Daniel O'Neil

Death of a Dominican Hero: Sonia Pierre

Sonia Pierre was both lauded and harassed by the Dominican government for her work to protect the rights of people of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic. While the Dominican Government was threatening to revoke her citizenship, her photo was being displayed downtown Santo Domingo as a Dominican Hero.

I worked with her in 2008 as we were preparing a proposal to improve conditions in the the bateyes. I was impressed with her drive and vision as well as with the quality of the work that MUDHA was implementing.

Human rights work is thankless work. The Dominican government knows that it needs to have a clear, coherent policy towards dealing with Haitian migrants, but it is split. There are those who want the cheap labor and those who want to protect Dominican jobs--just as we have in the United States. Haiti has the same split--because Haiti cannot provide jobs or liveable conditions for so many of its citizens, it needs the escape valve provided by the Dominican Republic while at the same time deploring the way its citizens are treated. I saw this as an unsolveable problem and did not focus on it. Sonia Pierre saw this important work and devoted her life to it. 

Signs of Progress in Haiti

One of the greatest challenges in rebuiding Haiti is fighting the expectations. To some, the picture above is a picture of poverty. Women squatting in the street selling their meager wares surrounded by poor buildings. I fear that a lot of journalists would look at this image and see it as proof that Haiti is not being rebuilt.

But I know that this is a great victory. I wrote of my visits to this neigborhood last March. At that point, we had just started the rubble removal. I was thrilled to see how our work had transformed the neighborhood. And that is the challenge. If your starting reference is the scene below, the picture above is a beautiful success.

I am guilty of having written against the idea of just rebuilding the chaos.  Now I recognize that reconstruction has to go through steps. Just removing the rubble was a huge victory. Getting the unstable houses demolished and the damaged ones repaired was another huge victory. We have to help people rebuild their lives before we can help them to build a new neighborhood.

We are continuing to move forward. We are working with the local leaders and the mayor to build a better Delmas 32. Little by little, the bird will build its nest.

What would it have felt like to live through the Haitian Revolution?

 

 

The story of the Haitian revolution is a bizarrely twisted tail. The revolution began as an uprising by the slaves, became a civil war between the French and the mulatos (mixed race, free people) to a slave revolution. General Toussaint Louverture fought first for the French, then for Spanish, then for Haiti. Then when Haiti finally won its independence, its new rulers put the former slaves right back to work on the plantations. I tried to make sense of the convoluted story through a series of posts on the Our Border website. Isabel Allende has done a beautiful job of painting a picture of life during these turbulent times in her book, Islands beneath the Sea.

Island Beneath the Sea is the story of life in Haiti before and during the revolution and later in New Orleans as seen by a handful of different characters. The beauty of the story is how each of the different narrators shows how they view the world and what happens: the slave girl who stays with her master even though he repeatedly raped her because it is best for her daughter; the plantation owner who finds ways to justify owning and even beating slaves even though he knows it is wrong; a doctor who is outspoken against slaves but unwilling to admit that his mistress is colored. I was fascinated watching how each character saw and related to the outbreak and spread of the revolution.

My interest was in what happened in Haiti. I was disappointed when the characters all moved to New Orleans. The book kept me interested, but I was sorry that they never returned to Haiti.

Island Beneath the Sea is a great addition to the fictional narrative of Haiti’s history along with Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones. 

 

Video on House Repairs in Haiti

 

We just put together this video that explains what a green, yellow, and red tagged building is and what we mean by house repairs. Let me know what you think of it.

Rebuilding communities, not just houses

This is the text of the speech that I gave at the Earthquake Symposium on January 11th in Port-au-Prince. Although I am very proud of the work that we have done to repair houses in Port-au-Prince, I hope that we are able to move beyond just repairing houses to rebuilding communities.

Ladies and Gentlemen, good afternoon.

The Pan American Development Foundation has been partnering with the Haitian government for over thirty years. We remain committed to helping Haitians to rebuild their homes, rebuild their neighborhoods and rebuild their lives.

I have lived on this island for more than a dozen years. I was living in Santo Domingo when the earthquake hit and drove here bringing the first load of relief supplies the next day.

We have heard of the progress being made on repairing houses, removing rubble, and building transitional houses. These are important steps on the path towards rebuilding communities.

I would like to finish these talks by discussing what it takes to rebuild a community and how we have succeeded in involving both the local community and the Haitian government.

Haiti's reconstruction lessons are found on the other side of the world

I had this article published today in the Miami Herald:

Haiti's reconstruction lessons are found on the other side of the world

As published in the Miami Herald 

BY DANIEL O'NEIL

WWW.IMUNITEDFORHAITI.ORG

As I rushed relief supplies from the Pan American Development Foundation through the streets of Port-au-Prince just after the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake, I could not fathom how Haiti would recover from the worst humanitarian disaster in the history of the Western Hemisphere.

Nearly a year later and on the other side of the world, I saw what could be Haiti's future.

