Diaspora Haitians, go home despite the distrust

Street vendor in Jacmel, Haiti. (Swiatoslaw Wojtkowiak, Flickr)

by Deborah D. David

Of all the obstacles to face when returning home to Haiti, I never would have guessed my own people would be one of them.  Years ago when I was preparing to graduate college, an organization in Port-au-Prince hired me to work with ti machann, street vendors. I was really excited; I’d written my senior thesis about microcredit in Haiti.  What my university work could not prepare me for however, was the resistance of my Haitian co-workers to the “just come” in their midst.

Haiti at 6 months|Managing expectations by not naming them?

A tree is a rare sight at a camp and here, in Tabarre, residents use the shade for community meetings.

When I nearly fainted in the second camp we visited in Tabarre this Monday, some of the women leaders who live there brought me a Tampico juice right quick.  It was sweating, ice cold.  How do they get ice? And where do they keep it? Then I thought, Great.  They’re running to bring me juice while the 250 families that live here get by on 500 gallons of water a day. That’s the same amount of water in a luxe hotel’s fish tank.

Sitting on one of the wooden benches in a makeshift classroom, I sipped enough of the juice to get my sugar up and gave the rest to a little boy who’d been eying it.  Who can blame him.  Cloudless sky, big naked sun, scrub grass, one tree, cooking inside plastic tents: it’s white hot out here for Haitians everyday.

Boys lounge on a dusty cement floor at another Tabarre camp of wooden homes, not tents, run by Saint Vincent de Paul

Why should the foreigner get camp juice?

With the IHRC, diaspora money doesn’t talk

(remittancesgateway.org)

Annually, Haitians abroad remit more than twice the amount pledged by the seven countries sitting on the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC)–yet these seven can vote; the diaspora representative can not.