Praise for Travesty in Haiti
“This book knocks it out of the park “
-Paul Farmer
“I recommend to anyone who has an interest in helping the Haitian people that they read Timothy Schwartz’s book Travesty in Haiti”
-Sean Penn on the Charlie Rose Show
“It's a tour de force -- a searing expose of what bad foreign aid and trade policies have wrought in Haiti. . . “
-Ken Dilanian, LA Times
“… painfully personal, shockingly revealing, intensely honest . .”
-Robert Lawless, Author of Haiti’s Bad Press
“An excellent & illuminating piece of work. . . “
-Peter Hallward, Author of Damming the Flood
“By far the most insightful, educating, and rewarding work on Haiti”
-Paul M.Gahlinger AAASS Prize Ph Sc.
“. . . bracingly honest and unflinching analysis of Haiti’s charity industry… essential reading….”
-Kim Ives, Editor, Haiti Liberte
“…interesting, humorous and readily understandable. a significant contribution to the plight of the Haitian people. . . . a must read for anyone interested in hearing the truth about Haiti.”
-Marguerite Laurent, Playwright, poet, lawyer
*****
Travesty in Haiti
A true account of Christian missions, orphanages,
fraud, food aid, and drug trafficking
By
Timothy T. Schwartz, Ph.D.
Travesty in Haiti
Copyright 2012 Timothy T Schwartz
Smashwords Edition
*****
Chapters
Chapter 1-Death, Destruction, and Development
Chapter 2-The Hamlet, Witch Doctors, and Sorcery
Chapter 3-The Village: Crime, Corruption, and Vigilantes
Chapter 4-The Survey and Chaos in the Court
Chapter 5-Gutless Wonders: Windmill Fiasco and History of Aid in Jean Makout County
Chapter 6-CARE International: Dedicated to Serving Itself
Chapter 7-The American Plan: How to Destroy an Agricultural Economy
Chapter 8-Orphans with Parents and Other Scams that Bilk U.S. Churchgoers
Chapter 9-Medical Treatments: Greed, Rudeness, and Renegades
Chapter 10-Disconnected Directors and the Arrogant Haitian Elite
Chapter 11-Boy’s Mysterious Death Evokes Troubling Thoughts the Obvious
Chapter 12-Keys to the Research Goldmine: Nepotism and Testing the Obvious
Chapter 13-Anger, Disillusionment, and Despair
Chapter 14-Colombia and its Drug Trade to the Rescue
APPENDIX B: The Market (or lack thereof)
APPENDIX C: Food Aid in Jean Makout
APPENDIX D Food Aid as Deliberate Undermining of the Market
APPENDIX E: Agricultural Production in Jean Makout
APPENDIX F: Funding Institutions, Lobbysts, and Corporations
APPENDIX G: Crops and Resistance to Drought in Jean Makout
APPENDIX H What Should be Done
APPENDIX I: History of NGO Accountability in Haiti and the “Donor Guide”
*****
Chapter One
Death, Destruction, and Development
Five black peasant men walked down the dusty Village street. Their clothes were torn; their hands were bound; their heads were bowed. A jeering mob trailed. From amidst the mob emerged a thin young man. His shirt was open and his wiry torso glistened with sweat. In one hand he carried a cudgel. He lunged at one of the bound men, swung the cudgel, and with a sickening thud crushed the man’s skull. Another of the bound men was smashed in the knees with a pole. He crumpled to the ground where a machete sunk halfway through his neck. The mob fell on the remaining three and hacked and beat them to death. Several men then dragged the bodies to the crossroad in the middle of the Village and heaved them one on top of the other. A moment later a fat middle aged woman came waddling quickly up the street. In her hands she carried a dirty white bucket of gasoline. She poured the gas on the pile, scattering it so that all the bodies were soaked. The local domino champion lit a match, tossed it on the pile, and the corpses exploded into a blaze. Soon the pile began to sizzle and crackle and the sickly smell of burning flesh wafted through the street.
Officially 139 men were killed that day. Some say it was more like thousands. The leader of the massacre claimed before a journalist’s video camera that he had organized the killing of 1,042 “communists.”
They were not communists in the traditional sense of the word. They were members of a Catholic development cooperative funded by the Church and a Swiss charity advocating land reform. Throats were slit, heads cut off, one man had his bound hands tied to a log and then, screaming, watched as they were chopped off.
Most aid workers subsequently left the area. But others soon replaced them. The projects started again and when I first arrived in the area three years later they were in full swing. This is the inside story of those projects and the impact on the people they were meant to help. It is largely a story of fraud, greed, corruption, apathy, and political agendas that permeate the industry of foreign aid. It is a story of failed agricultural, health, and credit projects; violent struggles for control over aid money; corrupt orphanage owners, pastors, and missionaries; the nepotistic manipulation of research funds; economically counterproductive food relief programs that undermine the Haitian agricultural economy; and the disastrous effects of economic engineering by foreign governments and international aid organizations such as the World Bank and USAID and the multinational corporate charities that have sprung up in their service, specifically, CARE International, Catholic Relief Services, World Vision, and the dozens of other massive charities that have programs spread across the globe, moving in response not only to disasters and need, but political agendas and economic opportunity. It is also the story of the political disillusionment and desperation that has led many Haitians to use whatever means possible to better their living standards, most recently drug trafficking; and how in the service of international narcotraffickers and money launderers, Haiti has become a failed State.
The accounts I present in the pages that follow come from my own experiences while living, researching, and working in Haiti over a period of ten years. The stories are entirely factual. Anecdotes are based on real events, dialogues on real conversations, and statistical and archival information is accurate to the best of my ability as a researcher. Sources not referenced in the text are summarized in chapter by chapter appendices. I have, however, blended two towns. I have also changed names of people and places.
