Lavi chè!

Okay, so, where to begin? The initial outburst of street demonstrations has subsided. The movement began in the southwest corner of Haiti, in a relatively peaceful beach town called Les Cayes. There have long been murmurings of unrest over the skyrocketing cost of living ("lavi chè" in Creole). For at least four months there has been a vague expectation that something like this might happen. But a lot of factors came together to light the fuse. The UN force stationed in Les Cayes got drawn into a violent confrontation which incited a major demonstration. The protests were driven in part by students.

The Haitian government responded by saying that the unrest was being provoked by drug traffickers. I have no idea what truth there is to this statement, but it certainly is true that drug traffickers have benefited from the chaos. The protests spread to Jeremie and other places before finally arriving in Carrefour, just west of Port-au-Prince, within a few days.

I went to work on Tuesday morning unaware of what was going on in the city. By 10:00 a.m., there were large crowds in the streets all around our office, chanting, banging things around, making plenty of noise. I found out that a photographer from a newspaper where a friend of mine works was shot while taking pictures in Champs de Mars, the public area surrounding the national palace. The protesters nearly succeeded in destroying the barricade surrounding the palace, chanting all along that the president must leave the country.

This is an intriguing part of the story. When President Preval was elected for his current term, in 2006, there were some questions as to whether some sort of runoff vote would be needed. There were reports of ballots being burned in parts of the country (my organization has photos) and crowds began forming. The masses of people that turned out in the streets were by and large the supporters of President Aristide who had been aggrieved ever since he left the country under murky circumstances on February 29, 2004. Their aim was clear: the obvious winner of the election – Rene Garcia Preval, former prime minister to Aristide, president from 1995-2000, champion of the poor – must be declared the winner immediately. The crowds stormed the Montana Hotel, where the election headquarters were located, and eventually everybody in charge decided not to test the wrath of a desperate population. Preval was declared the winner.

If you’ve seen the movie “V for Vendetta” you probably remember a line where the hero says something like, “People shouldn’t be afraid of the government. The government should be afraid of the people.” So when I think about those crowds of people demanding that their sheer mass be respected, I think, sure, whatever, patience is a virtue, but if the point of a democracy is to represent the will of the people, then a big enough crowd is effectively a vote, and one that cannot be vetoed without destroying that democracy. The people protesting for Preval to be declared the winner were largely being driven by a distrust of the election authorities, thinking that the elites would pull their strings and use some obscure legal maneuvering to undermine Preval. This is not a paranoid delusion. Both rich and poor countries offer plenty of examples of the popular will being subverted even under the banner of democracy.

However, this time around things were much more complicated. The enormous crowds of people protesting last week were the largest seen here since the 2006 election. Only this time, two years later, the crowds were demanding that President Preval leave office. The primary demand of all of the protests has been to lower the price of basic foods and gas. (Gas is over $6 a gallon here, the minimum wage is $2 a day, and most people are unemployed.) Secondary to these demands has been the demand for the UN mission to leave Haiti, and the demand for President Preval and Prime Minister Alexis to step down.

So this begs the question, were these anti-Preval crowds made up of the same people that made up those pro-Preval crowds just two years before? Did “the masses” really turn so decisively against the man they used to support? In just two years? I won’t try to answer, but I’m sure it’s not just a yes or no kind of thing. People often think of Haiti as an overwhelming majority of very poor people with a tiny middle class and a tiny elite. There is some truth to this, but it’s a mistake to then assume that any one of these three groups thinks or votes all the same. The tension between Evangelicals and Catholics and, of course, Vodouisants, is another frame that doesn’t really adequately explain the situation. And, as in any protest, the property damage and looting was being carried out by a small minority of the people in the streets. Always good to keep in mind when you’re looking at pictures of mayhem and destruction.

I was in the office listening to the radio reports of crowds of people forming all over the city, barricades of flaming tires going up on the main roads, windows being broken, etc. I started a googlechat (surreal? yes) with another MCCer, who was at a house outside of the city. His wife was stuck at her house right on the main road of Delmas which had massive crowds marching past it constantly. She watched the convenience store for the gas station across the street as it was looted until completely empty. It was only then I realized that this thing was going to last a while.

