is to move quickly, not to carefully consider each decision. As I wrote earlier, I thought that the Haiti earthquake response was just as effective as the response to the Ebola in West Africa. Yet, the Ebola responders were hailed as heroes and the earthquake responders were scorned.

During the years after the earthquake, Haiti continued to grow quickly. All the major hotels expanded, the Marriott and Best Western built hotels. The streets were paved not only in Port-au-Prince, but in every major town. By 2015, Haiti looked better than it had before the earthquake.I felt that the earthquake response was a success.

Then Haiti flubbed its national elections. The government was forced to cancel the second round of the presidential elections and President Martelly handed over power to a caretaker government. The scandal broke over the handling of the Venezuelan government’s program that allowed Haiti to obtain fuel on credit (the Petro-Caribe Program) which provided the government with around $1.7 billion for projects, many of which were never completed. On top of all of this, Haiti was hit by a Category 5 hurricane.

I returned to Haiti in May and have been sadden by what I see. The economy is in shambles and the government’s attempts to remove a fuel subsidy resulted in wide spread protests. There is little investment happening and little hope that Haiti can pull itself out of this crisis. There seems to be such deep mistrust between the government and the opposition that no comprise appears possible. The international community seems to be adopting a policy of tough love: “We won’t bail you out of this one.”

When I left Haiti in May 2010, I figured that I was done with Haiti. I knew that if I stuck around, it would break my heart. I love Haiti and love the work that I am doing. But when I lift my head and look around, my heart breaks. In the end, outsiders can only do so much. For Haiti to move forward, the Haitian politicians need to figure out how to work together. Without political stability, there we will be stuck in this viscous circle of no private investments, a declining economy, and growing civil unrest.This time it is up to Haiti to solve this crisis.

If only the American Red Cross was as efficient as the US Government...

Inspectors assessing the earthquake damage in a house in Port-au-Prince, Haiti

"I still have a lot more questions for the Red Cross," said Sen. Charles Grassley in a statement. "I have other questions about the spending numbers and how they add up and the overhead costs for both the Red Cross and the grantee organizations. Also, I'd like to see more details of the results achieved from each of the partner organizations."

Propublica and NPR have done an admirable job of trying to figure out what the American Red Cross (ARC) has done with the nearly half a billion dollars that they raised for the Haiti earthquake. However, I fear that Senator Charles Grassley will lead this in the wrong direction. The ARC should be encouraged to give out the money that it raises rather than trying to do it all themselves.

As we’ve seen with nearly every disaster, the ARC does a great job of raising money and a lousy job of using it. Even in domestic disasters like Katrina or Sandy, the ARC seems poor at delivering results. Imagine how much harder it is to set up a large organization in a foreign country in the middle of a disaster response. It is just a recipe for failure.

Instead, the ARC should follow the example of the US Government’s disaster response agency: the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA). As soon as a disaster hits, OFDA sends a small team of experts to help assess the situation and to review funding requests. They focus on working with organizations that are already on the ground with a solid track record of success. Because they are on the ground, they understand the situation and can work with their grantees to ensure that proposals make sense. The field team is senior enough that they can frequently review proposals on the spot.

This model allows OFDA to quickly get funds injected into where they are needed the most. They keep their overhead low by focusing on channeling money to those who can use it effectively. Their field teams are able to work with their partners to keep projects moving. By channeling money through other organizations, they build local capacity and make it easy to wrap up their work as quickly as possible.

The ARC’s problem is that it establishes a large bureaucracy that is unable to implement projects directly and very slow to issue subgrants. I did succeed in getting a large grant funded through the ARC, but it took nearly 10 months to get it worked out. Once awarded, we were micromanaged from beginning to end. I have worked with funding from a wide range of donors and found the ARC to be the most difficult. We did succeed in repairing 4,000 houses for the ARC and the work was of higher quality than what he had done for OFDA and others, but it was a soul-sucking process that left all of us exhausted.

