Fear and Trembling

Joegodson and Paul

Last week, Antonia passed her ninth month. This is her first pregnancy. The baby is very much alive and is constantly knocking at the door. Antonia waits. But she is increasingly anxious. Perhaps all expectant mothers pass through this moment. Here’s what it is like for Antonia.

She and Joegodson moved into a tiny room – two and a half metres squared – in Delmas 33 a couple of months ago. There was room for the two of them and only two of the three pieces of furniture that Joegodson crafted. The third piece – the vanity – he had to leave behind in Delmas 19 where he was living under a tent. His old neighbours dismantled it to use as firewood for cooking. “Oh well,” he says.

Joegodson in the process of crafting the vanity in September. (He is embarrassed to show the piece 'under construction.' He was proud of the finished product. The camera was stolen after this photo was taken, and so we never took photos of the finished products.) In any case, he had to leave this item behind in Delmas 19, where it is serving as firewood.

Antonia listens to the radio. People keep warning her that tremors are coming. She never feels them. However, the warnings are enough to make her tremble and keep her off balance. There is a floor above them and she is constantly worried about how quickly she could get to the door to escape when the earthquake comes. What will happen when the baby is born? Would it be better to be under a tent than in a room where the furniture blocks access to the door?

Worse, she can’t escape the constant political tension. She knows that she will give birth any day and she is convinced that, no matter what happens, there will be violence. She is living with constant anxiety and so, therefore, is the baby. She can’t stop it. She heard this week that the United Nations have given Haitians until January 31 to settle the political crisis or the ‘international community’ will impose a government. If that ultimatum is true, what could it mean? She takes stock of the situation. Lavalas, the most popular party and the one that she and Joegodson support, is excluded from the electoral process without explanation. Therefore, the majority will automatically be excluded from any settlement. Those political actors in the running (those not excluded by the CEP representing undisclosed interests) lead groups who are clearly dedicated to violence to take control of the government. Then Duvalier showed up and a number of people, for whatever reasons, demonstrated their willingness to support him. That people support Duvalier, regardless of his intentions in Haiti, has served to further unsettle Antonia. Politically, there will be violence … and soon. There is no way to avoid it given the mix of factors. It seems quite possible that the chaos was deliberately fomented in order to arrive at the imposition of a president chosen by the United Nations; more specifically, whatever interests control that body. They will probably choose someone who can put a humanitarian face on deepening the imperialist project. Antonia will give birth at any moment. She is anxious not only for the future the child will face, but the actual moment of birth for her and the baby. Will she be forced to run for safety as a pregnant woman or with a baby in her arms? Neither image is calming her down.

On top of those concerns, she and Joegodson face the same uncertain futures as every poor Haitian. Will Joegodson be able to realize our fair trade enterprise, which is very much alive but dependent on a number of factors both in and out of Haiti? Otherwise, will his small entrepreneurial activities be even modestly successful? Since these questions can only be answered in the future, Antonia succumbs to more stress.

Don’t forget that they are eating very little and they are surrounded by communicable diseases. Joegodson’s dad died of typhus, at forty-eight years of age, only a couple of weeks ago. That has been a difficult loss to accept and a depressing reminder of their vulnerability. Antonia did not attend the funeral according to a Haitian custom whereby it is thought to be dangerous for an unborn child should its mother look upon a deceased body.

On top of all that, the rumours multiply. The latest rumours concern the catastrophes that people claim await the entire planet in 2012. (In fact, catastrophes await the poor each year for the foreseeable future: 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 … it’s a great time for soothsayers!) What could be worse than 2010? For some time, people have been claiming that the reason that Americans are buying Haitian property is that they fear that their own country is going to be destroyed next year. At the extreme, people say that Americans are building an underwater tunnel from Florida to Cap Haitien. When Florida begins to collapse into the sea, (or, according to climatologists, when the sea rises to swallow Florida), they will escape to Haiti where they will displace Haitians. Neither Joegodson nor Antonia believe that people are actually tunneling under the Florida Straits en route for Haiti, but Antonia says that the rumours add to her level of stress.

To understand the evolution of this rumour, it is helpful to consider the presence in Haiti of fundamentalist, evangelical American missionaries who read Revelations literally. Many Haitians and Americans share a similar perspective. For Joegodson, the message of Jesus is love, not conquest. In their political, economic, and military implications, the two “Christianities” move in opposite directions. Joegodson is offended by those who appropriate the message of Jesus in the interests of conquest. They are everywhere and they are arrogant and dangerous. Humility and determination mark someone who acts in the spirit of Jesus. He gives Gandhi as an example. In any case, the doomsday prophets add to Antonia’s anxiety.