A friend of mine called from Champs de Mars where she went to see the aftermath. The building for Air France was gutted entirely. One of the strangest things she observed was that Digicel was left alone. There are two major cell phone companies in Haiti: Digicel and Voila. They each have their signature colors, they each have endorsements from Haitian celebrities, and they each give away lots and lots of t-shirts and backpacks and the like. And yet the protesters drew a clear line between them. They destroyed a Voila office just a few doors down from a Digicel office. My friend saw one protester get beaten up by other protesters after he threw a rock at Digicel. She saw a guy raise his fist in the air and say, “Digicel. Respect.” She saw another man come out of the Voila office with a laptop. He declared that he could take it and sell it for a lot of money, but since Voila is run by thieves, he preferred to make a point with it. Which he did, by cracking it in two over his knee.

I have to say that I’m baffled by this. It’s true, Digicel has superior customer service. It’s also true that Digicel has invested a lot into making Haiti’s soccer team competitive. But how in the world could that make such a crucial difference to an angry crowd? I don’t know. I guess it just attests to the fact that an angry crowd is not a mindless crowd. It is made up of people who are making very specific choices for very specific reasons.

Around 4pm, people started leaving the office in groups, planning only to take routes that were verified as clear. There was one road I could take to get to my house up the hill in Petionville. My friend called from Champs de Mars to tell me that a big crowd had just left there to march up that same road. I thought I was going to be stuck at the office for another couple hours, but my boss told me to get on my motorcycle and high-tail it home while I could.

Driving up Rue John Brown I passed a couple of burned out cars, one upside down. There were burning tires here and there, and several big trash containers had been upset into the street. In Petionville the mood was tense. Every other intersection had something burning in it. There were few cars on the road. I talked to all the other MCCers on the phone. I entertained the thought of getting up early and getting out of town to wait things out with friends away from the action. Ultimately we decided to hunker down where we were.

On Wednesday I woke up and turned on the radio. There was lots of talk about protests in Petionville. I heard shots from time to time. I called my boss to check in and he made me promise to stay in my house all day. I was glued to the radio, while at the same time listening to the sporadic fire and the occasional roar of a crowd not more than a few blocks away.

Radio reporters were talking about how the president had promised to make an address to the Haitian people at 8:00am, and everyone was hanging on to see what he would say. While he may in many ways be a captive to this horrible situation, his handling of the protests so far left much to be desired. His reaction to the Les Cayes protests, as I mentioned, blamed drug traffickers for the unrest. While this could be true, it also seemed to dismiss the validity of the protest, at a time when all Haitians are hurting, and some starving, because of rising food costs. When protesters announced to the press that they were going to come to the national palace and demand Preval’s resignation, Preval responded saying, “Pase cheche l.” This is Creole for “go and find it,” but a more appropriate translation would be Bruce Campbell’s “come get some.” Probably the best comparison is with George W. Bush, who responded to the insurgency in Iraq with “bring it on.” Note to all world leaders: don’t bluff with big crowds of thousands of people that already don’t like you. It wasn’t much longer after “pase cheche l” that the protesters decided to take the president up on his challenge. So here we were, a day after the protesters trashed his front yard. Millions of us with our ears cocked to the radio speaker, waiting to see what the hapless president would say. Eight o’clock came and went, and nothing.

Mid-morning I watched a very large crowd come up my street, moving along at a jogging speed. In stark contrast to what I had expected, I saw a lot of smiles. The people in the front were carrying leafy branches. I didn’t see any guns or rocks. Eventually the crowd thinned out and then I saw people running a lot faster to catch up, as the sound of shooting got closer. Several of the people in the street ran into the narrow, clogged entrance to the huge slum of Jalousie, which is about 100 feet from my window. A white UN S.U.V. and two big armored UN vehicles pursued the crowd past the entrance to Jalousie, firing tear gas canisters into the slum. I saw lots of troops with guns, though I don’t specifically remember seeing any of them aim and shoot. It all happened pretty fast.