I would love to be able to support the American Red Cross. With their incredible name recognition, they have enormous potential to help. Instead, their repeated and very public failures make it that much harder for everybody else to raise money and help out.

 

Getting Lucky in Bangladesh

Here in Bangladesh you have been very lucky. It has been two hundred years since your last major earthquake. But for how long will your luck last? With its proximity to an active fault, very weak soils, dense population, and poor controls on construction, the next earthquake will be a terrible disaster.

I repeated these lines over and over while working our booth at a safety conference for factory owners in Bangladesh. Dhaka is a scary place for earthquakes. Very little of the construction is designed to resist even a small earthquake. The government’s own reports highlight the risk—with a 6.0 earthquake (10 times weaker than the 2010 Haiti earthquake), 70% of the buildings will be badly damaged including the hospitals and other emergency facilities. Roads and rail lines would be damaged. The airport would be closed. Hundreds of thousands of people could die.

This was my first visit to Dhaka. I spent five days talking with people at the expo, visiting factories, and driving around the city. I came away with very mixed feelings and a deep fascination for the country.

Having spent so much of my time in Haiti, I naturally found myself comparing Dhaka and Port-au-Prince. Both are poor cities with weak infrastructure and both are struggling to grow and modernize. Dhaka is a dramatically bigger city with bigger assets and much bigger problems. Traffic has been Dhaka’s bane for many years. From early in the morning until late at night, traffic crawls through the city. It can take three hours to get from one part of the city to another. Pollution is another bad problem—a heavy haze that hangs over the city.

At the same time, the city is growing well. A handful of overpasses are being built. There are beautiful new buildings. I felt a strong sense of optimism and hope—that Bangladesh was moving forward. The quality of the buildings is also improving. Many of the new buildings appeared to be well built. Perhaps if Bangladesh can remain lucky for another 50 years, then perhaps be ready for the next earthquake.

Still Looking for a Good Book on the Haiti Earthquake

 

I seek out books on the Haiti earthquake in the hopes of finding one that captures what I experienced and perhaps helps me to understand it better. Instead, all of the books seem to describe a different event. Like the story of the blind men trying to describe an elephant, one author talks about the leg and another about the trunk. Perhaps all I know is the tail.

I had high hopes for two books that just came out: Jonathon Katz’ The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster and Amy Wilentz’ Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti. Each book captured part of what I experienced, but they each described a world that I didn’t know.

Jonathon Katz was an AP reporter that had lived in Haiti for a couple of years before the earthquake. His account of the actual earthquake and the events of that night were the most powerful part of the book. I found it to be especially spooky because Carolle and I had lived and been married in the house that collapsed under him. I had hoped that his book would show a strong understanding of Haiti and how the events unfolded. The best parts of the book were his description of the night of the earthquake and then his quest to find out the UN’s role in introducing cholera. Unfortunately, most of the rest of the book felt superficial—more of a drive-by viewing of the disaster response.

 

Amy Wilentz’ book was the opposite. Whereas Jonathon Katz tried to tell a straight forward story of the disaster, Amy’s book seems to be more her grappling with the earthquake and its aftermath. The book reads more as a collection of thoughts than a coherent story. It is a very personal book as she openly wrestles with her feelings towards Haiti and journalism—is she helping Haiti by getting people’s stories out or is this just voyeurism? Her first book had been on the epic struggle to get rid of Duvalier and of Aristide’s rise to power. But Aristides’s presidencies were failures and Duvalier is back in Haiti. Perhaps it wasn’t such an epic time after all. Her book clearly reflects her personal struggle with the impact that she is having.

Both books skewer the disaster response provided by the international community. The subtitle of Katz’ book nicely sums up his view, How the International Community Came to Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster. Amy Wilentz wrote “It’s fair to say that one of the biggest issues to rise from the earthquake’s dust is whether aid agencies and international development organizations can ever be trusted, either by the victim community or by the donors who fund them. Are they honest—do they know how to be honest; can they be honest and survive?” She goes on to complain that aid agencies are not effective at working themselves out of a job. 

