And then I worked on a Somalia aid program.

It’s been quite a while since I worked on my blog. For the sake of… I don’t know, posterity?… here’s a little something I wrote while working on an aid program for Somalia.

It’s pouring down sheets of rain and wet marks are starting to form on the ceiling tiles above me. It’s 7pm on a Friday night and we’re all still in the office. My hands are pale white from the sudden cold of the storm, but I type ever faster, finishing updated key messages for journalists and supporters about the humanitarian crisis in Somalia.

“The crisis in Somalia has not yet peaked. Rainy season has just begun, leaving hundreds of thousands of people, their bodies weakened by hunger, vulnerable to waterborne and respiratory disease,” I write.

My shoulders hunch up with the all-too-familiar creeping weight of aid worker’s guilt. A thunderclap booms and my first thought is “I’m so glad I’m inside.” My eyes flick up to the blustering leaves in the yard and I’m completely lost in memory the photograph I saw earlier today, of Somali women and children, rail-thin and huddled under cardboard boxes, as the same rains pelt Mogadishu, Somalia.

I duck my head back to my computer screen. I think furiously about how to best get across to journalists and our supporters back home the severity of this crisis, even as news of Kenya’s military incursion into Somalia grabs every headline. It seems that the world has forgotten that four million people Somalia still don’t know where their next meal is coming from. When I turn on the TV news at night (the guilt again, I have a TV), the European debt crisis and a winter storm in New York and the Australian airline workers’ strike are the top stories. I look back at my key messages on Somalia.

“The aid response isn’t meeting the need. We must urgently scale up our programs to ensure we save as many lives as possible.”

The words lay stagnant on the screen. Those millions of people are far away from Nairobi, where we have electricity, restaurants, and clean sheets. The raindrops bring a heavy chunk of despair in my stomach. This is Save the Children’s Somalia emergency response and non-Somalis like me can’t be based in the parts of Somalia worst affected by this food crisis.

I know we have hundreds of Somali staff spread across the country, working around the clock to provide over 180,000 people with food, water, medical care, sanitation facilities, and safe spaces for children to play and learn as they recover from malnutrition. I know those of us here in Nairobi have an important role to play too – obtaining and managing funds to run our programs, ensuring supplies move from factories and fields around the world to hungry Somalis, providing health workers and engineers with technical guidance from our experts to do their jobs in horribly difficult working conditions. We’re on the phone and writing emails with our Somali staff constantly: “How are you feeling? Did you get caught in that IED in Mogadishu? Do you need more saline bags for rehydrating sick patients?”

The rain is coming down so hard now that I have to shout to my colleague at the next desk. I hear the sound of rushing water and wonder if that’s the same sound families are hearing now in southern Somalia. Every day – or maybe more like every hour – I ask myself if we are doing enough to help people in Somalia. Am I helping? Probably not – but I hope I’m helping our staff who are in turn helping hungry Somalis.

I hunker back down over my computer. I will the flooding waters in the street outside to inspire me to write more powerful words. I want the rest of the world to feel the enormity of crisis, to not turn their backs, to honor Somalis’ life and death struggle with attention and support. So I type and I think and I type, and still the rain pours down.

 

Mixed Feelings

At any given moment, I feel very different about my hope for Haiti. Sometimes I hate this place, and sometimes I feel great optimism for it. I can’t really say I ever truly love it. I’m not good at loving a place where the majority of people live in poverty. I get angry too easily at the wasted potential of this place, its bad governance.

Start of the day: gorgeous blue sky, look out my window and see tropical flowers in the yard. Turn on some Girl From Ipanema and all is good. Turn on the tap and water runs out, and life is even better.

Climb into the Land Rover for the 10-minute drive to the office. Greet our driver and the security guys. Say goodbye to the dog. Radio in our location. Lock the doors. Tumble down the crazy rutted mountain I live on and pass people pouring sweat at 7am from hiking up the mountain with goods for sale on their heads. I feel like a horrible colonialist. I also think back to how awful it feels to physically exert yourself when you’re malnourished. Some of people I know are – the infamous swollen belly and skinny legs. I have been malnourished (and clinically starved!) in my life (oh, the wonders of Celiac Disease). When you walk uphill when malnourished, your heart feels like it’s going to beat out of your chest and there’s a rock in your throat and you have a pounding headache. So in this moment I feel a) ashamed that I’m in a vehicle and others are walking, b) blessed that I recovered from my own illness when I was malnourished and starved, c) angry that people are malnourished and most are living hand-to-mouth, d) excited to go to work where I work for positive change, e) scared to go to work and feel like I might not actually make any difference in this situation at all.

