The Question We Don't Ask

Right now I am enjoying the fifth week of with American volunteers. Being here with volunteers here is really interesting because I have a chance to see “the mission in action”. This is not to say the mission does nothing when the American missionaries aren’t here, there's always a lot going on at the mission. When the American volunteers are here however, some of the bigger projects get started. Last week when Westminster was here we wired the computer lab and we started a scarf making class. I learned a whole lot last fall when I was here on my own, but having the groups here allows me to see everything I learned last fall in a different light. 

In every group there are some people who are coming to Haiti for the first time and some people who have been down to Haiti many times before. I haven’t met anyone who’s been here for an extended period of time like me, but I have met some people who have been to Haiti over twelve times. Everyone comes down with great enthusiasm about their projects and about the mission in general, and most everyone is anxious to learn as much about the mission as they can. I’ve seen Pastor Pierre and other members of the mission talk with the American volunteers for hours about the work the mission does. Every missionary seems to have a different set of questions he or she asks, and whenever a new program is starting, those invested in the project begin to ask questions specific to their initiative. I appreciate the value of good research before embarking on a development projects like these, I certainly did a whole lot of research before I came down in September, and I applaud the missionaries who come down having already done some research on their proposed initiatives. People ask a lot of questions, but one question I’ve never heard asked is “why is what we’re doing not already being done? Why are we the first people to do this?”.

Asking “why is what we’re doing not being done?” is not an intuitive question to ask. I didn’t even ask it until just a few weeks ago, but I think it can help to explain much about the social landscape in Haiti and, more importantly, can identify the flaws in certain projects and explain why many projects fail. I’ve seen so many people who come down here and see a problem with what appears to be a simple solution. So many times the apparent solution will fall apart almost immediately because of some quality of Haitian life that an American mindset doesn't see at first. We are going to naturally apply an American framework to the problems we see, but sometimes that American framework can’t solve Haitian problems.

Most of the projects the volunteers focus on are aimed at promoting a general standard of living; they’re starting after school activities, they’re administering medical care, they’re improving the electrical system, their testing the wells, etc. Most initiatives pursued by the American volunteers are incredibly common in the US and contribute substantially to our standard of living, but do not exist in Haiti for one reason or another. In certain cases, the answer to this question is fairly straightforward and doesn’t shed much light onto the situation. Two weeks ago Sandy Conley mentored a local artist, Jimmy, and helped him sell some of his art. Why is there no one already helping Jimmy and why does he need help marketing his art? Haitians are struggling to pay for food, so I doubt they are willing to spend money on art. That also means there’s no art market, so there’s no artists in the community to help Jimmy develop his skills.

But with other initiatives, the answer is not so clear. There is a temptation to say either “they can’t afford the service” or “there’s simply no one to do it”. This may seem true, but this is rarely the case. Though Haitians are poor they do have money, and they are just as capable as we are. (most of the students in the school can afford to pay tuition, which is $240 a year. Only about a third of the students are sponsored by families in the US). One of the best instances where this question was very illuminating was with a volunteer who wanted to teach classes for the rural farmers in the surrounding areas. This person came down saying “I’m going to teach new agricultural techniques to help these farmers increase their output”. This seemed like it would be a great program. Farming in the US requires serious technical knowledge of biology and botany, the farmers in Haiti can barely read let alone understand the science of their crop harvests, a little education would probably help a bunch of people make more money, right?

Unfortunately this isn’t the case. First of all, farming in the US is done on a whole different scale from farming in Haiti. Farming in the US involves enhanced technology with things like fertilizers, pesticides, and genetically modified crops. Sometimes these enhanced techniques will increase a farmer’s crop yield, and sometimes they will cause a farmer to harvest nothing. Fortunately farmers in the US all have crop insurance for these situations. If the cool new fertilizer turns out to be a total bust, the American farmer won’t go broke. For many reasons Haitian farmers don’t have insurance, so if we gave them enhanced farming technology and it didn’t work, they wouldn’t get rescued by insurance, they would starve.

But even if we take into consideration the constraints facing Haitian farmers, even if we factor in things like crop insurance or the lack there of, I don’t know if you could teach Haitians very much about their own farms. The rural Haitian farmers probably have the greatest incentive of anyone to produce as high of a yield as they can. Even if they don’t have a formal education, they’re surrounded by farmers, and they probably come from a long line of farmers, all of whom have probably grew the same crops on the same piece of land. These farmers probably know what's best for their land.

This is one of the difficult pieces of development work, we have to ask questions that add complexity and make the solution seem even more difficult to reach. I’ve been working on the wells recently, and I’ve been all over the community testing the water quality currently in the wells, and I’ve come across a bunch of wells that are totally defunct. They used to work, but one problem or another came about and now they don’t deliver water. Most of these wells aren’t dry, because there is another well fifty to a hundred feet away that works perfectly fine. 

A few months ago I was sitting with a volunteer who was demanded more wells be dug. “These people are doing to die of thirst if they don’t get this well”. Though the communities he was referring to didn’t have a well readily accessible, they were getting water from somewhere, hundreds of people don’t just settle somewhere that doesn’t have water. This volunteer was also missing the major problem, which was that these people already had wells, they just weren’t maintaining the wells. If we dug another well it might benefit the people for a few months, but eventually it would fall into disrepair like the rest. The question he really needed to be asking is “why are there so many broken wells, and how can we fix them so they’ll serve the community for longer than a few months?”. A well costs about ten thousand dollars to install, maybe that money could be applied in some other way that would maintain the preexisting wells.

In America if a community needed a potable source of water,  the most likely solution would be digging a well. In America this type of solution works. There are public utilities companies who can install and maintain wells, there are plumbers who can fix the pipes that deliver the water to the community, and there are people willing to pay money for water. In Haiti there are people willing to pay money for water, but there are very few reliable plumbers and even fewer reliable companies who will maintain wells once they are dug. When we come to help places like Haiti, we have to be creative, we have to think of Haitian solutions.