The reason that I have made an effort to disguise people and places is because what I hope to accomplish is not to embarrass or denounce individuals or to attack specific charities. Nor do I aim to damage the industry of charity. What I hope to do is call attention to the need for accountability for I believe that the disaster we call foreign aid—‘disaster,’ at least, in the case of Haiti—comes from the near total absence of control over the distribution of money donated to help impoverished people in the country.
At the level of individuals and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the lack of fiscal accountability is manifest in the enrichment of the custodians of the money—pastors and directors of NGOs, schools, and orphanages—and the redirection of charity toward middle and upper class Haitians for whom it was not intended. At the level of governments, the absence of accountability invites subversion of a different sort: Charity is manipulated to serve political ends. In both cases lack of accountability allows the aid to be distorted into something that arguably does more harm than good. I hope that this book in some way contributes toward correcting the problem and redirecting the millions of dollars that well-meaning citizens of developed countries annually donate to the people it was originally intended: the poorest of the poor in Haiti. In the following chapter I begin the account with my return to Haiti in 1995 and the impoverished people whom I lived with. It is they who originally motivated me to write this book.
*****
Chapter Two
The Hamlet, Witch Doctors, and Sorcery
My story begins in a remote area of Haiti. There is a bay. Toward the back of the bay, deep blue water encircles the ivory sands of a beachhead. An orderly line of rowboats rest on the sand and just beyond the high-water mark, the huts of a small fishing hamlet retreat haphazardly back toward the desert scrub. The huts are made of thatch, sticks, rocks, and mud. Behind them are built smaller thatch and stick structures. These are kitchens where food is cooked over smoky wood fires. On the sides of the houses and the kitchens, nets are slung, waiting to be mended. In the yards, bamboo weirs lie strewn about. On frail pole racks, fish hang to dry in the sun.
The Hamlet is located in the back of the bay where even during the wildest storm the little thatch-roofed huts go unmolested. But on the bay itself it is not always so calm. On a typical day, as noon approaches, the air in the desert valley behind the Hamlet heats up and rises up the slopes of a desolate and wind-sheared mountain. The rising air sucks the easterly trade winds in from the gran mar, the Big Sea. By afternoon the wind rips across the water, churning up whitecaps and whipping them past the beachhead.
Approaching midnight, long after most of the fisherfolk have gone to sleep, the air on the mountain cools and the wind falls off again. Inside the little thatch and stick houses the mosquitoes come down from the rafters to feed. People slap at the pests, pull sheets over their heads, and sweat. At daybreak the air is dead still. The bay is smooth as glass. Women and children come out from their huts soaping their faces and brushing their teeth. Fires are started and the smell of coffee wafts through the Hamlet. The men are already on the water, rowing across the bay, raising fish traps and nets. But the catch these days is almost always meager, for marine life has been disappearing. The silt that washes down from the deforested and eroding mountains smothers the reefs. They are dying. Today, instead of thousands of teaming tropical fishing, colors, and sea fans waving in the current, one more often finds white skeletons of dead corral, barren, like swimming among gravestones. Porpoises, whales, and sharks no longer visit the bay. Turtles have become a rare delicacy. In the autumn the migratory fish still come but they are fewer every year.
I arrived in the Hamlet in 1995. I had come to conduct research on marriage and child rearing practices, the final hurdle in attaining my doctorate in cultural anthropology from the University of Florida. Equipped with three years of graduate school and a grant from the National Science Foundation, I was supposed to do what is called participant observation, meaning that I was to live in the community, take part in the lives of the people there, live as they live, interfering as little as possible so that I could learn about their culture and how impoverished Haitians deal with problems of daily survival. When I was done, after I had written my dissertation, I would be qualified to join the ranks of foreign aid experts who work for charitable organizations such as CARE International, experts who design and carry out farm, commerce, and health projects meant to help the poor in their struggle to overcome hunger and disease.
I thought that desire, that will to help, would give me a special status among the people living in the Hamlet, a status of respect and appreciation. I also expected to pass the year in close and relatively comfortable association with nature, with the sea and the natural environment.
It didn’t work out that way, on either account.
To begin with, adapting to life in the Hamlet was not easy. Simple luxuries did not exist. There were no toilets, no running water or appliances or gas stoves. And the natural environment was anything but comfortable. The first few months were especially miserable. I detested the food. Typical meals consisted of huge portions of rice and beans, and tiny portions of small, bony, and oil-drenched fish. For most of the year I was sick with intestinal infections, making the trudge into the thorny, cactus-ridden brush to relieve myself that much more onerous. Often the Hamlet spigot was dry and I had to walk half an hour to get clean fresh water. Brushing my teeth, bathing, getting my clothes cleaned, all these tasks were drudgeries. The afternoon winds made sure that sand penetrated everything I owned, my books, my clothes, my laptop.
Another problem was mosquitoes. I had first chosen the Hamlet because, unless there had been a recent rain, there were few mosquitoes. Not long after I arrived the International Red Cross came and changed that. An official of the organization visited, saw the people deprived of comfortable and hygienic latrines and decided to do something about the problem. Experts, materials, and money arrived. Household heads who wished to have a toilet agreed to dig a five-foot pit behind their home. The people dug. But when the digging reached two or three feet below the surface the pits filled with fresh water. Undaunted, eager to modernize, and never seeming to realize the boon that the fresh water offered in other respects, the directors of the project ordered the digging to continue. The pits were then covered with cement platforms that had round toilet holes perforated through the middle. The project was heralded a success. The Red Cross erected a large sign on the nearby dirt road announcing to the few people who passed that way—the few who could read—that it had aided the Hamlet with thirty new latrines. The experts departed.
