Haiti After the Earthquake (48 page)

Catherine's school, Green Hills Academy, launched the first studentrun fundraising campaign. Churches, schools, and radio stations invited us to deliver speeches and promote our relief efforts. Radio stations supported fundraising for several months with an ongoing radio campaign. The Anglican Church of St. Etienne immediately wrote a check, organized prayer sessions, and offered their kind friendship and support to our grieving family. Private businesses gave whatever they could, from cash and in-kind donations to services and logistical support. Donations of plane tickets, handicrafts, hotel rooms, electronics, gift certificates, and more were raffled or auctioned to raise funds. Staff of Inshuti Mu Buzima, PIH's sister organization in Rwanda, pledged 10 percent of their salaries to Haiti. These are just a few examples of those in Kigali who have joined us in standing up for Haiti—there are so many more. From this campaign, we raised well over $30,000, a significant contribution for a small country known best for its own struggles to overcome one of the world's worst humanitarian crises of the past two decades.

My family has reason to be grateful to Rwanda, our adopted country, both for the government's support of Haiti's government and for the generosity and commitment of the many individuals who helped us raise money and awareness, as well as our shattered spirits. Only days after the quake, the government gave a generous donation to Partners In Health's relief efforts. The message accompanying their donation revealed an incredible solidarity between the countries. Haiti is truly blessed to count Rwanda among its friends.

In June I returned to Haiti for the first time since the tragedy. It was extremely hard to land in Port-au-Prince and see with my own eyes what I had watched on TV. At first, I feared my reaction. From the plane, approaching Port-au-Prince, I could see the masses of shelters and tents stretching to the horizon and could not stop my tears.
Then the passenger sitting next to me asked whether it was my first time back since the “event.” She shared her own story of survival, as did everyone else that I met on my short visit home. Being in my destroyed country helped me to mourn.

A few months after that, I returned again, this time to witness firsthand the situation of women and girls living in some of the thirteen hundred spontaneous settlements in and around Port-au-Prince. My work with Partners In Health in Rwanda, initially focused on assisting their government in the development of its national community health program, had more recently involved working with women's organizations there to address the needs of vulnerable women and girls at the community level. I hoped that my visits to the camps in urban Haiti would allow me to identify areas of possible Rwandan-Haitian collaboration.

Images of the camps, at the time home to 1.3 million people, were by then familiar to the outside world: sprawling landscapes of makeshift tents where food, water, and sanitation are in short supply. Less evident in those media images was the struggle of women and girls amongst the desperation and violence, and the shadow crisis emerging from that: a wave of forced pregnancies resulting from the rape of young girls, unprotected behind the thin walls of what were supposed to be temporary shelters.

The situation of women in Haiti has always been precarious, but on this trip I found thousands of women in the camps on the brink of survival. Access to the most basic human needs of food, water, proper shelter, and education are severely limited for everyone, but girls and women face an added dilemma: satisfying those basic needs often places them at high risk of sexual violence and exploitation.

In the overcrowded camp in Parc Jean-Marie Vincent, I met ten-year-old Virginie. The day after the earthquake that left her father dead, she had moved here with her mother and four siblings to the settlement at the outskirts of downtown Port-au-Prince. Virginie's mother had sought work in town, lugging produce for market women, to provide food for her children, forcing her to leave Virginie responsible for her younger siblings. In her mother's absence, Virginie was repeatedly raped. The improvised house of sticks and
other scavenged materials she lived in provided little protection from the men who prey on young girls. Speaking with Virginie, I thought again of my own daughters, and the heartbreaking decision her mother was forced to make between physical and social vulnerability—between hunger and safety.

Sexual assault and rape had been common in pre-earthquake Haiti—a fact that had led us years before to conduct our own ethnographic studies of “forced sex” in the rural countryside—but the social structures of family and community had provided some protection for women and girls. The collapse of Haiti's social infrastructure in the January 12 earthquake also destroyed these physical and social safeguards against sexual violence.

As vulnerable as Virginie was within her family's shelter, she and other girls are at even greater risk when they venture to the bathroom—little more than a crude dark closet with a hole in the ground, where they squat in darkness. These primitive latrines are also often far away from “home.” Many girls described being followed and attacked on the way to the toilets. While police may patrol some camps during the day, and citizen brigades have formed in some camps to escort women and girls to both latrines and cooking areas after dark, armed men continue to prey upon them.

Shortly before my visit, the women's committee of Parc Jean-Marie Vincent had identified Virginie's family as being among the most vulnerable in the settlement. Fabiola Coqmard, Partners In Health's Women's Health Coordinator, began to address the family's most immediate needs, first by providing a proper tent. Recently, PIH has helped Virginie's family to relocate to a less populous camp, where Virginie can attend school, and helped her mother start a small income-generating activity to enable her to both work and remain with her children in the camp.

When I spoke to Virginie, I asked her what she wanted for her future. She said that she would like to go to school and become a nurse so that she could repay her mother for her hard work caring for the family. Although our immediate efforts can provide some protection for Virginie and her family, her future, and that of all Haiti's young girls, depends on a broader investment in their education and empowerment.
This means ready access to school and a decent shot at a decent job when their education is complete.

The frequent sexual assaults, combined with inhumane living conditions, have led to an epidemic of unplanned pregnancies in adolescent girls and women. The medical coordinator for Partners In Health expects hundreds of pregnancies in the Park Jean-Marie Vincent camp alone if conditions don't improve—and the number is likely to climb even higher in coming months. Many women will deliver their children in the shelters of bedsheets and rubbish that make up their temporary homes. When twenty-eight-year-old Martine gave birth to a child in the camp, she had nowhere to place the newborn but in a bowl of dirty towels. With only bedsheets and linens as cover, the future of Martine's newborn and others born in the camp is bleak.

