India: Arrivals

So concludes the series from Haiti. If you're interested in finding out more about Haiti, including blogs from others currently in the country, I highly recommend checking out the Blog on the Community and Friends section of this page called PAWÒL APRANTI-SAJ.

The next series is from one I wrote for Blueear.com. The pieces are snapshots and themes that emerged throughout my first few months in India.

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Arrivals

Delhi in June is brutally hot. I step off the plane at 11:00 at night to temperatures in the high forties. A dust storm in Rajasthan leaves the city coated with an extra layer of dust, in addition to the smog and pollution that comes with having a population of fourteen million. A train-station joke-book declares that in Delhi, if you want a breath of fresh air, have a couple of cigarettes. It's not so far from the truth.

I must admit, when I stepped off the plane, I was already thinking, "What the hell have I gotten myself into?" I had no plans, except that I was to arrive in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu in a month and a half. The jarring shift from academia, with all the regimental routine it entails, to a month and a half without much of a plan left me in a state of anxiety and mild shock.

I was a Canadian travelling in the wake of SARS, arriving via Toronto, no less. A friend had already been denied a visa to complete thesis work in Russia. Clutching my bright pink SARS survey, travel insurance policy, and passport, I made my way into a seemingly interminable cue. One could, if clever enough, write a travelogue based simply on the experience of waiting in a cue in India. For the impatient, they are agony. For those of us with social tendencies, they can be, as Vikram Seth’s character Mrs. Rupa Mehra (from A Suitable Boyˆ) puts it, “opportunities for expanding one’s social circle”.

With little more than a flick of the eye, I was waved through into the madness: the luggage carousel; taxi touts; throngs pressed against metal barriers – men with Hindi scripts, English signs with company logos and job titles printed in bold lettering, aunties clutching their purses. Irrational visions of political calamities floated through my head as I scanned the crowd for the friend who was to meet me: was the road closed on his way back from his hometown, Srinigar? Could he have been hit by stray bullets along the line of control? While I would later realize the foolishness of my panic, in the musty heat and waves of a language so foreign to my ears, I clutched my luggage cart with all the jet-lagged ferociousness I could muster.

"Sarah", he calls out, ensconcing me in a desperately needed hug. "Welcome to my home. Welcome to India."


My Rough Guide to India states:

India is the product of a complex and tumultuous past. It's climate and fertile soil, which have supported settled agriculture for at least 9000 years, have also given rise to countless regional dynasties, perennially covetous of their neighbors' land and wealth. For as long as written histories of India have existed, this same fecundity has also lured invaders across the deserts, oceans and mountains that border the subcontinent. Successive waves of armed colonists, from the Aryan tribes to the British, have poured down the peninsula, assimilating indigenous traditions and implanting their own. Scholars of history, archaeology, and religion are still trying to make sense of the extraordinary wealth of historical monuments they left behind.

For the months before I left, I waded through history books, articles and novels, trying to make intellectual sense of it all. The more I tried, the more any definitive statement eluded me: Where a Canadian government briefing report stressed the significance of the Kashmir conflict, another book emphasized Hindu-Muslim tensions as defining the "Indian Ethos". Is there such a thing? I think of my own country, Canada, and consider: I would consider it foolish for blanket statements to be made about the entire population based solely on our Northern geography. So, why should I expect the same to be true of any other country?

In my hostel room in Delhi, the months of reading and intellectual haranguing slip away. To gain my bearings, I focus on what's around me:

I walk wide streets in Delhi, near Connaught Place, where the shops are pricier than back home. Roads are filled with green-headed, yellow-fronted auto rickshaws, horns blaring and piercing through the mid-day air. Dust settles over the skins of everyone in sight, a sheen insulating us from the thick, dry heat that frizzes my hair and keeps those who can find shelter out of the street until late afternoon. Cows – scrawny and massive, with sagging jowls and wispy tails – lazily chew their cud and watch the traffic and madness of the street around them. They huddle under trees, away from construction workers with hand-trowels who dig ditches and labor to expand the ever-crowded streets.

In a filmi magazine, a Bollywood starlet comments, "Delhi is so much cleaner than Mumbai. There are so many trees – it's almost lush." In the afternoon, the abundant trees lining the ring roads are covered with a thin sheen of dust. Perhaps it will settle tonight – it began to rain, sweet, cool drops weighing down the heavy gashes of dust and sand that coat my ears and clog my nose.