Yes, it was confusing and there were some big mistakes made (the construction of the Corail camp out in the middle of nowhere being one—providing services in makeshift camps was another). Both lionize Sean Penn for running a camp as well as the pros. But if the pros are running camps as well as Sean Penn, doesn’t that mean that the “pros” were doing something right, too?

This is where both she and Jonathon Katz got it wrong. The earthquake response that I saw was an exhausting slog against incredible obstacles and through a bizarre maze. Although some of the early journalists seemed to have believed that Port-au-Prince had been completely destroyed, that was never true. Half of all the buildings in Port-au-Prince were not significantly damaged. Although President Preval’s government seemed to disappear in the first days after the earthquake, it soon reasserted itself. 

The biggest complaint against the work that the NGOs did is that we did not build a shiny new Haiti from the rubble of the earthquake. Yet that was never our mandate. As weak as the Haitian government was, it was still the national government. It was the only institution that could have declared eminent domain to seize land to create camps, widen streets, or enforce a new city wide master plan. Neither the NGOs nor the United Nations had this authority. When the government was unwilling to take these steps, no one could. But what’s the point in bashing the Preval Government? Its weaknesses were quite well known and documented.

I ran the  earthquake response for the Pan American Development Foundation, one of the larger NGOs, from the day after the earthquake until this past January. Of course I made mistakes—we were trying to move as fast as we could in a very complex environment and using whatever resources we could find. We passed out food and other goods that had been collected in the States to help the poor Haitians. I would much rather have received cash, but our local partners were happy to receive whatever we could give them. I would much rather have purchased local rice rather than receiving donations of fortified rice, but the imported rice was free and we didn’t have much cash. Our first attempt at home repair in the Jacmel area fell flat—we had budgeted too little money and the repairs were too isolated. 

We also had huge successes. We helped evaluate the safety of over 400,000 structures throughout the earthquake impacted area. This gave hundreds of thousands of people the confidence to return to their safe house and provided a blueprint for the repairs that were needed. We trained hundreds of engineers, masons, and contractors in improved construction techniques and used them to repair 10,000 houses. We helped neighborhood committees come together to determine how they wanted their neighborhood rebuilt.  We helped scores of microentrepreneurs to start small businesses.

In Dr. Farmer’s earthquake book, Haiti After the Earthquake, he seemed to believe that his organization was the only one to do a good job. I’ll bet a lot of us feel this way. My organization did a great job. It’s too bad that all the other organizations couldn’t do as well. Naturally some organizations did better than others. Unfortunately, most people who donated, donated blindly. They gave to the Red Cross because they always give to the Red Cross, even though the Red Cross’ reputation as a slow bureaucracy is documented after every disaster. They gave to Wyclef Jean because he is a famous Haitian, not because they thought that he had a professional organization behind him. I wish that more of the funds had gone to PADF and other organizations that were well established in Haiti, but I thank God that people did give.

Perhaps someday I’ll find a book that tells the story of the earthquake as I saw it—the story of a hard struggle to have the greatest possible impact as quickly as possible in an incredibly complex situation.

Our work wasn't perfect, but it was the best that we could possibly do and Haiti is better off for it..

Le Grande Rue Languishes while Petionville booms

Le Grande Rue--the historic buisness center of Port-au-Prince

For the first time in quite a long time, I ventured into the traditional heart of Port-au-Prince. It was a sad sight. Most of the buildings along the main street (Boulevard Jean-Jacques Dessaline or Le Grande Rue as it is commonly known) were so severely damaged that they were unusable. Vendors squatted in the shade of the porches selling their goods while sunlight streamed through the shattered building behind them. Although all the loose rubble was gone, there were few signs of the reconstruction.

Even before the earthquake, this area was withering. The streets were a mess and never drained. The roads were blocked by traditional market vendors with stalls extending into the street. Crime had become a bad problem. Most businesses had moved to Petionville. 

