Schuller-Schwartz exchange on aid and reconstruction in Haiti following the earthquake

Smoke and Mirrors in Haiti

Deflecting Attention away from Failure in the IDP Camps

By MARK SCHULLER, Counterpunch, December 21, 2011
In many senses the lack of progress following Haiti’s earthquake centers on housing. Assessing the damage, a team evaluated 382,256 housing units in Port-au-Prince. Of these, 205,539 were tagged “green,” ready for human habitation, 99,043 “yellow,” requiring significant repair, and 77,674 “red,” which were so damaged so as to require demolition. Anthropologist Timothy Schwartz led a team to write a report for USAID, who funded the housing evaluation. The report contained some important warnings; despite its technical successes and easy-to-understand coding system, the program didn’t noticeably alter people’s decisions to move back into homes. Most alarmingly, 73,846 of 115,384 (sic.) “red” houses had been re-inhabited by January 2011.

In addition to these carefully researched findings, Schwartz included others that were not a part of his mandate from USAID, about the official estimates of the death toll and the “legitimate” internally displaced persons (IDPs). According to his own blog on Salon.com, USAID denied publication of the report because it attempted to distance itself from these controversial claims. But Schwartz persevered, leaking the draft report to the press. Finally,Agence France-Presse (AFP’s) Emily Troutman published a story about it on May 27.

This story triggered a heated debate on a subject that for most Haitians was only marginally relevant and even disrespectful. Blogs and publiclistservs such as the 8,000-member “Corbett List” registered scores of email commentaries that degraded into ad hominem attacks. Like many other peoples displaced by the holocaust of the middle passage, Haitian culture grants a central role to its ancestors whose spirits return home, to ginen, Africa. To many, digging up the question of the numbers of dead disrespected the memory of loved ones and the ancestors. The Haitian government’s official death toll from January 12 was 230,000, which was repeated by the NGOs and the media. As the first anniversary loomed, without citing additional research or proof, Haitian Prime Minister Max Bellerive announced that the earthquake killed 316,000 people. As Schwartz blogged, this was a deliberate inflation aimed at loosening up more funds for the relief and reconstruction effort. Dozens of news stories, including in large-circulationWashington Post, New York Times, Newsweek, and Time, repeated this finger-wagging, more editorializing than news reporting.

While basing Schwartz’ critique of the Haitian government on its lack of transparency in its research methods, the leaked report was similarly opaque. For its part, USAID distanced itself from the most controversial claims, citing inconsistencies and irregularities within Schwartz’ research methods. Only two stories that made it to Google’s daily news alerts reported this critique, despite the dozens that used the leaked report to lodge a critique against the Haitian government, many drawing on familiar narratives of Haitian incompetence, adding to Haiti’s unending bad press. The damage was already done. True, Schwartz was acting as an individual, not USAID, but as a humanitarian actor nonetheless. Schwartz’ crusade was aimed at a clear, if unflattering, gaze back at the humanitarian effort, particularly NGOs who he argued were complicit in the inflation of the death toll for self-interested ends.

As a study of the impact of the housing evaluation, it was an important intervention. But the report that was leaked to the press – and uncritically repeated – did not explain the methodology for Schwartz’ un-commissioned campaign: for example, what sampling criteria were used, both in terms of neighborhoods and individuals, how this sample represents larger trends, etc. There seems to have been no recognition of the possibility that entire structures leveled to rubble would have been impossible to number, whose family members were all either dead or living in the IDP camps. The report cited precise numbers, not rounded, to estimate both the numbers of dead and the “legitimate” IDPs, despite the conventions of rounding based on significant digits within statistical research, declaring there to be from 46,190 to 84,961 dead, giving an average of 65,575, a little more than a fifth of the government’s estimate. Part of the study’s argument rests on contrasting its precision with the Haitian government’s lack of precision. Conclusions were reached about IDP camps without researchers visiting the camps. The report estimated 258,085 “current” IDPs (range of 141,158 to 375,031 compared to the IOM’s estimate of 680,000 from the Displacement Tracking Matrix or “DTM”), with 42,608 “legitimate” IDPs.

