September 02, 2015
The Clintons’
Haiti Screw-Up,
As Told By
Hillary’s Emails
The family still doesn’t know how
to wield its own power.
It’s hard to find anyone these days who looks back on the U.S.-led response to the January 12, 2010, Haiti earthquake as a success, but it wasn’t always that way. Right after the disaster, even as neighborhoods lay in rubble, their people sweltering under tarps, the consensus—outside Haiti—was that America’s “compassionate invasion” (as TIME Magazine called it) had been “largely a success” (Los Angeles Times), offering further proof that “in critical moments of the history of mankind … the United States is, in fact, the indispensable nation” (Expresso, Portugal).
As the latest release of Hillary Clinton’s personal emails by the U.S. State Department Monday revealed, that perception was not an accident. “We waged a very successful campaign against the negative stories concerning our involvement in Haiti,” Judith McHale, the under-secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, wrote on February 26, 2010. A few weeks before, the public affairs chief had emailed newspaper quotations praising U.S. efforts in Haiti to Secretary Clinton with the note “Our Posts at work.” Clinton applauded. “That’s the result of your leadership and a new model of engagement w our own people,” she replied. “Onward!”
But one person even closer to the secretary of state was singing a different tune—very, very quietly. On February 22, after a four-day visit to the quake zone, Chelsea Clinton authored a seven-page memo which she addressed to “Dad, Mom,” and copied their chief aides. That informal report tells a continuing story of the unique brands of power and intelligence wielded by the Clinton family in Haiti and around the world—and of the uniquely Clinton ways they often undermine themselves.
First off, there was the secrecy. The memo—by a Clinton, with a master’s in public health from Columbia University, pursuing a doctorate in international relations from Oxford and with a prominent role at her family’s foundation—would have obliterated the public narrative of helpful outsiders saving grateful earthquake survivors that her mother’s State Department was working so hard to promote. Instead, like so much of the inner workings of the Clintons’ vast network, it was kept secret, released only in an ongoing dump of some 35,000 emails from Hillary’s private server, in response to a Freedom of Information Act Lawsuit wrapped up in the politics of the 2016 presidential election.
Chelsea Clinton was blunt in her report, confident the recipients would respect her request in the memo’s introduction to remain an “invisible soldier.” She had first come to the quake zone six days after the disaster with her father and then-fiancé, Mark Mezvinsky. Now she was returning with the medical aid group Partners in Health, whose co-founder, Dr. Paul Farmer, was her father’s deputy in his Office of the UN Special Envoy for Haiti. What she saw profoundly disturbed her.
Five weeks after the earthquake, international responders were still in relief mode: U.S. soldiers roamed Port-au-Prince streets on alert for signs of social breakdown, while aid groups held daily coordination meetings inside a heavily guarded UN compound ordinary Haitian couldn’t enter. But Haitians had long since moved on into their own recovery mode, many in displacement camps they had set up themselves, as responders who rarely even spoke the language, Kreyòl, worked around them, oblivious to their efforts.
“The incompetence is mind numbing,” she told her parents. “The UN people I encountered were frequently out of touch … anachronistic in their thinking at best and arrogant and incompetent at worst.” “There is NO accountability in the UN system or international humanitarian system.” The weak Haitian government, which had lost buildings and staff in the disaster, had something of a plan, she noted. Yet because it had failed to articulate its wishes quickly enough, foreigners rushed forward with a “proliferation of ad hoc efforts by the UN and INGOs [international nongovernmental organizations] to ‘help,’ some of which have helped … some of which have hurt … and some which have not happened at all.”
The former first daughter recognized something that scores of other foreigners had missed: that Haitians were not just sitting around waiting for others to do the work. “Haitians in the settlements are very much organizing themselves … Fairly nuanced settlement governance structures have already developed,” she wrote, giving the example of camp home to 40,000 displaced quake survivors who had established a governing committee and a series of sub-committees overseeing security, sanitation, women’s needs and other issues.