Antonia faces childbirth surrounded by a general state of dread that touches the web of political, geological, and economic factors. She has no doctor and is not sure what will be the circumstances of the birth. Add the prophetic talk of doom. She’s finding it hard to be joyful in what she thought would be a joyous occasion.

Insurrection in SONAPI

Joegodson and Paul

When last we left Frederique and Manouchka, in November, they were both working at the SONAPI Industrial Park in Port-au-Prince.

It was Baby Doc Duvalier who, in the 1970s, had offered the impoverished peasants, newly arrived from the countryside, to American industrialists looking for the cheapest labour in the hemisphere. While journalists recorded for us images of a few people cheering Duvalier’s arrival at the airport on Sunday, we think a more meaningful manifestation was taking place in the nearby assembly plants. It’s not clear how much the handful of Haitians were paid to cheer Duvalier’s arrival at Toussaint Louverture Airport (once named for his father), but we know to the gourd how much the workers make in the Industrial Park. That’s only part of their problem.

We hope the victims of Duvalier find the strength and the support to force Baby Doc to account for his actions. There appears to be such little life behind those eyes; perhaps only a comprehensive enquiry could light a spark in his soul. Meanwhile, we have to place the actions of the humble $3-a-day Frederique in juxtaposition to the $500,000,000 president-for-life Duvalier. We want to keep in the forefront those, like Frederique, who fight for justice and dignity, even as we are forced to deal with the architects of oppression like Duvalier. The trap is to spend so much time with evil that you forget where the hope lies. Moreover, Duvalier is only the most obvious case; he should not be allowed to displace those who have more effectively rationalized their avarice and contempt for the world.

Frederique

Remember that Frederique had been having problems submitting to the philosophic underpinnings of the Haitian class system. Much as the evidence showed him that he was worth almost nothing in the marketplace, he demanded nevertheless to be treated with respect. That flaw in his character culminated last week in a significant – and totally unreported – workers’ revolt in Building 43 at the SONAPI Industrial Park. Let’s trace the education of a troublemaker.

His girlfriend Manouchka had saved ten dollars so that he could take a course to learn how to operate an industrial sewing machine. After he was fired from his first job for insubordination, she also found him work at Building 31 at SONAPI. There, he was assigned the job of pressing men’s pants. He had a quota of 1,000 pieces a day and he earned about 20$US a week. If he worked all the overtime hours, seven days a week, he earned 36$US.

After a month, he developed a very uncomfortable rash under his arms as a result of performing the same motion repeatedly in extreme heat. Port-au-Prince is hot. Building 31 is hotter. Now, imagine pressing pants at breakneck speed for ten hours a day. He sweated profusely. His moist arms rubbed constantly against his sides and caused, over time, an irritating rash. Finally, he couldn’t perform the motion because of the pain. He asked for a few days off so that his skin might heal. No. He asked for a bonus in recognition of his pain. No. And so Frederique decided to leave anyway in order to heal.

He stayed in the tent in Delmas 31 that he had erected for Manouchka and him. Manouchka continued to take the taptap each morning to SONAPI, without him. Soon, his skin was healed and he was well again. But he didn’t want to return to that job.

Outside of each of the factories at the Sonapi Industrial Park, a group of unemployed wait to take the place of an unwanted employee. Notice that all of the hopefuls are men. Women are preferred by the managers as they are thought to be more controllable.

However, once healed, Frederique returned to SONAPI and stood in front of Kay Morisette (Morisette’s place). The locals name each building for the Haitian family that runs it. For instance, you may be sewing clothes for GAP or Gildan Activewear, but you know the sweatshop for the Haitian sub-contractors. Those are “the families” that run Haiti: the oligarchy.

Frederique was chosen to work in Kay Morisette. Like the other sweatshops, work started at 6:30 am. He worked in a small module to make pockets for men’s trousers. It was demanding. The module had to produce 1,000 pockets by 11 am. If not, it risked being sent home. The daily quota was 2,000 pockets. The members of the module worked hard to make sure they surpassed the quota. However, they got paid nothing extra when they did. They got paid nothing if they didn’t make the quota. At Kay Morisette, Frederique earned 80$US every two weeks. However, he hated the work. His experience was similar to that of Manouchka last year, described in our article A Haitian Love Story. The module system is designed to make workers police each other. If one member is slow, then the whole module suffers. And so, the workers can be cruel to the slowest worker. In SONAPI, a worker who is judged to be a drag on the module is called a kokoye: a coconut. It’s a bitter epithet to swallow.