Soon, in the depths of the water-filled privies, mosquito larvae began to hatch.
Sleeping became hell. At night I would wake to people cursing and slapping at the blood suckers. Babies would scream. In the morning people wandered about the Hamlet complaining about the lack of sleep, about the curse that had befallen them. A malaria epidemic hit the Hamlet. To escape the mosquitoes some of us took to sleep aboard the rowboats moored in the bay. To my knowledge, no one ever used any of the toilets, but no one could tolerate the idea of undoing this significant step in the modernization of the Hamlet. Eventually the toilets began to cave in because the sides of the holes, dug in the sand, had never been reinforced. But for several years, until the last toilet collapsed, the problem lingered.
Another thing that made me miserable was the very people I had come to study. They turned out to be annoying in ways I never anticipated. Among the annoyances was the begging. First, there were the children.
The Hamlet covered an area not much larger than a football field and there lived in this space a total population of 253 people, 79 of whom were under the age of ten. Whenever I emerged from the hut where I was staying, these little people came running from every quarter of the Hamlet. Usually naked and covered with dirt, they would plead for sinkant kob (about 3 U.S. cents at the time) to buy a piece of bread or a small pouch of sugar. How do you say no to a hungry child? Giving made the begging worse.
And then there were the adults.
Scrawny underfed mothers, infants at breast, would pull me to their houses, whispering desperately, pointing to sick children.
Old men, young men, teenage girls, even officials, judges, policemen, and politicians came by the Hamlet to beg from me. People literally asked me for everything I owned. If someone saw me using a pocket knife they would ask to have it. When I slept in a tent, the “cloth house” awed the locals and they came from far around to ask me if I would give it to them. People with whom I was only dimly acquainted would present me with carefully prepared lists of personal gifts to purchase for them on my next trip to town or overseas. The more money someone had, the bigger the items they wanted. Important men, men who were older than me and for whom I would take pains to demonstrate respect would ply me with food, rum, and coconuts and then pester me to buy expensive items for them.
The begging, I would learn, was one legacy of half a century of foreign aid, but there were also aspects of my behavior that perhaps invited annoyance and begging, or at least made me seem stupid and easy to manipulate. I was, for instance, linguistically and socially inept when I arrived. I had been to Haiti on earlier research and I had studied Creole at the university, but actually speaking with anything near functional fluency was something that came neither easily nor quickly. There was also the issue of cultural competency. I knew about voudou and I knew about Haitian folklore. But local versions turned out to be vastly different than what I had studied. Farming, fishing, and rearing livestock were also subjects and skills I knew little about. The local plants and animals were strange to me. Any Hamlet child could identify a dozen different types of mango trees while I had difficulty remembering the difference between the leaves of a mango and those of an avocado tree. I considered myself athletic, but the people of the Hamlet were far more skilled in their environment. They were agile when walking in the mountains and when boating and swimming among the reefs. Even the girls could make me look clumsy. One time en route from a market I followed a train of Hamlet women and girls down the face of a cliff so steep and precarious that a single misstep would have meant plunging to a certain death on the sharp and jagged lime rock below. My female companions walked down the precipice perfectly upright while expertly balancing cumbersome loads of produce and wares on their heads. To the intense amusement of the women, I, empty handed, crab-crawled backward.
Nor did I know about the social status of people around me, a shortcoming that significantly enhanced my apparent idiocy. It was not uncommon during those first few months for me to inadvertently snub someone to whom I should have been showing great respect while respecting someone to whom I should have been paying no attention at all. One incident comes to mind where I spent a good ten minutes ardently trying to converse in broken Creole with a woman who the laughing villagers later told me was insane.
So in turn, during that early period of my research, I got little respect from my hosts. An eight-year-old girl neatly summed up the attitudes among the people of the Hamlet. I was sitting on a straw mat in a thatch-roofed kitchen and the girl’s mother reprimanded her for poking and pulling on me, uh ohhh, pitit, fe respè a gran moun, tande. “Uh ohhh, child, respect adults, you hear.”
“But manman,” the child responded, “it is not a big person that Timotè is, non. He’s a blan.”
I was an especially easy target for bored young men who as a cultural rule in Haiti—and perhaps the world over—take great pride in being obnoxious. There were times when I had to decide on the spur of a moment and in a state of blinding anger if I was expected to fight or if fighting would get me killed. I never did fight and it happily turned out that fighting was not expected. In fact, it might have gotten me killed. But, as I soon learned, if I was to get any respect at all I sometimes had to act like I would fight.
Nevertheless, during those first few months I was unsure how to deal with the annoyances and begging. I did not want to abandon my research. But I was desperate for a solution. The way I eventually evaded the pestering and begging was by going to live in the house of a bokor (shaman).
In September 1973, a boat came to the Hamlet to buy charcoal. It was a large sailing vessel from the capital, Port-au-Prince. On the boat was Ram, thirty-four years old at the time and a bokor or, if you prefer, shaman or witch doctor. It was his first sea voyage. On board he worked as a mariner, a grunt brought along to help keep watch and to do menial jobs. But Ram did not know the sea and he did not like it. He could not swim and when the sea was rough he got sick. No one is quite sure why he had boarded the vessel in the first place. Some say he was running from the revenge of families of people he had killed with sorcery. His wife and children say he was simply trying to make a living, cheche lavi (looking for life). In any case, Ram got off the boat in the Hamlet and never got back on. Nor did he ever return to wherever it was he came from.
