In Haiti, middle class, impoverished share same despair-Added COMMENTARY By Haitian-Truth

BY JACQUELINE CHARLES
jcharles@MiamiHerald.com

PORT-AU-PRINCE — After he lost everything in the Haiti earthquake, a lawyers’ group gave attorney Clauvy Robas a tent to sleep in. But, rather than pitch it in one of the camps that have sprouted up around Port-au-Prince, he prefers to sleep in a friend’s car.

“I am not supposed to be sleeping in the streets,” said Robas, 29, a member of Haiti’s middle class — klas mwayèn — that has been overlooked in the urgency to save lives and provide relief to an estimated 1.5 million displaced by the violent quake.

As walls crumbled and the slums spilled into the streets, the Jan. 12 earthquake became the great equalizer in a society of staggering disparities, forcing the middle class and the most impoverished into the same bucket of despair.

Those who lost the least have received the most help, and those who lost the most have received the least.

“The worst place to be right now in this country is the middle class,” said Kesner Pharel, a local economist. “They’ve invested everything they had in their house and they’ve lost it all. You have a lower class that didn’t have a house, and today they have a tent and say `better for me.’ The top already had money to get back on their feet.”

In many cases, post-quake charitable dollars and goods flowing into the country have allowed Haiti’s lower class to climb a few rungs up the ladder, bringing a quality of life not known before Jan. 12.

But for the middle class, the disparity is unbearable. The quake that took a government-estimated 300,000 lives not only took their homes and livelihood, it also wiped away social status in a country where that is priceless.

On a hillside one recent Sunday morning, where once comfortable houses made up the middle class Petionville neighborhood of Morne Lazard, homeowners looked at the rubble and told a tale of anger and helplessness.

Almost six months after the quake, Haiti’s middle class — lawyers, doctors, receptionists and thousands of public administration employees — have become the new poor in a land of immense poverty. Now, they’re homeless and unemployed.

Mostly absent in the homeless camps, they choose instead to sleep in tents in the front yards of their damaged homes, or in neighborhood streets cordoned off with boulders and vehicles.

They’re still struggling to come to terms with their tumble from grace.

“They’ve forgotten us,” said Camille Bissainthe, 52, a father of two living with friends after losing his home of 22 years. “We pay the government taxes but the taxes don’t pay for anything.”

Before the quake, Guerda Thélisma was a receptionist, supporting herself and paying tuition for two younger brothers.

When the quake hit, the family’s three-story home on a mountainside collapsed, killing her father who ran a neighborhood grocery store, a brother and a 5-year-old nephew.

“There are no words to describe it,” said Thélisma, 27, who lost a total of 11 family members. “You are back at zero.”

Thélisma has had to rely on the charity of friends for clothes and a place to sleep. Her mother, sister and two younger brothers are scattered.

Even before the magnitude 7.0-quake shook Haiti, the country’s middle class was a struggling, thinning group. Roughly 15 percent of the population, they tended to survive on the shoulders of the masses and the country’s tiny elite.

Mostly black, the middle class is defined more by its common values and quality of life, than income or political ideology.

“The moment you arrive at a place [in this society] where you have something someone can take from you — a radio, a refrigerator — you’re klas mwayèn,” Marc Bazin, a former prime minister and World Bank economist said in a Miami Herald interview shortly before he died last month.

A member of what’s known here as the intellectual middle-class, Bazin was deeply concerned about the neglect of Haiti’s forgotten class even while in failing health. “The larger we expand the klas mwayèn, the more sound the economy will be,” he said. “It’s a class that’s full of ambitions.”

But it’s also a class that has been unable to find its place in a society where 80 percent live on less than $2-a-day and the five percent making up the economic elite — often light-skin, French and English-speaking with deep family connections — have controlled most of the wealth.

Empowered during the 1940s and emboldened during the early years of the Duvalier dictatorship, many in the middle class later fled, forced by turmoil and lured by opportunity, to Paris, New York, Miami and Montreal in the decades that followed.

