What I’ve Been Working On

I’ve talked a decent amount about Haiti these last few blog entries, so this time I thought I’d switch it up and talk a little more specifically about my work at here at Fonkoze. As I mentioned in my first few posts, I originally had been working jointly between Fonkoze and Alternative Insurance Company (AIC) to try to find some solutions for covering Fonkoze’s loan clients when hurricane season comes around. Unfortunately, that position was not all it was cracked up to be. The insurance company was apparently misinformed about my capacity, as one of my first tasks was to predict the probabilities of hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, landslides, and other natural disasters hitting certain areas of Haiti. That’s right, I was supposed to tell them there is a 23% chance of a major hurricane hitting the southeastern tip of the country and it will cause $10 million dollars in damage! Yes, I did get my undergrad degree in Actuarial Science. No, I do not have the slightest idea how to begin calculating those numbers. Last time I checked that was reserved for senior level actuaries at the top US companies, and even they still have a hard time predicting these things. Needless to say, I sent out an email telling AIC I did not think I could perform the task. Not only did I not get a response to this email, but I got no response to another email that contained a large project I had worked on for three weeks. I currently don’t have the fondest feelings toward AIC since they basically ignored me until I went away, but thankfully I’ve picked myself up and I now find myself working on much more interesting things that are completely within Fonkoze.

Seeking to utilize some of the skills I learned last year during my graduate classes at Rutgers, I nuzzled my way into our Social Impact (Enpak Sosyal) division which is in charge of conducting evaluations on whether or not our clients are actually being lifted out of poverty and whether our programs are working as planned. This is exciting for three reasons: 1) The day-to-day job includes much more contact with clients across the country, or at least with data that shows how our clients are doing across the country. 2) I actually have a boss who is helpful, encouraging, and motivating 3) I’m on the frontlines of determining whether Fonkoze’s program are effective poverty-alleviators.

My biggest project with the department has been to compile all the data from a 24-month evaluation of our Chemen Lavi Miyo (CLM) clients. CLM is a pilot program of Fonkoze which seeks to aid the poorest of the poor. Many of our other microloan programs focus on those in moderate poverty, those who have some understanding of financial information and have some wherewithal to repay our loans. CLM, on the other hand, addresses much more dire women and families around the country. Fonkoze specifically goes into villages, uses a wealth ranking system, conducts interviews with town leaders, and seeks to find those who are at the bottom of the pile. These prospective CLM clients typically have no assets, no suitable housing, few money-generating skills, and no plan for the future. They beg to eat and they often find themselves and their children going hungry. These are the children with bloated bellies and skinny arms and legs so awkwardly painful to look at. They have no access to healthcare, meaning when they get sick, they die. It is this sort of client so many microfinance organizations around the world have been unable to help in the past simply because they did not know how to cater financial programs to such financially-insecure groups. Thus, Fonkoze, in many ways, is pioneering new ground in seeking to reach this crucial population.

CLM was launched 24-months ago and reviewed with client surveys and evaluations every 9 months. The CLM program infused clients with animal assets, encouraged them to foster gardens, and helped them devise a plan for another source of income (like selling things in the marketplace). Along with this, housing assistance was given to many to help change floors from dirt to concrete, walls from earth to wood, and roofs from palms branches to iron sheets. Case managers meet with clients regularly to assess their progress, give them health and sanitation advice, and help mediate program they encounter. This is only the tip of iceberg, but I can’t divulge every detail. After 18-months, CLM clients re then designated as eligible or ineligible to progress up the Fonkoze ladder into our Ti Kredi microloan program, which involves small loans starting at $25. Not all CLM clients were ready to graduate to the Ti Kredi program, but many have and many are planning on progressing even higher up the Fonkoze “ladder out of poverty”.