Twenty-two years later, when I returned to Haiti and began research in the Hamlet, Ram was a foul-mouthed and sour-faced man. He was ugly, almost six feet tall, deep dark black with flaring nostrils, pursed lips, bushy sideburns, and a raggedy beard. His hair was not the tight kinky curls like the other African descendents of the Hamlet, but a scraggly mop of never-combed curls that dangled down to his shoulders in a form resembling dreadlocks. His body was lean and impressively rippled with muscles, a feature almost comical in the way it contradicted his fifty-six years of age and his crabby demeanor.
The first time I met Ram, I had come to the Hamlet looking for Givme, a conch diver who I had befriended. But Givme was already out on the bay so I parked my little all-terrain pick-up truck—one of the few vehicles that could reach the Hamlet—and took advantage of the time to change the oil and check for loose bolts. Ram came over from the neighboring house—his own—and pretended to help me. Squatting by the truck as I grunted and groaned underneath, Ram gave me annoying advice on things about which he knew nothing—Ram, like most people in the Hamlet, had never turned a wrench in his life and might not know what one was if he found it on the ground. ”Don’t hold that thing like that, non, son” he said, punctuating his advice with affirmatives and negatives as Haitians do. “Turn the screw like this, oui.” I wished he would go away. When I was ready to leave he tried to get me to pay him for his annoyances.
The next time I met Ram was different. It was late, close to midnight. Givme and I were returning from a bout of drinking in another hamlet when our attention was drawn to a ceremony at Ram’s. There was drumming and singing, people were spilling out of the doors, others cramming to get inside. We managed to push our way through, whereupon someone seized my arm and seated me in the middle of the activity.
Ram sat in a corner by a table covered with white linen on which rested cola bottles and candles. There was no trace of the beggar I met weeks before. From where he sat Ram commanded a room full of disciples, dancers, and onlookers. He held a wooden drum between his legs, expertly beat out a rhythm on the drum, sang a couple lines, and then the entire room would respond in exquisite chorus. After each song, Ram sent around a bottle of klerin (moonshine). Occasionally a lwa, or spirit, possessed someone. The person would fall to the floor jerking, then stand up and greet la societe. Several times Ram himself was possessed. He passed around the room, going from person to person, greeting them, shaking hands, still holding on to the first hand, he would cross his arms and shake the other. He would then pass back around the room spraying us with Right Guard underarm deodorant and rubbing our faces with a silk scarf.
I had no idea what was going on. I was treated well, but the entire scene—my ignorance of what was expected of me and the bokor negotiating that ignorance while trying to make me comfortable—bordered on the ridiculous, or, at least, seemed ridiculous to me at the time. Every now and then the bokor would stand and give a speech that invariably concluded with a long repetition of how happy he was that I was there. A direct translation would have gone something like, "It’s happy that we are happy, happy, happy, happy, happy that you've come here to make a little visit with us.” At the appropriate moment Givme would nudge me and I'd get up and in broken Creole, slightly drunk and unsure of what was expected, say, “It’s happy happy that I'm happy, happy, happy, happy, happy, that it’s happy that you're happy that I'm here to make a little visit with you.” Then the rum would be sent around, all the adults would get a chug, we would all get another spray in the face with Right Guard deodorant, and the singing would begin again.
And so, as I mentioned earlier, I eventually came to live in the house of Ram the bokor. And there were very good reasons. Most importantly, to escape the gaggle of begging children and wisecracking teenage boys who followed me everywhere in the Hamlet, for I discovered that as I approached the house of the bokor these pests would drop away like fanned flies until I would arrive at the door alone.
Ram always received me well, gave me a place to sit, rum to drink, and cigarettes to smoke. There were no wild little children or crying babies in the house. There was only Ram and his wife, Sadi, their two teenage daughters Lili and Albeit, and their brother Robè, then a quiet, athletic fifteen-year-old who became my fishing buddy. No member of the house was permitted to pester me. No member of the Hamlet ever dared come looking for me while I was there. Sadi would cook fish, conch, and lobster that I caught. I was at peace.
And there was another reason I enjoyed the house of the bokor: Rather peculiarly, the mosquitoes didn’t bite. They were there, millions of them. I would lie in the corner of the hut on a bed of wooden sticks lashed together and made soft with old used cloths and listen to them buzzing in the thatch roof, a low hum of a million tiny wings. But they were not a problem. In the house of the bokor they simply did not bite.
I never unraveled the mystery of the mosquitoes. Perhaps the old man had some herb that he used like a repellent. I never knew. But life was unquestionably more pleasant for me in his house.
So I eventually moved in with the bokor and his family and while I couldn’t have cared less about spirits and voudou, subjects I thought anthropologists and travel writers before me had overworked—all too frequently using voudou to sensationalize Haitian culture and sell books—I nevertheless began to learn about sorcery. I would lie at night in the corner of the hut, on the bed of wooden sticks and discarded used clothes, and from there quietly watch the bokor perform his divinations.
Visitors, usually older men, would come, always after dark, and Ram would burn candles for them, divine their wishes and fears, and set magical traps for their enemies. I can still see him there, sitting on a rickety wooden chair in the dimly lit corner of his crumbling mud-and-thatch house, by his side a small table cluttered with magical paraphernalia: a candle, a half dozen bottles of Haitian cola, an ancient colonial dagger, a 1967 Introduction to Hygiene book, and a dog-eared deck of playing cards.
The bokor would light the candle, stab the dagger into the ground, and methodically lay the cards down, one by one, silently, intently interpreting their meanings to himself. The lwa named Ogoun, the spirit of iron and war, would enter his head and clarify what he was seeing. Then he would explain to the client what he had learned and he would offer remedies or retributions.