So we bump through the gutted streets, braking for small girls with ribbons and matching pinafores. Haitian children going to school must be one of the cuter sights in the world, I think. We pass the souvenir corners of handmade goods and I wish I could pop out and buy several. During this 10-minute car ride I feel happy that we have a driver who stops for children (many nearly kill the kids) and regretful that I’m not a better haggler when buying souvenirs and fruits and vegetables on the street.

The morning hours in the office are the most enjoyable: zombielike trips to the kitchen for coffee, enthusiastic greeting of dozens of people who you just saw twelve hours ago, restarting the computer many times to ensure best possible performance during the day.

The light from sunrise to about 9am is Haiti at its best: invigorating, fresh, sharp. After about 9 o’clock, the sun breaks loose from its morning softness and comes out burning. Haiti’s poverty is thrown into sharp relief. In wealthy Petionville dirty water runs along the street edges. In teeming Delmas, ragged preadolescent boys weave between cars, escaping fenders by what seems a toe width, trying to entice drivers to pay them for wiping down their vehicles with cloths so dusty you wouldn’t want to breathe too closely to the rag. The worst part is that the boys’ clothes and skin and even their eyes have the same film of dust, so caked on it’s like spackle with too many air pockets.

As the sun turns from lovely and warm to brutal, so do my feelings about Haiti. The day picks up urgency. I just missed a meeting. A reporter in Germany needs a hard-to-find bit of information about water trucking in next hour. Wyclef has declared he’ll challenge the electoral council ruling. I’m maxed out on the amount of coffee my stomach can handle. This is a confusing time of day. Sometimes I feel forward momentum: yes, I’m contributing to a better Haiti. Sometimes I feel like it’s all futile and that I’m a hated foreigner in this country.

By the afternoon, my feelings on Haiti could be anywhere. Today I sat for about 15 minutes in the “security” foyer at the Prime Minister’s office, waiting to the let into the office of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission. I listened to some very lazy Haitian staff complain about white people in Creole, assuming we couldn’t understand. I felt frustrated about the chasm between foreigners and Haitians in quake recovery work. I also felt annoyed that these people work here, in a place with so much power to do something good but they really don’t seem to care at all. But then again, maybe they have reason to be mad about a bunch of white people and they’re more realistic than I am about the actual power of the Prime Minister’s office.

At the end of the day, I chat with the driver on the way home. Some days we talk about his kids and I feel happy that his daughter is recovering from her clavicle injury, which happened during the quake. Some days we talk about how he only eats one meal a day and his family lives in a tent because he’s saving money to finish making the payments on a small plot of land. I ask him if he’s sure he’ll get the title for the land. He says he’s sure, once he’s made all the payments. I get worried because I know Haiti’s land titling system is a mess, sometimes nonexistent, and property owners have little security of ownership. I don’t know if I should tell him about my worry. Maybe he already knows. I tell him if he ever wants a meal don’t hesitate to ask. He says that’s very nice and in life we have to sacrifice to get to the good stuff. I tell him he’s right, he’s a good father, he’s a good driver. I get out of the car and I greet the dog and the security guards and I go inside and gulp loads of cold water. I’ve lost my appetite.

Searching for my moon

This morning there were children screaming at play outside our house. I stood on the balcony and tried to see them on the street, over the top of the wall and metal gate that enclose our house. But I couldn’t see them so I guessed they were playing with the water that sometimes flows out of the pipe built into the hillside. Children everywhere in the world, it would seem, love to play with water.

But my first thought when I heard the children playing was how precious that water is and I’m glad their little bodies will get rinsed off today. Nearly half of the children of Haiti didn’t have access to clean drinking water even before the earthquake. And that water running out of the pipe definitely isn’t clean. As a Haiti-based American journalist told me, “you’d better keep your mouth closed in the shower.” Even so, at night when I’m covered in sweat and grime and the water flowers out of the showerhead in my bathroom I am so grateful that I literally whisper “thank God,” and I mean it.