Then came the earthquake. The New York Times beautifully captured the devastation on Le Grand Rue with a  sweeping panarama. As the panorama shows, large number of the buildings collapsed or became unstable. The National Palace is only a few blocks away and also crumbled. Throughout 2010, the government talked of the need to develop a master plan to rebuild the area. President Preval imposed a moratorium on construction to ensure that all new construction would follow the master plan. But then no plan was ever approved.

In 2011, Digicel's CEO, Dennis O'Brien stepped in to rebuild the Iron Market--a bizarre  19th Century Egyptian train station turned outdoor market. He spent $12 million to rebuild the market to make it better than it had ever been--a beautiful symbol of the rebirth of Port-au-Prince. 

President Martelly has rescinded the construction ban, but little has been done. The market remains beautiful, but it still stands alone. It wouldn't take much of an earthquake to bring many of these crumbling buildings down on those squatting under them.

I found my visit to the center of town to be quite striking due to the contrast with Petionville. I spend most of my time in Petionville where the traces of the earthquake are largely gone. New hotels, restaurants, and shopping complexes have sprung up all over. It is easy to believe that Haiti is better off now than before the earthquake--Petionville is booming.

Naturally money follows money--people are building in Petionville because others are building in Petionville. Perhaps the rebirth of downtown Port-au-Prince will only start when the government begins rebuilding its home--the palace, the parliament building, and the ministries. We can only hope that this starts soon. 

 

Moving on

After 13 years, one week, and four days with the Pan American Development Foundation, I am moving on. As I left the office today, I had a powerful mixture of feelings. I am sad to say good-bye to so many good friends--people who have struggled with me as we fought to make changes in Haiti. I am sad to leave an institution that has an incredible potential to make an impact not just in Haiti, but throughout the hemisphere. Yet I am excited for the change and I know that I am leaving at the right time.

On January 7, 2000 I began directing a complicated program designed to help rebuild Haiti following the passage of Hurricane Georges. Yes, it had already been 15 months since the Hurricane had hit Haiti. But development work moves slowly. I accepted a twenty month position that grew into a 13 year career.

I loved the Hurricane Georges Reconstruction Program. We built roads, fixed irrigation systems, planted trees, distributed seeds, and helped the Haitian government to develop its community-based disaster management system--the one that is still in place today.

In 2003, I moved with my family from Haiti to the Dominican Republic to start a program to strengthen cross-border ties in the Haitian-Dominican borderlands. The Our Border Program grew into a powerful initiative that helped to increase investments in the border and improve relations between the two countries. I loved the team that we had and I loved how we were able to move between working with rural farmers in the borderlands and top officials in both countries.

Nothing matched the challenge that I faced when the earthquake hit. Less than 24 hours after the earthquake I crossed into Haiti and quickly took over managing our Haiti operations. The early days were overwhelming. Again, I had a wonderful team that pulled together despite incredible challenges and did unbelievable work. I know that I pushed them too hard, but there was so much that needed to be done.

In July 2010, I moved to Washington to oversee the Haiti program from Headquarters. This was a new challenge. I was no longer the boss and had to mediate between the needs of the field and the demands of those above me. We continued to do great work. We've created strong social networks in the most difficult neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince. These networks have in turn helped to start businesses and develop reconstruction plans. We've repaired nearly 10,000 houses and each one was inspected by a government inspector and certified by them as safely repaired. Now we are funding larger buisnesses--those with up to $1 million in revenues a year--to create new, sustainable jobs.

I'm also proud of how I have left PADF. Ever since I moved to Washington, I have tried to work myself out of a job. By helping those around me and seeking the best possible people, I have worked hard to pass off my authority (not just responsibilities) to others. As I walk away from PADF, I leave an institution in very good hands. PADF will not replace me, but I suspect that they will miss me.