In the days and weeks after the quake, their exodus continued as many grabbed their passports and children and hopped flights.

In a country increasingly dependent on foreign aid, Thélisma and others say Haiti’s middle class is not looking for a hand out, but a way to help it rebuild.

They watch helplessly as the government attempts to convince homeless quake victims to return to homes that either did not exist — or were mere shacks, even before the quake, as their own lots remain clogged with debris. They can neither afford the cost of rebuilding nor the rubble removal.

“Everyone wants to concentrate their actions on the camps, and the very poor,” said Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, who has tried to bring more attention to the plight of the middle class.

“That is not going to change anything in Haiti. After $2 or $3 billion, we will be back to the best of where we were on the 11 of January, which nobody liked.”

Bellerive and others say that what Haiti is staring down in the struggle to move out the 1.5 million people living in hundreds of makeshift camps is 200 years of economic and social neglect that cannot be solved in months. And they warn that the country risks a social explosion if reconstruction efforts focus solely on the poorest of the poor.

Haiti has always struggled with the class issue, even as neighborhoods boast having wealthy and poor families living in them.

“We are living in apartheid,” said Leslie Voltaire, an urban planner and government official leading reconstruction efforts.

For weeks now, Voltaire has been waging a quiet battle to turn 9,884 acres the government seized into a mixed-used development for both poor and middle-class families.

He sees the quake and reconstruction as an opportunity to create a revolution in the country’s social consciousness — not just to build homes in a country struggling with a massive housing shortage even before the disaster wiped out 100,000 homes.

It’s a difficult battle in a society where there are degrees of classism even among the poor. To illustrate his point, Voltaire recalls when President René Préval, during his first presidential term, asked him to create a housing program just outside Cité Soleil for several slum residents who had lost their homes to a fire.

The non-Cité Soleil residents protested, saying they did not want “assassins and thieves” living next to them.

“I said `They are Haitians. What do you want us to do with them?’ They said `put them in a sack and drop them in the sea,’ ” he recalled.

Voltaire sees the government-acquired land between the community of Bon Repos and city of Cabaret as a chance to change that mindset.

The Inter-American Development Bank is providing $30 million to help plan a community that will include roads, schools, 24-hour electricity and jobs.

“We want to show there are opportunities for everybody,” he said. “That should be a new vision, that we want to mix all the classes.”
The Miami Herald
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COMMENT: HAITIAN-TRUTH.ORG

This article is a good one.

The January 12 disaster left a lot of people in the middle class flat broke.

One of my associate’s parents had managed to acquire three houses, over the years. The rental from these gave them a comfortable income. Now, the quake destroyed these, plus their personal residence, leaving them without an income and no place to live…other than inside a small tent set up in the front yard.

There is no help for these people and they must depend upon the charity of friends – who may be in the same situation.

Over 250,000 homes were destroyed or damaged to the point that no one can live inside.

Many from the slums lost their roofs but now live better in the tent cities complete with light, latrines, water, and entertainment. (Many of the locations have a stage that sees local entertainers tour the areas.)

The middle class victims are unlikely to share space in these places.

Preval’s team has delayed approvals for repair of homes.

There has been a leveling effect that is not a useful factor in the survival of the Haitian urban communities.

Almost 6 months have passed and the nation has seen little or no improvement as a result of the fortune pumped into Haiti.

There are some new millionaires.

Most of these are no Haitian.

Some are high level people in MINUSTAH and other UN groups.

