Travesty in Haiti: A true account of Christian missions, orphanages, fraud, food aid and drug trafficking

By Timothy T Schwartz

TRAVESTY is an anthropologist’s personal story of working with foreign aid agencies and discovering that fraud, greed, corruption, apathy, and political agendas permeate the industry. It is a story of failed agricultural, health and credit projects; violent struggles for control over foreign aid; corrupt orphanage owners, pastors, and missionaries; the nepotistic manipulation of research funds; economically counterproductive food aid distribution programs that undermine the Haitian agricultural economy; disastrous social engineering by foreign governments, international financial and development organizations--such as the World Bank and USAID-- and the multinational corporate charities that have sprung up in their service, 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. TRAVESTY also chronicles the lives of Haitians and describes how political disillusionment sometimes ignites explosive mob rage among peasants frustrated with the foreign aid organizations, governments and international agencies that fund them. TRAVESTY recounts how some Haitians use whatever means possible try to better their living standards, most recently drug trafficking, and in doing so explains why at the service of international narcotraffickers and Haitian money laundering elites, Haiti has become a failed State. TRAVESTY reads like a novel. It takes the reader from the bowels of foreign aid in the field; to the posh and orderly urban headquarters of charities such as CARE International; to the cold, distant heights of Capitol Hill policy planners. The journey is marked by true accounts involving violence, corruption, appalling greed, sexual exploitation, disastrous social engineering, and the inside world of drug traffickers. But TRAVESTY it is not a novel. It is founded on 15 years of academic and field experience, research, and hard data. It entertains the reader with vivid first hand accounts while treating seriously the problems inherent not only in international aid, but the sabotaging effects of the drug war on economic development in remote and impoverished areas of the hemisphere.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Timothy T Schwartz
• Release date: Jan 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465779724

Timothy T Schwartz

Timothy T Schwartz earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Florida and then went to live and work in Haiti for six years. His research included 15 months living with impoverished Haitians in the thatch-roofed huts of a remote fishing hamlet and three years residing in agricultural settlements and villages. He worked as a consultant for international aid agencies, including the German foreign ministry (GTZ), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), French ID (Initiative Developpment), and CARE International, the world’s largest international charity. Since leaving Haiti he has been living in the neighboring Dominican Republic where he works as an international consultant specializing in Haitian-Dominican relations and coordinates social impact assessments for private companies. His studies have been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Curtis Wilgus Foundation and the University of Florida College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Recent publications include the Haiti entry for an encyclopedia of world cultures, Countries and Their Cultures (Macmillan Reference USA: Yale University), an article in the refereed Journal for Research in Economic Anthropology entitled Pronatalism and the Economic Utility of Children in Jean Rabel, Haiti, and an article published in the Caribbean’s oldest and most prestigious journal, New West Indian Guide, entitled Subsistence Songs: Haitian 'téat' performances, gendered capital and livelihood strategies in Jean Makout, Haiti.

Book preview

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

Reviews for Travesty in Haiti

[ernie marton · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I always had the suspicion the author brought up. Working previously with CARE I recognized some names and initiatives.

[Breno Oliveira · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great info that will definitely change your perspective on NGOs. Help doesn’t always mean giving free but to stimulate the one who needs help in order to create a more sustainable future.