Researchers with the Small Arms Survey conducted an independent study, much more methodologically grounded, of the death toll, lower than the Haitian government’s estimate but significantly higher than Schwartz’ – 158,000. This estimate first appeared in a Los Angeles Times editorial on July 12, eighteen months after the earthquake and a month and a half following the leak of Schwartz’ report.

The debate was primarily focused on the death toll, leaving the other unsubstantiated claims about the “legitimate” IDPs and incendiary statements such as people only living in the camps for the free access to services unaddressed, to say the least about the study’s most troubling finding of a majority of “red” houses being reoccupied. The total silence, the attention deflected away from this discussion of the “illegitimate” IDPs, was an insidious outcome. With the public debate focusing on what to most Haitian people I know consider a red herring – with nothing to be done about the dead, no one ultimately responsible for their deaths – the inflammatory and controversial allegations about living IDPs, whose rights were actively being challenged by a range of actors, became tacitly accepted by the lack of scrutiny.

Unfortunately, these allegations were not true. The DTM continued to enumerate just under 600,000 IDPs as late as November, six months after the Schwartz report. The IOM contracted with French NGO ActEd to survey 15,446 IDPs about their intentions, publishing a report in early August 2011 when there were 630,000 IDPs still in the camps. According to this report, 94% of IDPs wanted to leave the camps. Corroborating this information, I led a team of eight State University of Haiti and five City University of New York students in a five-week study of eight IDP camps.[1]We selected four that according to the DTM were adopted by NGO management agencies and four who did not have an NGO management agency. Most were about the same size (200-400 families at the beginning of the research, per the DTM) and were situated on private land. Our survey of 800 randomly-selected families[2] yielded a similar result: 92% of IDPs wanted to leave as of July, when the survey was conducted. Our survey also showed that 79.5 percent of residents were renters before the earthquake, so even if their houses were tagged “green” they could not return because of how high rents skyrocketed. The Christian Science Monitor reported that rental costs have shot up by a factor of five to ten since the earthquake. In addition, as of November only a few thousand damaged housing units rebuilt or rehabbed. In short: IDPs can’t leave because they have nowhere to go.

In addition to not being able to leave, the “free services” that ostensibly were the magnet to the camps – notably water and toilet services – were being shut off as NGO contracts ended. As of October 2011, only 6 percent of IDP camps had water services according to international agency staff, and in November water trucking services had to stop per government decree. In the eight camps studied, water and sanitation service stopped in four camps (three hadn’t had service when research began in June 2011). To the oft-repeated quote – amplified and justified by the Schwartz report – of people suddenly appearing in unused tents whenever a distribution was made, my eight research teams spent five weeks in the same camp and noticed a constant level of comings and goings, economic activity, and social life. In other words, they were all “real” camps. To the concern about the free aid being a magnet pulling tens of thousands of people from the provinces, the survey showed only 3.5 percent came since 2010, with the mean year of migration to Port-au-Prince being 1993, which follows the general pattern of Haiti’s rural exodus. Simply put, all but 3.5% are “real” IDPs.

Whether or not this deflection was intentional, certainly by a maverick like Schwartz who has criticized NGOs, it was useful to many actors. Landowners and government officials such as Delmas Mayor Wilson Jeudy who actively sought to close IDP camps, found justification. Days after the APF’s story (that uncritically quoted Jeudy) Jeudy again destroyed an IDP camp on public land in his municipality, his second violent act within two weeks, citing a similar refrain of the IDPs not being “real” victims but criminals. Jeudy employed armed irregular forces to rip people’s tents and destroy their belongings.

This unchallenged discourse of “illegitimate” IDPs was also useful to humanitarian agencies increasingly on the defensive following billions in aid spent and little evident progress. If the number of IDPs were artificially inflated and most not “legitimate,” humanitarian agencies have fewer obligations. USAID was in a bipartisan U.S. House of Representatives spotlight: H.R. 1016, on May 10, 2011, calling the agency to account for the billions and apparent lack of progress. Indeed, members of Congress who represent large Haitian communities sent a scathing condemnation of the Haitian government for not protecting IDPs two days before AFP leaked the draft Schwartz report.