After three months in Kay Morisette, Frederique got sick. He began to suffer from abdominal pains and couldn’t keep up. He told the boss he needed time off. The boss brought him a pill. He said he was serious, that he needed a real diagnosis for his stomach cramps. (Don’t forget, these overworked workers are living – like Frederique – in squalid conditions surrounded by malaria, diptheria, typhoid, cholera and other contagious diseases.) They told him to get to work. He asked the bosses why he was having ONA deducted from his miserable salary if there was no healthcare. (ONA is a mandatory deduction for employees in the formal economy. It is supposed to cover health insurance, but it is obviously a scam to line somebody’s pockets – the same pockets he was sewing while sick.) The bosses didn’t like his questions any more than Frederique liked their answers. They responded by mocking him. They aimed at his masculinity, calling him a wimp, a crybaby and, finally, when he weakened, a kokoye.

That was the final straw. He walked out on the job and to recuperate in his tent in Delmas 31.

Last month, Manouchka persuaded him to try again. This time, he stood outside Building 43 to work for The Well Best. There, the manager is a harsh Korean woman named Jessica. He was hired as part of a module of thirty workers to begin production of a new product the company was launching: women’s slacks. Jessica told them that the quota was 1,200 units per day. Pay was 80$US every two weeks. The workers responded that the quota was unreasonable. They said that their module could manufacture a maximum of 600.

Jessica made two modules of fifteen workers each. Each was responsible for 500 pieces. She offered a bonus of 4$ if they achieved the quota. The workers had seen this before; Jessica was testing them to see how much they could achieve if they worked hard. Once that was established, the bonus would be eliminated and the module would be responsible for the maximum.

The personnel officer has much power inside the SONAPI factories. He harasses, humiliates, and fires workers from time to time to control the group. The personnel officer needs to demonstrate to the owners that he or she is ruthless in order to be considered for advancement. They have to be seen to be contemptuous of the workers. In this case, the Well Best workers were finding the quota impossible to attain. They were working at breakneck speed. If they had to use the toilets, they rushed in, took care of business, and then rushed back so fast that they left the paper towels on the floor. They knew that there was a janitor whose job was to clean the washroom. However, the personnel officer – a Haitian – came by to humiliate the workers very publicly. He called them animals – kabrit (goats) – for the way they left the washroom.

Those kinds of words are meant to humiliate the workers. The personnel officer needed to be as loud and insulting as possible in order that his bosses register his contempt for the poor workers. Frederique was supposed to recoil in the face of the insult. However, Frederique responded in the tone that the personnel officer had chosen. He said that if they were indeed animals and coconuts, then there would be no question of them operating the machines, since everyone knows that goats can’t sew. He said that all thirty workers were going to  work like actual goats until the personnel officer and Jessica admitted they were human beings. Spontaneously, every one of the workers stood with Frederique.

The apology not forthcoming, they all walked out of Kay Morisette and loudly made known their insurrection. Other workers from the other sweatshops of SONAPI began to join them. They all threw stones at Kay Morisette, breaking the windows and terrifying Jessica and the personnel officer.

MINUSTAH also has a presence inside of SONAPI. The control of workers is a priority of the "international community," excluding its populations, press, and politicians - except in huis clos.

Jessica called the SONAPI guards. However, they were not strong enough to confront the growing crowd. Then, Jessica called the PNH (national police). They arrived and asked the workers why they were striking. The workers responded that they were underpaid and treated like animals. The police told Jessica that it wasn’t their business. They left.

The insurgents remained well past closing time, holding Jessica and the personnel officer hostage since they were afraid to present themselves to the crowd that the security guards and the police had decided were outside of their jurisdiction.

Jessica then called out to the workers using a loudspeaker. She said that they should choose three people to negotiate their grievances. The crowd began to calm down. They chose three people to speak for the whole module. The crowd then disbanded, deciding that they would withhold their decision until the following day. However, as soon as the crowd dispersed, Jessica left the building to go home, without exchanging as much as a word with the representatives. It had been a tactic to disperse the crowd. She had no interest in negotiations.

The next day, when Frederique and the others arrived for work, they first learned of Jessica’s treachery. Frederique said that he had had enough. He handed in his badge and turned around for Delmas 31.

Manouchka called Frederique later in the day, worried. She stopped by Kay Morisette after work as usual to ride home with him. He explained that he had given up on the place. She said that there was a big crowd out front. She was afraid for what might have become of him.

