Bad Idea Jeans> Travels

January 1^st 2006.

OK, I have been a lazy bastard. My apologies, but now I have something I feel like writing about. I have spent the past few days in Haiti, volunteering as an election monitor for Haiti's recent municipal elections. Last month my friend Claire sent me an email asking if I wanted to go to Haiti. I said sure, why not. Claire works for an NGO called Haiti Democracy Project that is trying to help consolidate and improve Haiti's unstable Democratic system. I thought it would be really interesting to see a third world election up close and try to a be a bit of help to a worthy cause.

So I applied to be a volunteer and was accepted, however HDP did not receive their grant money from US AID until 2:30 on November 29^th, a day before I flew to Santo Domingo (I flew into the DR because I figured I could combine the monitoring with a brief trip to the Dominican Republic). Claire had been in Port Au Prince, one of the world's more dangerous cities, for the past three weeks arranging the ground logistics for 50 observers without knowing whether or not they would actually get the grant money to make the project happen. Needless to say she was put in a shitty position, but ended up doing a great job. Meanwhile the director of HDP was in the US getting together the grant money. For some reason he didn't send the potential observers any instructions whatsoever on how an election monitor is to go about doing their job.

Anyway, the funding came through and I flew to Santo Domingo arriving in the afternoon. I had enough time to check out the old town, which contains the New World's first church, Western built military structure, Monastery, Hospital and oddly enough, fax machine. The next morning I boarded a bus to to Port-Au-Prince. I was asked several times why I was going to Haiti and people seemed to feel it wasn't the best place to be. If you don't follow these things, Haiti doesn't have the best reputation for safety and lawfulness. In fact the government recently passed a bill that anything goes once the sun goes down. Total amnesty. Just read what the US State department has to say. “Travel in Haiti is dangerous and not recommended” does not make for a great slogan for the Haitian tourism bureau. Port AU Prince, PAP, is considered by far the most dangerous part of Haiti and kidnappings, gun fights and jaywalking on a massive scale are a daily part of lives for Port-Au-Princians. That said, you are much less likely to have your pocket picked here than say, Paris.

When I crossed the border between the DR and Haiti it was like going from the developing world into the undeveloping world. Did you know that Haiti was the richest Colony in the world in the mid 19^th century. After a successful and terribly bloody slave rebellion between 1791-1804 the GDP has gone down pretty much every single year to the point that Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere with a median income of 44 cents a day. This country isn't just backwards, it's shifted in reserve and has had the peddle to metal for the past 50 years. For instance, Haiti's national flower is the Florentica Nobalis Duvalierus, which is a purplish grey flower that only grows in piles of garbage. It's technically a mold.

I arrived in PAP as the sun was going down and my friend (and Claire's boyfriend) Hunter and a friend of theirs named Darrin were supposed to pick me up, but were stuck in terrible traffic so were late about 45 minutes. I spent the time standing next to the bus's security guard, who carried a big shotgun. When Hunter finally arrived I was surprised to see that he was driving the car, a large white Montero. The streets here were crazy and I would have been freaked out trying to drive, not to mention the security threat. I was also surprised to find out that I would be flying to Les Cayes, a city in the South West the next morning at 7AM. Anyway, we picked up Claire and took off for a guesthouse on the other side of town. Hunter and Claire seemed pretty comfortable just driving around past slums and had come to the conclusion that it was highly unlikely unless you had a fixed routine that you would be kidnapped. Why? Because the traffic is so bad it would be very hard to make a getaway.

One of the first thing I noticed is there were just a ton of people just hanging out on the “streets” in complete darkness. PAP only has city wide public electricity 2-4 hours a day so the streets are pitch dark with the only light coming from burning piles of garbage and car headlights. Speaking of garbage, the “streets” were covered in piles of it as Haiti has no public garbage collection. I write “streets” in quotes because they are more like a series of potholes and craters that run through Haiti where cars tend to drive.

Later that night we drove to the Hotel Montana, one of PAP's most expensive hotels and where most of the election observers were staying. (Claire, Hunter, Darrin and I stayed at a great Catholic Missionary guest house) There we were supposed to be briefed on what exactly being a election monitor entailed. For some reason the head of HDP, Claire's boss decided not to and all we were given were the questionnaires we would have to fill out to report our findings. Yeah, all of this work and money to get us out there and none of the observers knew what we were doing... yup.