Miss Thunderstood

This is inspired by a conversation I had a few days ago with my friend Daniel Zier about things to consider before actually going to Haiti. He brought up relevant concerns about danger.

Daniel and many others are concerned that Haiti is a dangerous place to be right now. The question we debated is whether the media has overstated possible dangers to aid workers or in Port-au-Prince. We’ve both heard that recovery aid has been slow—Damon Winter on the New York Times Lens blog says in an interview with James Estrin:

I’m just amazed at the lack of relief that we’re seeing here. Every day, we go out with the intention of finding some kind of relief program happening here. And we just don’t find it. I’ve seen one U.N.-sponsored food distribution food line and that’s pretty much the only thing I encountered, beyond a local police officer who owned a water truck and who was distributing water to these really, really desperate people.

But as Estrin points out, can you really call some people fighting over meager supplies looting? Natalie Hopkinson at The Root argues that the media, in this case, the New York Times, is too quick to interpret images of black survivors who are possibly foraging for food both in Haiti and New Orleans during Katrina as looters.

And there’s a sense that looting, violence or other security issues could be part of the reason aid isn’t getting disseminated across Port-au-Prince quickly or efficiently. Daniel says the videos that he’s seen on CNN and online look like “Hell on Earth” (I haven’t watched any video coverage, have just been reading articles). He saw it reported on Rachel Maddow’s show that neighborhoods have set up roadblocks of corpses. We both heard that two aid workers from the Dominican Republic were shot. And Lt. General Ken Keen of the U.S. Southern Command has said that “incidents of violence” are hindering aid workers and “fear of looters and robbers has been one of the factors slowing the delivery of aid.”

This seems to me like a justification for the military to come to Haiti and act like, well, the military. Implementing and enforcing curfews, controlling citizens through force and threats of violence and generally dehumanizing the already terrified population. Creating an illusion of a state of chaos in part because the military functions more efficiently and effectively when it has permission to use force and is free from restrictions of peacetime civility. It is the military, after all—but, of course, I’m not there, I can’t confirm or deny reports of violence and this is my paranoid mistrust of troop activity in general, I admit.

I would have imagined the collapsed port and single airport runway are bigger impediments to aid workers, especially since others, including Paul Farmer of Partners in Health and Michael Appleton, another photographer for the Times Lens blog, both denied rumors of widespread violence or looting—

Appleton compared it to the 2004 coup in today’s post, saying:

“It feels much safer than 2004, when there were people with knives and guns everywhere. There is much more suffering now, but people are together — in groups of hundreds — still sleeping in the street, still singing prayers.”

This leaves me no more or less convinced that Haiti is dangerous for aid workers right now. I can imagine that distributing food, water and medical supplies to desperate people can get chaotic, but isn’t that always the case in disaster response? Aren’t these organizations trained to diffuse situations and address need peacefully and efficiently?

My sense is the true danger in Haiti is to Haitians approaching a week post-earthquake without adequate help.

Thinking more about Haiti, when and if to go and with whom. I’ve been having a lot of conversations with folks and, like everyone else, am reading a whole bunch of shit on the Internet. Issues emerging seem to be finding a good organization to support either with money now or as a volunteer in the future; the need for sustainable, responsible aid—i.e. not militarism; and the media’s persistent fascination with Haiti’s poverty and its failure to acknowledge Western imperial responsibility for that poverty.

As always when making a charitable contribution (as when volunteering) it’s important to know where the money’s going and understand the past and present work of the organization you’re donating to. For example, the Red Cross puts money and services to aid disaster recovery, but has a much more difficult time promoting development in part because they don’t have relationships with local organizations or communities pre-disaster.

According to an Urban Institute report cited in Katy Reckdahl’s essay on the Red Cross’s response to Hurricane Katrina, “after Katrina, said the experts, the Red Cross was hindered by ‘its relative lack of integration with local networks of social welfare agencies and publice and private funders.’”

