Getting over HODR blog

Well that was an interesting week or two. I’ve been in Haiti for nine weeks now and around week six I was sick to death of the place. 80-90% of the buildings have been squashed around here so there are no: bars, clubs, libraries, internet café’s, normal café’s, shops of any description. There are also no parks or public spaces because they are covered in makeshift tents which is where the Haitians live. There is nothing to do and nothing to do within 45 minutes of our base unless you get a moto or taptap.

Speaking of volunteers, which I wasn't, Sangita was a girl from the UK. She was badly blocked up, in fact she hadn't had a successful trip to the toilet for nine days. That is quite a backlog, and one nobody else could understand given the soupy consistency of the average turd at HODR base. I took her to the hospital one night because she was starting to feel ill and she explained her problem to the doctor. Doctors love to use any issue as a teaching experience and before long there were eight or nine medical types standing around discussing options to treat her. Pills, potions, a saline drip to moisten things up a bit. One of the them suggested a digital manipulation to dig it out. I giggled and waggled my middle finger at Sangita, who turned pale.

I felt these guys were missing the point.
"What she really needs is an enema." That stopped conversation for a moment, and one of the nurses eyes lit up-she was the enema specialist. Sangita shook her head in mild embarrassment, but really that was what she was hoping for.

I asked if I could get one as well, two for the price of one, but the offer wasn't on the table. Did she want me to hold her hand while they inserted the hose? No thanks Tim. So I left and Sangita got her enema, and later that night did her first turd for nine days. When she emerged from the bathroom later that night she got a round of applause. Awesome.

There are plenty of smashed buildings to demolish and clear. So for the first month when you’re on a high from being in such a different, interesting place you work till you drop everyday. The shitty food is delicious and you relish the freezing bucket showers you take before and after work. Then you become a team leader and you get a kick out of running groups of people to continue the job HODR is doing.

I found that running teams was really satisfying, for a while. I had to work out how to get and keep people motivated to work hard, and also enjoy themselves and make them feel like they were contributing. Most of the people who come down to Haiti can contribute well, but truthfully some don‘t add much value. Having said that I felt it was our job to at least make them feel useful by giving them some small task they could complete because they had made the effort to get down here and help out, an act by itself which is very meaningful.

There was always a huge variety of people to work with-old, young, fit, fat, smart, dumb, etc. I would say some people are motivated to work and that others aren’t but coming here in the first place is quite a filter, lazy people don’t usually make it to Haiti. To sum it up, I liked some people at HODR and disliked others but respected almost everybody there. However, if you run the team well most people work properly. It was always satisfying to turn a rubble pile into a liveable plot of land again as well.

I found it easier to run teams with lots of girls because rubbling is a fairly repetitive job. That might seem like a strange connection but I think its because girls concentrate better than guys in general. So if you give them a repetitive job (like pushing a wheelbarrow) they will actually do it, and not come up with a helpful suggestion, or a better, shorter, different, faster, more efficient way to get the task done.

Girls understand that while running a site can be a collaborative decision making process, in fact it usually isn’t. They also won’t stop what they are supposed to be doing and pick up a sledgehammer and pulverise the nearest object for no reason.

Guys like sledgehammers. I get it. You break shit with them, work up a sweat, then walk away and let someone do the boring job of cleaning up the mess.

Some guys liked wheelbarrows too. They could run all day with them. Not me. I found it boring, and thought my talents were better deployed destroying things rather than shifting them around.

I’ve lead a couple of good teams and had a great relationships with the people in them. Then they leave and you teach another group the same things, and get them operating really well…then they leave…and it happens a few times you get tired of going through the same processes with new people, because you know where it will end.

So by week six I had decided to start something different. I was still out in the field a lot but was spending more time in the office. By office I mean concrete enclosed space with four industrial sized fans circulating air. There is a tenuous internet connection and dress code consists of thongs, footy shorts and…that’s it. That’s what I wear anyway-despite the practical nature of this attire you are still in danger of sliding off the metal chairs from the sweat lubricating the seat.

Anyway some Harvard Business School students came to Haiti I guess so they could put the HODR project in the Life Experience section of their C.V. Some of them were quite useful. For example they had skillsets in organising committees/discussion groups to disseminate methodologies to ascertain measurable, deliverable and tangible outcomes in relation to proactive group-based post act of God/cataclysmic natural event debris relocation, or rubble removal as the rest of us call it. One of them wanted to get locals in touch with a microfinance organisation called Finca to dish out loans to the local small business owners. I followed up on this and had a grand plan to set up HODR as a central part of the economic recovery of the region, and wanted to collect names of people who would be suitable for these loans and get them in touch with the finance providers.