Once I burned a candle with him. I was visiting at Givme’s house when someone stole money from my book bag. And so at the urgings of Ram I sought to discover the culprit through divination. I put seven goud (50 cents) on the floor, Ram lit a candle, stuck the ancient dagger into the dirt, laid out his dog-eared cards, and pretending to read from his Introduction to Hygiene book, he began to see things that came from the other world.
In his possessed state Ram divined the thieves who took my money. And he did a poor job of it. He misdivined the sum of money stolen. I had told everyone it was 500 goud ($33). In reality it was 1,000 ($66). As expected, Ram divined 500. As for the hygiene book, I assumed the book was a way of impressing clients who were mostly, like Ram, illiterate, for he held the book upside down. He ended his performance asking what I wanted to do, force the culprits to get caught in the act of stealing from someone else or kill them? Prompted by the urging of his two young daughters, Lili and Albeit—who had sat watching and listening the whole time and whispered, “don’t kill”—I opted for forcing the thieves to get caught.
Ram then instructed me to go off in pursuit of an assortment of items needed to perform the magic, including a series of plants for which I would have had to climb the dry, stony 2,400-foot mountain that rose up behind the Hamlet. At the time, I simply could not have cared less about the lwa, divination, sorcery, or even the money I had lost, and I sure as hell was not going to climb a mountain for a laundry list of weeds. I let the whole thing go.
But no matter what opinion I had of Ram, his determination, mystical demeanor, and occasional success as a bokor convinced others of his spiritual powers, something that brought him a certain degree of wealth and prestige. And I came to respect Ram for something else. Whether a bluffer or not, Ram helped the neediest people in the area.
When I did my first census of the Hamlet, I began at Ram’s house, where he lived with his principal wife, Sadi, a buxom woman with smooth skin and a harsh demeanor. Sadi was forty-two years old.
I then headed next door to Sadi’s sister’s house. Ram ran out ahead of me and stood in the doorway. Perplexed, I told him, “if you wouldn’t mind,” that I needed to speak to the man or the woman of the house. Beaming, Ram assured me that he was the man of the house. He was the husband of his wife Sadi’s buck-toothed, slightly retarded younger sister, Kwaku.
About an hour later, after visiting a half dozen other households, I approached a hut on the far side of the Hamlet. Arriving at the front door I hollered, as is customary, oné (honor). A man inside hollered, respè (respect). The door opened and there stood Ram holding a broom and wearing an apron—quite a joke for rural Haitian men. He was, he assured me, the husband of Janette who lived in the house. And so it went. All told Ram had seven wives, five in the Hamlet, one on the mountain, and one in another fishing settlement up the coast. He had nineteen children between the ages of one and twenty-one whom he cared for and not all of whom were his genetic progeny.
There were many people who depended on the bokor. Had I known more the night that I attended the gombo in Ram’s house I would have recognized that the people around him, those who attended his ceremonies and who depended on him, had come to the Hamlet out of desperation. His wives and children, many of whom were adopted, were a collection of misfits, survivors of disease, and the remains of families that death and economic misfortune had shattered.
Sadi, for instance, was the child of a destitute peasant family on the mountain. Her father had died and her mother was unable to care for her. At eleven years of age she had been sent to live and work as a servant with a family in the Village near the Hamlet. When she was sixteen she became the common-law wife of a fisherman named Chesnel with whom she had nine children. All but two boys died. The older of the boys was named Tiyol and the other was called Robè. After the birth of Robè, Sadi fell ill with some kind of lingering uterine infection. Chesnel the fisherman took her to several bokor but none was able to successfully treat her and he eventually brought her to Ram, where she spent a year living in his sacred home and being treated spiritually and with the herbal teas and baths that Ram made for her. Ram fed and cared for her and drove off the spirits that were making her ill. In the end neither she nor her husband could pay for the treatment. Chesnel did not seem to care and had taken another wife, so Ram kept Sadi, along with the baby, Robè, and the older son Tyol. She had two more children with Ram, Albeit and Lili. Both lived in the house when I arrived.
Sadi loved all of her children profoundly. Perhaps as compensation for the seven she had lost, she spoiled them. She doted over the girls, performing little chores that for any other female child of the Hamlet would have been considered their duties. Lili responded by becoming a bitter girl who complained and cursed at the slightest inconvenience. Albeit was spoiled as well, but she was a happy and sweetly manipulative girl who, instead of lashing out angrily, would say things to her mother such as one time that stands out in my memory. Her mother had been pestering her to fetch a bucket of water.
“Manman,” Albeit whined, “I don’t want to.”
“Non, you don’t want to, but you have no choice. Go or I will whip you,” Sadi threatened.
“But manman, you don’t love me?” Albeit’s voice was small.
“But, oui, I love you, cherie,” Sadi forgot what she was doing and looked at her youngest daughter.
“You would love me if my face was burnt by fire?”
Sadi kissed Albeit on the forehead, picked up the bucket, and headed off to get water herself.
Sadi was harder on the boys, but in a good way. She pushed the two boys in school and made every sacrifice to get them educated. She scrounged the money for tuition and school supplies; she sold fish in the market and she specialized in selling dous, hard sugar candies. The money from these activities went to cover the costs of the boys’ education. What happened appeared to everyone in the Hamlet a miracle: The boys turned out to be star pupils. From the very beginning they were the brightest in their classes. They had begun school together and they competed with each other, driving one another and leaving the other Hamlet children behind. At first the other Hamlet families were jealous; the children of the lowliest outsiders in the Hamlet were getting better grades than their own children. But when the boys arrived in school in the Village and proceeded to surpass the Village children, the people in the Hamlet were proud. The boys were representatives of the Hamlet, proof that their children there were as good as any other. But, as the people in the Hamlet say, Lè ké ti poul kontan, malfini pa lwenn. “When the little chicken is happy, the hawk is not far behind.”
