After the Batey

Life is about telling stories, narrating events. With this in mind, allow me to share the story of how I arrived in Haiti:

My story begins in the Dominican Republic, across the border from Haiti, where I was a Peace Corps volunteer. The Dominican Republic is a steadily developing, middle income country. Because of its stunning natural beauty, and thanks to forward-looking environmental policies, it has a booming tourism sector to complement a robust agricultural and emergent service sector. The future is bright.

Yet like much of Latin America, this Caribbean nation suffers the bane of widespread inequality. And most acutely if you happen to be Haitian. Hundreds of thousands of Haitians live in the DR – having fled Haiti, mostly illegally, to provide cheap labor to a flourishing Dominican economy (at least before the global economic crisis). Two years ago, the Peace Corps placed me in a Haitian village in the DR – what are locally called, Bateys.

Bateys are an anachronism in today’s modern Dominican Republic. Economically disadvantaged, socially isolated, and politically marginalized, Bateys are islands of extreme poverty in a sea of relative prosperity. They represent what two decades of strong economic growth has largely been able to eradicate. If not for the “Haitian-ness” of Bateys, Dominicans would not stand for such destitution. But ethnic tensions and mistrust run deep between the two groups.

I lived and worked in my Batey for two years. Simply put, it was two of the best years of my life. Challenging and frustrating, but stimulating and immensely rewarding, it’s an experience I will forever cherish.

Culturally, life in the Bateys is a wonderful blend, neither wholly Dominican nor Haitian. The breads and dishes, the music and dance and religious ceremonies, are unique creations of the Bateys – fusing Haitian traditions to a new Dominican reality. However, with each decade, Dominican traits become more pronounced, as Haiti increasingly becomes a distant memory.

The lack of 100% authentic Haitian culture is what first inspired me to explore Haiti. I knew I was experiencing a hybrid-culture and wanted purity. Language offers an illustrative example. Both Spanish and Haitian Creole are spoken in the Bateys, almost interchangeably, but Batey Creole is so influenced by Spanish that locals themselves think of their Creole as something distinct from Haiti’s.

I also recognized that for as much as Bateys are islands of extreme poverty, their presence inside a functioning state offers certain assurances you don’t find in a country like Haiti, where there is an almost complete renunciation of the responsibilities of the state. As a student of development, Haiti offered a reality I had yet to experience and facilitated a better understanding of a group to which my Batey made me uncompromisingly committed: the poorest of the poor.

According to recent estimates, there are nearly one billion people living in “failed-states” like Haiti, or Chad, or Afghanistan for that matter (a silly term if you ask me). These states commonly posses a majority of the population living in poverty so grinding that it should have no place in a world of such unprecedented global wealth. I recognized the magnitude of the challenge to alleviate this form of extreme poverty and made the commitment to make Haiti my mentor.

My commitment to Haiti has certainly paid dividends in this regard. I’ve found an organization in Fonkoze that has institutionalized a rigid commitment to Haiti’s poorest and I’ve been introduced to an assortment of strategies designed at eradicating this most obscene form of poverty. Culturally, each day offers a chance to explore Haiti’s richness, and as my control of Haitian Creole has progressed, I find myself taking advantage of new opportunities. All in all, it has allowed me to appreciate the considerable similarities between Haitian and Dominican culture where they exist and reflect on the differences where they do not. To put it mildly, it has been quite a worthwhile experience.