So I organised a seminar for the Finca rep to speak to our volunteers. This guys job in essence was to sell micro loans, so I should have known better than to invite him to speak, having been a shady financial products salesmen once myself. Anyway I heard “Finca” mentioned perhaps 20 times in the first 5 minutes, and then the guy really got animated.

He was wearing a typical friendly African dictator/evengelical preacher button up long sleeve shirt-brightly coloured with gold stitching and slogans on parts of the fabric. He had large gilted rings and a bulky gold watch hanging loosely on his wrist. He had small square glasses perched on the end of nose, meaning his head tilted back and he stared down his nose when addressing you. His shabby trousers were held up by a worn belt and gleaming black shoes poked out the bottom. He took a deep breath, smiled, and spread his arms wide, pausing…“In Leogane you have some serious problems my friends! It is Finca who is the answer to your economic problems! Finca will help you feed your child and satisfy your women! Finca wants nothing from you but your partnership in this great vision of Finca’s!”

Then he started levitating and with a halo around his head and visions of God crackling around him he begun to berate our guys, loudly, for their ignorance, scepticism, rude questions and general intransigence in the face of the overwhelming logic and unparalleled opportunity he was offering them.

It seemed that he just wanted to five Finca discount these guys' money and I knew it was a failure when the guys started sniggering and left to help bring out tools for the afternoon session (something I’ve never seen them help with before) but I decided to call it a learning experience.

I pushed it, writing up a plan to get anybody with money, be they public, private or NGO, to channel their funds through us-we have experience on the ground with Haitians and could them direct funds efficiently. I sent it to management where it was met strongly and decisively with apathy and disinterest.

That was pretty frustrating as I thought that apart form the economic effect on Leogane, it could have helped HODR raise funds from donors by giving us a long term, sustainable program we could point at when in fundraising mode.

So at the end of week seven I had had enough. Most of the people I initially made friends with had gone and been replaced by others who I wasn‘t interested in, or lacked the energy to get to know. In my mind the general feeling around HODR had changed as well. It used to be a place where everybody worked flat out but in an uplifting way, where small things were done for you for no thanks and you did small things for others even when you knew they would never know it was you. Inspirational people had met me when I first started, and now were gone.

In my mind it seemed like small acts of selfishness and stupidity are more the norm and the workforce has changed composition, so that instead of strong proactive people it feels more like a babysitting adventure holiday. I had obviously burnt out. I just had no interest in Haitians, for a variety of reasons. It is very difficult to help people when many of them only see the opportunities you present them as zero sum games. I knew there was every excuse in the world for these people, poverty, lack of education, disasters, exploitation. After a while I got to the point where I stopped caring about the sad stories and have started wishing people here could learn some accountability, and learn to help themselves.

I knew it was me, not the place because whilst lying in my tent one night I heard two newbies chatting about how positive the atmosphere was at HODR and how proactive people were-they sounded the same as I had two months earlier.

I was essentially, bored and jaded and sick of living in everyone else’s pocket. Many of the Haitian guys who work with us are excellent in ways I’ve outlined previously. Conversely, many of them are useless to the point of frustration and as a team leader I’d lost patience. For example, it would be at least 35C here everyday, with 80% humidity or higher. One of our local guys, called Job, showed up day after day wearing a beanie, long pants and a baggy collared shirt. I told him the beanie at least was a stupid idea but he continued to wear it as a fashion statement.

So one day when he sat down at work overheating I threw his beanie away and told him it was a shit idea, through a translator. I explained that because he wears inappropriate clothes and has to sit down the rest of us have to do his work for him and that tomorrow he needs to grow up, just a little and wear proper clothes to work.

I forgot these guys never had role models apart from retarded American rappers. It wasn't their fault, but they needed to learn.

The point is, stupid little things were getting to me and I’d lost some perspective on what was going on. I needed to do something different.

As a result I decided to go to Jacmel. Jacmel is on the southern side of the island of Hispaniola and is a beautiful old colonial town surrounded by tropical beaches.

The HODR volunteer program has about 110 international volunteers on the base at any one time. They are mostly Americans with some poms, too many Canadians and a few token Aussies for some balance and perspective.