Whether or not Schwartz acting as an individual had intended these outcomes, the AFP article deflected attention and criticism against both the Haitian government and USAID and offered ideological support for reactionary positions, justifying forced evictions and lack of progress for IDPs. When the smoke and mirrors are set side, the facts, carefully researched and established, are clear. Unfortunately, the IDP camps are not going away anytime soon, despite everyone’s wishes to the contrary – especially from those who have nowhere else to go. Rather than blame the victims, topping our holiday wish list should be an effective strategy to rebuild housing.

Mark Schuller is an activist anthropologist at York College (CUNY) and l’Université d’État d’Haïti. Schuller’s research on globalization, NGOs, gender, and disasters in Haiti has been published in over a dozen book chapters. He is the author of forthcoming Killing with Kindness: Haiti, International aid, and NGOs (Rutgers, 2012) and co-editor of four volumes, including Tectonic Shifts: Haiti Since the Earthquake, to be published in January by KumarianPress. He is co-director / co-producer of documentary Poto Mitan: Haitian Women, Pillars of the Global Economy. He chairs the Society for Applied Anthropology’s Human Rights and Social Justice Committee and is active in many solidarity efforts. He can be reached at: mschuller@york.cuny.edu

Notes.
I would like to thank my research assistants for their work in collecting this information. York College – Sabine Bernard, Sandy Nelzy, Adlin Noël, Stephanie Semé and TraceyUlcena and l’Université d’État d’Haïti – Marie Laviaude Alexis, Théagène Dauphin, Mackenzy Dor, Jean-Rony Emile, Junior Jean François, Robenson Jean-Julien, Roody JeanTherilus, and Castelot Val.

[1] Camps were Place de la Paix, Delmas 2; Saint-Louis de Gonzague, Delmas 31; HANCHO I, on the border of Delmas and Cité Soleil; Nan Bannan, Delmas 40; Carradeuxrelocation camp, on the border of Delmas and Tabarre in the neighborhood of Carradeux; Kolonbi, Delmas 19 by the industrial park; Mairie de Carrefour, Diquini; and CAJIT, inPaloma (Carrefour).
[2] We selected one in every x household (tent); for a camp with 400 families it would be one in every four tents. In camps with sub-sectors, we took steps to ensure parity across these sectors.

A WINDOW ON TWISTED TRUTHS IN HAITI

Reply to Mark Schuller's 'Smoke and Mirrors'

Long version, posted to Salon blog Jan 04, 2012
Short version, posted to Salon blog Jan 04, 2012

December 29, 2011--Dr. Mark Schuller’s Smoke and Mirrors in Haiti opens a window into the twisted truths, exaggerations and self-fulfilling prophecies that still bubble forth from post-earthquake Haiti, mostly from NGOs, UN organizations, and activists like Schuller himself. Putting aside what strike me as an almost personal attack—accusing me of leaking the report and of actively blogging the story in an attempt to attract the press--here’s a list of clarifications,

1. Whoever it was who sent the BARR to press, technically the report was not “leaked.” It had been vetted and approved for publication by USAID-Haiti staff. The AP and AFP would not otherwise have published articles about the report. Schuller, who sometimes publishes in newspapers, must know that (my blogs came after the story broke).

2. USAID-Haiti (as opposed to USAID-Washington) never repudiated the findings of the BARR report. They simply said they had not commissioned the death count. Specifically, USAID-Haiti director Carleene Dei told the AP that,

"We tasked the organization to assess the impact of rubble removal and structural assessment efforts on the return of Haitians to neighborhoods and determine if, and how, we could improve upon our efforts. Any comment on the death toll of the tragic earthquake of January 2010 that affected so many, is beyond the scope of the commission and purely reflects the views of the author."

3. Although USAID-Haiti distanced itself from the death count, it was in fact an integral part of the task I was commissioned to do. Specifically, USAID commissioned me to estimate the number of Haitians who had returned to their homes. That task could not be accomplished had we not known how many of those people were dead, a point so obvious as to make the frequent claim from activists like Schuller that I was somehow acting as a rogue researcher absurd: let me say it again, the dead would not return home and therefore had to be subtracted from the count of absentees. Had we used the Haitian government estimate of 316,000 fatalities, we would have concluded that not only had all survivors returned home, but that we had some 20,000 extra people (this would have made it even more difficult to explain the people in the camps)

4. It was USAID-Washington staff that rejected the BARR survey findings. This difference, for those inside the bureaucracy, is significant. USAID-Haiti was most concerned with the stalled recovery effort; USAID-Washington was responding to the political fallout. Specifically, according to the June 4^th AP article,

"Mark Feierstein of the U.S. Agency for International Development said the report is problematic because the authors used a statistical sampling that was not representative. The study didn't include data from heavily damaged areas in Haiti's countryside or from the number of houses that collapsed and killed people”

Each of those claims is either false or misleading.