When Tiyol was twelve and Robè was nine, a severe drought hit Jean Makout County. Making matters worse for the people of the Hamlet, the migratory fish did not come that year. The people had no money. Sadi’s market activities suffered. The business of sorcery suffered. Ram had no income and was forced to go deeper into the kadas, the semi-desert scrub that surrounds the Hamlet, to cut bushes and cacti, hacking them into piles of sticks, covering them with dirt and leaves and smoldering them into charcoal that could be sold to ships destined for the city. With the money earned from the charcoal he was able to purchase just enough meager rations of rice and beans to keep himself and his miserable dependents alive.
Then a typhoid epidemic hit the Hamlet. The nearest government clinic was swamped with patients. Children were hit especially hard. More than thirty of them died. Tiyol and Lili, children of Sadi, both fell sick with the disease. Tiyol died in the clinic. The doctor depended on test kits for his diagnosis. The test kits were expired and yielded false negatives. As with the other children he treated, the doctor believed he was dealing with malaria and so treated Sadi’s oldest son with chloroquin tablets, instead of the necessary antibiotic.
After Tiyol died, a devastated and desperate Sadi had to make a choice. Lili lay in the hut, on a mattress of used Goodwill cloths, delirious and sweating. If the doctor could not save her son, Sadi reasoned, then it must not be a “hospital disease.” It must be a “leaf disease,” meaning that it required herbal and spiritual treatment. At that point, she recounted to me, Ram became useless: “I don’t know what happened with him,” she told me, “It was like his hands were bound.”
Apparently, according to Ram, he had tried very hard to make treatments for Tiyol and Lili. But they were ineffective and so Sadi had turned to the clinic doctor. But Tiyol died and afterward Ram felt defeated. He stopped coming home and slept instead in homes of his other wives. “The whole load fell on my head,” Sadi said. “I put Lili on a donkey and I led her up the mountain to a bokor known for treating this particular disease.”
Lili survived, and to this day in a corner of the house, tied up in the rafters, hangs a cola bottle with the herbs and medicines that had driven away the demon that devoured her brother and almost consumed her as well. The bottle hangs there to make sure the demon does not return.
I had moved into the bokor’s house for several reasons, to escape the begging, pestering, and teasing as well as the mosquitoes. But there was another reason as well
Before moving in with Ram and his family, my first residence in the Hamlet was in the house of my friend the conch diver, Givme, a name that—although I was unaware at the time—was derived from English (“give me”) and reflected the half century of charity and influence from evangelical missionaries and foreign aid experts that I mentioned earlier.
Medium height, a lean 150 pounds, coal black with fine chiseled features; Givme was the best swimmer I’ve ever known and undisputedly the best in the Hamlet and surrounding area. He could go down one hundred feet under the sea and stay there hunting for conch, lobster, and fish for three to four minutes. As much out of the need for a friend and guide as a common interest in diving, I befriended Givme. Every morning during my first several months in the Hamlet, before the trade winds were sucked in and began to howl across the bay and the water became cloudy with stirred-up sand, Givme and I would go spear fishing. So, to make fishing easier, I moved into his house with him and his family.
I liked Givme, I liked diving with him, I liked his three young daughters, his three-year-old son, and his wife, Lorna. But things did not work out between us. Indeed, it was a disaster.
The problem was that I made the mistake that so many blan make in Haiti: I started giving. Givme wanted to buy a big sailboat so that he could transport dried fish and charcoal some thirty to forty miles up the coast from the Hamlet to the city of Baie-de-Sol. He thought he could then haul mattresses, bicycles, and other imported goods back to the Hamlet and sell them to people in the nearby Village and to farmers in the mountains. So with me playing the role as financier, we purchased an old thirty-foot, handmade wooden sail boat that needed to be repaired. To patch the boat we bought a living oak tree, cut it down, and paid two professional sawyers to hand-cut the tree into boards (the only way it is done in Far-West Haiti). For caulk we bought bré, a sap derived from a nut of a local tree that is black and tar-like when heated over a fire but turns to a hard glass-like substance when cooled. And we bought locally wrought nails. I also bought extra diving fins, masks, two large nets, six fish traps, and two pigs to fatten and sell so that we could earn money to pay for any craftsmen we needed to do special repairs.
For reasons that still mystify me, Givme did nothing. He did not make the smallest effort to repair the boat. And worse still, he did things that would have been unthinkable were he dealing with any one else in the Hamlet. He never once gave me my 50 percent of the catch due as the owner of the nets and traps. In a year, Givme gave me two fish. Even when I pulled in the nets, Givme would make off with the catch saying things like, “My wife will sell these for us.” But I never saw a single goud. The pigs that I paid for and Givme was supposed to feed went hungry and became a nuisance to others in the Hamlet, stealing fish off racks and raiding kitchens. Eventually a neighbor woman caught one of the pigs in the act of invading her kitchen. She heard the pig knock the pot of beans off the fire and came running, machete in hand, arriving in time to sink the blade into the animal’s skull. The other pig disappeared. I suppose that Givme sold it.
Meanwhile, Givme took a second wife, a woman who lived in the Village and who had three children of her own. He acquired another rowboat, a boom box, a watch, a gold chain, new clothes and shoes, a fancy sea captain’s hat. By the end of two months Givme had been transformed from a barefoot fisherman in rags to what appeared to me, and to many of the people of the Hamlet who took to criticizing him behind his back, a stylish and overdressed gigolo. His daughters got gold earrings and his first wife, Lorna, became an active market woman, not just in fish, but in produce and used clothes. God knows what his new wife was buying and selling.