Later, she joined him at their humble tent up in Delmas 31. He was worried that she would be angry that he had lost another job. But she understood his frustration and his action. She said that she couldn’t stand working there either. They decided that they would find a way to realize their dreams together and that they would not include SONAPI. Manouchka spoke once again of her dream to be a florist or to sell flowers as a street merchant. It has been slipping away. Both working together at SONAPI can’t make enough money to live in more than a tent.

We suggested months ago that the industrialists have no interests in the earthquake victims improving their living conditions. Frederique and Manouchka are living under a tarp stretched across two by fours, each working over sixty hours a week, and cannot save enough to improve even that shelter. Even the humanitarian NGOs who help the victims of the earthquake underwrite an inhumane system of exploitation.

 

Double Crossed

Joegodson and Paul

As Canadians were donating to the Red Cross in order to help the victims of the Haitian earthquake, one of its ex-employees, Virgil Grandfield, was refusing to allow the labour abuses he witnessed in Indonesia after the tsunami of 2004 to fade into history. He resigned from the Red Cross when it refused to address his evidence that the Red Cross subcontractors were not paying the Javanese workers they had brought to remote areas of Aceh province. Stranded, the men found out too late that they were victims of human trafficking. You can read Grandfield’s account of his struggle to seek justice for the Javanese wokers here. Radio-Canada, acting on his information, verified the systemic use of human trafficking by the Red Cross subcontractors. Young business graduates searching for a career in the current global market might want to watch how a Red Cross spokesperson earns her keep by filling in the moments until the interviewer has exhausted his stunted curiosity.

In the age of global neoliberalism, subcontracting is standard procedure for burying unethical business practices. We have shown how multinational corporations use it to protect themselves from allegations of worker abuse. There is much more to say. While basking in the light of goodness, NGOs are in fact corporate structures that ruthlessly protect their reputations and their ability to raise huge amounts of capital.

On the Wednesday before the election, Joegodson went to explore a project that the Red Cross is sponsoring in Cite Soleil. He was raised in another part of Cite Soleil, so, once he disembarked from the taptap, he had to ask the local people for directions to the worksite.

Once there, he saw a truck marked International Red Cross coming from a construction zone. He entered the area. It was a large camp with many shoddy tents. A section of it was under construction.

He saw a number of groups of men constructing shelters. He was drawn to one of the groups where an argument was taking place. The argument was about money, but they stopped as he arrived. The men dispersed.

Joegodson spoke with the boss who remained behind. He was a young man and the foreman of the group. Each group had one boss and five workers.

Joegodson told the boss he was a carpenter and asked if there was any chance in finding a job on the site. The boss told him that the training sessions had already taken place some time ago. Each worker and boss attended the training sessions. Then they had begun the actual work. However, the boss advised Joegodson that if he checked in each morning, very early, he might be able to take the place of anyone who quit. Joegodson asked why people quit. The boss answered that sometimes they find better jobs elsewhere. Joegodson asked how much money the workers earn. He told the boss that he had been to the USAID-CHF worksite where the workers worked but didn’t receive their pay. The boss wouldn’t say how much the men earned, but he said they were paid. The boss went away.

Joegodson hung about and approached a couple of the five men – the workers – who had been talking with the boss earlier. Joegodson asked about the working conditions and salary. The guys said that the group has to make one house every six days. They start very early in the morning. The houses aren’t prefabricated and the ground has to be prepared, so there is considerable work involved. The bosses wanted to pay them 300 Haitian dollars for each house, but the workers forced them to agree to 400, which is 80$US. So, in principle, each worker would make 13$US a day. However, no one had yet been paid anything at all. They said that they are supposed to be paid when the whole project is finished. No one knows when that will be.

These men are the victims of the earthquake. They are homeless, except for their tents. They have families that they can’t feed. The workers are afraid that, like the CHF men, they won’t be paid. So, now Joegodson could understand why they might look for work elsewhere – work that paid.

The men told Joegodson that they thought the Red Cross were thieves for withholding their salary. Question: “Why do you work here then?” Answer: “There’s nothing else.”

Joegodson left to poke around the shelters that had been completed. He was amazed at the apparent lack of foresight in regards to the planning. The shelters were simple affairs. They were each three sheets of plywood by four, or twelve by sixteen feet. They were crowded together; there was not a metre between them. The most disturbing thing was that in the middle of the group of shelters was the community latrine. It was central so that the shelters actually butted up against it. In some cases, he could measure 50 centimetres between the latrines and the shelter. No one was living in them yet, but Joegodson couldn’t see how they could ever be inhabitable. In the Haitian heat, fecal matter makes its decomposition quite public. No one can stand the smell of the latrines even from a hundred metres away. When the trucks come to empty them, the smell is unbearable. And so it is unimaginable that people would accept living in such proximity to the community latrines.