With the 24-month data collected, I’ve been doing data analysis in order to help a group of London researchers produce a more formal report of the entire CLM pilot program. We look at things like food security, animal ownership, child education, self image, housing conditions, etc to determine whether our programs our working. While the results aren’t all final, it’s been interesting to see what they say so far. Much progress has been made with CLM clients since the program began. For example, approximately 96% have improved their baseline score on one of our evaluation surveys. More people send their kids to school and more clients that they have improved their place in society. Furthermore, garden cultivation has increased, assets have grown, and fewer people are forced to skip meals or beg for food.

Results, however, are not all positive. Between the 18-month end of the program and our 24-month evaluation, many clients began to slip back toward the same despair they experienced at the beginning. Those who graduated into our Ti Kredi program are faring much better, but still some of these clients are also seeing declines in positive indicators. All this shows there is still much work to be done. We need to look at how we can sustain our results, how we can help more clients improve in the first place, and what needs to change to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of our work. Just like in so many other areas, we’ve reaped the rewards of blazing new trails in poverty alleviation with our CLM program, but it’s not perfect yet. This is the future challenge for Fonkoze, but it’s an exciting one and I’m glad I get to be a part of it!

Waging a wage war

A few years ago when I worked as a server in a steakhouse, in between our banter about rude customers and weekend parties, all of the servers would at some point chastise the low hourly wage we were paid ($2.85) and remark on our heavy reliance on tips from customers. Even on slow nights, however, we usually came out of there with decent money that bumped us up to at least the regular minimum wage of around $6/hour. At the end of the day, I was never in the same situation as most of the other servers. I was just a college student looking for a little extra cash and a fun job after classes. Many of the other employees were single moms trying to raise young kids or Mexican immigrants struggling for a better life. They actually depended on those wages to make ends meet, to put food on the table. It’s amazing how little $6 an hour can get you in America. After food, transportation, rent, schooling, clothes, and our outlandishly over-priced healthcare system (especially for those whose work doesn’t provide insurance), most of those employees were left with a few nickels and dimes.

Now, switch to Haiti. By no means is the cost of living for the average Haitian as high as it is for the average American (unless the average Haitian tried to live the lifestyle of a typical American with imported cars, big houses, and material extras). Nevertheless, the cost of living here is still quite high. Being a small island nation, many of the consumable goods must be imported from places as diverse as the Dominican Republic, Brazil, and Turkey. This adds transportation and tariff costs to the prices Haitians pay for food and other daily needs. Thus, many survive by eating non-imported goods like mangos, avocados, pineapple, plantains, bananas, etc. Yet still Haitian staples like rice, corn, etc. must flow in from international locations and often fluctuate greatly in price thanks to the world markets.

With this in mind, imagine trying to survive not on $6 an hour, not even on $6 a day—but on $1.75 per day. That’s right, $1.75 per day. Until last week, that was the Haitian minimum wage. If you study development or if you stay up late enough to watch the World Vision segments about starving Africans, you’ve no doubt heard that one of the international standards of poverty is the $2 per day line. Those who make less than $2 a day are considered impoverished. It’s hard for me to believe that a country could literally set its minimum wage below the international poverty standard—but Haiti managed to.

As I talked about in some of my earlier posts, the violent demonstrations that we see here in Port-au-Prince have been largely the result of this low wage. Progressive students from the State University of Port-au-Prince have marched through the streets demanding an increase to this insult of a daily wage. On May 5th, the Haitian Senate voted to up the wage from 70 gouds a day ($1.75) to 200 gouds a day ($5.00), but President Preval refused to sign the bill into law. Despite overwhelming support for the bill from the people of Haiti, the president was instead loyal to a small core group of textile businessmen that argued an increased wage would force them to pull out of Haiti. Many reports say it was a few as 8 key textile companies that were inhibiting the passage of the law.

The manifestations began the day after I arrived and still have continued occasionally up through last weekend when over 2,000 people gathered outside the Parliament to shout for change. Haitian police and UN troops regularly dispel the protests with teargas and rubber bullets, often just inflaming the Haitians’ hatred for the United Nation’s presence here. The protesters respond by throwing rocks and burning cars (like the UN truck flipped upside down and torched outside of Fonkoze a few months ago). People are fed up. They can’t survive. 80% of Haiti lives in poverty.