“They wanted to help themselves, and they wanted reliability and accountability from their partners,” Chelsea Clinton wrote. But that help was not coming. The aid groups had ignored requests for T-shirts, flashlights and pay for the security committee, and the U.S. military had apparently passed on the committee’s back-up plan that they provide security themselves. “The settlements’ governing bodies—as they shared with me—are beginning to experience UN/INGO fatigue given how often they articulate their needs, willingness to work—and how little is coming their way.”
That analysis went beyond what some observers have taken years to understand, and many others still haven’t: that disaster survivors are best positioned to take charge of their own recovery, yet often get pushed aside by outside authorities who think, wrongly, that they know better. Her report also had more than an echo of the philosophy of her Partners in Health tour guides. More than five years later, her candor and force of insight impress experts. “I am struck by the direct tone and the level of detail,” says Vijaya Ramachandran, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development.
But then came the recommendations—and a second classic pitfall. Far from speaking uncomfortable truths to her parents’ power, Chelsea was largely agreeing with their own assessments. At a March UN donors’ conference for Haiti over which Bill and Hillary Clinton presided, the secretary of state would tell the assembled delegates that the global community had to start doing things differently. “It will be tempting to fall back on old habits—to work around the [Haitian] government rather than to work with them as partners, to fund a scattered array of well-meaning projects rather than making the deeper, long-term investments that Haiti needs now,” she said, nearly repeating her daughter’s dismissal of the “ad hoc efforts” that had defined the early response.
Bill Clinton had also long been scathing in his assessments of aid work there. As the Associated Press correspondent in Port-au-Prince before, during and after the quake, I’d followed him on his visits since becoming UN Special Envoy in mid-2009. In public, the former president called for better coordination between NGOs and donors. In private, after long, frustrating days in the Caribbean heat, he’d sometimes just go off, lighting into the nearest staffer about partners’ missed meetings and broken promises. The former president also loved to apologize for his own past actions—destructive food policies which flooded the Haitian market with cheap Arkansas rice, and ordering a crippling embargo that destroyed the Haitian economy during the reign of a 1990s military junta (some of whose members had been on the CIA payroll).
Yet those introspections rarely extend to the present. As anyone who’s covered the Clintons can tell you, they armor themselves with staffers who hit back against almost any hint of criticism—especially when an election is near. The one thing the Clintons never seem to question is the idea that they, personally, should remain in charge. And that is precisely what Chelsea recommended in her report:
“The Office of Special Envoy—i.e., you Dad—needs authority over the UN and all its myriad parts—which I do believe would give you effective authority over [the NGOs].” Her father, the former president, should be a “single point of authority,” she said—overseeing a replacement for the organizational system of government agencies, militaries and NGOs.
The truth is that Bill Clinton was already by far the most powerful individual in this flawed system, with Hillary close behind. She was guiding the U.S. response as secretary of state. He was already UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Special Envoy for Haiti, head patron of the Clinton Foundation and co-leader of the newly formed Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund. Weeks later the couple would share the dais at the donors conference, where governments and aid groups pledged some $10 billion for Haiti’s recovery. Her father would soon accept the co-chairmanship of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, the quasi-government body charged with allocating many of the funds. (“Finally,” chief of staff Cheryl Mills wrote to the secretary in a March 29, 2010, email, when news of the appointment leaked to the Haitian press.)
The irony is that, after pages of scathing analysis about the failure of international responders to understand and respect ordinary people in Haiti, Chelsea Clinton’s plan would have created an even more powerful foreigner operating at an even greater remove. She did call on this new Super Clinton-led structure to “support the Haitian government,” but noted that it could only build “local capacity and capabilities, where feasible”—a logical loophole the U.S. government would fall back on time and again as it kept to old habits after all, including refusing to provide Haiti’s government with direct budget support.