Since Haitian infrastructure was a mess before the earthquake, development-minded relief work will be even more valuable. As a donor or volunteer, I’m looking for organizations that have been operating in Haiti with low administrative costs for a long time. If it’s a Haitian organization, even better.

On the topic of kinder, smarter aid work, I’m looking for organizations that oppose militarism in disaster response. People have been making an understandably big deal about Wyclef Jean’s comment on his Yele organization site that:

President Obama has already said that the U.S. stands ‘ready to assist’ the Haitian people. The U.S. Military is the only group trained and prepared to offer that assistance immediately. They must do so as soon as possible. The international community must also rise to the occasion and help the Haitian people in every way possible.”

I’ve heard too many stories in New Orleans about violence and harassment at the hands of the National Guard during the weeks after the flood. I fear Haitian earthquake survivors will be victimized by military attempts to enforce “order” in Port-au-Prince. As Bill Quigley, Legal Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights and a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans, writes in his widely-circulated list of “Ten Thing the US Can and Should Do for Haiti,” “Do not allow US military in Haiti to point their guns at Haitians.”

It’s also my sense that reports of violence within the country are being overstated by media. While there’s undoubtedly some, but I was heartened by Partners In Health co-founder Paul Farmer’s report in Sunday’s Miami Herald:

Contrary to rumors of looting and mayhem, the city of two million was quiet, which in itself was unusual. I had never experienced Port-au-Prince without the blaring of radios and car horns. And I expect it will remain this way — calm, as long as people are offered dignity and respect and the necessities of daily survival: food, water, sanitation and shelter.

Supporting suspicions that media prefers reports of Haitians engaged in mayhem and violence over reasoned accounts of suffering and struggle, Tamiko Beyer in an extremely thoughtful post on the Kenyon Review blog brings up Haitian novelist Edwidge Danticat’s observation that when there’s not a coup, “the country disappears from people’s consciousness.” Beyer goes on to analyze the ways that media word choice avoids the harsh truth that the US government and other “developed” nations both in their obvious exploitation and their misplaced good intentions are directly responsible for conditions of poverty, starvation, corruption, and environmental devastation.

On a mildly ironic note, I’d signed up with Hands On New Orleans to do some MLK Day volunteering. Was going to landscape with Make It Right (Brad Pitt’s rebuild org in the Lower Ninth). Landscaping in New Orleans, especially in the Lower Ninth, is more than just cosmetic, you can receive steep fines if your grass is overgrown and those still displaced have a difficult time keeping their properties maintained.

Got an email on Saturday that the event was canceled and I’d been reassigned to hand out fire safety pamphlets in Gretna with the Red Cross. Needless to say, I’m here writing shit on the Internet and donating to Partners In Health instead of knocking on doors with a clipboard. Probably should have just showed up and seen for myself, but I kind of feel like I know enough already.

Maybe should have titled the post, “When to Go to Haiti” because though it sounds like workers are still struggling to find survivors and treat victims, aid organizations emphatically do not want me rushing in on the next boat from the DR.

According to the comments in this Mercy Corp blog post by Global Emergency Operations director Randy Martin, dozens of concerned folks, some with pretty impressive qualifications, are anxious to get over there and help.

The outpouring is heartening. But as a later Mercy Corp post clarifies, “Mercy Corps does not send volunteers to our programs overseas, even in emergencies. Our staff is made up of paid professionals, and we hire people locally.”

It’s frustrating to see offers of help refused, but though I’ve never worked in disaster response, it seems there’s sound reasoning behind not taking hoards of well-intentioned yet untrained volunteers to the site of a large-scale natural disaster.

According to the Center for International Disaster Information:

The Center receives thousands of calls each year expressing the same desire to volunteer for international disaster relief assignments. The reality is that volunteers without disaster relief experience are generally not selected for relief assignments. Candidates with the greatest chance of being selected have fluency in the language of the disaster-stricken area, prior disaster relief experience, and expertise in technical fields such as medicine, communications, logistics, or water/sanitation engineering. In many cases, these professionals are already available in-country.

