Perhaps the humility is cunningly deliberate but either way, that would make him a good craftsman. For, when you read the book, you come away with the feeling that the author/anthropologist didn't mean to expose foreign aid, fraud, greed and the apathy he experienced in working with foreign aid agencies and the political agendas that permeates the industry but just found himself part of an unconscionable paradigm, part of a palimpsest painting, part of layers that seemed critical to lift up for a look and then, write about, even if it cost him his chosen career and made him unemployable with the NGOS. Like so many others Schwartz could have just done the regular thing, made unusual alliance for the sake of a job or, simply come back to the US and raised funds "for the poor" and joined in the black exploitation game in Haiti. But, this conscience, this unveiling, this choice, makes Schwartz unique - one in a million. Timotà ¨ sa a, li se vagabon pa nou. Enjoy:
***********************
TRAVESTY
in Haiti : A true account of Christian missions, orphanages, fraud,
food aid and drug trafficking A book by Timothy T. Schwartz, Ph.D. (buy the book) Reviewed by Ezili Dantà ²/HLLN, December 2009
p. 196 "For me and other anthropologists and missionaries working in the country, the many coups and uprisings in the late 1980s and early 1990s were more an inconvenience than a threat. We were not targets and could resign ourselves to working around them. So while the military was gunning people in the Port-au-Prince slums, I chartered a small plane in Miami and flew into the city of Cape Haitian...That night soldiers shot two young men in the street below my hotel window. (During the three days that followed the ouster of Aristide by military leaders, the CIA trained narcotraffickers described in an earlier chapter...at least 3,000 people were slaughtered in the Port-au-Prince slums)... But for the most part, Cape Haitian was quiet. Within several days, I boarded a Haitian sailboat and 36 hours later I sailed into Baie-de-Sol harbor. And that is where I met Sharon, sunbathing on a beach. She invited me to lunch with her parents, siblings and the other teachers. We became friends ...in the ensuing nine years"
Chapter One - Death, Destruction and Development -p. 2 to 3
"This is the inside story of (development and charitable projects and working with foreign aid agencies in Haiti)...and the impact on the people they were meant to help. It is largely a story of fraud, greed, corruption, and 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...
The accounts I present herein come from my own experiences while living, researching, and working in Haiti over a period of ten years...I have 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 to 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 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. (emphasis added.)
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."
Chapter Eleven - p. 202 to 204
"...Sharon (the principal of the School for Jesus Christ of America in Haiti) had power. When her telephone didn't work and she couldn't get it fixed, she summoned the children of the head of the (Haiti) state-run telephone company from their classroom and sent them home with a message, "tell your parents that you cannot return to school until my telephone is fixed."
When the school (for Jesus Christ of America in Haiti) couldn't get fuel for the generator, Sharon picked up the phone and called the parents who monopolized the regional gasoline trade and who had children in school: gasoline arrived that evening. When she had a problem with papers for vehicles, she simply opened a spot for another child in her school - for the son of the director of the division of motor vehicles - and registration papers were no longer a problem. When she had problems getting goods through customs she did the same thing, admitted the children of the director of customs.
She also had a plush air-conditioned condominium (in Haiti), a video library, refrigerators and freezers the contents of which looked like a merger between a candy shop and a steak house. She had the ability to get anything imported from the U.S. free of charge and with the rapidity of Federal Express - which, need I say, didn't serve the region. Often I did not even have to pay for what I ordered. I had two pairs of free prescription eye glasses, half a dozen high-priced tape recorders for my research, parts for my motorcycle, free medical care.
...The realization that the school was a nest of elites began to eat away at my conscience. These were the same elites who looked down on and spurned the impoverished peasants, fisherman, and slum dwellers; who referred to them as ignorant and uncivilized, as subhuman, who called them dan wouj (red teeth) and pye pete (cracked fee). It infuriated me. The impoverished children in the Hamlet could not get medical care and when they did, it was bad medical care that they had to pay crushing fees for. But the children of the Haitian doctors who extorted them and the children of the other Baie-de-Sol elite were getting medical and dental care for free. (HLLN Note: Baie-de-Sol is a coastal city in Northwest Haiti that's an 8-hour drive from Port au Prince. It's the fourth largest urban center in Haiti whose actual name is altered in the book to Baie-de-Sol.) They were getting Christmas presents flown in. The were getting a virtually cost-free education. It wasn't meant for them. It was meant for poor children like those in the Hamlet. The kids at The School of Jesus Christ of America didn't need it. Their parents could pay for it. If the Baxters didn't give it to them their parents would send them to private school in Port-au-Prince or Miami. Some parents had taken their children out of school in Miami specifically to send them back to Baie-de-Sol (Haiti) to The School of Jesus Christ of America, specifically to take advantage of the free education, of the charity, the charity meant for children like those of the Hamlet.
On top of all this the Baxter's regarded themselves as altruistic. They thought of themselves as good Christians who made a great sacrifice by coming to Haiti to help the poor. Visiting missionaries thought of them as dedicated spreaders of biblical truth, somehow holier than ordinary Christians, closer to God, better than the rest of us.
I am not a religious person but it seemed to me too that the Baxter's embodied charitable and family ideals that while I myself may fall far short of fulfilling, I nevertheless had tremendous respect for. I respected them, admired their honesty, their good works, the closeness of their family. I had gone to their church services, stood with them holding an open bible in my hand as the Reverend read the words. Then it turned out to be bullshit. Helping the poor? The hell they were!
Now what I saw in the Baxters was a perversion of Christian idealism and I despised them for it. The country-style buffet lunches, the candle-light dinners on the patio with Haitian servants standing off the side waiting for tea glasses to get low so they could rush in and refill them, servants who were likely as not the objects of (Reverend Baxter's) the old man's sexual depredations, servants who had been trained by the mother, a sharecropper's daughter, using money meant for the poor to turn them into waiters and maids so that she could live out what were no doubt childhood fantasies of being a wealthy planter's wife. Those meals on the patio became a mockery of everything that The School for Jesus Christ of America was meant to stand for. It was like CARE, a perversion of American charitable ideals with its false claims to be aiding the "poorest of the poor" when what it was really doing was throwing exquisite banquets at plush hotels while carrying out U.S. political policy in the interest of international venture capitalists and ago-industrialists. The charity and Christian morality of the Baxters was a smoke screen, a rationale like "food aid" meant for the hungry. The Baxters were living like royalty, buying their way into Baie-de-Sol elite, rubbing shoulders with the beautiful people, granting them free education in exchange for favors while they used as lords use sefts the poor who they were supposed to be helping."
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