Filed under: International Development Workers, On Poverty | Tags: Dominican Republic, FONKOZE, Haiti, International Development, Paul Farmer, Peace Corps, Poverty, Public Health, United Nations, World Bank
The international development field has a martyrs’ mentality. Because the field is dedicated to alleviating poverty and suffering, many development practitioners feel obliged to live in some form of poverty and take on hardships they wouldn’t seek out if in a different field. These hardships take many forms, but range all the way from not eating your favorite name brands to living without running water and electricity.
Having lived the martyrs’ lifestyle for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer – sometimes without water and electricity for weeks at a time – my perspective is that it is, simply put, an invaluable experience. And that doesn’t just hold for those in the development field. The reasons are myriad and each individual will ultimately derive something different from her experiences, but simply in terms of understanding poverty, there is no better teacher. When, for instance, the much renowned saint of global public health, Dr. Paul Farmer, is asked about his greatest teacher, he invariably responds, Haiti - where he first witnessed poverty’s grim face.
But, a friend of mine likes to retort that if, for example, we development workers were in the business of providing shoes, it wouldn’t make any sense for me to take off my shoes just because you don’t have any. My suffering doesn’t help you. What I should focus on is getting more shoes so we can both have a pair. It’s a point well taken.
I don’t necessarily subscribe to the martyrs’ doctrine. In fact, I often find myself annoyed by pretentious development workers who carry around a holier-than-thou smugness because they’re spending their summer internship out “in the field” and without electricity. But, that said, I do think we should reach a balance. And in the context of living in poverty, “walking barefoot” is the best way to understand the pains and hopelessness of poverty.
I joined the Peace Corps for a variety of reasons, but one in particular was to develop relationships with the beneficiaries of development projects – the poor. After college, I was concerned that I was headed down a road to “development from above” – meaning large NGOs, the United Nations, and God-forbid, the World Bank. I joined the Peace Corps so I could never forget that I’m not just working with numbers and statistics; I’m working for people like Josepha, a 26 year old friend in the Dominican Republic. She has five kids, no job possibilities, and no means of sending her kids to school. Until recently, she even sent her 11 year old son out into the sugarcane fields to cut cane just to make enough to eat.
It is my shared experiences amongst the poor in the DR and now in Haiti that motivate me each day. It is the relationships I built that remind me why I have chosen the path I’m on. For me, the poor are not a jumble of statistics; they have names, personalities, and voices. If I had decided that walking barefoot was not worth my time, I don’t know where I would have been today, but I doubt it would haven’t been here in Haiti with Fonkoze. And now that I’m here, for the moment, I cannot really image a place I’d rather be.
Filed under: Haiti, On Poverty, Ultra-poor | Tags: Chemen Lavi Miyò, Development, Doctors Without Borders, Dominican Republic, FONKOZE, Haiti, MICROFINANCE, Paul Farmer, Ultra-poor, Zanmi Lasante
To call someone ultra-poor or to say that she’s the poorest of the poor isn’t enough. It doesn’t do justice to the depths of her deprivation. The designation evokes only an economic understanding of poverty: it’s only a question of her income, which is invariably lower than everyone else’s. But that doesn’t tell the whole story.
Take Krismen, for example, I just met her Tuesday. She’s a sure-thing for CLM – Fonkoze’s program for the ultra-poor. She’s a single-mother taking care of 12 kids and two very aged adults; she lives in a home with mud walls, a dirt floor, and a thatch roof; she’s not harvesting nor does she own any land; she’s sick; her kids are malnourished and easy victims of preventable diseases; not a single child is in school because she can’t pay tuition fees; and on top of everything, she’s understandably depressed. Is it enough to say she has a low income?
Then there’s the fact that she’s poor in Haiti, an already impoverished country with inadequate social services. Haiti is a state in the minimalist sense. Eighty percent of children attend private schools, not out of choice, but out of necessity; there simply are no public schools for miles. Public hospitals are scant, located only in major population centers. Instead, it’s outside organizations like Doctors Without Borders or Paul Farmer’s Zanmi Lasante that provide health services.
If Krismen wasn’t living in Haiti – but even in India or South Africa – her income could be just as low, but her poverty wouldn’t be as deep. In either country, Krismen would at least find a state fulfilling its most basic responsibilities. Her kids would be in the public school system and her illness would find treatment at a public hospital. It’s likely that neither would be of notable quality, but the services would be there. She might have even found her way into a government-led home construction or seed distribution project to improve other areas of her life – both of which are common across the border in the lower-middle income Dominican Republic.
In Haiti – or Chad, or Afghanistan, for that matter – we are talking about the poorest countries on earth. The DR, Mexico, Egypt, South Africa, India, these are developing countries with great swaths of poverty, but still head and shoulders above the very bottom. It’s a difference that’s commonly overlooked when talking about “developing countries,” with all non-rich countries awkwardly lumped together.
Krismen’s case is not an exception, not in rural Haiti. She is no outlier. Still, take comfort knowing that for Krismen, opportunity’s unjust absence is over. The opportunity to send her kids to school, to earn a living, to be empowered and lead a dignified life, Fonkoze has knocked on her door to introduce such an opportunity. Over the next 18 months, with the help of Fonkoze, Krismen is poised for a grand transformation, a transformation so complete past CLM clients have called it a rebirth.
Filed under: Haiti, On Poverty | Tags: Gonayiv, Haiti, Hurricanes, NGOs, Refugee Camp, Victims of Poverty
I didn’t start this blog to try and provoke pity for Haiti. I think the country’s press does enough by itself without me adding to it.
But on my last trip to Gonayiv I passed by a refugee camp for internally displaced persons. Somehow I hadn’t noticed it on the handful of other trips I’d previously made to this struggling coastal city. The camp is for families displaced by a series of hurricanes that began to strike last September. Seven months ago.
The make-shift refugee camp was not organized by any local non-governmental organizations (NGO) nor by local government. Instead, it was spontaneously formed by peasants washed out of the hills by rapacious flooding that left them homeless while wiping out their meager attempts at subsistence farming. (more…)
Filed under: Community Development, On Poverty, Peace Corps, Ultra-poor | Tags: Development, FONKOZE, Haiti, Peace Corps, Ultra-poor
The poorest of the poor are what fuel the West’s development aid to the Rest. They are the faces we see when we are asked to spare the equivalent of a cup of coffee to vaccinate a child or pay to send her to school; it’s this sector that galvanizes large multilateral efforts to alleviate poverty worldwide. Even amongst the “bottom billion,” it’s they that compose the lowest rung.
Yet even with all this attention, many don’t seem to understand the depths of deprivation and injustice that the poorest of the poor have endured and how it affects their psyche and hence our development projects.
The poorest are timid, they lack self-confidence and they lack self-esteem. Besides not having productive assets, besides not having land to harvest, besides not having a formal education, besides being consigned to a general lack of opportunity, they often carry broken spirits. History, both across generations and in an acutely personal sense, has mistreated them. (more…)
