The Issue of Agency

I’m currently reading 1491, a fascinating book by Charles C Mann about the civilizations in the Americas before Columbus came in 1492. The book brings up an interesting term, agency. Though the term is applied to the native populations, I feel it also applies quite well to my work in Haiti. Agency, as used in 1491, is the idea that people and societies have the ability to make rational decisions, think for themselves, and function properly without oversight from another person. Agency is something American legal system embraces; we give our children almost full agency at age of 18. We believe that 18 year olds can make their own decisions, purchase property, get married, vote, and engage in formal contracts and agreements without the supervision of their parents or any other governing body. Culturally we also embrace this idea. We feel that after high school kids are mature enough to leave home, go to college, and start to make their own decisions.

The current day histories of Native American populations, the history lessons I was taught in high school and middle school, focus on the atrocities committed by the white settlers against the native populations. The narratives vary, but the general idea is that the Natives Americans were living peacefully off of the land until the European settlers came and forcibly drove them out of existence. These histories are true in fact, everything they report did happen at one time in history, but this focus on the atrocities committed by the European settlers creates an unfair historical stigma against the native populations; it denies their sense of agency. The current narrative of early America assumes the Native Americans did not have a sense of agency. Charles Mann writes the current narrative of early America paints the Native Americans as noble savages, people with good intentions but not capable of forming adequate societies that were capable of responding to European Settlement. The Native American societies I was presented in my history classes were described as small bands of nomadic hunters and gathers with little central organization, which is why the Europeans were able to come in and push them around. Though the European settlers did push the Native populations around quite a bit, the native populations were not simple savages, they had as much agency as the European settlers. The Native American tribes were quite well organized and just as capable of creating prosperous societies as the Europeans were. This historical denial of agency is not intentional, but by focusing only on the atrocities committed by the settlers, we create an image of the Native American as being brutish rather than sophisticated.

The same denial of agency is done by some of the volunteers who come down to Haiti. Now before I go further, I want to be clear that I don’t mean this to be a condemnation of any of the volunteers who come down here. No one, not the historians who write about early America in our textbooks or the volunteers who come to La Croix, intentionally deny a group of people agency. This is a natural occurrence that happens to everyone, it even happened to me. When anyone initially comes to Haiti, he or she is thrown into a storm of humanity. Right when you get out of the airport you are instantly surrounded by dozens of Haitians competing for your attention, causing you to feel totally overwhelmed. This overwhelming feeling persists, and you begin to think, “if I can’t think straight after only having been here for a week, how can these people possibly get anything done, no wonder they’re so poor”. We attribute the poverty to be a symptom of the chaos.

Though Haiti is chaotic, the chaos does not imply people’s inability to function on their own and act in a competent manner. The market place, one of the most chaotic places in all of Haiti, has a distinct logic that creates an emergent order, and that order guides everyone in the marketplace to function almost as efficiently as they would in an American supermarket. Though Haitian societies seem more chaotic on the surface, the Haitian people who compose those societies are just as capable of making their own decisions and guiding their own paths any American is. (For more on the emergent order seen in the market, look at my posts about the market I wrote in February)

This denial of agency is an easy mistake to make, I even make it from time to time, but it comes with distinct consequences that can hamper a volunteer’s ability to help the community. When we assume that people can’t act rationally, the initiatives we pursue inherently take on a paternalistic tone to them that conveys the message “I know what’s better for you than you do”. Not only is perspective unhealthy for forming relationships, but it leads to initiatives where the community ends up being hurt rather than helped.

One example of this paternalism is seen with food distribution. Some of the volunteers I’ve met come down and pass out candy to every kid they see, and in other cases they will pass out bags of rice at random to people in the community. A few weeks ago we had an organized food distribution effort, but we had too much food so the group just ended up giving food out at random. Most times when I question why they’re giving out food, I get the same response, “these people are so hungry and it’s our job to feed them”. The volunteers assume that the Haitians don’t have enough food so it’s our job to give them food. Though some Haitians do suffer from malnutrition, that doesn’t mean it’s our job to just give them food. If we are going to give out food we have to target to a certain population and distribute it in a way that doesn’t hurt the rest of the community. When we give away candy indiscriminately to the kids at the school, the kids begin to assume that we are here to just give them stuff. When groups come and just give out candy the kids won’t interact with the volunteers who don’t give candy. When the groups begin to just give stuff out people come to us only looking for free handouts. I would try to interact with the kids or the adults, but they would only interact with me if I could give them something. Kids would come up to me saying “give me candy, give me your sunglasses, give me food” and when I denied them, they moved on to the next volunteer.  They had developed an expectation; the volunteers are here to give us food, if you ask enough of them you’ll be able to get something. This made everything else we did quite difficult. We thought that we were feeding the hungry, but in reality we were creating a complex that assumed that hampered the rest of our work.

I don’t want to be too critical of the volunteers who come down. Every single person who has come to the mission has come to serve, they unfortunately sometimes get the wrong idea of how best to do that. In the US, caring for someone and serving someone are usually synonymous, but in places like Haiti that take on very different meanings. When we deny people their sense of agency, we lose sight of their own abilities; we lose sight of what they can do for themselves. The Haitians are capable people, service to them should focus not on what they need, but what good they can do, and how we can help them do more of it.