As it was, that personality-driven leadership style meant the response to the Haiti quake would focus on priorities set by those surrounding them, rather than those of majority of Haitians. The new email tranche shows how quickly the construction of low-wage garment factories and prioritizing exports to the U.S. market came to the center of the U.S.-led response in Haiti. That strategy, authored by economist Paul Collier, was what Bill Clinton had come to Haiti to promote as special envoy before the quake. Little more than two weeks after the disaster, Mills, a former Clinton White House counsel who became her point woman on Haiti, forwarded the secretary a New York Times op-ed by Collier and consultant Jean-Louis Warnholz rebranding the pre-quake strategy as a form of post-quake reconstruction.
“He now works for us,” she noted for her boss, referring to Warnholz.
The new emails also show how Hillary’s staffers brought former Liz Claiborne Inc. executive Paul Charron into the fold to collaborate with Hillary Clinton and Warnholz on helping to make the garment factories a reality. “As I communicated to Jean-Louis, I am happy to be helpful to you and the State Department on this project,” Charron wrote Mills in August 2010. Around that time, Charron made a key phone call to a former Liz Claiborne colleague now working as an advisor for the South Korean garment giant Sae-A Trading Co. Ltd., to encourage that company to come up with an investment plan in Haiti, the New York Times reported two years later.
In 2012, Bill and Hillary Clinton attended the opening of the brand-new, $300 million Caracol Industrial Park in northern Haiti, with Sae-A as the anchor tenant.
Today, there has been little reconstruction in Port-au-Prince. Most quake survivors have moved back into precarious homes, hoping another disaster doesn’t strike. The country is still being ravaged by a cholera epidemic that began nine months after the earthquake and has killed nearly 9,000 people. Both Bill and Hillary Clinton have publicly acknowledged this epidemic, unrelated to the quake, was caused by United Nations peacekeepers—who in turn, as Chelsea correctly foresaw, have been able to avoid any semblance of accountability. President Michel Martelly, who Hillary Clinton helped put in office as secretary of state, is struggling to hold the country’s first elections since he took power, with observers watching warily to see if he will leave office next spring.
As for Caracol, the northern industrial park has created just 5,479 out of a promised 60,000 jobs when I visited in the spring, as workers complain about the long hours and low pay. Farmers who once tended land on the property complain they were pushed off without proper compensation (a claim the park’s boosters deny). Many of those living around the park now see it as the embodiment of the powerful Clintons’ disconnect. “They go to the park, but they don’t come to our village, because they care more about the park,” said Cherline Pierre, a 33-year-old resident who signs up would-be laborers near her home, a few miles from the park’s high gates.
All a reader plowing through the email tranche can do is wonder, what might have gone differently had Chelsea Clinton’s insights reached more people in real time, and if the Clintons had applied more of them to themselves. “I wish this had been made public when it was sent,” Ramachandran said of the report. “It might have helped.”
++++++++++++
Jonathan M. Katz won the James Foley/Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism for his coverage of the 2010 Haiti earthquake and cholera epidemic, and the Overseas Press Club of America’s Cornelius Ryan Award for his book, The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster. He reported on the Clintons in Haiti for POLITICO on a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Follow him on Twitter @KatzOnEarth.
>via: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/09/hillary-clinton-email-213110?o=1
_____________________________
CHELSEA CLINTON’S LETTER
UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05774218 Date: 08/31/2015
To: Dad, Mom
Cc: Cheryl, Doug, Justin
There is a context section at the bottom, which is longer than I would like, but I think it is important to articulate what I saw and whom I spoke with (and what I didn’t see and whom I didn’t meet) so that you understand my data set and its clear limitations. To say I was profoundly disturbed by what I saw – and didn’t see – would be an understatement. The incompetence is mind numbing. Not incidentally, it rained twice while I was there. If we do not quickly change the organization, management, accountability and delivery paradigm on the ground, we could quite conceivably confront tens of thousands of children’s deaths by diarrhea, dysentery, typhoid and other water-related diseases in the near future. Below are my major takeaways and a few nascent/early thoughts on what we (however we define we) could do to drive significant and incremental improvements on the ground in the near and longer term. As is often said, if I had more time – and less emotion – I would have written a shorter letter. I hope this mini-behemoth is not rife with grammatical errors or inadvertent gaps; I am sorry if either true.