• a) First off, although the BARR sample was not perfectly representative of the total population of 3 million that the UN defined as living in the earthquake strike zone, it was representative of ~2 million of those people and they were overwhelmingly living in the hardest hit areas. What this means is that when we generalized the BARR data to the remaining 1 million people we were sure to overestimate-- not underestimate--the impact of the earthquake. USAID knew this. The decision to use that population was deliberate, chosen in conference with USAID supervisors specifically because we wanted the findings to be as defensible as possible.

• b) Of course we included collapsed houses; not to do so would have contradicted the entire purpose of the survey, which was to estimate how many people had returned to their prior residences or the place where that residence had been. In cases where the house was completely destroyed and/or no residents were present, we gathered data from neighbors (who knew very well how many of their neighbors had died). It is also worth pointing out that the question we asked people was not ‘how many people died in the home when the earthquake struck,’ but ‘how many people who lived in the home died when the earthquake struck,’ meaning wherever it was they were at that time.

5. Why USAID-Haiti had different things to say about the BARR findings than USAID-Washington is part of the politics of the Haiti recovery effort. This is not the place to elaborate, but suffice it to say that there were two US government bureaucracies at work. USAID-Haiti had been promoting the repair of damaged and destroyed houses over the building of new ones. Being the decision makers, USAID-Washington and the State Department trumped them, insisting on pursuing the construction of massive new residential developments and, in the process, bogging the entire reconstruction process down in a quagmire of land tenure controversies, exorbitant and even fraudulent lawyer and surveyor fees, and controversies over what were habitable sites. While this was going on there was the evolving nightmare of tent cities largely filled with opportunists—albeit many of them poor—hoping to get one of the promised new homes. This opportunism is something that anyone who knows Haiti would have anticipated (especially in light of the poverty and 50 years of indiscriminate charity). I will return to this issue of the camps in a moment, but first,

6. There are at least four other studies of which I am aware that corroborate the BARR findings regarding the death count. They too have not been published because the NGOs, UN organizations and governments involved are sensitive to the reaction seen with the BARR. Among these is another BARR survey. It was a census of Ravine Pentad, a neighborhood considered by the US government to be among the most earthquake devastated sectors in all of Haiti. Prior to the census we were told by the NGO staff working in Ravine Pentad that 2,000 of 6,000 residents had been killed. We found that neither of these figures was correct. 4,421 people lived in the neighborhood at the time of the earthquake; 142 were killed. That translates to 3.2 percent of that population (one third the rate the government claimed for the entire strike zone).

7. The government counting methods were indeed seriously flawed. It was not me who concluded this. AP, Miami Herald and Radio Netherlands journalists all came to the same conclusions, calling the methods into question and documenting that those methods involved not simply poor counting; there was no counting at all. The issue was never pursued further, not by anyone; not by journalists, UN, NGO, or government officials. They all began repeating the government claims when data from their own staff and citizens suggested that those figures were inflated by factors of 900 % or greater. Here’s a few examples,

• The Government of Haiti (GOH) reported 30% of its 60,000 civil servants were killed. But the real figure may be closer to or less than 1 percent. Not only the BARR suggests this, but I base this on the only data the GOH ever released: high government officials and the police, ostensibly the hardest hit sectors. But when all was said and done, two of Haiti’s 141 senators, congressman, and ministers were killed (1.2%). Seventy-seven (77) of 10,544 Haitian police (0.7%) were killed. In short, the government appears to have inflated the number of civil servants killed by a factor as high as 15 to 30 times that indicated by the only data they ever released.

• Fatalities for UN personnel were almost identical to the government figures. Specifically, the UN lost 101 of 9,151 international staff in Haiti at the time of the earthquake (1.1%). That’s a terrible tragedy, but a far cry from the 10% death toll they have accepted for the general population. Most of fatalities were in the same building, the Hotel Christopher.