It has been a wild ride for these thirteen years. Especially in the years since the earthquake, I have made a lot of painful mistakes. Yet these mistakes seem to haunt only me. I have been deeply touched by the support that I have received from my team in both Haiti and in Washington, DC.

I am also excited by this move because I am joining a wonderful new team. I brought Kit Miyamoto to Haiti the week after the earthquake. He spent an entire month volunteering his time helping Haiti to start on the right path. We partnered together to conduct a detailed assessment of the impact of the earthquake and then to repair those 10,000 houses. Miyamoto International is a purpose driven company, dedicated to making the world a better place and to saving lives. I am thrilled to join their team. My job is to open their DC office and to help them to expand beyond Haiti. Having seen the high cost that Haiti paid for poor quality construction, I have become evangelical on the importance of improving construction quality. Miyamoto International, a California-Japanese seismic engineering company, is the perfect platform for this message.

I am sad, nervous, and excited about the change. I love what I have done with PADF and am very excited as to what I could do with Miyamoto. 

It is not about the tents

Cite Soleil--is this really any better than a tent?: Photo by Jordon Michael Zuniga

When journalists discuss the progress of reconstruction in Haiti, they frequently cite the number of people still living in tents as an indication of how much work is left to be done. In the New York Times recent article about housing, Deborah Sontag wrote:

Two and a half years after the earthquake, despite billions of dollars in reconstruction aid, the most obvious, pressing need — safe, stable housing for all displaced people — remains unmet.

She later went on to state that 390,000 people that were displaced by the earthquake remain homeless.

I do not dispute that 390,000 people still live in tents and that they live in terrible conditions. However, at least a million other people live in tin shacks in places like Cite Soliel. Their living conditions are no better than those who live in tents plus they have to pay rent for their shack.

Living conditions for Haiti’s poorest were terrible before the earthquake. Many people moved into camps not because they lost their house, but because they did not have a decent house before the earthquake. I strongly agree that one of Haiti’s most pressing needs is for safe, stable housing. I hope that this is for all of Haiti’s poor—both urban and rural—and not just for those living in tents.

 

Responding to the Haiti Earthquake--my story

The Pan American Development Foundation put together a video to thank the Caterpillar Foundation for the support that they gave to us following the Haiti earthquake. It features me telling the story of how we responded. I am very pleased with how it turned out:

Two years later: a long slow fight

photo by Jordan Michael of Red 1 Studios

Two years ago, the ground in Port-au-Prince shook and tens of thousands of buildings collapsed. The January 12^th earthquake was the worst disaster to ever hit the Americas. The early days after the earthquake were unimaginable. When I drive through some of the neighborhoods that I visited that first week, I get terrible flashbacks. Poor Haiti had been in such bad shape before the earthquake, I just couldn’t imagine how it would ever get rebuilt.

As we commemorate the second anniversary of the earthquake, there are lots of stories highlighting what has and has not been done. A lot of articles focus on the apparent slow progress with headlines like Haiti 2 years later: Half a million still in camps. Except that most people are not in camps because they lost their house and are waiting for someone to rebuild it. They are in the camps because they are desperately poor and have nowhere to turn. The Miami Heralds video, Nous Boke: Two Years Later nicely highlights this problem by talking with people living in the distant Corail camp who are desperate for work.

Nou Bouke: Two years later from The Miami Herald on Vimeo.

This desperation existed well before the earthquake. The earthquake made a bad situation much worse. The important question is where should Haiti be today? Given how bad the situation was before the earthquake and how bad the damage was, have we made good progress?

At the one year anniversary, I had strongly mixed feelings. On one hand, I was disappointed at the lack of progress. The camp populations seemed enormous. Although the rubble had been cleared from the roads, the wounds seemed very fresh. I wished that we had made greater progress. At the same time, I couldn’t image having worked harder or pushed my team any harder. I found the same reaction when I talked with others working to rebuild Haiti. We wished that we could have done more, but had no idea how we could have gone any faster.