I think there is a part of my brain that is developing into the Haiti part. Like when I’m surprised to see myself in a mirror because the way I look has completely disappeared from my thought process (except, of course, the very powerful 27/7 awareness that my skin is pale white). The way that I worship bleach and its germ-killing powers and “refreshing” scent (why do I find that refreshing?!). When I meet a child I look straight to her belly, wondering about malnutrition. At the grocery store I’m surprised to find a product not past it’s sell-by date (most everything in the grocery store is imported from the States). I actively try to eat more salt because I sweat so much (although I don’t really know if eating salt helps!). Hearing rain at night makes me feel guilty because 1.5 million people are living outside under plastic tarps.

I’ve been in Haiti for over three months, which is a very short time to try to understand this country and a very long time compared most of the aid workers here. But, I have learned a few things, and I guess I’ve changed while I’ve been here.

If I don’t work for a three-hour stretch on a Sunday I feel like I haven’t worked in a week. I know that staying calm is one of the greatest achievements and challenges in life. Wise people stay calm! One of my daily challenges is to stop myself from mixing French and English in the same sentence. Scented laundry soap is an amazing thing because it covers up the constant mildew smell. If you lose 10 pounds from a parasite you really can eat a lot of chips and chocolate to gain it back. Squatting to pee into a deep hole is better than squatting to pee directly on the ground (less splashing). You really can’t eat too much yogurt, especially the kind with extra probiotics. It is possible to drink about 10 liters of water in eight hours on a daily basis. Haiti has absolutely beautiful flowers and if I were smarter I’d get into the flower export business.

Sometimes during college I felt like I couldn’t fit more information into my head. It was like there were filing drawers for pieces of information and the drawers were absolutely filled with sheets of paper, and not a single new sheet would fit. Here, I also sometimes feel like I can’t fit more information into my head. But it’s not like a filing drawer. Instead I feel like my brain is filled with squishy balls of thoughts and feelings and analyses on different interdependent topics ranging from the safety of chlorinated water to integration of former sex workers into mainstream businesses to the fact that my favorite colleague at work has a standing house but chooses to sleep in a tent outside. Every day is a behemoth effort to try to make sense out of it all, and at the same time that I’m processing my emotional and intellectual response to everything I’m tasked with communicating to the rest of the world what’s going on in Haiti and what more has to be done, in a clear and honest way.

Very few things, it would seem, have a simple answer, especially in Haiti. Maybe that’s why I like bleach so much. No matter where you are in the world, it has the same smell, and it kills lots of germs, Haitian germs and American germs alike. I think tonight I’m searching for my moon that looks the same from everywhere in the world and doesn’t have particular complexities because I’m seeing it from Haiti.

Mother’s Day in Haiti

It’s been a long time since I’ve written. Sometimes I think there is so much going on, I don’t really have a way to gather my thoughts in my head.

Sometimes I also feel like it’s really hard to explain all that goes on here. When I have time and the internet connection works, I go through news coverage of Haiti from the US and I find myself having an out of body experience, like “oh wow, what a tragedy.” Then I realize I’ve been living here for 2 1/2 months. I know I recognize some of the camps in the photos, but it looks so much more romantic in the pictures.

Now I finally have part of a Saturday off and I’ve been hanging around the house, reveling in the availability of the internet and drinking as much water as possible and eating lightly, which is the only way to feel energized in this insanely humid and hot environment. Today is Mother’s Day in Haiti, and it’s a lovely thing. We just went to the supermarket and it was jam-packed with people buying all the best things, like cheese and meat, and chocolates and flowers, and little children, egged on by their fathers, trying to pick a box of cookies for their mother. Today is like a lovely fantasy day when men treat women in this country kindly. I think families treat each other kindly, but men, in general, do not treat women kindly. Violence against women in this country is horribly prevalent.

Last week I took my R&R (we have mandatory leave for one week, every eight weeks – it prevents breakdowns and illness) in Florida with my aunt and extended family. It gave me some time to think about my experience so far here. When I’m in the States, Haiti seems very far away and my experience here seems like a strange dream. When I’m in Haiti, I feel like I’ve been here for ages, but that I still know nothing about actual everyday life as a Haitian. I know all about the politics of NGOs and the UN and the Government after the quake. But I know nothing about what it means to be an ordinary Haitian.

