Scraping ‘hope’ from rubble

By Joel Thurtell

One week after the disaster that left Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas in ruins, the toll on this country has been measured almost entirely in lives. But Haiti’s institutions, weak as they were, have been grievously wounded too. A day immersed in this country’s struggle to recover makes it clear that their absence leaves a palpable void.

— New York Times, Page One, January 20, 2010

I’m still puzzling over that line, “A day immersed in this country’s struggle to recover makes it clear that their (Haitis’s institutions’) absence leaves a palpable void.”

I wonder what this means: “A day immersed in this country’s struggle…”

The Times article had a double byline: Ginger Thompson and Deborah Sontag. Did Thompson and Sontag together take part in Haiti’s “struggle to recover”?

Does a single day spent “immersed” in this little country’s “struggle to recover” provide enough insight to draw the sweeping conclusion presented in the article’s headline: “Haiti Takes Tiny Steps on the Long Path Back”?

If the reporters actually took part in some aspect of Haiti’s “tiny steps,” did they forsake their journalistic objectivity?

Readers of JOTR know that I don’t believe there is such a phenomenon as “journalistic objectivity,” but since many working journalists suffer from that delusion, for the sake of this article let’s pretend it exists.

What does it mean for a reporter–no, TWO reporters–to be “immersed” in a “country’s struggle to recover”?

Did the Times reporters work for a day handing out aid to Haitian people? Did their self-proclaimed “immersion” mean they worked alongside Germans (described in their story) trying to bring water to a population whose own water department in the best of times was a sham?

Did the reporters pitch in and help cops (again, described in their story) at a rubble-strewn police station bury their dead and make patrols in their wrecked precinct?

Did they help doctors and nurses (also in the story) conduct operations in a largely-destroyed hospital?

My reading of the article makes me suspect that “immersion” consisted of two reporters showing up at different places to watch and chat with people who were trying to get some real work done. Their so-called “immersion” too get a quickie story was at best a distraction to those were coping with the emergency.

Something tells me their instructions were to fill in the blank spaces in a story whose outline was dreamed up over a cup of Starbucks in Manhattan: Give us a tale we can pop on Page One that says Haiti is making “tiny steps” on its own.

Give us a story that gives our readers hope.

Let’s us feel good.

What arrogance.

What condescension.

To claim that a few hours of kibitzing constitutes “immersion” is breath-taking in its journalistic chutzpah.

Hey, it got them on Page One.

Am I too sensitive?

I never boasted that I was “immersed,” but I can claim to have taken a small part in foreign aid. It was in the early 1970s. I was a Peace Corps volunteer assigned to build U.S. government-financed schools and wells in a small town in northern Togo.

I repeat, I would never claim to have been “immersed” in Togolese society. Yes, I spoke French, the lingua franca of Togo and lived among Togolese, worked with Togolese. But I was, ultimately, an outsider, white person with the ability whenever I liked to withdraw myself from this hot, impoverished land and return to the relative wealth of my previous existence in the U.S. Not what I would call “immersion.”

But in Togo I learned enough about the complexities of delivering aid in a poor country to know that anyone who draws conclusions from a single day spent observing people at work and then claims to have been “immersed” in that activity, in that culture, is spinning bullshit of the first order of magnitude.

I worked far longer in the newspaper industry than I did as a Peace Corps volunteer, yet not long enough to tolerate these pre-fabricated “situation” stories. I did my share of this kind of know-it-all story for my employers at the Detroit Free Press: Tragedy or scandal strikes some small Michigan town and the plot line is just bizarre or terrible enough to rouse the editors of big regional newspapers.

They dispatch a reporter who most likely knows nothing about the targeted town and its inhabitants. The idea is to serve up a story that makes readers think the newspaper knows all about this place, an impression which is a total fraud. While the reporter is chewing the fat with locals in barber shops and coffee houses, some intrepid desk person pulls up the town’s demographics, a graphics person whacks out a locator map, and voila! Sometime that evening, a breezy, vacuous story is on its way to the presses.

Whether it portrays the target community accurately is of no consequence. Whether it makes wrong assumptions about the target population is irrelevant. The key objective is honing a story that will amuse suburban readers over coffee.

Actually, an even more crucial goal of such a story is amusing editors as they chew the fat in their afternoon story meeting. The story would succeed if editors agree it’s a “talker” and a “hoot.”

“Tiny steps” is a curious concept. “Tiny steps” toward what? “On the Long Way Back,” according to the Times head.

Long way back to what?

If we’re to believe the reporting about Haiti, the place was a hellhole before it was hit by an earthquake. Corruption was rampant and infrastructure virtually nonexistent.

Again I ask, “long way back” to what?

More of the same crappy regime where rich people can count on clean water and everyone else gets sick?

Not only is the Times methodology suspect (“immersed in this country’s struggle”), but the idea that this kind of story somehow lights the path back to normalcy is just plain dumb.

When normalcy is hell, the long way back to it is a waste of time, and the tiny steps discerned by those Times reporters in their day-long immersion are an exercise in futility.

It didn’t take me two years in Togo to understand that this little west African country is hugely poor and riddled with graft. While it made me feel good to work on schools and wells, that country needed far more than our piddling foreign aid to provide people the sanitary water supplies and sewers we take for granted.

What they need in countries like Haiti and Togo is a society free of corruption within and equally free of domination by foreigners who stay for a time, give a little help, but never immerse themselves enough to identify with and address the real problems.

Those problems are so fundamental that they escape the ken of most visitors. For instance, those Germans laboring to supply clean water to Haitians. That is a fine goal. But what happens when the Germans go home? Even if they leave their water-purifying equipment to the Haitians, how likely is it that local people will understand how to run the equipment or have money to maintain it?

Not likely.

That is why, in Togo, I insisted on digging a large-bore well rather than drilling the kind of well we know in the U.S.–a pipe run vertically underground to a water-bearing layer of soil, with a pump to draw the water to the surface. Even a simple pump will eventually need repair. Where are the parts going to come from? Who’s going to pay for them? Who’s going to know how to install them? Sounds so simple in our complex American society, problems that could easily be solved with a phone call or a google search. Not so simple in a place where the annual per capita income is under $300.

I preferred a well wide enough for people to drop a bucket and haul the water up with a rope. I was proud of that well. Previously, women and girls carried earthen pots several kilometers to fetch water from a stream, and the well eliminated that  long back-and-forth hike. 

Yes, they had water. Major improvement. But would you or I drink that water? Not without filtering and boiling it. But villagers drink that cloud stuff straight out of the well. So what if the water is open to insects and animals and pollution is its constant condition? When people don’t know better than to drink contaminated water, the problem is not just one of access to resources. It is much more profound, for we’re dealing with basic ignorance of public health essentials.

What kind of government would tolerate contaminated drinking water?

That is the condition those “small steps back” are leading to.

If they’re headed for the old status quo, I don’t seem much cause for hope.

Drop me a line at joelthurtell@gmail.com