Women in Sarees and Salwar Kameez are bright splashes of color among men in dark trousers and western-style clothes standing in clumps along the streets. They are waiting in masses for the "clean" buses that travel about the city.

Delhi has an ever present aroma of the Sandalwood incense that burns in shops with altars set up – shrines for Hindu gods, gurus, playing-card sized images or framed photographs bedecked with garlands of jasmine and chrysanthemums.


I am in India, officially, to spend a month at Tamil Nadu Agricultural University studying intercultural communication and international extension with eleven other students as part of my Master's work at the University of Guelph, in Canada.

I arrived early, to explore a country that has been hovering in my mind for the last twelve years. I have a friend in Delhi, a friend's mother in Chandigarh, classes in Coimbatore, and three months on my hands. I have Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy for company.

Over the course of this series, I will present snapshots: situations I encountered and themes that emerged from three months in a country that continues to hold me in thrall.

Haiti: Speaking in the Feminine

“What prevents us from encouraging our wives to participate in these meetings,” says a pastor, “is that the leaders of the community steal our women and sleep with them.”

The women’s movement, like much political activity in Haiti, began clandestinely. Before 1986, under the Duvalier dictatorship, small groups of professional women protested against injustice and the treatment of women in Haitian society. Their protest was against a patriarchal societal structure, which forced the domination and submission of women by men. Working with women in the Haitian diaspora, as CRESFED writes in its publication Le 8 Mars et la Lutte des Femmes, they “denounced the harsh conditions in the country under the brutal dictatorship.”

With the departure of “Baby Doc” Duvalier on February 7th, 1986, women’s organizations formed and expanded, along side the boom in the social and economic activity in civil society. Haitian women began to assert their position as pillars of strength in the Haitian economy. “In particular,” CRESFED writes, “it is necessary to note the protests of the 3rd of April in Port-au-Prince… [the protests] brought together more than 30 thousand women of all ages, ideologies and levels of society, with the aim of vindicating their right to participate in the affairs of the country.” For women, declared the journal Ayiti Fanm, this became an historic day in the lives of Haitian women. By mid-1987, the movement had reorganized itself, mobilizing on issues such as education for women and women’s position in society.

“Women are all working,” a woman explains to me, “they have to work.” She continues, “education is the difficulty – women need a chance to get together and discuss.”

In 1987, amid the violence political turmoil and widely anticipated elections on November 29, the women’s movement began to denounce violence against women. This denunciation took on a particularly poignant turn as violence before and after the election escalated, and the government dubbed by journalists as “Duvalierism without Duvalier” returned to government. This government, according to CRESFED, was determined to “castrate the young democracy that had been installed in the country.” As life for all Haitians became even harder, CRESFED notes a new faze in the oppression of women: because of it’s force, “violence exercised in a systematic fashion against women. Violence was transformed into an instrument of repression and military power.” The international embargo, aimed at breaking the regime, essentially fell, onto the shoulders of women.

The celebration of the International Day of the Woman in 1991, after the coup d’etat in 1991, resonated with the poignancy of its theme: 500 years of resistance and domination. Commemorations thereafter allowed, as CRESFED writes, “clear and neat demonstration against the return of the repressive system, to denounce acts of violence and the activities of ‘zenglodos’ (bandits).”

When the military regime was dismantled in 1994, and constitutional order was (theoretically) restored to Haiti, the Haitian government created the cabinet position of Minister of the Condition and the Rights of Women. Increasingly, the issue of violence against women began to take an increasing dominance in the fight for women’s rights in Haiti.

With the gains made in the women’s movement reported by CRESFED, women’s position in Haiti appears to be much the same. The General Hospital, according to one resident, receives numerous cases where women have been severely beaten by their husbands. A woman who does gender training tells me, "at the end of our gender training sessions, we ask participants to make one resolution concerning the treatment of women. In some cases, it’s that they resolve to stop beating their wives.”

Indeed, CRESFED writes, “in reality, the participation of women in the political life of Haiti is still very weak…. The role of women in political and economic decisions is remains marginal. For this participation to effectively exist, the organizations must have access to all areas of decision making until women take their place in all domains.”