My first thought when I heard about the quake was, most definitely, “how do I get to Haiti?” I was ready to empty my admittedly sparse bank account and set out to lift concrete walls off starving children in Port-au-Prince.

But then I imagined myself in Haiti. Unlike many of the commenters on the Mercy Corp blog, I’ve never been to Haiti, have no disaster relief training and do not speak Haitian Creole—or French for that matter. All I’ve got are my fortune at not having lost everything in a 7.0 earthquake, my relative stamina and health, and my good intentions. No small contribution, but probably better that food, water and resources available in the country go to victims rather than those traveling to help.

It’s also worth mentioning that I won’t be collecting dry goods, clothing and toiletries to send to Haiti. According to this article by David Case in GlobalPost, sorting through care packages sent after the 2004 tsunami was an organizational nightmare for aid workers and victims.

In an effort to help, people shipped boxes, often following the instructions of local television news programs. And so in Aceh, Indonesia amid the trauma, hunger and devastation, care packages piled up containing everything from pajamas and teddy bears to birth control pills and Bibles — a hodgepodge impossible to sort through. There were boxes filled with half-used ointments and prescription drugs, as if do-gooders had cleaned out their medicine cabinets. And some unscrupulous corporations — exploiting tax write-offs for soon-to-be-expired pharmaceuticals — apparently shipped whatever had been lying around the warehouse for too long.

I still plan to go to Haiti, but not until the country stabilizes somewhat and there’s need for the relatively unskilled and untrained. Right now I’m assuming this will be once NGOs have established rebuild or reconstruction projects there. It also makes sense to wait until media coverage (and cash donations) has dropped off. Until then, I’ll follow the news closely, donate money when I can, and study Haitian Creole.

Guidestar has info on nonprofit operations and can help you figure out where to send the bucks.

I didn’t think long and hard and weigh a lot of factors before deciding that since I was interested in volunteering I should probably go to New Orleans. I think I made the right choice, but I was going on instinct. There’s a vague sense across the country that the city still hasn’t recovered, plus I thought New Orleans would be a cool place to spend a couple months. Since I’m interested in other people’s volunteer experiences as well as my own, the suspicion that a lot of other people were coming to New Orleans on a hunch made it feel like the place to start my research.

Just as I decided, on instinct to go to New Orleans, I chose to work with organizations confronting scarcity of affordable housing, rebuilding and homelessness because it seemed obvious. It’s my sense that rebuilding New Orleans neighborhoods and housing stock is one of the most high profile service projects in the US.

According to the Corporation for National and Community Service, in 2007 over 166,000 volunteers from other states traveled at least 120 miles to volunteer in Louisiana. That’s 19 percent of the state’s total volunteers that year. Louisiana ranked sixth in the US in total number of long distance volunteers though the overall volunteer rate was ranked 48th. Rebuilding the Gulf Coast post-Katrina is the main reason lots of out-of-towners end up volunteering here.

A note on quoting of federal agency data: I am aware that volunteering is widely encouraged by government and supported by mainstream values, and since I’m wary of many conventionally “good” practices like marriage, employment, sobriety and exercise, this makes me a bit uneasy. But I’m going to put skepticism while I figure out if there’s actual progress to be made as a volunteer in the Crescent City. At some point, I’ll compare more anti-establishment activism with volunteerism, but for now I’m going to have faith in community service.

I offer these statistics as a sort of framework and also because I’ve found it tricky to find reliable numbers on housing and homelessness in post-K NOLA. Most of the data comes from articles in the Times-Picayune and the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. The GNOCDC aggregates findings of different Government and NGOs including the Brookings Institution, FEMA and the USPS. I’ve linked it all up, but I am not the best chart reader–amendments, corrections and context are always appreciated.

According to the Brookings Institution there were 228,000 houses in the storm’s flood zone, nearly 45 percent of all homes in the New Orleans metro area. The city was the 31st largest city with a population of 485,000 before the storm.

