Features
(PHOTO BY RICK DELVECCHIO/CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO)
“Once someone exists, they will always try to find a better way”
November 18th, 2009
By Rick DelVecchio
Cap-Haitien, Haiti – I’d never seen so many people working so hard with so little to show for it.
We arrived in Haiti’s second-largest city late on a Friday afternoon. The main highway through town was at full roar. Fighting for space were buses, trucks and cars packed with families and young men. Motorbikes found every seam between bigger vehicles. Young males on foot made a third claim for room, forming a moving mass in the central intersection as traffic picked its way through.
I strained to find one place that looked, for all the commotion, as if it might signal organized economic activity. Sidewalk shopkeepers lined both sides of the street, offering sparse handfuls of packaged goods, a few pieces of battered-looking produce, recycled auto parts, bamboo poles. I looked for a transaction, some sign of buying and selling. I couldn’t see one.
I wondered what the young men forming the human traffic jam had been doing all day and what they had lined up for tomorrow. I wondered what the people in the vehicles crowding the highway had to show for their day’s efforts. And the merchants: Had they sold anything? Being in Haiti, did they have any reason to believe they would?
I was a first-timer in Haiti and went there assuming I’d see the harm that extremes of corruption and dependency can do to the human spirit. I knew Haiti had the hemisphere’s worst poverty, worst governance and longest story of futulity. I’d been prepared to look into faces and see listlessness if not hopelessness, slowing down if not giving up.
Instead, I found a high-energy people persevering in a place where their exertions seemed almost guaranteed not to change their external conditions.
The Haiti I saw was too disorganized to offer hope, but the Haitians I met were too spirited to be hopeless.
“Haitian people, regardless of what you see, want to have a better life,” said Farid Moises, a Haiti project manager for Catholic Relief Services. “They will do whatever they can to make something of themselves.”
I went where Haitian perseverance is at its most intense: on, and over, the border with the Dominican Republic, Haiti’s poor but better-off neighbor in an uneasy relationship on a crowded island. I saw Haitians taking risks not only in search of a better life, which most aren’t destined to find, but also in search of a greater claim on human dignity than they have a right to expect in their own country.
Cross-border transit is a growing global reality. Some 200 million people are on the move from places of want to places of relative wealth. Of these, 1 million to 2 million are Haitians abroad in the Dominican Republic, a number that has doubled in 10 years.
In addition, there are a billion people moving inside their own borders. Often they flock to frontier towns like Ouanaminthe, Haiti, looking for work or a chance to cross for a season or for good.
The tidal shift of labor brings growing humanitarian concerns with it, among them an increase in trafficking and smuggling and heightened tensions as nations’ rights to protect their borders clash with migrants’ human rights.
Advocates for migrants’ rights say immigration policies should be more sensitive to humanitarian issues. They worry that a rising wave of undocumented migrants and increasing resistance from host nations is a recipe for abuse, despite a host of international conventions protecting the rights of people in transit regardless of their status.
They also argue that a more human rights-based stance on mobility will better prepare developed as well as undeveloped nations for the next cycle of economic growth.
At an international migration forum in Athens Nov. 3, the Vatican’s representative, Archbishop Augustino Marchetto, called for “a search for new solutions at the international level, in addition to local ones” that reflect the changes in global labor markets.”
Pope Benedict XVI spoke on the issue at the 6th World Congress on the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Refugees, which was held at the Vatican Nov. 12. “Migrations invite us to focus on the unity of the human family, the value of acceptance, hospitality and love for others,” the Holy Father said.
I went to the Haiti-Dominican border to see the humanitarian response to migration as much as the impulse that drives it.
I met people of conscience who had formed a chain of way stations, islands of civil society, on the migration road across two troubled countries. Some are members of Catholic dioceses in both countries and other Catholic organizations such as the global aid network Caritas Internationalis, the Jesuits and the Sisters of St. John the Evangelist. Others are Haitian, Dominican and international workers who in some cases risk their own safety to defend human dignity.
Through them, I witnessed the Gospel’s tangible force.
“In the Church,” said Bishop Chibly Langlois of Haiti’s Diocese of Fort-Liberté, “we believe that once somebody exists they will always try to find a better way to live.”