Finally, this last weekend the Senate reconvened and responded to the demands of the people, voting to raise the daily wage to $3.75. It’s hardly a livable income, but better than not having raised it all at all. We’ll see if it quiets the protestors in the streets. More importantly we’ll see if it quiets the rumbling bellies and cringing cries of poverty. My guess the answer to both of these questions is “no” because even after the good news of the Senate’s vote, a few issues still remain with wages…

1. The daily minimum wage law only affects about 250,000 out of the 10 million people living in Haiti. The overwhelming majority of people sell small items on the streets rather than work for more formal sectors which the government can regulate. These people undoubtedly make less than the government minimum wage. What can be done to either increase their profits or, more likely, to provide more formal, sustainable jobs for them?
2. The UN and Bill Clinton (Special Envoy of the UN to Haiti) recently released a report that said that Haiti’s comparative advantage was in clothing factories. They argued that low wages, along with no tariffs to export textiles to the US, were important to bringing jobs to Haiti. Thus, they effectively opposed the higher wage the people were demanding. Sounds to me like they are joining groups like the World Bank who impose structural adjustment policies on countries like Haiti which in effect can hurt the people and undermine democracy. Similarly, it raises the question of whether the policies like those of Clinton and the UN create a ‘race to the bottom’ where developing countries must continually lower their wages and labor laws in order to attract international business.
3. Along the same lines, will these key textile companies be true to their threats and pull out of Haiti? I saw it when I was in Namibia with a company called Ramatex. After a number of years of giving into the demands of the multinational company, the Namibian government finally refused to allow the company to continue polluting the local water, paying horrible wages, and prohibiting labor unions. Within less than 2 weeks, the company had moved their textile factories to a place with cheaper labor and lax regulations. It’s a tough question to answer: Do we encourage this type of foreign investment even though the companies are clearly taking advantage of impoverished people? Or do we tell these companies to get lost and risk losing a precious opportunity to at least put a few people to work?
4. Wages are just one gear to fix in the logjammed clockwork of poverty. Higher wages can do their part, but how effective can they be when you have a poor education system, little access to healthcare, poor infrastructure, etc.

These are a few of the questions that are playing out in my head now. It will be interesting to see how things unfold in the coming weeks here in Haiti. The unfortunate thing is that while I am merely pondering these questions, thousands of people are out there living the reality of it all. They are the ones who get thrown around between the latest government regulations, the handouts of international aid groups, the projects of thousands of NGOs, and the daily grind of life without a safety net. While the UN troops may be the ones with the tanks and guns, it’s the Haitians that are truly on the frontlines.

Dye Mon, Gen Mon

If you keep up with me on Facebook (which I visit about 10 times more frequently than this blog), you know that this past weekend I got to visit a place previously only familiar to me through the pages of one of my favorite books. Tracy Kidder’s “Mountains Beyond Mountains” was a book recommended to me by a friend from the University of North Carolina in 2006. It’s a huge bestseller and now even a required read for all freshman at Valpo. HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT! The book tells the story of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Harvard trained doctor who started visiting Haiti as a young man. He eventually established a hospital in the remote village of Cange, saving thousands of lives and operating with a mindset of “Do Whatever It Takes”. People said it couldn’t be done and people said that he was naïve, but he and his organization Partners in Health have since opened branches around the world and become leaders in the fight against HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria.

This past Saturday I was lucky enough—thanks to my roommate James and our pull as Fonkoze employees—to get a private tour of the hospital in Cange where the whole story takes place. They specifically don’t give tours to the public because of their goal to operate a hospital rather than a tourist destination. But we graciously accepted our invitation and headed out from Port-au-Prince for the drive through the mountains to the small village.