Nearly a year after the storm only half the population of Orleans Parish had returned to the city. Still the population is only back to 73 percent of pre-Katrina numbers. There’s no official data on how many residents are still displaced, but because of the influx of residents who have moved here from elsewhere it’s safe to assume that the number that still haven’t returned exceeds 27 percent.

As of September 2009, New Orleans had approximately 61,000 unoccupied residences. That’s approximately 29 percent of residences in the city. Many of these abandoned homes are occupied by the city’s 11,500 homeless.

Not a mile from the Mid-City apartment I’ve been subletting while here there used to be a camp under the I-10 overpass. And while rebuilding is extremely high profile in the city, the homeless population flies largely under the radar of voluntourist groups out in New Orleans for a week or two.

In New Orleans, like in most US cities, there’s a widespread belief that people who are homeless don’t want to work, or are at fault in some way. Needs of the homeless population here involve access to food, education, employment opportunities, legal aid, healthcare, civil rights, counseling and treatment for substance abuse, in addition to access to sustainable, affordable and safe housing.

Because of the number of homes destroyed after Hurricane Katrina, the amount of public housing demolished in the city since the storm, and increases in insurance and construction costs rental properties are significantly less affordable than they were before the storm. Section 8 housing has replaced public housing but landlords discriminate against tenants with Section 8 and the voucher program besides being overburdened can be prohibitive and difficult to navigate.

As a volunteer, I’ve tried to move beyond the obvious rebuild work and connect with organizations working on behalf of the homeless population. In the future I’ll write about some of my experiences, most notably at the Harry Tompson Center.

Say you’re a recovering alcoholic who, after being a defendant in over 40 misdemeanor cases in the past 16 years, is in AA, holding a steady job and wants to give back to the community. You could mentor at-risk youth, help former inmates find employment, fundraise for a drug and alcohol abuse treatment center—or, you could donate time making photocopies at the local prosecutor’s office.

That’s what John Sempek is doing now that he’s gotten his life in order.

The prosecutor thinks Sempek is a model excon:

“This is kind of some way to pay back and to look at things that go on this side of the counter we like to say and hopefully maybe someday he can help other people on the other side of the counter.”

I genuinely admire John’s recovery and turnaround, and for all the reasons I’ve already started to discuss, I think volunteering can provide meaning and perspective. I have to admit though, this story makes me a little uncomfortable. Since when did turning your life around involve volunteering to help prosecute other people? This is my own skepticism about a legal system that for 16 years could do nothing more for John than put him on trial 40 times; however, I also understand that John is an adult and should be responsible for his actions when they harm others.

Volunteering in the city prosecutor’s office has changed Sempek’s view of the people who enforce the laws that he used to break.

“I was on the other side all this time and never got to see the good part about these people. I didn’t know people cared down here, the cops and the attorneys down here. On the other side you think they’re evil and don’t care, but actually they do.”

But the most interesting part about this story is not my knee-jerk discomfort with his choice of volunteer venue, but the way volunteering is working to bridge a gap between two obviously opposing parties. Empathy is an inadvertent result of Sempek’s time in the prosecutor’s office. Volunteering is exciting when it brings people from different backgrounds with different life experiences together. The prosecutor undeniably has the power, but through contact they wouldn’t likely have otherwise, he and Sempek gain some perspective, come to understand each other better and the whole experience fosters goodwill.

In this way, Sempek volunteering at the prosecutor’s office makes sense. Maybe for him, the whole thing is a way of showing himself and others how much better off he is now, of performing his own rehabilitation and privilege—if he’s volunteering for the prosecutor’s office, he’s certainly not being prosecuted. As weird and uncomfortable as it seems, it could be a way of reclaiming control over his time and making a choice about how to spend it. Helping out rather than being imprisoned or forced to do community service.

Eh, but I’m just reading the situation based on the report. I have no idea what Sempek is doing or why. I do know that volunteering can show you your own good fortune. Donating time you can afford to give, you’re rewarded with the good feelings that come from knowing you’ve made someone’s life easier and the gratitude that person shows.

[Thanks to Daniel Zier for the crappy title]