I met at least two other people of faith who had become so outraged by the hate and victimization they saw that they had acquired the moral authority to shake up people in high places.
“I like to defend and that’s why I’m defending the lives of others,” said Johnny Rivas, 29, a former farm worker turned labor rights defender and a frequent witness in cases involving exploitation and violence. “I believe in God, I believe in what I’m doing, and God gives me a will to help the others.”
An anti-migrant group threatened Rivas and his wife in 2007, prompting international outrage and a new-found respect for Rivas among high-ranking Dominican authorities.
Denisse Pachardo Rodriguez, a secular member of the Nuestra Señora de Altagracia order, defends poor children who are at risk of being preyed upon by international sex tourists in a Dominican Republic beach town. One of her feats has been to challenge the authorities into setting a higher moral standard than the status quo would have them do.
“As people, they care,” Rodriguez said. “As a person they would feel terrible revulsion. But as a person in the system, in their role they are kind of stuck.”
The humanitarian workers I met reached out to people like Lucien, Roselene and a hurt young girl whose name I never knew.
Lucien, a street kid who is nearly 15 but has the stature of a much younger boy, earns 50 cents a day shining shoes and is under the protection of the Sisters of St. John the Evangelist, known as the Juanistas, across the border in Dajabon.
The Sisters want to send him to school, but Lucien can’t go because he’s the oldest of six kids and has to take care of the family. His parents don’t have jobs. At the same time, Lucien is dealing with the effects of having been attacked on the Dominican Republic side of the border river while bathing. The United Nations is investigating the case.
In a shantytown outside Ouanaminthe, I saw a young girl with an angry-looking lesion on her forearm. I learned it was from a cooking oil spill. The girl was lucky: She had been noticed by Juanistas who watch over the neighborhood as best they can, and she would get care the next week at the Juanistas’ infirmary in town. But there was no way of telling how long it had been since the girl was hurt, let alone how many other children in the neighborhood had even more urgent needs that no one could meet.
I met Roselene Joseph, a welcoming woman in her 40s but looking much older. She lives in the neighborhood with her husband, Lemercier, and five of their children. The Juanistas are helping the Josephs with their basic needs, but it seemed there was very little that the Josephs could do to help themselves.
Roselene, herself the product of a home where her mother died and her father wouldn’t take care of the family, told me she used to sell belts in Dajabon but the woman who supplied her died.
In Roselene’s neighborhood, there was an overwhelming sense of too many mouths to feed and many more to come. “We don’t have enough food to feed then,” Juanista Sister Mazulie Monpremier said, “so of course they are hungry.”
It’s hard to overstate the extent to which Haiti doesn’t work. That’s why Haitians like Lucien, Roselene and the hurt girl are pushed to the edges and over. The economic reality is that women and children, seen as burdensome and disposable, are the first to be cast aside.
Only three in 10 Haitians work in the formal economy. That’s some misery indicator, but I’d discover that it’s far from Haiti’s worst.
The public schools reach fewer than two in 10 children. The roads are so bad that Catholic Relief Services’ new Haiti country representative, Karel Zelenka, says that an overland trip leaves him feeling “like someone is beating you up, literally.”
Worse yet, 40 percent of Haiti’s population has no real access to basic health care. Simply put, Haiti can’t protect the physical integrity of its people.
Haiti suffers from some of the world’s worst corruption combined with intense population pressure, Zelenka told me. There are always efforts internally and internationally to improve the civil society, but the need is so great that it can appear as if nothing gets better.
“Whatever effort you make, it gets almost eaten up by population growth,” Zelenka said. “You are basically running to stand still.”
Catholic San Francisco Assistant Editor Rick DelVecchio and two other Catholic journalists recently spent eight days in Haiti and the Dominican Republic to report on migrants and refugees, whose vulnerability as they cross national borders in search of a better life is a growing humanitarian concern. The trip was organized by Catholic Relief Services. The itinerary highlighted CRS-backed efforts to aid migrants – efforts involving personal courage and risk by people in the Church and their beneficiaries. This is the first installment in a five-part series.
From November 20, 2009 issue of Catholic San Francisco.
Printer Friendly
