PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti.- Midnight, and the dining room at the Oloffson, formerly Port-au-Prince’s grandest hotel, is pounding with the rhythm of two hundred feet and the joyful noise of local band Ram’s ten musicians. Yellow spotlights fill the room with a rich, warm glow, and the air shimmers with the heat of so many bodies, soaked with Prestige beer and voodoo cocktails, moving luxuriously to the beat – a party suspended in a golden droplet of Barbancourt rum. The revellers form a swaying line, and then a circle, and then a shouting, singing crush of random limbs and improvised instruments in the middle of the dancefloor. Tomorrow, we meet the Prime Minister; tonight, we party for Dessalines.

Haitians’ pride in their history and culture is legendary, and an almost corporeal presence in every note of every song, at every meeting table. It’s a ghost walking alongside every man, woman and child, reminding them to straighten their backs, iron their school uniforms, hold fast to the special destiny promised them by their forebears when they declared this mountainous territory the world’s first nation of freed slaves. Any development project initiated here must be undertaken on Haitian terms with full Haitian participation if it is to be successful; cultural and social irrelevance and their capacity for causing dependence and disempowerment are the biggest roadblocks to the long-term effectiveness of humanitarian interventions.

Earlier in the day, I had gone for a tentative exploratory walk around the neighbourhood of Paco. The bright afternoon sun and the schoolchildren stumbling downhill in small, giggling knots had sparked a realization that was always evident on the familiar streets of big Canadian cities but that I had lost sight of amid tales of kidnapping and gun battles on the streets of Port-au-Prince: violence is a lifestyle for a few violent people; the majority carry on living in the crosshairs.

I made my way down to the bottom of the street, greeted with bonsoir mademoiselles and curious but not unfriendly looks, then walked back up again, past the hotel, to the top of a steep and narrow road.

There I stopped and stared at the immensity of poverty: green mountains blanketed in an artificial tree line of patchwork homes, a study in the art of recycling. Breezeblock walls and roofs of hammered oil cans, smoke rising from cook fires in dusty yards, children vanishing and reappearing between lines of hanging laundry, everything open and bare and second-hand but not without beauty.

A water truck decorated with happy faces passed, playing a tinny monophonic rendition of “My Heart Will Go On.” I turned, raised my camera to my eye, and a man called out to me in English from a shady doorway. “Where you from?”

Canada, I told him.  

“How long you going to be here?”

“Four days.”

He studied the camera around my neck for a moment. “With what objective?”

It took me a moment to realize what he was really asking; my first thought, as solid and oppressive as the afternoon heat, was I don’t know.

It’s that brief exchange and its weighty subtext I’m thinking of, my brain still slushy with kompa music and rum punch, as our hired car climbs the steep, shady driveway to the offices of Prime Minister Jacques-Edouard Alexis. A former general’s mansion dating from the first Duvalier regime, the building is both home-y and imposing, sparsely furnished but full of light and soaring curves. At a quarter after eight on a Friday morning, a full staff contingent and Alexis himself are already hard at work.

Our meeting with Alexis takes place in Haitian Kreyol, and I listen without understanding, but from his smile and the warm tone of his voice, it’s obvious that the BRA has sailed through another green light on the road to establishment in Haiti.

Hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested in Haiti in the form of relief initiatives and foreign aid over the years, Alexis says in Ulrick Gaillard’s voice, via my tape recorder and a pair of headphones, but the population is still poor. “Not to say that the cooperation with the international community wasn’t important, but it hasn’t led to any concrete results. There is a serious need for the sons and daughters of this country to come back and assist it.”

The country has “a hemorrhage” of qualified human resources dating back to the 1960s and the dictatorship of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, he explains. The ousting of Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986 helped stem the exodus, but those who left are hesitant to come back due to the lingering instability.

Now, the need for assistance from the diaspora is greater than ever, Alexis says, “but we have to create a formula under which all those Haitians who are professionally competent overseas can come and assist their country without any complications.”

“I have no doubt that your intervention will be a success in Haiti,” he adds, “for one key reason: because development has a lot to do with culture. It has a lot to do with identity, for the person to feel comfortable within themselves, and when the services are offered in their own language, based on their cultural values, those services will be a lot more appreciated, and the change that you are looking for in terms of behaviour will occur very fast.”

With those words, Alexis has contextualized my brief encounter in the rough streets above Paco, and, in a way, absolved me of responsibility to it. In time my memories of my short stay in Port-au-Prince will become like photographs shot on low-speed film – grainy and vaguely sepia-coloured, images from another time, a dream that was never mine to interpret.

For more information on the Batey Relief Alliance, please visit their website.