There was a solitary young woman sitting in front of the shelters. She appeared dejected. Joegodson went to sit on a rock next to her and struck up a conversation. He asked her what she thought of the shelters. Why did she think they would put the toilets in the middle of the shelters? She was trying to understand the same thing. She said that even when you’re a distance from the latrines, the odour is unbearable. How could people possibly live here? She told Joegodson that she lived in this neighbourhood. Like everyone else, she was now under a tent. But she was not going to live in these things. So, she was trying to figure out what to do. She had a family.

She said that the Red Cross had a program that she didn’t like any better. If you found a room somewhere else, like Delmas, and you brought a lease from the prospective landlord to the Red Cross, they would check it out and go to see the landlord. They would pay the landlord for six months rent. Then after six months, they would give you 2,000$H (400$US) to start a business. (That’s what they say; no one believes anything.) But then they would have to leave their neighbourhood – their community – and they would have nothing to live on.

Staring at the little development in front of her, she said that the mud was going to be a critical problem when it rained. In Port-au-Prince, the people in the poor districts are very sensitive to mud. There is no pavement or grass and the torrential rains turn the common areas into disaster zones of mud. (People sometimes just leave their shoes in the mud and carry on without them when they get stuck too deep.) The shelters were in a little depression and nothing had been done to assure that the entrances would be protected from the rain and mud. The planning was disastrous.

He left her to ruminate over her family’s future. He didn’t see either choice as attractive either.

A Haitian Love Story, continued

Joegodson and Paul

On June 2, we left Manouchka at death’s door at the CICIMED medical clinic in Delmas 19, Port-au-Prince. Her boyfriend Frederique had tried to get her back pay from SONAPI to cover the costs for the tests that the staff said she needed, but he had failed. Both were desperate in the face of her impending death.

Manouchka preparing for work before she came down with malaria in June.

The medical personnel told Frederique that Manouchka would have to be transferred to another clinic where she could be diagnosed and treated. CICIMED is an upscale clinic that normally takes only paying customers. Clearly, they counted Manouchka and Frederique among working Haitians. And working Haitians could not afford CICIMED bills. Manouchka was delirious and deteriorating quickly. Frederique was desperate.

Things changed. Soon after, the medical staff told Frederique that Manouchka had malaria. They also agreed that they would provide her with the antimalarial drugs that would save her life.

Things could have been worse. We can understand both her illness and recovery in relation to the earthquake. The earthquake led to the squalid living conditions in which malaria and other potentially fatal diseases thrive. It also brought organizations that temporarily infused local private clinics like CICIMED with cash. In order to qualify for the cash, we speculate, they were obliged to accept cases like Manouchka. Before the earthquake, the poor people living in the neighbourhood of CICIMED never considered it in relation to their health. You need money to be admitted into CICIMED. That window of treatment for the poor has closed again. The old healthcare model has re-established itself.

To understand the difference, consider the experience of Manouchka in June and Deland this week. Deland, it must be underlined, is suffering from both typhus and malaria. Also facing death, he was required to travel in insalubrious and uncomfortable conditions to line up for hours for a quick examination and diagnosis. He was then sent away with a prescription for expensive drugs. Hundreds of poor Haitians lined up with Deland at the same public clinic from five o’clock in the morning, for want of more humane alternatives.

When Manouchka left the clinic in June, she did not want to return to her old job at SONAPI. She tried to imagine another way to survive. When she returned for the back pay that they would not give to Frederique a couple of weeks earlier, she learned that receiving it depended on resuming the job that she detested and that had almost cost her life. She acquiesced for want of an alternative.

Meanwhile, Frederique was unemployed. He had erected their tent in Delmas 33, but it was a shoddy affair even in relation to the other makeshift shelters. He was ashamed to be at “home” while Manouchka worked long hours at least six days a week.

Frederique with Manouchka in the CICIMED clinic in June.

After a few weeks, Manouchka was able to save 10$US so that Frederique could take a course in operating a sewing machine and thus enter the formal labour market. The course completed, he presented himself outside a factory at SONAPI. He was hired. However, since his skills were rudimentary and he was unable to work fast enough to please his bosses, they fired him.

He was able to find another job in one of the many sweatshops of Port-au-Prince. While he came to work efficiently, he refused to accept the degrading treatment from his bosses. He spoke back, asserting that he was a man and therefore refused to be treated as a child. He also refused to relent in the face of the constant derision. He says that his resistance angered the boss who saw it as a test of wills. Frederique came to see that insisting that he be treated with respect was upsetting the equilibrium of the sweatshop. The daily salary of three dollars US came with constant humiliation. Learning how to operate the sewing machine was only part of the job. More important was accepting the subordinate social role of worker.