“My presence here [at this meeting] isn’t because I was personally invited [as some of the men claim],” another woman emphasizes, ‘“I wasn’t.”

So what has changed in Haiti? As a foreigner, I can be frustrated by the sight of men sitting in groups, talking politics, and playing dominoes while their wives are cooking, washing and caring for their children. In terms of development theory, it is commonly thought that the means to empower a family is through the women in the household. And yet it is women who have the least in terms of political and social empowerment. The discrepancy between the effective role women can play in development and the reality in a developing country like Haiti seems determined to remain one of the unfortunate ironies of development.

Haiti: Debriding Wounds

As I walked into the maternity ward of the General Hospital in Port-au-Prince, I nearly slipped in a puddle of amniotic fluid. Outside, beyond heavy iron gates, women were sprawled on the ground, waiting to see a doctor.

In Haiti, most health services are provided by NGOs or religious organisations. Clinics, like the one run by the Sisters of Charity, and dispensaries are common throughout Haiti, particularly in Port-au-Prince. These clinics are always overflowing with people, with maladies ranging from scabies to abscesses to deep, gouging wounds on their limbs. Health care, what exists of it, tends to be limited to Port-au-Prince and major cities – the majority of doctors are found in Port-au-Prince whereas in rural areas, there is generally only one doctor for 30 000 people. For people who live far from Port-au-Prince, it can take a day to reach a hospital, if they can make it that far.

If you can get to a hospital, immediate care is expensive. During my stay in the Canape Vert Hospital, the best in Port-au-Prince (or so I’m told), to secure a room I had to produce a 15 000 Gourde deposit (about $682 US). During my stay, I was charged for everything from the tape that they used to attach my IV to cotton balls to the thermometer, on top of medication. In total, without doctor’s bills, my stay cost at least 7 000 Gourdes ($320 US). For me, with medical insurance and an employer to help me cover my bills, this is entirely reasonable. For the average Haitian who makes $260 US a year, it’s impossible.

The typical hospital experience in Haiti is more likely what you fine at the General Hospital (L’Hopital Universitaire de L’Etat d’Haiti, HUEH). In a recent article for La Nouvelliste, journalist Serge Philippe Pierre writes of the endless struggles to receive care at HUEH. If a patient arrives at 5 am, there will already be a line. If it’s there first visit, a file needs to be opened, which can take all day. If they’re returning, the file needs to be retrieved from the archives, which are rarely in order. In general, HUEH has 600 to 700 seeking treatment on any given day. They manage to see perhaps one quarter to one half of them. Those unable to see a doctor their first day can come back again the next, if they don’t die of their illness first. Some use the services of racketeers. Pierre writes, of a discussion with one of the doctors, “at times, the doctor tells us, they put the blame on us. “The patient says, at times, that they paid to see a doctor quickly. It’s one way of saying that it’s us, the doctors, who maintain the group of racketeers that operate in the courtyard.”

The General Hospital is a series of drab concrete buildings located in downtown Port-au-Prince, an area whose security problems increase significantly after sunset. The hospital itself has 700 beds and an occupation rate of 82% - 92 %. For these 700 beds, there are only 143 licensed doctors. Most of the work, it turns out, is done by the residents. Pierre writes, “the residents say there is most frequent need of a state doctor’s assistance with certain emergencies. “We’re left to ourselves. We consider ourselves health professionals in training (10%) and employees who provide 90% inexpensive labour.”

All of this seems typical of a developing country – extreme lack of doctors, inadequate health services, woefully under served rural population. Haiti is a country where people die frequently of diseases easily, and cheaply, cured in North America.

At the General Hospital, my good friend, a resident in his final year of studies, lives on the hospital grounds. There really isn’t any point for him to keep an apartment; he’s always at the hospital. After visiting him at the hospital, spending time volunteering in wound clinics, and a brief stay at the Canape Vert hospital myself, the General Hospital incensed me. “It’s difficult,” he admits, “but you get used to it. We always work in these conditions.” I asked him once what makes him mad. It wasn’t the hours he works at the hospital or the incredible stress of the job – that was a choice he made when he entered medical school. “The thing that makes me mad,” he tells me, “is that people steal the supplies. Without them, I can’t do my job properly.”

Haiti: More Than Words

“I don’t want to draw a cross or put my thumbprint on papers,” the gray-haired, weathered man told me, “I want to learn to sign my name. That’s why I’m here.”