At the second anniversary, I feel far better about the progress. The rubble is gone from most public spaces. The government’s program to empty six camps into sixteen neighborhoods (“6/16”) has emptied the camps that used to occupy Place St Pierre and Place Boyer—two of the most visible camps. As I drive around Port-au-Prince, life seems to be much more normal.

One of the challenges is that change comes slowly. After the earthquake, we all hoped that Haiti could be quickly rebuilt and rebuilt better. We dreamed of modernizing Port-au-Prince to have wider streets, of building modern building, of making Port-au-Prince into a livable city. Two years later, we are still dreaming of this. In Delmas, we are working with an urban planner who has drawn pictures of townhouses on palm tree lined streets. Maybe someday we will get there. However, we have to first finish repairing the existing buildings, clear out the collapsed buildings, and start repairing the streets.

When I left Haiti in May 2010, I did not intend to return. I was proud of what I had accomplished and wanted to try something new. I also feared that if I stayed in Haiti, that Haiti would break my heart. I stayed and it did. But I am glad that I stayed. Brick by brick, micro-entrepreneur by micro entrepreneur, we are helping to rebuild Haiti. It is a long slow fight, but I believe that we are moving in the right direction.

What do you think? Should we be proud of what we have accomplished or should we be embarrased that we have not done more?

Notable books on Haiti

Several friends have asked me for recommendations on books about Haiti. The following are books that I have read and would recommend. I have divided them into four categories (fiction, non-fiction, dubious but interesting, and coffee table books). I thought about leaving out entirely the books that I consider a bit dubious, but the all have facinating information. (Note all links are amazon affiliate links)

Fiction

The Comedians  by Graham Greene: Classics just never go out of date. This is still a great book about Haiti.

Island Beneath the Sea by Isabel Allende: a moving portrayal of the Haitian revolution told from the point of view of a slave, her owner, and people both sympathetic to the revolutions and fighting against it. Note that the second half of the book takes place in New Orleans.

The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat: the story of the massacre of Haitians in the Dominican borderlands in 1939.

Breath, Eyes, Memory also by Edwidge Danticat: fictionalized story of growing up in Haiti.

Non-Fiction

Notes From the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti by Michael Deibert and Raoul Peck: a great overview of the collapse of the second Aristide government.

Rainy Season: Haiti-Then and Now by Amy Wilentz: a fascinating look into Aristide's role in the downfall of the Duvalier Government. It was written before Aristide's government collapsed and does not look into the darker side of what later happened.

The Immaculate Invasion by Bob Shacochis:  the story of the 1994 US occupation told by an embedded reporter. This nicely brings out the rambling, lack of focus that characterized the occupation.

Restavec: From Haitian Slave Child to Middle-Class American ;the autobiography of Jean-Robert Cade. Tells the story of the abuses that he faced as a child slave in Haiti. Knowing how many kids never escape form this fate makes it a painful read.

Mountains beyond Mountains : Tracy Kidder the fascinating story of Dr. Paul Farmer and the start of Partners in Health.

Dubious facts, but interesting reads

Anything by Paul Farmer: Dr. farmer is a hero for the work that he has done in Haiti and around the world. In his books, he plays fast and free with the facts to back up his own point of view.

The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist's Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombis, and Magic by Wade Davis: A supposedly scientific investigation into voodoo. I don’t believe the insights into how voodoo works, but it does have good insights into Haitian rural life.

Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola by Michele Wucker: provides a great, east to read overview of the history of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. However, the central thesis that the island is too small to allow for strong presidents to govern in both countries doesn't really hold up.

Coffee Table/gift books

Paroles et Lumieres-Where Light Speaks: Haiti (English and French Edition), by Hiebert; Phelps; Yates; Cav: A beautiful look at Haiti by two people who love it well.

Hispaniola: A Photographic Journey through Island Biodiversity  by Eladio Fernández: A beautiful catalog of the animals on both sides of the island.

What other books would you recommend on Haiti?