We should note that the sweatshops do not even train the workers they abuse. Men and women must already have paid for a course that allows them to be financially and socially maltreated.

Before long, the boss realized that Frederique would not submit and fired him. By now, Frederique was proficient at the work. He would need to at least pretend to accept the proposition that he was the social inferior of the bosses in order to keep his next job.

Men wait outside the gates of one of the SONAPI factories in June. When an employee is judged too slow or troublesome, he or she is quickly replaced by these unemployed, always in great supply. Women are chosen first which accounts for the fact that this photo (illicitly snapped by Joegodson) shows men waiting their chance to make four dollars US a day.

In August, he went back to SONAPI. Manouchka, after a year, is considered a profitable asset. She, like Frederique, was fired from her first jobs at SONAPI and in the more informal sweatshops because of her inability to work at the pace of the quota. In August, she was able to convince the boss to hire Frederique who waited outside the factory. For the last couple of months, they have been working together in the same shop. They each make under thirty dollars for a seven-day week.

They live still in their tent in Delmas 33. That means that they have to take a taptap to and from SONAPI each day. Since the factories all open at six-thirty in the morning, they must leave at least an hour in advance to have a chance to arrive on time. At six-thirty, the gates close and the latecomers are shut out for the day. Likewise, returning after five or six in the evening (depending on when they are dismissed) is chaotic. All of the commuters are under the same pressure to arrive on time and they fight with each other for spots on the limited number of taptaps.

Like Frederique, Manouchka refused the treatment when she first arrived from the countryside. She still hates it. However, now, she wakes up before Frederique, who is less resigned to their fate. She makes sure that they leave early enough to arrive at the factory on time. He allows her to lead him. Both ponder their dreams as they are pushed around Port-au-Prince: Manouchka to be a florist and Frederique to open a karate club. However, they work such long hours and are so exhausted that they have no time or energy for anything but survival.

They managed to save enough over the last two months so that Frederique could buy some two-by-fours in order to reinforce their tent. In other words, they seem to be building a life in the tent. Their employers in the formal economy – the sweatshops run by wealthy Haitians in the service of the multinational clothing corporations – are profiting from their squalid situation. Manouchka and Frederique are motivated to continue to suffer the abuses because of their young love and their dreams of a future together.

At home, there is little in the way of domestic chores because there is nothing there. They have no time or wherewithal to cook and so they buy their plates of rice from the street merchants. On the Sundays when they aren’t required to work, they buy from the merchants near their tent in Delmas 33 and eat together.

Antonia and Joegodson watch their friends with great sympathy. They too are looking for a way to escape the inescapable trap set by the powers that control Port-au-Prince within the global economy.

“It’s so tragic,” Joegodson mused the day after the hurricane as his own father faces death from malaria and typhus. “They are in love and they want a future, but it’s hard to see how they can escape the fate of people like Mayou.” Mayou is Joegodson’s elderly neighbour who lost her only son in the earthquake. She has never been able to live independently of her equally poor mother despite working all her life at the SONAPI Industrial Park. (We called her Seret in a previous article, but she is no longer concerned about us using her real name.)

We wonder how the employers will respond to the deadly epidemics that are present in Port-au-Prince and show no signs of dissipating. With the public healthcare so ineffective at even keeping people alive, skilled, overworked employees like Manouchka and Frederique living in squalid conditions will be increasingly vulnerable. Manouchka has already escaped death, but could more easily succumb to the next bout of malaria, cholera, typhus, or tuberculosis, all of which are flourishing in the squalor.

We must take note of the fact that Haitians are not at the bottom of the global pay scale. Other populations in Asia are living in squalor and receiving even smaller salaries. It is possible that, around the boardroom tables, executives are calculating the birthrate and the availability of replacements for the deceased. (We can’t know how they are calculating their bottom lines because their strategies are protected from public scrutiny. Private, corporate entrprises are fundamentally totalitarian.) Joegodson highlights the fact that the birthrate has exploded since the earthquake – a phenomenon well documented after other disasters and wars. In other words, the exploitative employers will not lack for victims. He observes, with mordant accuracy, “We’ve already replaced everybody who died in the earthquake. More, probably.”