In my two years in Switzerland, I think I developed a good sense of what it means to live everyday as a Swiss person. But there I could walk freely, buy freely, dress freely, talk freely, make friends freely. In this country, I cannot do those things. We cannot walk around the city due to security threats. I cannot buy items at the street markets because I’ll never get a fair price. I can’t wear what I want because of the mosquitoes and leers from men. I can’t speak Creole (although I understand quite a lot, at this point!) and many Haitians are wary of making friendships, much less being friendly, with foreigners.

This is not to complain. I’m part of the “NGO state” that Haitians talk about, the army of do-gooders who have taken up residence in their country. What right do I have to understand the deeper mysteries of their culture? How dare I presume to know what’s best for them, in this place of misery and endless “emergency phase”?

The best thing I can come up with, so far, is forging some good relationships with some of my Haitian colleagues. We have over 400 Haitian staff with Oxfam here. My small work team is just seven people, including three Haitians. Every day I work closely with my national press officer, a wonderful young guy who was in college when the quake struck. He’s an incredibly hard worker, has strong morals and values and a strong sense of right and wrong. People like him give me faith in Haiti and Haitians. I especially try to remind myself of his behavior when another rude man has refused to let me pass, or another corrupt “community leader” manipulates NGO aid for his own profit.

The tenor is darkening here in Haiti. After five months of living under plastic sheets, Haitians are getting angry. They want to know what their government is going to do to forge a way out of this rubble-filled quagmire. They want a labor market so they can earn an income to send their children to school and buy food. Frustrations are coming to a boiling point. Many humanitarians feel like we’re in a long marathon trying meet people’s most basic needs, even as voices and fists are raised and crime trickles into neighborhoods like a black sludge.

So on this Mother’s Day, I’ll try not to think of those things, and think instead of lovely family dinners with enough food and gifts for the hardest working people in this country – women. Then tomorrow they’ll go to church and pray for saving from Jesus. Monday the struggle will begin again.

A dusty resettlement

What an intense week!

About 10 days ago, we found out that the government of Haiti identified a site for temporary location of homeless people living in flood-prone settlements in Port-au-Prince. They took two months to identify the site and we had one week to prepare it. It’s a desert-like flat plain about 15 km outside of PaP. The dust is intense. We sent out emergency WASH (water, sanitation, hygiene) teams to install latrines, showers and water bladders. They were the only ones working on the site up until the last day before the arrival of the first group of IDPs (internally displaced people – ie, people left homeless by the quake and living in settlements). Our engineers installing latrines had to wear face masks to protect against all the dust. The American military calls that site “peanut butter camp,” because when it rains, the plain turns into a brown mud pit.

That’s not to say the site can’t be made workable. Our engineers have experience in countries all around the world with tough climates, including Chad and Ethiopia. But it takes time to dig pits around 12 feet deep, lay in large stones and wooden frames to secure the loose soil, and drop in corrugated metal walls. Then the latrine is covered with one of our latrine slabs and around the slab goes a reinforced heavy plastic box with a raised, ventilated roof. The latrines also need handles and locks for the security of the person inside. Someone looking at our latrines at the site on Saturday asked if we could move them a little bit to be closer to his organization’s temporary camp. I looked at him and said, “It’s 12 feet into the ground. That’s no Port-a-Potty.”

Finally, just before the IDPs were due to arrive, gravel was laid down. Other agencies arrived with a mobile clinic and hygiene kits. Our water bladders were filled and we made sure enough showers were working for the first small group of people. (Thank goodness for that water bladder. It’s the best water I’ve drunk my entire time in Haiti. It’s slightly chlorinated taste reminds me of my childhood, where the city also slightly chlorinated the water.)

I went back out to the site on Saturday because I figured a lot of media would be there. I wanted our engineers to do their job and I would talk to the press. Everyone was in a nervous state all afternoon. Boys from the neighboring camp played soccer on the newly flattened fields. American soldiers lounged in their humvees. The IOM officer kept staring nervously at his watch. Finally the rounded buses arrived with the new camp residents. The media followed. President Preval was traveling with the convoy too. They started filing out. A little boy walked through the dust mounds, each little hand small inside of the bigger hands of two women by his side. Someone next to me said the President was there, but I couldn’t see him through the horde of media and soldiers and NGO workers.