• Losses for US embassy personnel and citizens were even less than 1 percent. The US Embassy lost 1 of 172 foreign staff members (0.6%); and 6 of 800 of its Haitian staff members (0.8%). As for the 43,000 US citizens in Haiti at the time of the earthquake: 103 were killed (0.2%).[i]

• Canadians: 58 of 6,000 citizens in Haiti at the time of the earthquake were killed (1.0%).

• The Dominican Republic: 24 of 2,600 (0.9%); 22 of whom died in a single building.

• NGOs, orphanages, and missions also accepted the inflated figures despite the fact that fatalities among their own staff members also hovered around 1% and in most cases were less. Oxfam reported on its home page the government figure of 230,000, yet it only lost one of 100 employees in Port-au-Prince at the time of the earthquake. Catholic Relief Services cited the same figures but lost none of its 100 employees in Port-au-Prince. World Vision home page says that “at least” 230,000 were killed in Port-au-Prince, while it lost none of its 95 staff member in Port-au-Prince at the time. MSF said the earthquake, “killed hundreds of thousands of people,” while they lost 7 of their staff of 800 in Port-au-Prince at the time. The Red Cross lost no one. God’s Littlest Angels--featured on CBC, ABC, CNN, and Larry King--lost no one. Most NGOs lost no one.

• Businesses were the same: Triology telephone company lost 5 of 576 (0.9%); Digicel telephone company lost 2 of 900 (0.2%); the cement company CEMEX lost 0 of 115; Petionville Golf and Tennis Club lost 0 of 100 employees, not a single employee even lost a home.

8. In every case in which there is solid data with which to cross check other data from the BARR study, the findings are substantiated. For example, researchers from Colombia University and Karolinska Institute used cell phone signals from Digicel phone company to track the movements of earthquake survivors in the months following the disaster. One thing they came up with is rather precise estimates of how many people fled to the provinces after the earthquake: 570,000. The UN organization United Nations OCHA claims to have actually counted the number of people who fled to the province: they came up with a figure of 511,405. The BARR data very neatly covered both estimates, indicating that the number of people who fled to the provinces was in the range of 465,246 to 584,754 (p < .01). These organizations also came up with rates of return to the city; rates that almost exactly fit the rate of home return found in the BARR. These examples of the probable accuracy of the BARR were key points in USAID Haiti staff’s decision to accept the BARR findings. A more recent example corroborating BARR data comes from Schuller’s study of 800 randomly selected families living in the camps. Schuller found that on average respondents had migrated to Port-au-Prince in 1993; BARR found the exact same thing.

9. Schuller tells us that a challenge to the BARR findings came from Muggah and Kolbe, former researchers for the Geneva Small Arms Survey. He calls their study (announced in a July 12, 2011 op-ed in the LA Times) “much more methodologically grounded.” But he offers no indication that he even knows what the methods were--in either study. He also criticizes me for not using rounded numbers in my estimates without noting that Muggah and Kolbe do the same thing (so do most researchers). There are, in fact, some problems with that study but more to the point here, a) its findings were not as far from the BARR findings as many believe, b) Kolbe latter retracted most of her critiques (the critiques derived from the fact that, for some unexplained reason, Muggah and Kolbe could not obtain the 100 page annex describing the methods), and last but not least, c) Schuller will surely change his opinion of the Muggah and Kolbe study when he realizes that it challenges his defense of the camp residents as coming from destroyed homes, finding that less than 10% of people in the camps at the time of their study came from destroyed houses (Muggah and Kolbe estimate that there were only 70,000 people in the camps who came from destroyed houses in Port-au-Prince).

There are a range of other critiques launched by Schuller that are simply wrong or misleading. But most biting to me is that Schuller has accused me of disturbing the Haitian ancestors by drawing attention to the dead and questioning the numbers. From one anthropologist to another, that’s a pretty serious charge. I would turn it on its head and say that I’m honoring the ancestors by not allowing opportunists to heap an extra 250,000 unverified souls in the grave with them. But what Schuller is really concerned about is not the dead; he’s most concerned about the living. Me too. With that in mind, let me move beyond the death count and get to the real “smoke and mirrors”