Please do not forward this in whole or in part attributed to me without asking me first – happy to be an invisible soldier. Mainly hope this is even marginally helpful.
Thanks, Chelsea
Takeaways are below, with illustrative examples, in a logical flow, not order of importance. Bolded what I think most important.:
– Haitians want to help themselves and want the international community to help them help themselves – this sounds obvious but wasn’t to some of the UN and International NGO (INGO) folks I ran across. The UN people I encountered were frequently out of touch (e.g., would not have been off Logbase in days – or ever), anachronistic in their thinking at best and arrogant and incompetent at worst (e.g., one woman from the UN – UNDP I think – told me she was waiting for the Haitians to “demand their political rights” – when they’re asking for tents, latrines, soap, food and not getting that….)
In fact, Haitians in the settlements are very much organizing themselves, in part to help define their needs and then articulate them to the UN/ INGO community. Fairly nuanced settlement governance structures have already developed. The largest settlement I visited in Parc Jean Marie Vincent (40k and counting) had an overall governing committee with a head of the governing committee (voted on by the governing committee); a women’s committee; a security committee; a sanitation committee (with a soap subcommittee), etc. Women comprised 50% of each committee. One of the most illuminating anecdotes from my trip was talking with the head of the security committee and a few other settlement residents, including 2 women from the governing committee. The security committee wanted 100 tshirts -though I think they’ll need at least 2-3x that – so that the security volunteers could wear them when patrolling so that people, particularly women, would feel safe when they saw them approach in groups of 2 or 3. They also ideally wanted flashlights to also use on night patrol. Finally, they wanted to be able to pay the security team (though this was less important than the first two `asks’). IF that option were not feasible, their second choice was for the US Army to come into the settlement and patrol at night. Not the Haitian police (unreliable) and not the UN (dismissed). They wanted to help themselves, and they wanted reliability and accountability from their partners.
The settlements’ governing bodies – as they shared with me – are beginning to experience UN/ INGO fatigue given how often they articulate their needs, willingness to work – and how little is coming their way. Tents and latrines / sanitation remain the largest urgent needs – obvious to anyone with a minimum knowledge of public health and the settlement residents themselves
The Haitian government appears to have an emergent, albeit still largely lacking in specifics, plan of action (detailed below), for both the near (to get through the next 6-12 months) and longer term (while rebuilding over next -5 years)
The Haitian government’s inability to articulate its plan quickly enough or in sufficient terms to the UN/ INGO community has lead to a proliferation of ad hoc efforts by the UN and INGOs to ‘help,’ some of which have helped (e.g., we met no one who was worried about water supplies in camps even though it’s a motley crue of French Red Cross, Oxfam, IMO/IOM, etc that have achieved that), some of which have hurt (e.g., the largest settlement we visited had 1 latrine to every 1,000 people or 40 for -40k though given the settlements’ growth rate its probably 40 for -45k today; there should be 1 for every 50 people or 800+ latrines) and some which have not happened at all (e.g., the only settlements with lights at night are those in areas that had lights before that continue to work; settlement at the Petionville Golf Club, for instance, has some lights at night while most sit in darkness)
This disorganization across the UN/ INGOs has had a variety of effects on the Haitian government, including that it has now visibly distanced itself from the UN Cluster process (e.g., instead of going to a meeting a day the Haitian Minister of Health is now going once a week – because it was “such a waste of time” and he said that is representative of the government’s current modus operandi); though we heard the cluster process was improving – when I asked for a concrete example of how, I was told meetings were “more efficient.” This lack of efficiency – not to mention lack of visible consistent progress – has also lead to a further distrust of the UN/ INGOs by the Haitian government and Haitian people in the settlements. The former feels like it shows up to no effect – and the latter feels like very few actor(s) reliably show up