I was sort of wandering around the registration tents, where the residents were getting information about their new place to live. I walked up to people with cameras and introduced myself. Wherever the President went, so went the cameras. It was like watching a flock of crows hunt.

A little while later, CNN and al-Jazeera asked me to give an interview. The cameraman asked me to take off my sunglasses. When I did, I almost stumbled backwards as my eyes adjusted to the light. I’d been wearing them all day against the blinding sun. Thank goodness for wrap-around polarized sunglasses. They protect your eyes from the light and the dust.

Saturday was an intense day, but I was really proud of Oxfam. Earlier that week, we’d issued a press release with World Vision and CARE, protesting the last-minute way the site was picked, and the lack of planning and coordination. We worked long hours to get the site ready on time, and we are so proud of our engineers who toughed out those difficult conditions. At least we know that those people have clean water, a sanitary and safe toilets and showers.

Memories of Dirt

Have had my first real sickness, a nasty diarrhea that lasted about 36 hours. Blech, what a nasty feeling. Went to an MSF hospital and talked to a doc there, she gave me some lovely pills that prevented me from vomiting. Then I decided it was time to take the Cipro, et voila, everything is well again. Cipro is an amazing thing! But it seems to be American; no one from outside of the States has heard of it here.

Two weeks now in Haiti. I’m starting to get a grasp on what our programs are and how to do media around it. Yesterday, when I was home recovering from my sickness, I wrote the media strategy… at last, a quiet place to sit down and write, and write I did. We’ll see what happens to it when others mark it up.

Today was a national holiday and we went into the mountains above Port-au-Prince. I was technically “on call” so I tapped away on my Blackberry from time to time. My thumbs are getting scarily agile. It’s about an hour or hour-and-a-half drive. It’s absolutely beautiful. What a relief to get out of the overly crowded city! The mountains are green and stunning and very steep, with red earth and verdant grasses and tropical flowers. My Malian housemate says it reminds him of Rwanda. (Actually, tonight’s dinner conversation centered on the Rwandan genocide, because two of my colleagues worked in Goma in 94-95 and I’ve worked with refugees from that war.)

 So we climb and climb the rock-studded dirt road to old Fort Jacques, a French-built fort from the 1800s (I think. Our self-appointed guide proclaimed to speak French and English but I didn’t really understand a word he said in either language). The people are desperately poor in these mountains, but it seems no more so than their compatriots in Port-au-Prince, and their living conditions are better. Clean air, not too hot, little trash (in comparison with PaP), lots of locally grown food on small farms. Not to say it’s an easy life. Today at the Fort an old man kept talking to us, asking us for money for food. I have never seen such work-worn feet in my life, not ever. They were hardly feet anymore, but more like flattened, thickened planks with small knobs for toes. Most of these people are sustenance farmers, although they look far less sad and pinched than the sustenance farmers on the road to Jacmel in the south.

 The fort affords an incredible view over the jutting mountains down the turmeric-colored terraced hillsides to the concrete and blue plastic tarp sea that is PaP and finally out to the sea, which goes from muddy blue (pollution) at the shore to a lovely Caribbean sea foam green farther out. Best of all, when you’re in these mountains, you feel like a whole person again, because you’re not pressed up against the flesh and stink of well over a million other people. You can breathe again.

 We climbed yet farther to a high-up mountain hotel and restaurant, run by what seemed to be a permanently drunk Belgian, serving strictly NGO expatriates and MINUSTAH personnel. It’s a beautiful, peaceful site. I would love to return many times again except the service on the lunch was so incredibly slow I don’t think we can ever return for a meal – just a drink, perhaps. Of course as soon as we arrived my colleague recognized formers colleagues of his and then everything shied away when MINUSTAH police arrived bearing weapons. NGO-UN peacekeeper divides remain even when there are cigars and wine handy. For myself, I stuck to walking around the grounds, taking close-up pictures of calla lilies, and eating salt-encrusted fish.