In addition there are about 30 Haitian guys who show up and work with us every day. Mostly they are top guys as I’ve outlined before. Some of them are dickheads.

I got one guy removed from the program because he was a shifty swindler. He was slimy, lazy, and ingratiated himself with people and then asked them for money or things, like phones, shoes, whatever. The reality is that, politically incorrect as it may sound, most people, when they first arrive, have a rich white person/poor black person complex and feel they owe these guys something and oblige the con artists. They have a great racket going because there is such a turnover of volunteers.

I went through the process with Dave Shakalaka myself when I got suspended. He kept insisting on taking my money so he could pay for things, and I never seemed to get any change. Everything was always 20-30% more expensive around Dave but he never did anything such that you could finger him for it. This went on for a while as I had to rely on his help while I had no accommodation but I drew the line after this conversation:

“Hey man what you do today?” Dave leaned against the wall with his hands behind his back, grinning slimily. He looked slightly sheepish, like he knew he was about to ask something that would probably get a bad reaction.
“Don’t know, probably just hang around at Joe’s.”
“I need some money man.”
What the fuck? I was already 99% sure he’d been ripping me off but this was a new approach.
“Can I have 500 Goud?”
“What for?”
“I need to buy some new shoes man, look at these ones!” He gesture to his sandals which looked fine to me. They were the third set of footwear I’d seen him in…that day.
“Dave, I’m not buying you new shoes. I told you yesterday I don’t have much money.”
Dave shrugged and raised his eyebrows. He wanted to appear reasonable. I wondered what was coming next. “Yea man, but we friends remember? Your money is my money.” Wow! If nothing else I had to respect the guys front.
“What? That‘s ridiculous. My money is my money and I’m not buying you new shoes.”

Anyway after that I told him to his face he was dishonest and a thief, and pushed to get him kicked off the program. Other people came forward and said they’d had similar experiences and that was it for Dave. His other problem was that he didn’t work very hard on site. He would pick up a sledgehammer and blow a block to smithereens, shouting loudly and drawing attention to himself…if there were women present. Everything he did was demonstrative and calculated to draw the girls eyes. He would speak in Spanish because it sounds more emotive, even though nobody else on the team could speak Spanish. Except me. One day he was saying in his loudest most emotive Spanish: “We’re going to the beach to play with horses! We’re going to the beach to play with horses!” Sure Dave. When I explained to everyone what he was saying he looked at me a little embarrassed but mostly resentful. At any rate it worked, because a moronic, loud, stupid, fat girl from New York called Cassandra fell “in love” with Dave after being in Haiti for 10 days and was still sending money from the US months later when I left. When we kicked Dave of the program it deprived him of access to stupid rich people and naturally he was upset.

To the guys credit, he was a good con artist. He showed me a receipt for a money wire from the US, from Cassandra for a few hundred dollars. Good on him, and good on her, maybe they'll have have shifty, annoying babies together.

I learned a few things about con artists in Haiti. They rip you off but never leave direct evidence of having done so. Then when you confront them about it they act extremely hurt that you could think such a thing of them and try to convince you it was misunderstanding. They try to make you feel bad that you think ill of them, so that you back down and they can ingratiate them selves again. A popular trick in Haiti, for the guys who I had stern conversations with, was to tell me that only God judges them and if they are what I say they are then God will pass judgment to that effect at the gates of Heaven. Stern stuff.

Jesse James was a guy who lingered around the camp flexing his pecs at girls. He also kept asking for things, and newly arrived volunteers always opened their purse for him. He got told to go away as well, so there was lingering resentment about HODR from a couple of groups. I made a few enemies in Haiti to be honest, a quiet source of pride for me.

One day a letter was found on one of the bobcats. It outlined that the translator we used-Jacob-should not be getting paid, and that we should fire him. He needed to be replaced with a local from Leogane (Jacob was from a town called Gonaive).

If this didn’t happen bad things were going to happen to Jacob and his family.

Three days later management decided to roll back the local volunteer program. It was a Thursday afternoon and I had been down the road sinking a few beers and was feeling quite pleased with myself. At the HODR base there weren’t many options for release, but I found a good one. In fact, it involved alcohol, can you believe it. I didn’t drink very often but when I did everyone found out very quickly what was on my mind.

So when I got back to base that afternoon after a few settlers and saw my Haitian mates crying I wondered what was going on.. I stood up at the nightly meeting in front of 100 or so volunteers and in a calm and articulate manner voiced some objections to their decision.

That saga is another post in itself.