Again, the UN seemed at best chaotic and at worst absent as I travelled around in an action-oriented sense – I saw few IOM/IMO tents in settlements or workers or evidence of work; no evidence of WHO; no evidence of OSHA; no evidence of… You get the picture. I did see lots of UN peacekeepers riding around however in their vans, humvees, etc. Though on the point of trucks, I asked how many trucks were in the country – including the non-Port Au Prince UN ‘bases’ – and no one could tell me. There appears to be NO accessible and usable UN inventory system or logistics operation. WFP, for instance, is largely piggy backing on the US Army/ SOUTHCOM but the “UN” / OSHA could not tell me how many trucks WFP had, much less how many the UN itself had. I counted – I kid you not – hundreds of trucks and cars at the UN logbase and other UN bases we drove by
UNICEF was the only UN agency that seemed to be universally acknowledged to be doing a good job by settlements’ residents, by Haitian doctors and by INGO partners, perhaps in part because of its narrowly defined agenda currently in Haiti (vaccinations) and that its reliable – i.e., it shows up when it says it will in the settlements and other central locations
There is NO accountability in the UN system or international humanitarian system (including for/ among INGOs), this is not new news but it is one area that the Cluster approach had aimed to remedy – e.g., there is no feedback mechanism for when the British Red Cross dug the 34 of the 40 above latrines only 3 feet deep and didn’t tell the residents when they would come and extract the latrines or properly train people to take care of the latrines, etc. – that malpractice continuum is appalling and the British Red Cross should know better—at the least, the British Red Cross subsequently should not be allowed to dig elsewhere/ ‘do’ latrines
The cash-for-work program the UN heralds is not working optimally, to put it mildly. It currently focuses – perhaps solely – on debris cleaning – important no doubt – but it has not extended its work into the settlements or helped set standardized, and differentiated wages, for settlement work. For instance, the UN cash for work program should have already started to pay people in the more organized camps – to clean latrines; ‘guard’ latrines, including insuring kids use soap; be teachers; be on security patrol; be on evacuation duty; work with the WFP during the XYZ drop times, etc…. NONE of this is happening as far as I can tell. When we were there the cash for work program head was still focused only – it appeared – on rubble cleaning.
Re: education in the settlements and beyond: This is theoretically the responsibility of UNICEF and Save the Children – I heard they’re starting to work on this but that is all I know. Ad hoc schools have begun in some of the camps. We met a woman – our host in fact – who working with the Israeli Agency for International Development Cooperation – had started schools in 4 settlements for at least the next month.
The World Food Program continues to NOT buy locally – which is probably now a moot point as it appears that the dairy, fruit, vegetable and grain stores have all spoiled. The WFP also seems to have been rather erratic in the early days but most people I spoke to said WFP is now more systematic and reliable in its food delivery. However, it had not yet started to deliver cooking and eating utensils though these are promised for next week.
In contrast to the UN, there appears to be respect for the US Military on the ground – for the Army particularly as that is the branch people see guarding the hospital – and it is a negative comment on the UN forces given their effective absence. I saw no anti-US graffiti though the walls now are covered in parts of downtown with anti ‘ONG’ (NGO) and anti-UN graffiti. (Also, not only graffiti writers with the above sentiments; one of the Haitian doctors I met said, “We must be so poor we can’t tell them [UN and INGOs] what to do – or kick them out and use the money ourselves.”). There is also great fear – at least from the Haitian and ex-pat medical community- that the Army is leaving soon largely because of the security and total organization vacuum that would then be left around the hospital. The UN community, in contrast, did not seem to be perturbed by this prospect. On an unrelated note, the absence of the Catholic Church’s efforts is notable, particularly given the high death toll among priests, nuns and seminarians. Catholic Relief Services is present.