But that was not all that bothered me. Givme had begun to do things that suggested he hated me. Twice while spear fishing he took off in the rowboat and abandoned me in the middle of the bay, an offense that anyone else in the Hamlet would have considered attempted murder. Indeed, people in the Hamlet became appalled. Once I had to swim a half mile to the nearest shore and then pick my way, barefoot, three miles through cacti and thorn bushes, to get back to the Hamlet.
Other people in the Hamlet saw what was happening and although no one ever advised me to break with Givme—as I now know, no one ever would, for that would have been an invitation to sorcery—people began to taunt me with pointed questions like “Timoté, friend, how many fish you find in the hands of Givme today?” and “How’s the boat getting along?” (The boat having been left abandoned on the backside of the Hamlet beach).
So over the course of months I began to spend less and less time at Givme’s house.
The final straw came when Givme blew up at me and in an argument over a piece of rotting plywood, threatened to split my head open with a club.
Following the argument, a group of the younger men led me off to the Village to drink rum. And that afternoon, people I had never spoken to sought me out to tell me not to pay attention to Givme, not to abandon the Hamlet.
But I did abandon the Hamlet.
Givme’s tirade was the last straw in an increasing psychological burden. I was already fed up with the begging, the deceptions, the relentless pestering and teasing. So I went to live not far away on the white sands of a paradisiacal beach in a tent. There I spear fished and worked nets with other fishermen. When I returned to the Hamlet two months later, it was to the house of Ram the bokor that I went.
At the same time that I moved in with Ram, Sadi, the girls, and Robè, I also quit bringing gifts back from my forays to the city and to Christian missions. I began to deliberately run out of money. I would leave my vehicle and most of my cash with a family of American missionaries who lived on the mountain. Then I would put on a pair of torn swimming shorts, a T-shirt, ragged flip-flops, and I would hike the four hours down the mountain to the Hamlet, where I tried to feed myself spear fishing and gathering conch, tasks that I enjoyed but at which I was not notably skilled and so, soon hungry, I did not feel as sorry for the women and children. The men could not harangue me into buying them cigarettes and rum. I also had become more settled in Ram’s house, so I did not feel an obligation to buy things for other people. I had my family.
But, as oddly as it seems, even to me, for the people of the Hamlet, and especially for Givme, the reason I had abandoned my “friend” and began sleeping at the home of the bokor had nothing to do with Givme taking advantage of me—something they were vociferously aware of—or with the pestering I had been forced to endure or with the mosquitoes that made nights so miserable and sleepless. Indeed, it seemed never to have occurred to anyone in the Hamlet that their incessant questions, jokes, and begging could have annoyed me and no one ever ventured inside the home of the bokor with the goal of verifying if what I said about the mosquitoes was true. For Givme and the rest of the people of the Hamlet, the reason I had moved out of his house and in with the bokor, and the reason the gifts stopped coming was something completely different: It was maji (sorcery). I had, they believed, fallen under the spell of Ram’s magical powers.
An insidious fury roiled through the Hamlet. The people blamed Ram, his wife, and his children for the change in my behavior and they suspected that they were hoarding for themselves all the gifts and money I had previously given so freely—secondhand junk that my friends and family in Miami would load me down with whenever I returned to Haiti. I was being prevented from sharing. On several occasions conflicts broke out with other family compounds. People would stand in their yards hollering across the Hamlet that Ram was keeping the goods the blan had for them. People would walk by the house loudly saying to no one in particular, “Oh they think they are going to be rich.” They warned me to leave Ram’s house, ou pa ka rete a moun sa yo, “you can’t live with people like that.”
Givme and his family were especially angry. Even before his tirade, Givme had quit visiting Ram’s house. Both he and his wife no longer said hello to Ram and Sadi. There were fights between their children. I was sure that Givme was actively seeking help from another bokor. After my move into the house of the bokor, my new hosts several times roused me at night so that I could peek through a hole in the crumbling mud wall and see candles burning in Givme’s yard, a sure sign of witchcraft. So nothing seemed clearer to me. Through the language and cultural barrier that was slowly crumbling, I understood that the people of the Hamlet believed Ram had stolen me away from Givme and that Givme and his family were out to settle the score.
I learned that Ram was to be killed by maji and once Sadi claimed to have surprised a strange man in the act of sprinkling powder at the door of the house. Events occurred in my presence that spooked me. The most peculiar event happened one night while we slept. An eight-inch poisonous centipede had somehow gotten into Ram’s bed and bitten him. I awoke to Ram howling and jumping frantically around the room. It was something that I was unable to discover having ever happened to any other person in the Hamlet and, while I didn’t know for sure how it had gotten into Ram’s bed, I suspected that it was no accident.
At the same time that the bokor was having a hard go at it, Givme’s luck also went sour, very sour. He squandered most of the money he got from me. The masks and spear guns wore out, mostly from neglect. A $150 pair of diving fins, the best pair I used to own, he put on a tin roof in the sun “so,” as he told me later, “they could dry out.” They shriveled up like burnt toast. The fishing weirs I had bought for us to make money to repair the boat were swept away in a storm as was one of the nets. The other net was stolen. To help support his new wife and her two children he sold his watch and gold neck chain and then, desperately trying to hold on to her he, bit by bit, borrowed all of his principal wife’s market money. Not a good idea.
Growing frustration with Givme, who was not originally from the Hamlet, exploded in a row over a bicycle that belonged to his new wife. Givme’s in-laws, members of largest family in the Hamlet, that of the gran lakou, “the Big Yard,” descendants of the Hamlet’s founder, gave him a brutal beating.