Yes, there are poor people in the camps. Most camp residents--even the majority who are not direct victims of the earthquake in the sense that they come from destroyed homes—qualify as poor and desperate. Indeed, it should go without saying that the poverty and desperation that prevail in Haiti are such that if at any time in the past 20 years the international community in Haiti (earthquake or no earthquake) began to hand out massive quantities of food and water, provide treatment to people for ailments, and promise free homes, camps would have sprung up. Anthropologists such as Schuller know this all too well. Schuller also knows that the camps grew not so much as a direct response to the earthquake but to the slow and unequal pace of aid delivery that followed. On January 20^th, day eight after the earthquake, the International Organization for Migration (IOM)—the organization that would take charge of the camps in Haiti—estimated that only 370,000 people were living “under improvised shelters.” That number grew for 7 months, long after the last aftershock. The camps grew until July 2010, when IOM claimed there were 1.5 million people living in 1,555 camps. That’s a population equal to half of the total in the strike zone.

It is unlikely that there were ever 1.5 million people living in the camps. BARR data suggests that at the height of the exodus, about 68% of residents in the earthquake impacted region left their home (that extrapolates to 2,040,000 people); but only about half of those people (30% of the total population in the earthquake strike area) went to camps (900,000). Within weeks they began returning home; 70% had returned home by July 2010, when OIM estimated there were 1.5 million in the camps. From whence came the majority of people alleged to still be in the camps is another issue. Based on the BARR data I can’t determine how many people were in the camps; I can only estimate how many of them were from destroyed houses. But Schuller should have a pretty good idea.

What Dr. Schuller does not tell us in his essay is that in the studies that the French NGO ACTED carried out on behalf of IOM—and to which Schuller links his own work – was that they found that 92 of the 1,152 sites visited had only empty tents, meaning that no one at all was living there. Of the 1,061 camps that did have tents with people living in them, 712 (67%) contained at least some empty tents. In one area (Ganthier), 73% of the 213 tents were empty. In the commune of Croix-Des-Bouquets, 6,525 tents located on 63 sites were empty (30% of all tents in that area). In the southern regions of Grand Goave 736 empty tents located on 34 sites were empty (49% of tents all tents in that area). In Léogâne, 1,770 tents located at 74 sites were empty (36% of all tents in that area). Overall, 15% of all tents in the sites that ACTED checked were empty. As for how many people in total were living in those tents that did have people in them and who many were lying about it, we don’t know. To their credit, IOM personnel did report that the average reported 'household size' in the camps was 4.1, and in some areas as low as 3.3 (compared to 5.2 to 5.8 for Port-au-Prince homes), something that suggested to the authors of the IOM report that, “some IDPs have decided to keep some household members in the IDP sites so as to retain access to services in the sites, while other family members return or resettle elsewhere.”

But despite all of that, Schuller and the IOM authors used their findings to defend the camps as full of authentically homeless. (Now there are some ‘smoke and mirrors.)

Is it ethically permissable to misrepresent how many people are living in the camps and the alternatives available to the them in an effort to bring them more aid? I would argue that there are problems with it. As a researcher I would argue that blindly defending people in the camps obscures the fact that much of aid that did get spent on reconstruction and recovery was spent sloppily on impoverished people who were trying to get a piece of it and not on getting people back home and helping them rebuild. While NGOs, and IOM, and other well intentioned people and organizations were focusing on camps, most of the people who owned or rented destroyed homes went back to them to rebuild and put their lives back together, and most received little to no help at all in doing it. This is one of the man lessons from the BARR survey. A careful re-reading of Muggah and Kolbe’s report and subsequent research tells us the same thing.

With all that in mind, and getting to what I think is the most important point that should come out of this controversy, these twisted vistas from NGOs, UN organizations and activists such as Mark Schuller obscure much harsher truths. What we saw in Haiti regarding the camps, their growth and the poverty that drove that growth has arguably less to do with the earthquake and more to do with two centuries of meddling in Haitian affairs on the part of the major international powers. The meddling has been especially acute in the three decades preceding the earthquake, when Haitian agricultural exports were systematically eliminated by discriminatory US and EU import regulations while domestic agricultural production on which 60% of the Haitian population directly depended was destroyed by insensitive and even deliberate attempts to subjugate the Haitian market to US and EU imports. Specifically, a) compelling the Haitian Government to remove tariffs on imports, thereby exposing the Haitian farmer’s products to open competition with inexpensive and highly subsidized produce from the US and Western Europe, and b) what appeared to most American and European taxpayers to be the good hearted gesture of flooding the Haitian market with food aid (this was in fact a very deliberate part of neo-liberal economic policy and a promotion of US and European agricultural exports; for those interested in details I invite them to read my 2008 book, Travesty in Haiti).