Education in Haiti exists mostly in theory instead of practice. Under Haitian law, education is free and compulsory for children between the ages of six and thirteen. In reality, factors such as location of schools, the cost of school supplies and uniforms, and the availability of teachers can severely limit access to education. In many cases, particularly in the countryside, families cannot afford to lose the work a child can contribute to support the family. These barriers mean that only 40 to 50% of school aged children actually attends school, which leads to adult literacy levels of only 48% for men and 42% for women, the lowest in the Western Hemisphere.

With the gap left by formal education in Haiti, other means of teaching must necessarily step in.

FONKOZE (Fondasyon Kole Zepol, “Foundation for the People”) is a national alternative Haitian bank whose main clientele are the economically poor members of Haitian society. Among it’s banking services, offered at branches in at least 15 communities in Haiti, is a literacy program. Pierre Malvoisin, the director of FONKOZE’s literacy program, tells me, “In the beginning (of FONKOZE), there wasn’t a literacy service. We worked with people who, for the most part, could neither read nor write. They are what we call in Haiti timarchands (street vendors)”. Through FONKOZE’s micro credit program, the bank discovered that “they (the timarchands) had difficulties filling out the forms … they couldn’t sign anything – they were obliged to put a cross or to put their thumbprint to sign their name”, Malvoisin explains. “We said we had to create a (literacy) program as an accompaniment (to the credit program) to help them. That’s how the idea of the literacy service started.”

The literacy training itself is based on two sessions – Alpha de Bas (basic
literacy) and Post Alpha (post-literacy). Instead of textbooks, the literacy materials are creative – the activities are based on games like dominoes, monopoly and card games. The program, designed by general coordinator and founding member of FONKOZE Father Joseph Philippe, must see results quickly. Malvoisin explains, “he (Father Joseph) chose the games for their creativity. We work with a lot of older people who may think it isn’t worth the time and effort to learn to read and write. Or, because of their age, it takes too much time”. By teaching basic literacy skills quickly, FONKOZE is able to convince more people to attend their literacy sessions.

During the second session, for those who completed the first, FONKOZE adds a guide to business management and an exercise book for home study to the basic material. In addition to the printed support material, Malvoisin says, “we work with the people in the micro-credit program to help them better manage their economic activities – things like elevage (animal husbandry), commerce, etc… We give them credit, but we also give them training in the business management”.

Because of the success of their program, and in an effort to expand its scope, FONKOZE contracts out its literacy services to other institutions. “As soon as they heard that it works”, Malvoisin explains, “they began knocking on our door”.

It’s easy to get excited at the prospect of such a successful program. At the end of the training sessions, though, I have to ask, “Now what?” If the participants have managed to survive without reading or writing so far, how is signing their name going to change anything? Malvoisin tells me, “this doesn’t mean that after the Post Alpha program they’re intellectuals…. (After this program) you have someone who is able to not only write their name and do an inventory, you have someone who has the capacity to reflect not only on their business activities but also on their environment”. Even after the first session, Malvoisin says, “if people apply themselves and meet our demands, they are able to write their name… we (also) help them to break down and record their thoughts. And, while people are already very strong in calculations, we teach them how to do it on paper.”

The underlying methodology and working material of the program, while practical, supports a strong theoretical base. Malvoisin explains, “what we take as theoretical basis is essentially what Paulo Friere calls Conscientizing Literacy. However, it’s also functional…. We try to use a theoretical basis that’s a balance between the two (Conscientizing Literacy and Functional Literacy)”. The program, says Malvoisin, is “essentially conscientizing because we try to teach the person how to better organize their thoughts, their work, etc. At the same time, it’s based, in the majority of cases, on activities like commerce or elevage – every day activities”.

This element of conscientization, or critical awareness, is an important distinguishing trait between simply writing your name and understanding your environment. Malvoisin explains, “for example, if we take a term like deforestation”. Through debates, “we discuss what deforestation means. It’s a participatory method. Each participant gives their opinion and (…) we try to end up with some kind of lesson or investigation – this is how the problem is posed, this is how we analyze it, this is how we find some way to combat the problem”. Through this discussion, this participatory method, they are able to empower greater understanding.

Sitting in my living room at the end of the interview, Malvoisin says, “there are some things that are made up of more than just words.”