Post Earthquake Jacmel (Haiti) Report and EMMA

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And now, flush with hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, international NGOs and the
government are beginning the rebuilding process. xxviii They are hiring teams of locals, mostly to
sweep the streets, gutters, and to do low grade maintenance and rebuilding of retainer walls.
Meanwhile, the great bulk of aid is directed toward external experts brokered by the Haitian elite
and the NGOs. Massive amounts of money are spent to write reports that are not read or that are
about foregone conclusions, xxix while literally hundreds of thousands of Haitians sit idle, having
been knocked out of the economy by the aid tsunami. Contracts are being negotiated with
foreign rubble removers, toilet operators, and construction companies, the same members of the
merchant elite who have dominated both government and the import and export sector for
centuries; having always fed off of the rural regions and given little in return, they now sit at the
tables with the high paid consultants and try to central plan the new system. At a lower level the
Haitian agronom and aid workers (the majority of who did not suffer directly from the
earthquake), flush with gifts of cash from their sympathetic NGO patrons (imagine that your
neighbor dies and your boss hands you a $10,000 sympathy check), desperately try to understand
not so much what is going on in the rural areas, but rather what blan wants so that they can get
more paychecks, more of the aid pie, perhaps a promotion and, if everything goes really well, a
visa. At the very bottom is the average Southeastern peasant who has fled to a Dominican sugar
plantation, considered among the most exhausting physical labor in the hemisphere, to work
backbreaking 10 hour days over a period six months with the hopes of saving the US$500 dollars
he needs to come back home and invest in his garden and livestock, all with the goal of shoring
up the security-net upon which his and his family‘s lives will depend. Meanwhile, back in the
office, the average NGO consultant sips his coffee, eats his three hardy meals per day and
consumes in salary, transportation, hotel, and food expenses about the same amount of money,
per day.
There has to be a more efficient way