Today, with the help of well intended activists such as Schuller, it’s almost as if that history is being rewritten so that economic despair begins with the earthquake and justifies not merely a continuation of prior policies but a radical intensification of them, not least of all the indiscriminant and unnecessary importation of food aid—despite claims in the media to the contrary.

Approaching a conclusion, and getting back to the main point: yes there was an earthquake and yes, there was massive destruction. But the nature of that destruction and the misappropriation and poor managing of the aid has been obscured by ‘smoke and mirrors’ in the form of misinformation coming from NGOs, UN organizations and well intended activists like Schuller.

Mind you, I am not pointing the finger at the Haitians who say they are earthquake victims when in fact they are victims of something else. For me it’s not their shame. It’s not the shame of impoverished Haitians who posture as victims—whether as earthquake victims or as a parent trying to pass his/her children off as orphans or restavek in the hope of getting a subsidized education. The Haitians who do so are responding to the systematic elimination of traditional livelihoods and adapting to the few opportunities available: specifically the charity and ‘development’ that has been an integral part of supplanting their livelihoods. And while I did not deliberately concoct data or an elaborate scheme to embarrass Haiti and the international community, Schuller is indeed correct in stating that I am an ardent proponent of exposing the role that we--aid workers and researchers-- have played in that process. And that brings me to the real “smoke and mirrors”: the roles of charities, the UN, NGOs and, unfortunately, some activists and their tendency to twist and contort data that doesn’t suit their objectives and attack solid academic studies that contradict their simplistic tallies of victims so that they can present alternative truths which, perhaps with the best of intentions, lend support to donor campaigns but may not be contributing to the long-term good of the Haitian people. The death count and depiction of camps are only two examples of the misinformation that were used to collect over US$2 billion in aid. Here’s a couple more:

• Destruction of buildings: The GOH initially reported that 83% percent of Port-au-Prince's buildings were destroyed. Shortly after that the figure was modified to 280,000 of 434,328 buildings--65% of all structures in the strike zone- “collapsed or severely damaged.” One year after the earthquake, Miyamoto Inc. and the Haitian Ministry of Work, Communication and Transportation finished evaluating and counting all houses in Port-au-Prince and they found that 20% were destroyed or severally damaged (in the sense that both vertices were compromised). About 7% had collapsed.

• Rubble: In the month after the earthquake, US Army Corps of Engineers put the estimated total rubble in Port-au-Prince at 20 to 40 million cubic meters, enough to fill 8,000 to 16,000 Olympic swimming pools. Two years later, when all was said and done, the best estimate appears to be less than 4 million cubic meters, one fifth to one tenth of the original count, enough to fill about 1,500 swimming pools. Yet, with the help of their congressional and senate representatives US owned companies such DRC and AshBritt—both rather famous for criminal allegations, the latter having earned an ugly reputation in Katrina cleanup and the owner of former once sued by the US government for defrauding the US of more than $25 million during Hurricane Mitch—managed to absorb over 100 million dollars in aid for rubble removal. When people complained to the US Embassy that Haitians were being cut out of the profits, the companies partnered with entrepreneurs such as Gilbert Bigio, the Israeli Consulate-General and reportedly Haiti’s richest man. Note also that these “humanitarian corporations” and “humanitarian entrepreneurs” began their cleanup efforts billing at a figure of about 500% the cost per cubic meter that it should have been, US$60 to 80 in the months after the earthquake compared to US$15 to 20 that It became one year later.