 When we returned to the car, there was a horde of young boys selling fresh-picked mint, with the dirt still on the roots and smelling exotic. Dirt, I find, is one of the strongest memory-makers around. The dirt from my home smells different from the dirt at my parent’s current house which smells different from the dirt in Spiez which smells different from the dirt at the ruins in Rome (although the dirt at the ruins in Rome smells nearly the same as the dirt at my home in Poway, California!). And here, the dirt smells like red, mineral-rich clay. It smells like waxy enormous flowers and heavy humid air and cassava skin.

 This evening I got a workout on my French. First explaining my entire Celiac experience to a very interested colleague. Trying to say “gastroenterologist” in English is a trial, and in French it just adds to the fun. Then at dinner talking about the Rwandan genocide, then talking about a poorly run food distribution I saw last week. I find the more I speak at length in French, the more I speed up, and then I really get too much spit in my mouth and gargle all my words! But in our house we are now four native francophones and two adept French speakers and one who only speaks English. French rules the day! But, I like it and they’re pretty forgiving. I’m finding I’m making progress with my use of prepositions inserted before the verb (“y” and “en”, especially “en” when it replaces a “de” after a word like “plusieurs” or “besoin”), but I’m increasingly getting tongue-tied trying to conjugate multi-syllabic verbs! Again, speaking too quickly. Being surrounded by francophones and dinner conversation gets me all excited and I speed up too fast.

Haiti: Week One

First week in Haiti has passed. How did it go? I suppose as well as it could have. I don’t really know where to start.

It’s 18h30 and I’m sitting on the back patio at our house in Petionville. We live in massive villas up on the hill over Port-au-Prince. It seems bizarre that we live in these mansions. It’s the grandest house I’ve ever lived in. But they’re the only houses remaining after the quake, partially because only the wealthy built houses with any strength, and partially because Petionville stands on the bedrock and had less damage from the quake.

 It’s never quiet in Haiti. As I write, there’s the rumble of the generator, the buzz of the cicadas, the noise of the TV of the people next door, the tapping keys on the computers of my housemates sitting around me, the clinking of dishes in the kitchen. On the streets, in the day, it’s far more of a cacophony. People talking loudly, honking horns (streets are only one way, so when you turn a blind corner, or pass, you honk against traffic), the rumble of endless rows of dirty white Land Rovers enclosing foreign aid workers and Haiti’s wealthy.

 The food lines, long, long lines of women belly to back, holding hands so as to not fall over in the crush, are noisy too, but in a different way. The crowd whines as they shuffle toward an unseen destination, prodded by Brazilian peacekeepers in blue helmets toward what we all assume to be World Food Programme bags of white American rice.

 Now is the best part of the day: the time after work, at home. I get up at 6h15, dress (which shirt out of four to pick today?) and eat breakfast of cooked rice with milk, a banana, and coffee. Must remember to always take my anti-malarial and multivitamin. Leave for the office in the Land Rover, with five other housemates, at 7 am. We pile in and greet Telemac with a rousing chorus of “salut, Telemac.” We belt in and lock the doors and clip on our office badges that list our blood type. The guard opens the gate and we roll out onto the long, sloping hills of Petionville. The roads are insane here. Huge potholes, ragged cracks from the earthquake, mountains of debris and trash. Our drivers somehow navigate through all this.

 (Today I stupidly said the BBC could film somebody traveling in a vehicle and then I realized it would be far too bumpy to film anything at all!)

 We go through the streets for about 10 minutes until we arrive at the bamboo shop in front of our compound. It doesn’t operate anymore but I imagine it was beautiful with stocks of bamboo outside. In the streets people are up and about and the bright Haitian sun shines beautifully. It’s not too strong yet, although my National Media Officer Peleg tells me it will be terrible in the summer. Women carry all manner of items on their heads. Men walk around with one earbud in an ear, talking away on their cell phones. Some people put together nice outfits and do their hair and others don’t care at all. My favorite part is when we pass the flower stalls that sell armloads of tall calla lilies and exotic birds of paradise and simple gerber daisies. In the rubble of this country there are the most beautiful flowers.

 We pull up to the compound gate and pile out of the vehicle. An enterprising man has set up a shoe shining stand in front of our office where national staff pay him to polish their shoes. Many Haitian men at our office come to work in full dress pants and black leather dress shoes with points, like the Italians in Geneva.