Thoughts on what is needed – and what we could do below. (I know much of this is familiar.):
The Office of Special Envoy – i.e., you Dad – needs authority over the UN and all its myriad parts – which I do believe would give you effective authority over much of then INGO sphere given how persistently the collective humanitarian community holding onto cluster approach. I know you know this and are working on it. OSHA clearly is failing on the ground, otherwise it could be “empowered” to do this but it ostensibly already is. However, regardless of the attachment to clusters, there needs to be a single point of authority either over UN / INGO efforts on the ground organized in one of two principle ways: either expertise areas (e.g., latrines, lights) or by settlements/ Port Au Prince regions with constituent settlements, with full structures – e.g., finance, procurement, project management etc., understanding certain functional areas would be cross- cutting (e.g., pay for work)
There needs to be a coordinated logistics effort which should follow from the above with an urgency on procurement and deployment of latrines, tents and lights – and what is needed to support installment, servicing, maintenance, etc of each. In parallel, a new logistics center/ warehouse coordinating facility should be built; every non-UN logistics-focused person I talked to said a need exists for a new logistic center near the major seaport. A plan must be developed for the rainy season, which is already on us, particularly for the settlements and it should include answers to questions like where can people evacuate to when it rains? How will they access food and water and latrines, at a minimum, from those spaces? Also, could those places be multipurpose, e.g., also schools and clinic tents/semi permanent structures (one engineer talked to me about fiberglass?)?
On pay for work, UN needs to expand its mandate and coordinate with relevant INGO partners to start employing people, at differential wages, in the settlements and coordinate with the groups above to ensure consistent wages until a ‘market’ could develop
The UN – IMO/IOM – or someone needs to take a monthly census of the settlements at the minimum
Speaking of censuses, the UN also needs a census of itself and its materials in country – including of the peacekeeper bases outside Port Au Prince. For example, we drove by 2 bases on the way to Cange and there were collectively, I would estimate, more than a hundred trucks and buses just sitting between the two, as well as at least 800 Napali soldiers (according to locals) laying effectively fallow – and I don’t think anyone expects an outbreak of violence on the Central Plateau in the near future so even if they and their colleagues are deployed under UN Charter Chapter 6, surely preserving the peace could be interpreted to work with the settlements? At the least, their hardware could be used more effectively in Port Au Prince
Special/ extraordinary management needed around areas that have received significant attention and offers of assistance, e.g., the general hospital in Port Au Prince which multiple actors, including Sarkozy, have now offered to rebuild
Holistically, all of the above should support the Haitian government both actually and ostensibly to not undermine its authority and also to help augment and build local capacity and capabilities, where feasible
The UN/ INGO should look to source locally or work with local partners whenever possible, post emergency phase at the least. For example, work with local solar light producers, buy from local t-shirt factories (if any survived outside Port Au Prince), mandate WFP first look to local producers, etc. Now bias I think has to be on quickest production but in medium term that should accommodate a local dimension
Re: USNS Comfort: for as long as it is there, at a minimum, its mission should be expanded such that its military and civilian staff could work on the physical therapy of earthquake related victims and ideally care for non-earthquake related cases.
Re: US Army: If its mission is largely coming to an end, I hope there is a succession plan for its current tasks, e.g., the hospital security, that the Haitian government is comfortable with; currently Haitian government/ at least Haitian government people on the proverbial ground have no idea what the transfer plan is
Re: medical evacuations: think this will be improved given our collectively- experienced chaos on Sunday
Re: mental health in settlements and beyond: clear people are thinking about this now – largely because Dad asked about it and made it prominent – but still unclear what the action plan is
Re: Haitian plan: I am not sure it’s the best plan, but it is a plan and we should work with the government to flush out the details so it is robust and actionable – not sure who the we is here probably most of all
Re: Catholic church: Could we reach out to the Vatican – or even Catholic groups/ prominent Catholics domestically to raise money and the necessary expertise to rebuild the central cathedral and main seminary? It would be a powerful symbolic statement – and put lots of people to work
Re: status, including mental health of workers there, both Haitian and ex-pat: I am consciously leaving this off as I just can’t process right now
FYI: Emergent Haitian government plan of action, as I understand it:
o Near term/ for the next year
- Buttress the settlements that currently exist that are not in the lowest lying flood plans, i.e., get tents and latrines in place, ensure sufficient amounts of clean water flowing in or being brought, ensure food supplies sufficient, ensure security and safety (though this seems to be people-focused only); ensure medical care accessible; start schools at least for the youngest children.