Manouchka is alone with Frederique. Her female relatives, with whom she was living after the earthquake, refused to accept Frederique; she thinks out of jealousy. In choosing Frederique, she faced the abandonment of her relatives. While she resents having been forced to make a choice, she is happy with the one she made. They are fortunate to have good relations with Frederique’s mother and brother, who are struggling like them. Frederique’s mother has recovered from her broken leg and has resumed her work as a street merchant. Again, she benefited from the funding that NGOs (Doctors Without Borders) temporarily offered after the earthquake to have her leg set in a clinic.

Meanwhile, Frederique and Manouchka are trying to figure out how they can escape the prison of SONAPI. They aren’t alone.

Seeing Value

Paul Jackson 

Joegodson

You’re a twenty-eight year old cabinet maker in Port-au-Prince. You will be married on October 1. In early 2011, you will be a father. You have no home. You have no money. Rents are well out of reach since the earthquake, given that there are very few habitable spaces. (Those that exist go to people who can pay for them, like the foreign humanitarian workers with good salaries.) You eat almost nothing to avoid creating an appetite that you know you couldn’t alleviate.

You have the fortune/misfortune to be the friend of a poor citizen of a rich country.

On the polished shelves of Canadian apparel stores, each of the articles of clothing that your neighbours manufacture sells for many times their daily salary of about three dollars. Under the quota system in the sweatshops, they might make a thousand items each day.

Your neighbours and friends all confront similar daily struggles for survival in Port-au-Prince. Few think of the future as you do. Everyone is subject to starvation wages for their work. Even still, those wages often go unpaid. And so the present perpetuates itself.

So you work with your impecunious Canadian friend to establish a non-profit company that brings together the most talented artisans, tailors, and designers to market directly to the Canadian public. The profits will be reinvested to improve the living and working conditions of the workers. In other words, you don’t wait for the right government to be elected. It won’t be. You don’t ask for charity. Why should you? Neither do you cower in the face of the bullying of those with money and power.

That non-profit company currently being registered is all about value. It is called Ann Bay Valè, a supple Creole term meaning Creating Value or Let’s Make Value or Towards Value.  We will soon be showing that things considered to be worthless can be transformed by lively imaginations into items of value. Mostly, we are reconsidering the value of people in the current global economy.

Joegodson is the Haitian inspiration behind Ann Bay Valè. Since we must begin with small items easily imported into Canada, we are forced to exclude his own work. However, it is representative of the creations we will soon be introducing through our new company. And so, we offer a sample here. This is the soul of our enterprise.

How do you prepare to raise a family without money? Into what kind of society will you be raising your children?

In June, Joegodson had the good fortune to be offered a gift of five hundred dollars from an anonymous donor in Canada to help towards his future with his fiancée Antonia, expecting their first child. How to use it? There were two possibilities: he could lay the foundation for a home or build the furniture that would go into it. Here is the conundrum: building a home was and remains a very risky undertaking. But without a domicile, what would they do with the furniture?

It is unclear who owns any property. Wealthy Haitians claim much of the country. The validity of their claims will be judged by their peers. However, throughout Haiti’s history, people have squatted on unoccupied lands. In time, their use of the land justifies their claim to ownership. Joegodson and Antonia, like thousands of other homeless people after the earthquake, fenced in a small plot in the vacant hills of Canaan. With the help of his cousin, he built the foundation for a home on a perpetually windy slope. That required iron bars (rebars) to reinforce the concrete so that the structure would resist the next earthquake. There were two options. The poor of Port-au-Prince have been recovering the iron bars from the debris and selling them for about half the price of new rebars. Joegodson opted for new bars. He judged that those recuperated from the earthquake debris had been weakened by being deformed and subsequently straightened. He bought twenty bars at eighty Haitian dollars each: 1,600 Haitian dollars (320$US.)

However, once the foundation was in place, Joegodson, along with many others, decided that the risks were too great to proceed further with the construction. How would the Haitian oligarchy respond to the new residents springing up in Canaan? He, like all of his potential neighbours, risked losing everything.

Joegodson turned to the furniture. Whatever might happen in Canaan, he could at least craft some furniture. The price of wood has skyrocketed since January 12. Wood has always been expensive in deforested Haiti. However, in view of the devastating effects of the collapse of concrete buildings poorly reinforced, it is the preferred building material. As a historical footnote, after the devastating earthquake of 1770, the small city of Port-au-Prince passed a by-law requiring that all buildings be made of wood.

Joegodson had enough money left to buy three sheets of plywood, each four by eight feet, at the Marché Guérite in the centre of Port-au-Prince. However, he has built most of his furniture with debris recovered from the collapsed clinic on whose grounds he lived. He was able to recuperate the doors crushed under the concrete and to transform them into a bed, a sideboard, tables, and a vanity. He has worked outdoors, for the most part with borrowed tools. It requires patience and imagination.