 We pile into the office, filing past the guards with a chorus of “Bonjou.” (Bonjour = bonjou and Bonsoir = bonsoi, more or less, in Creole.) We truck off to our separate department rooms. I plop down my sack and computer bag and plug in. I have to start up Lotus Notes for about 20 minutes before I can get my mail. The program is terrible and the Internet connectivity tempestuous (and I’m being kind). My Blackberry, however, works perfectly. That blinking red light indicating a new message rules my universe these days.

 We work in crowded offices with a jumble of chairs and desks and cords and fans that sort of work and lights that mostly work (except when the massive generator goes out, which is several times per day). There’s one good toilet and washing my hands each time I use the bathroom is the most refreshing part of my day. There’s actual liquid soap in there and running water and the toilet flushes, which is the best bathroom of anywhere. My room here at the house has finally got running water (when the house staff decide to turn on the pump), but the toilet is still broken.

 So I do email (mostly from my Blackberry because Lotus only manages to retrieve mail about three times per day), have meetings, and stroll around the compound on my Blackberry for the next 11 hours. It’s a well-known sight around the compound: advocacy and media staff walking in circles in the yard, talking into their Blackberries, saying over and over “I’m sorry, can you repeat that? The line is bad.” Seriously, people back home make their sentences too long!

 Sometimes I go out in the field to sites where we operate: to preview a site for a journalist visit, or to take pictures for communications with our supporters. Driving anywhere in Haiti takes a long time. The roads are poor and traffic in Port-au-Prince is intense. Last week, on the curving mountain road to Jacmel in the south, we nearly ran off the mountain in a head-on standoff with a large Mack truck. The driver turned to me and said “t’as peur, Julie?” I stared at him blankly because I’d hardly noticed the near collision. I was too busy practicing my yogic breathing to stave off another round of throwing up on the twisting roads. (The driver also gave me a lime to smell, which helped. I suppose it’s the Haitian version of smelling salts!)

 The worst thing I’ve done my whole time here is go to log base: the UN base at the foot of the hill that is Port-au-Prince. (This far and away worse than throwing up six times due to food poisoning.) Log base is swarming with foreign aid workers and diplomatic staff and soldiers, UN and American. And it’s about 100 degrees F there, at the least. It’s blinding white and a landscape of gravel and UN and US army tents and Land Cruisers and dust clouds from helicopters. Up on the hill in Petionville, you feel like you’re in the tropics. At log base, you feel like you’re in Iraq (or, what I imagine Iraq might be…). Within 30 minutes of arriving there last week, I walked past Bill Clinton and Sean Penn. Later, in a cluster meeting about camp management, I accidentally hit Sean Penn with my shoulder bag. He’s handsome, but not as good looking as the camp management cluster coordinator from the IOM, a guy called Giovanni.

 The best parts so far about this life are:

-         My colleague Peleg, who hasn’t even finished university. When the quake struck, he was doing his final internship. He’s hardworking and naïve and so willing to work hard to rebuild his country. This guy is the future of Haiti.

-         The fresh grilled red fish I ate with Peleg and our driver when we visited Jacmel. It was sauced with spicy little red peppers and tangy, sweet onions and served with piping hot fried plaintain. The skin was crackly and the insides sweet.

-         Our backyard pool and the beautiful flowers that grow abundantly around it.

-         The refreshing feel of washing my hands when I use the loo (but I already said that, right?).

Refugees Suffer During Recession

Here’s a new piece from NPR about refugees struggling in the US during the recession. The US resettlement system is quite complex, and localized such that situations for refugees can vary tremendously from state to state, and city to city. This piece just touches the iceberg of the complexity of the resettlement system and the heavy burden placed on non-profit, private organizations in the resettlement process.

Refugees Can’t Flee Recession, by Jamila Trindle, NPR

Swiss Vote to Ban Minarets

Article for Migration Information Source, December 2009.

http://www.migrationinformation.org/Feature/display.cfm?id=755

Switzerland’s Non-EU Immigrants: Their Integration and Swiss Attitudes

Thanks to the kind folks at the Migration Information Source, I have recently completed a major article about immigration to Switzerland of people from outside the European Union and EFTA countries.

“Switzerland’s Non-EU Immigrants: Their Integration and Swiss Attitudes“