• Children: Early on after the earthquake, we read headlines such as, “Haiti Orphans ‘Extremely Vulnerable’: Aid Groups Worry Up To 1 Million Kids Without Proper Care At Risk of Disease, Child Predators”(CBS News, January 27, 2010). The organizations responsible for feeding the information to the press were UNICEF and Save the Children. It helped bring in a lot of donations. UNICEF originally called for $120 million to deal with the crisis; when the agency reached US$229 million in six months, it upped the figure again, adding another US$127,243,000. By the end of the year, it had received a total of US$291 million. Save the Children originally called for $9.8 million in donations; when it reached that, it raised it to 20 million, then to $36.6 million, then to $65 million; by August 1st 2011, it had $87 million, almost ten times its original request. There are literally hundreds of smaller organizations that together brought in hundreds of millions more in donations, and whose major driving force was concern for children the earthquake had left orphaned or were lost or separated from parents. But just what were the real dimensions of that crisis and what did they do about it? No bonafide case of either child trafficking or sex slavery was ever confirmed. All we ever got was the 10 Baptist missionaries against whom there was never any proven accusation—except perhaps their naïveté. So how about the 1 million orphaned, separated or lost children? When asked ten weeks after the earthquake ‘just how many lost children and orphans are still out there?’, Marie de la Soudiere, the head of UNICEF's program to unite lost Haitian children with their families, told CBS 60 Minutes correspondents that “We feel it's upwards of 50,000." To Soudiere’s credit, that’s considerably modified from the one million figure that aid agencies were claiming earlier on. But how many lost and abandoned children had UNICEF, at that point-- ten weeks after the earthquake--reunified with their families? The answer is twenty. Yes, “twenty.” Did anyone ever ask just what happened to the one million? What about the 50,000? One year after the earthquake, in its January 7, 2011 annual report, UNICEF reported that together with its 430 orphanage and NGO partners, it had registered 4,948 children who were orphaned or separated from their parents. For any conscientious UNICEF employee, that’s certainly an improvement over the numbers in the three months following the earthquake. But-- and here comes the smoke and mirrors--of that figure, only 1,265 had been reunited with their families. And almost half of those children, 506 of them, had nothing at all to do with the earthquake; they were separated from their parents before January 12th 2010. Moreover, UNICEF won’t reveal the exact figures, but most of the remainder were not lost or orphaned; they were restaveks, child domestic servants whose parents had “given them away”--what most activists and NGOs refer to as “child slaves” (another issue smothered in misinformation and inflated numbers, one that portrays Haiti as the greatest slave state since the US Antebellum South, a rather ironic accolade for a nation descended from the only successful slave revolt in history).

Is it okay to misinform in the name of fund raising for the poor? I don’t know, maybe. But what I do know--and I am sure that Schuller will agree—is that most of the post earthquake money donated by caring people the world over, including the Haitian Diaspora, was wasted or went into the pockets of foreign bureaucrats and businessmen, Haitian elite, and aid workers. I also know that the actual work on the ground and the money that was delivered into the hands of poor Haitians is by and large a fiasco. So does Schuller. And if you don’t believe us just ask one of the “legitimate” earthquake victims still waiting in the squalid camps or who has rebuilt and moved back into his or her home.

I want to make it clear that I don’t object to UNICEF and its partners collecting billions of dollars for the earthquake relief effort. But I do object to the misinformation that I think is a big part of the lack of accountability. People who donated to the earthquake should have the right to accurate information about what happened in Haiti and what is still going on.

Having said all of that, I share something with Schuller. Like him I consider myself to be working on behalf of, and for the good of, the poor in Haiti. But I, and others who are more anthropologist than activist, subscribe to a different method of accomplishing that task. We think of ourselves as devoted to using scientific methods to help donors understand what is really happening in Haiti. I would argue that this is the only responsible way that we, as outsiders, can give an authentic voice to the impoverished Haitians who, as Schuller will certainly agree, are so often ignored. If Mark Schuller, or anyone else, would like to discuss what those methods are, I would welcome the opportunity.

Notes:
[i] In the first few months after the earthquake it was not exactly clear what the US data was telling us. The US Embassy could not locate 2,000 US citizens. But this is not unusual at the best of times, and because of benefits and inheritance it seems likely that if someone were killed they would have been reported. In the interim, it has become clearer that no more than that figure were killed. As of May 10, 2011, the official figure cited was actually less than the 104 in the original embassy statement: 103 US fatalities (see House of Representatives 1016 - Assessing Progress in Haiti Act (Lee, D-CA) http://rsc.jordan.house.gov/UploadedFiles/LB_051011_HR1016.pdf