- Move people who are in the settlements in the worst geographies for flooding or practical reasons/ other reasons (e.g., the one currently with 4000 people on the prime minister’s lawn) to pre-constructed tent settlements elsewhere – they have built the first of these already with INGO Shelter Box though apparently the tents were put up too close to one another
- Areas lacking in mention when I heard the above discussed: a solution to ensure people have somewhere to go when the heavy rains come; ensure continuity of key services once the rains come; a solution to ensure people are paid how to ensure sufficient light in the camps, clearly critical to security (rapes are skyrocketing and I know there were at least 2 murders in one camp on Saturday night); what the right spec of tent is for any of the above – housing, clinic, evacuation, school and what could be multipurpose; plan for older children/young adults who may be too old for initial schoolplan; how to best support / help create where needed settlement governance; how to census, on a semi-regular basis, who is in the settlements
- Over next 6-12 months:
- Assess which homes are sufficiently safe for families to return to and subsequently encourage them to do so; government estimates this will be —30% of all homes/families (though this seems to be a guess, i.e., no evidence base)
- Build semi-permanent settlements or augment pre- existing villages around Port Au Prince where feasible to enable the government to move people out of settlements to those sites. End goal is to move 400-1000 families to each of these as needed
o Longer-term:
Rebuilt Port Au Prince though it is unclear how/if/why people would move back or what the government’s post-rebuild vision looks like
Build more robust health, education etc systems than existed before the earthquake
*Clearly this is the less well-defined part of the “plan”
Context
I spent the last four days in Haiti. I was with Paul Farmer (Paul) and Partners in Health (PIH) the entire time – in Port Au Prince Thursday, Friday and Sunday afternoon and at PIH sites in Laconville and Cange, in the Central Plateau region Saturday and Sunday morning. I sat in on Paul’s formal meetings in Port Au Prince with: the Haitian Minister of Health Alex Larsen and his team; the Haitian government official ostensibly overseeing the reconstruction efforts/ UN liaison Leslie Voltaire; a x-UN group preparing for the PDNA (post disaster needs assessment) conference in New York at the end of March working on giving ‘voice to the voiceless,’ i.e., the designated 15minutes at the conference to highlight the voices of those most affected (the 15 minutes I gather are happening at all only because of Cheryl and Paul), UNDP, UNHCR and others were represented; a group interested in building a logistics center for the reconstruction efforts, i.e., outside the UN ambit, including people from Royal Caribbean, McKinsey and the people we were traveling with, including Wes Edens, CEO of Fortress and a supporter of PIH – and the person who donated, and continues to donate the space at the Miami airport that PIH, Clinton Foundation, University of Miami Medical Center and others are using to move goods by air and sea, via transfer, to Haiti. Informally, I talked with: people in settlements and settlement committee heads, through a translator; local Haitian doctors; ex-pat PIH and other doctors in mobile clinics in settlements; doctors, nurses and US police officers I ran into on the street, at dinner, at their ad hoc residence in the abandoned Aristide Foundation; Maryse Kedar who hosted us our nights in Port Au Prince, a member of the local elite, and her ad hoc Israel volunteers (from the Israeli Agency for International Development Cooperation, ie their USAID, as mentioned above); a broad swath of people serving on the USNS Comfort, both on and off the ship; US Army enlisted and officers whenever I saw them; Louise Ivers, head of PIH in Haiti, and others we met or ran into along the way.
>via: https://foia.state.gov/searchapp/DOCUMENTS/HRCEmail_August_Web/IPS-0120/DOC_0C05774208/C05774208.pdf