The problems with Givme and the Hamlet’s anger at the bokor began to affect my research. People refused to answer my questions about their families. A rumor spread that, under the spell of the bokor, I had been sent to gather their names so that he could sell them to djab (demons).
The fear seemed ridiculous. Ram, as with all the adults of the Hamlet, knew all there was to know about virtually everyone else living there. Lives in small communities like the Hamlet are never a secret. But what seemed obvious did not change the fact the people in the Hamlet were no longer cooperating with me and that because of me Ram’s family was having problems. And so after more than a year in the Hamlet, I left. I had satisfied my obligations to the National Science Foundation and to my graduate school, both of which had had funded me. I had become functional in the language and had gained insight into family life and local livelihood strategies. Not wanting to cause any more problems, I left the Hamlet and went to the nearby Village of Jean Makout, where three NGOs had hired me to conduct a demographic survey.
After I left the Hamlet, I felt obliged to help the family of the bokor. I sent money (about US$500) for the construction of a new house. But I could do nothing about the ostracism and the torment they suffered from others and that continued after I left. Indeed, the more I helped the worse it seemed to get for the family. The other people of the Hamlet made up derogatory songs about them. Lili quit school because of hazing.
Then Ram fell sick. Sadi came to me and told me he was feverish, coughing through the night and spitting blood. I learned from other people of the Hamlet who visited me in the Village that he was being killed for evil deeds, that he was a victim of sorcery. They said that he was being killed with a poud, a poisonous powder that another bokor had made, and that it was retribution for his killing people.
One night at 11:00 I surreptitiously borrowed a vehicle belonging to one of the NGOs who I was working for and drove over the mountain and down the washed out desert road to the Hamlet. I took the bokor and his family back to the Village where I put him in a hospital for tests and treatment, an ordeal that went on for nearly three months. In the meantime I supported him and the family and let the girls sleep at my house. Despite a sense of anthropological duty, an obligation to be a neutral and objective observer, I really wanted to heal Ram. I wanted to show the people of the Hamlet that their superstitions were bullshit, that maji and poud could not kill.
But there was no saving Ram the bokor. After his stint in the Village hospital under the care of a French doctor who was the hospital director and a friend of mine, it was conclusive that Ram had AIDS. I and Western medicine were defeated.
It was three hours after dark. I drove the borrowed Mercedes SUV over the last rocky outcroppings, down the makeshift road and then glided across the hard-packed sand of the beachhead, past rickety drift wood fences and the thatch roof huts of the Hamlet. I turned the steering wheel, and the headlights brought into view the house I had paid to build for Ram and his family. It was one of the finest in the Hamlet. The roof was made of fronds from a special and rare type of palm that lasts for as long as thirty years. The walls were solidly built of cut lime rocks Ram had scavenged from an ancient and crumbling French fort. The floor was not dirt as with most of the houses in the Hamlet but concrete.
The house had been prepared for a funeral, Ram’s funeral. A long thatch awning had been added to the front. Beneath the awning, dark-skinned men sat in crude wicker chairs playing dominoes at wooden tables. Heavy set women squatted on the ground next to small tin-can oil lamps, their black, age-creased faces flickering in the light, the treats they had brought to sell spread out on the ground on clothes in front of them: Homemade hard candies, peanut and coconut brown-sugar clusters, cigarettes and rum spiced with herbs and roots. Groups of men and a few women stood conversing in the shadows. Nearby was the old house, the one where the gombo (voudou party) had been held two years before and where I had subsequently lived with Ram and his family. It was now a collapsing assortment of sticks, the mud plastered on the walls crumbling, the thatch of the roof gray and brittle. Inside, women were washing Ram’s emaciated corpse.
I stopped the SUV. A girl ran from one of the groups of mourners and as I climbed from the vehicle, she kissed me. It was Lili, now fifteen years old, a disarmingly beautiful damsel. She wore a full-length strapless dress. Her shoulders were defined and muscular and her young cleavage full and smooth. Behind her came a small crowd. First the young girls, three snickering prepubescent damsels: Lili’s sister, Albeit, followed by Albeit’s two, always present, best friends. Then young boys, the littler ones naked. Several men sauntered away from the house to shake my hand.
The people, family and visitors, were waiting for the coffin. Sadi had ordered it from her native hamlet several miles away and some two thousand feet up the mountain. The arrival of the coffin was an important moment and the mourners were excited because they knew the coffin was close by. Suddenly there was shouting and pointing. Someone had spotted torches on the bluff above the Hamlet. We watched as they wound slowly down through the darkness, negotiating their way among the cacti and brush and down the path that descends the final rocky slope from the wilderness of the kadas and into the Hamlet.
The coffin emerged riding on the shoulders of four men and flanked by six others carrying torches. Each bearer had his own bottle of kleren (raw rum), was singing, and doing an exaggerated drunken jig. Lili was the first to go out to greet the coffin. She wailed. Long whooping wails. Albeit and two half sisters followed, making a pretentious show, sobbing and shouting, “Papa, Papa, Papaaaa.” Albeit threw herself, thrashing, on the ground. Now Lili’s wail changed, “Oh Papa, oh Papa, oh Papa.” Then she stopped.
I stood nearby in the shadows watching. Lili had spotted the other crowd coming from the main part of the Hamlet and now she shouted to them, excitedly, moun-yo, “people,” she shouted for all the Hamlet to assemble, moun-yo sanble, sekey-a rive, “People, gather, the coffin has arrived.”
The approaching group was a chaotic mob of wildly dancing men and women. They formed a train that weaved between the thatch-roofed huts. Dinel, another bokor, was in the lead and he blew on a bamboo pipe. Several other men with pipes followed. The sound was low and always the same, “doo doo da doo, doo doo da doo, doo doo da doo.”