In October, I traveled to Indonesia with a World Bank study group to see how that country recovered after the post-Christmas 2004 tsunami, which killed in excess of 200,000 and leveled some 139,000 homes, and the 2006 Yogyakarta earthquake, which took the lives of more than 5,700 and damaged 175,000 buildings.

STUCK...the Haitian Elections Part 3

The Haitian elections are at an impasse with no clear path out. I was in Haiti last week when the rioting broke out over the elections results. I had been asking my Haitian friends what they thought would happen.The most common response was, "I don't know what will be announced, but I don't think the results they announce will have anything to do with how people voted on the 28th." Like most organizations, we closed our office early on the day that the results were announced to allow our staff to get home before the storm broke.

That night, the CEP representative was shaking as he read the results that put Preval's Unity party in a strong lead for controlling the parliament and then announcing that their candidate had made the cut and would be part of the run-off for the presidency.

I spent the next days and a half holed up in our guest house as we listened to the reports of the protests that spread throughout the country then fled out through the Dominican Republic when a light rain kept the protesters home (it was a bit odd being the person from Washington who had to be evacuated out of the country rather than the one was expected to hold down the fort!).

What if the Haitian Elections were not so bad?

Yesterday, I wrote a post entitled "The Haitian Elections are Disputed...now what?" At that point, it looked like Haiti was headed towards a major crisis. 12 of the Presidential candidates had held a press conference to denounce the elections as fraudulent. Crowds had gathered in Petionville to protest against the elections. A well-connected friend of mine told me that the only solution was for President Preval to quit and leave the country. There were all the makings of a major crisis.

But then the tide changed. The top two opposition presidential candidates retracted their earlier allegations. Then the OAS came out saying that the elections were valid. It seems that the early returns had Mme. Manigat and Michel Martely as the top vote getters. It is hard to claim that the government had rigged the elections if their candidate was losing! Although it is too early to close this affair entirely, it does seem that we all jumped to the wrong conclusion.

So what happened? Assuming that no new information comes to light and the final results are legitimate and accepted, why were we all so ready to believe that they were fraudulent? I am afraid that this might turn out to be a case where we all chose to look at the world through our own filters rather than waiting for the facts. Haiti has had so many failures that it was easy to assume that the elections were yet another one. Rather than holding out for facts, we went with the easy story that Haiti had failed once again. 

I hope that am left humbled by this situation--that the final results show that Preval and his electoral council, with help from the OAS and the UN, did pull off the impossible and manage to hold relatively free and fair elections. I will happily apologize for having been a doubter.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-11870013udd

The Haiti Elections are disputed...now what?

Twelve of the candidates for the Haitian Presidency gathered today before the polls had even closed to denounce the widespread fraud that they claimed was happening. The candidates included all of the top candidates with the exception of the one in Preval's party who had been trailing a distant second in the pre-election polls. As I write this entry, there are reports of protests in Port-au-Prince, Gonaives, Cape Haitian, and elsewhere. So what comes next?

It would be wonderful if the reported cases of fraud were untrue--if the stories of stuffed ballot boxes and blocked voters were just exaggerations. There are always logistical problems at elections--we have this problem in the US as well. If it turns out that the actual vote count matches the pre-election polls, then perhaps the twelve candidates over-reacted.

A second possibility is that the fraud happened, but that the Electoral Council and the International Community decide that it was within an acceptable range. A candidate has to get more than 50% to avoid a second round (scheduled for January 16th). If the results show that no candidate won the required 50%, even if Preval's candidate (Jude Celestin) was in first place, then a runoff will have to happen. This might be acceptable to the Haitian political parties, if they could be assured that the runoff would be cleaner. Many would claim that the Celestin only made it to the second round through fraud, but it would hold out the hope that the opposition could still win in the second round. Note that Mme Manigat refused to run in the runoff elections in 2006 because she felt that the first round was too flawed. She might take the same route again.

The worst case would be to have the fraud so blatant that the results would be completely unacceptable--for example if Jude Celestin was declared to have won more than the 50% required to avoid a run-off election. This would force a confrontation and would force the international community to take sides.

The international community trumpeted these elections as an important milestone in Haiti's progress. Instead of providing a clear path forward, the elections have created many more questions and doubt. Haiti desperately needs clear leadership to allow it to rise from the rubble. I hope and pray that somehow this mess ends well.

The View from Washington

Back in Haiti--touring the Delmas 32 housing repair project with the OAS Secretary General and the PADF team.

Over four months ago, I drove away from Haiti thinking I was finished. I didn't make it very far. I know support PADF's Haiti operations from our Washington office. Although I spend a good bit of time in Haiti--next week will be third visit in two months--the view from Washington is quite different. 

The biggest difference is distance--both geographic and personal. I am typing this in my Rockville, Maryland house far from the hassles and stress of Port-au-Prince. Although I spend a good part of my days working directly with our Haiti office through phone calls and emails, I don't live the experience any longer. This geographic distance makes things much more personal. I was talking with our Country Director when the storm went through last Friday. It was an immediate threat to him and to those around him. For me, it was a logistics question--how could we mobilize any support to help.