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1 thought on “In Haiti, middle class, impoverished share same despair-Added COMMENTARY By Haitian-Truth

  1. YO PA KONPRANN PEYI A.EPI, YO PA P JANM RIVE KONPRANN PEYI A.
    Pwoblem Ayiti se ki te rsnplase kolon Franse yo.Se neg mwayen Oryan yo ki asosye avek politisyen rat do kale yo. Sa ki pi tris la, seke, sou gouvenman Duvalier yo, anpil Ayisyen te kouri al viv an Afrik. Se la yo te rantre ankontak avek anpil idewoloji kit kont sistem kapitalis Ameriken an. Yo marye Vodou avek Islam branch ame ki kwe nan vyolans la pou yo te retounen nan peyi a pa nenpot kel mwayen pou yo vin itilize Ayiti kom yon pon pasaj pou yo vin Ozetazini pou vin kreye tyobol nan rejyon an. Nou kapab we kouman Kastwo te itilize Lafrik pou ti anrichi sistem kominis la nan Kiba. Se poutetsa ke Preval ak Aristide ak tout lot konpayel yo, kanmarad yo ki kwe nan vyolans, mare sosis yo avek Kiba ak lot peyi nan Amerik la pou rive konbat Ameriken sou tout fom. Plan daksyon gouvenman neg lagoch sa yo, se yon plan global pou rive mete do Ameriken a te.

    Pa bliyeke, genyen 2 kalite eleman ki pa p janm chanje: Bondye ak Teworis. Bondye fidel nan pwomes li yo ak alyans li yo, Kriminel tworis yo se disip satan, yo pa p chanje. Yo tout bezwen gwo lajan, men, yo pa p chanje.
    Preval se yon senbol. Preval reprezante gwoup kriminel Lavalas-Duvalyeris yo ki se asasen san fwa ni lwa yo.Yo pap chanje. Yo pa dako avek chanjman. yo pap janm dako pou Etazini vin ede pov ak moun klas mwayen nan peyi a.
    Gade yon jwet k ap jwe. Yon fre Boulos. ansyen serate a, an negzil pou fo papye. Li toujou ap mande tet Preval. Aloske, lot fre a, Dokte komesan an, ap boule gra avek preval nan Potoprens. se Heidi Anabi, ansyen chef MINUSTAH a ki te alyans la ant gwoup preval avel gwoup boujwazi repiyan an.
    Mezanmi louvri je nou tande. Frape pye nou a te. pa rantre nan jwet koken elksyon Preval, ak kriminel yo. Ameriken pa bezwen bann kriminel sa yo pou ede nansyon an. Kreyol pale, Kreyol konprann.Kriminel yo fe chwa yo, nou menm tou, nou dwe chwazi ant lavi ak lanmo.Sous la vi a chita nan moun k ap lonje lanmen pou ede nou tout bon pou nou soti atoujame anba tribilasyon.
    Pa pran nan presyon.Chwazi kan Ameriken an kare bare.Menmsi Gouvenman Ameriken pa t prevwa bidje pou katastwof la, men, tout nasyon Ameriken an mete tout fos li nan cheche mwayen pou ede nou soti nan mize. Gouvenman Ameriken deja fe sa li kapab, men, tout timoun, tout gran moun Ozetazini ap patisipe nan efo pou ede nou.
    senk pou san kriminel yo k ap dechepiye peyi a, pa p janm rive dako pou kolabore avek Ameriken tout bon vre pou ede devlope Ayiti.Gouvenman Preval/Alexis/Pierre-louis/ Bellerive la ap fe tout sa yo kapab pou dekouraje Ameriken pou mete baz devlopman nan peyi a.Ale legliz, kore ONG yo, bay gouvenman an bel vag.si nou pa sipote yo, ebyen, nou deja nan mwatye wout pou delivrans nou. Se sou do nou yo toujou ap fe chou ak rav. Pran pye mon yo pou nou. Pa rete nan vil yo. Pa travay pou yo. Paske, travay pa travay, y ap toujou jwenn yon jan pou yo detwi nou ak tout ras nou. Travay avek ONG etranje yo ki vini pou ede nou.Veye moun tret yo nan pami nou.Regwoupe nou. epi Bondye va vini delivre nou.

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