Joegodson and the vanity, so far.

His friends have offered their skills to add value to his creations. For instance, Cemè contributed his talent as a wood carver to decorate the drawers of the vanity. Cemè is also a member of Ann Bay Valè, looking forward to the chance of marketing his work, in cooperation with the other members like Joegodson, directly to Canadians. After the quake, Joegodson worked for the Cash for Work program for five dollars a day, a wage certain to perpetuate poverty. Cemè also sees that if they could be paid reasonably for their work, then the profits could go towards creating decent living and working conditions, beginning with a community workshop. The workshop is intended to bring together a number of talented workers who can share their skills, tools, and imaginations to create unique products. At the present time, we want to shift the discussion in Canada away from the framework of charity and victims. The members of Ann Bay Valè are all working hard and are confident in their skills. We want to change how Canadians and Haitians understand the market under which corporate power decides that Haitian workers are worth a maximum of five dollars a day. We don’t think that is a fair reflection of the products produced. We’ll allow the Canadian market to decide.

Joegodson's sideboard, so far.

One of the conundrums that Joegodson and Antonia face is that they may soon have furniture and yet there is no place to put it. Joegodson can create beautiful pieces of furniture for their future family. Like their friends and neighbours, they have no home and cannot afford to rent. So, the furniture sits in a courtyard until the owners tell him to move it. That could happen at any moment. He covers the pieces under construction to protect them from the heavy rains. Why not sell the furniture on the Haitian market? He has tried. The only people who have any use for his creations (those with a domicile) refuse to pay him even enough to cover the costs of the plywood. They know that they can afford to value his skills, time, and imagination at nothing. His friends like Molière and Cemè, members of Ann Bay Valè, value each other for their talents and skills, but have no money to translate that into purchasing each others’ products. All live under tents and eat as little as possible, like Joegodson.

What should be obvious is that the formal economy that pays three dollars a day is also part of the Canadian economy. Look at the labels on the clothing in any high-end apparel store to understand your economy. The workers are not seeing any of the money that you are paying. Who does see that profit? Why, Canadians should ask, is it necessary to send charity to Haitians who are skilled, imaginative, and work well over ten hours every day? Who is pocketing the wealth that they create? If Haitian workers are indeed part of the Canadian economy, we at Ann Bay Valè are going to assure that they are valued for their work in that market.

In other words, imagine a shantytown on a vacant lot in Vancouver, Montreal or Toronto where all the adults are employed by the largest, wealthiest corporation in the city. They work from six in the morning until five thirty in the evening, including Saturday. The children beg or scavenge during the days because they can’t afford school. The adults bring home twenty-five dollars a week to take care of the family. Don’t, by the way, imagine that life is inexpensive in Port-au-Prince. It isn’t. I am describing our economy. I’m simply imagining the working-class district next door to you and not a world away.

Joegodson and the headboard for his bed and two tables, all made entirely from recycled debris from the earthquake.

At the moment, Joegodson is stuck. He has gone as far as possible with material recycled from the earthquake debris. To finish, he needs actual money, for the paints, for the bedrails for the mattress – not to mention the mattress itself. His planning for the non-profit company Ann Bay Valè as well as his articles on the economic and social conditions that have led him to establish that non-profit company have cost him much time and the very little money that has passed through his hands. His articles have been published throughout the alternative press in Canada and the United States. He has received nothing whatsoever for them. Anyone who has appreciated his insights and analysis might consider offering him financial support to allow him to plan his own future and to continue to organize the other artisans and workers (twenty to date) into Ann Bay Valè. Anything is welcome. Write him at keayiti@yahoo.ca. If you can afford a few dollars, you could send it directly to him in Port-au-Prince via Western Union. His actual name is Vilmond Joegodson Deralciné.

In Joegodson’s life, Jesus is the ultimate example of how to live. However, since Antonia is pregnant, their pastor has refused to allow the marriage to take place in their Baptist Church. The choir of which they are members has been told not to sing at their ceremony. Joegodson takes it all in stride. Like Jesus, Joegodson consistently concerns himself with the poorest and most abused people in the community. Two of the members of Ann Bay Valè are young patients in a home for incurables in Port-au-Prince. Struck by stray MINUSTA bullets in Cite Soleil, the paralyzed youths are eager to find meaning in their lives and demonstrate their skills as artists. On the headboard of the bed, Joegodson has inscribed, ‘Open your heart to Jesus.’  On the top of the sideboard, ‘Jesus loves you.’ You don’t have to believe, as he does, that Jesus was the Son of God to see the value of his actions.