Perhaps 15 minutes later I heard my landlady’s housekeeper running and saying “gas! gas!” Soon the guard, the housekeeper and my landlady and myself were all doubled over coughing with tears streaming down our cheeks. Being Haitian, they knew immediately what to do in the situation – we picked a few limes from a tree in the yard and bit into them, and then flushed our faces with water. Not long after that there was several minutes of intense gunfire coming from Petionville’s main park, a block away. I still don’t know exactly what was happening there, but I believe it was mostly the UN firing, since they have rubber bullets. The Haitian National Police were also in the mix, and they don’t have rubber bullets. But if live rounds were used, they must have been fired in the air, because otherwise what I heard would have been a massacre. There is still no clear picture of the casualties. I’ve heard six most often as the number killed, with 60 injured. That’s for all of Port-au-Prince, for the duration of the unrest. I’ve also heard stories about the UN bagging up corpses and chucking them into dump trucks, but these are probably not so reliable. Still, six?

Sometime around 11:00am the radio started playing the president’s address on a loop. I’m not sure if the speech was ever broadcast live. I got the impression that he recorded it and sent it out to the media outlets. Reaction to the speech was swift and unanimous: BOO! People started calling into the radio stations to complain that the president didn’t really say anything. He talked about some long term solutions, but not enough short term ones. He talked about how the whole world is dealing with high food prices, not just Haiti. True, perhaps, but not what a starving person wants to hear. Everyone agreed that the president blew it. Some announced that they were still waiting for the president to address them, because what they had just heard must have been a joke. And yet, there haven’t been any major protests since the speech aired. The country finally had something to react to and debate about. It was like everyone took a big breath of air, stretched their arms, and took a look around. The situation we found wasn’t pretty. Lots of businesses damaged, which would surely mean more people unemployed. Everyone I talked to had the same attitude: the president hasn’t done enough to avoid the situation we have now, his speech definitely sucked, but those people who took advantage of a tense situation to break and steal things are making the situation worse for everyone.

Shortly, the news on the radio shifted to a group of senators who was demanding Prime Minister Alexis to step down. This is where the politics get really murky, and I must confess I know very little about all the ins and outs of how this works. But as background, there was an effort just a few weeks ago in the senate to force Alexis out with a vote of no confidence. It appears that these senators are simply taking advantage of the situation to achieve a political victory against President Preval. Over the weekend, everyone went through the motions and Alexis found himself and his whole upper level of government employees without jobs. It’s too bad, really. True that there’s a whole lot of dead wood in the Haitian government. But Alexis has a good reputation as an honest, serious, uncorrupt prime minister. It’s hard to judge someone on job performance whose main task is to save Haiti.

Well, that’s about it for now. Things are calm. Still a lot of broken glass everywhere. Lot of trashed gas stations. Other than that, situation normal. Port-au-Prince is already in permanent bunker mode with big walls and gates absolutely everywhere. There have been scattered reports of protests in other parts of the country – but never all at once.

It’s frustrating to be right here in the country and still not have a clear idea of what exactly happened, why it happened, and what’s happening now. Oh, I should say, it’s kind of embarrassing that a story was on cnn.com quoting me as “Felix Kurt Hildebrand.” That’s just how my name got passed along to him. I’m not running around down here introducing myself to CNN as Felix.

Also, I’m sorry I didn’t take any photos of anything I saw. It honestly didn’t occur to me until days later that I should have had my camera ready. Another MCCer on the team got some footage of the Haitian National Police beating a crowd of totally nonviolent protesters without provocation.

Sorry this is so long, and congratulations if you made it all the way through! I’m sure a lot of it is vague, and you might have a lot of questions about what’s going on. If so, send them along. I’ll do my best.

I’m not just saying this because I need a silver lining to every cloud, but there have been some positive aftereffects rippling out from the chaos. Communities pull together. It’s Haiti, so there’s always going to be a lot of sidewalk debate. But the sidewalk debates these days seem to be more about big picture stuff. How are we, as Haitians, going to free ourselves from the abusive international relationships that ensnare us? What can we expect from the government? Are we a free country, or an occupied country? None of these questions are simple.

I also don’t want to gloss over the fact that the situation is, in every way, dire. Just looking at the numbers of people in Haiti who live on less than a dollar a day, I cannot possibly imagine how people aren’t starving by the thousands. The very survival of the Haitian poor is a miracle. But that’s how it was before the prices started doubling.

Thank you, cousin Jay, for praying. Everyone else, whether you pray or not, please pray for the Haitian people, especially those who are most vulnerable, and all people suffering acutely from the convulsions of our global economy.