I left the camp with a renewed dedication to increasing awareness of the day-to-day atrocities that women and girls are facing in Haiti. Right now, food, water, and shelter are critically needed and in short supply. But if we address these basic needs while neglecting the education and empowerment of women, we will continue to leave them and their daughters vulnerable to rape and the prospect of bearing children of rape for years to come.

In Haiti, women are the centerpost—the
potomitan
—of our families and society. The reconstruction of Haiti will succeed only if we strengthen its centerpost by educating and empowering our country's women and girls. The impact of women's empowerment and leadership can be seen firsthand in Rwanda, where it has been key in transforming a country devastated by one of the worst tragedies to afflict humankind into one progressively more able to ensure access to social services for its population. Rwanda still confronts many challenges to achieving its ambitious goals for recovery and rebuilding, but its emergence as a model for all of Africa provides a vision of what is possible for Haiti after the earthquake.

In less than thirty seconds, in an unprecedented cataclysm, our public and private infrastructure vanished; our friends, family, and
children disappeared; places and things firmly inscribed in our memories were destroyed. The earthquake created a rupture, and, just possibly, a new chance to become one people and one nation. It should be a chance for profound transformation and the beginning of the construction of a New Haiti where all Haitians, rich and poor, educated and illiterate, from public and private sectors, can participate in their country's development. Naysayers will claim that this hope is naïve or misguided, that Haiti's government is too weak, its people too poor, the damage too grave. To these people I say only one word: Rwanda.

I knew when I moved here in 2006 that I had a lot to learn from Rwanda, but I could not have expected just how valuable these lessons would prove to be in Haiti. In March 2011, just over a year after the quake, a Rwandan colleague of mine put it this way: “Rwanda and Haiti, they are the same. People lost family members. They lost husbands. They lost wives. They lost children. People's homes were destroyed and everything they owned was taken away from them. And afterward, people had to keep on living.” My colleague is a warm and generous woman with a ready smile and an indefatigable spirit. Even after her husband, a Tutsi, was killed by a neighbor during the genocide, she took in six Hutu orphans to live alongside her own five children, and has supported all of them ever since. When I asked her how she kept on living in the wake of so much loss, she responded simply: “I worked.” And she smiled as she said it.

My colleague attributes her resiliency partially to the ethic of hard work and self-reliance promoted by the post-genocide government's “public awareness” campaigns. But she also cites its sensitivity to gender issues and the importance of female empowerment in allowing women like her to gain access to the cash economy, to keep their children—and, in many cases, their neighbors' children—clothed, fed, and in school, and to find new meaning in a life which, for many, was suddenly absent of the husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers they used to love and care for.

As of 1994, 70 percent of Rwanda's population was female. It was largely on the backs of these women—victims of rape and physical violence, wives abandoned by husbands imprisoned or fleeing imprisonment,
women who had lost family members, friends, neighbors, lovers, children—that Rwanda was rebuilt. And as Paul often likes to say, it was built back better. In Haiti, we often wax poetic about the role of women as the centerpost of the nation, but Rwanda has actually put this idea into practice, with an emphasis on female leadership, economic empowerment, and education.

In Rwanda, leadership quotas and an emphasis on female involvement in both community and national-level decision-making has formalized women's role in good governance. A minimum of 30 percent of government seats are reserved for women, though this quota is regularly surpassed. The 2008 elections broke the world record for highest percentage of female representation in Parliament, at 56.2 percent. Even at the village level, generous quotas are set for female representation in local leadership positions, and efforts are made to include women in community forums, planning meetings, focus groups, and other venues. Finally, a Ministry of Gender and Family Promotion was created to help coordinate local, decentralized efforts within a national agenda for gender equality. This agenda has become a central project not only of good governance in Rwanda but of Rwandan society as a whole, with even banks and other private businesses setting high standards for female representation in the workforce.

Women are being empowered in Rwanda politically and economically. They are organized into associations and cooperatives and are offered mutual support and solidarity while seeking access to the cash economy, and banks that would otherwise be unwilling to take a risk on, say, a loan to a banana seller in Ruhengeri, are happy to help agricultural cooperatives raise capital. It is generally accepted that these women's cooperatives are secure investments because experience has proven them to be among the most reliable in terms of repayment. And as many proponents of microfinance have noted, women are more likely to invest in household maintenance and human resources such as health care and education, pushing the country's development agenda forward in the process. As part of its Vision 2020 plan, Rwanda now aims to qualify as a middle-income country within the next decade, thanks in no small part to the solidarity and entrepreneurship of its working women.

Rwanda's investment in its youth is also paying off. For boys and girls alike, educational opportunities offer promise for a better future. Educational associations at the university level seek to harness the brainpower of young scholars to focus on national development challenges and solutions. And admissions quotas at these universities ensure that women's voices are included in these associations.

Rwanda has drawn on its rich cultural heritage by adapting its traditional practices to respond to modern challenges. The
Itorero Imbangukiragutabara
, Kinyarwanda for National and Traditional Academy, was traditionally used to educate youth about Rwandan culture. In 2007, Rwanda revived the practice of
Itorero
as a forum for promoting unity and other positive values, such as living peacefully with others in a spirit of respect, integrity, solidarity, and tolerance. Organized as month-long civic education programs for Rwandan youth,
Itorero
engages the Rwandan people to participate in the country's development strategies.