After about a two hour drive in a rented SUV on Friday, we stopped for the night in the town of Mirebalais before it got dark. Similar to Jakmel, it’s always nice to get out of P-au-P and experience the tranquility of more isolated places. With James and his girlfriend Noel wanting to stay at a slightly nicer hotel, I found a cheaper place and spent the night by myself exploring the town a bit and making friends with the Haitians working as security at my complex. It was such a great night sitting on the town plaza, drinking a Prestige, watching people meander by, and trying my best to share some conversation in Kreyol. Clearly, however, the conversation was not quite as clear as I thought though after the guys went and found a Haitian prostitute for me as the night was ending. Confused for a minute, I quickly realized what was happening and I sent her away much to my relief. Nothing like being lost in translation for a minute! I laughed to myself for a good long time about that one.

The next morning we packed up early and hit the dusty trail toward Cange (literally, it was quite dusty and rocky). In Haiti, there aren’t too many roads so if you generally know which direction the town is, you can take the path headed that way and get at least somewhere close. Without any maps, we constantly rolled down our window and kept asking people on the streets if we were going in the right direction. As we got closer, we knew we were headed the right way as we came upon a massive dam and reservoir—a subject that was mentioned throughout the book as a foreign aid electricity project which had flooded many people out of their homes in the valley and forced them up in the rocky cliffs. (A good example of foreign aid gone totally bad!). As we drove along the narrow dirt roads, the houses seemed to teeter on the edge of the mountains—surely susceptible to falling rocks and mudslides. Finally pulling into Cange, we asked one last person where Partners in Health (Zanmi Lasante in Kreyol) was located and found the complex nestled on the side of a hill.

I’m not sure what I expected it to look like, but it wasn’t quite what I had in mind. The complex was huge with numerous different buildings serving a variety purposes from an education center to community meeting spots. As we walked up the hill, we got into the heart of the medical complex which really didn’t resemble an American hospital at all. Our guide first took us to the pediatric in-patient ward where numerous children and babies were being treated for everything from premature birth to malnutrition. We then visited the operating rooms which were surprisingly and awkwardly accessible as we viewed two live surgeries taking place. Apparently, health privacy laws have not made their way to Haiti yet. We then saw the recovery room and the isolation ward for those patients who are co-infected with HIV and tuberculosis. Throughout the hallways connecting these different locations, there were people everywhere. Some waiting for loved ones, some carrying relatives into the hospitals, others sick themselves and sleeping on the floor while they waited for open hospital beds. From there we moved into the female health ward as well as visited a group therapy building. Overall it was great to see one of my favorite books come to life, but like many parts of the country, it was still depressing.

Zanmi Lasante is one of the best funded organizations in Haiti with millions of dollars from charitable foundations and private donors alike. Yet, still there was so much need. They had some state of the art equipment, but not enough. They had devoted doctors, but not enough. They had medicine, but supplies can run low. They can treat most diseases, but not all. Again with the mentality of “Do whatever it takes”, some kids even get flown to hospitals in Boston and around the US to treat more serious problems. When you think about how cost-prohibitive that policy is, it makes some people in the development realm question the organization’s priorities. Why spend so much money to save one child, when you that same amount could be spent to impact more people? But Paul Farmer and Zanmi Lasante don’t think that way. If a child comes needing help, they find a way to get it. It’s pretty impressive. Overall, they have clearly overcome some obstacles in the fight for healthcare in rural Haiti, but there are so many more obstacles ahead.

After the tour, we headed back to Mirebalais before continuing on to the village of Sodo. There, we expected to see a huge waterfall that’s steeped in voodoo tradition for its healing powers—and we weren’t disappointed. We eventually made it to the site and discovered it full of Haitians who had come to purify themselves. When life gets bad and your troubles become too much, many in the area come to the waterfall, light a candle, wash themselves, and then throw their clothes into the river, letting them wash away downstream. Along with their clothes, their intention is to allow their troubles to wash away as well. While I’ve had my fair share of modest difficulties in Haiti, I decided not to strip down and throw my clothes into the river—opting instead to enjoy the beauty of the waterfall from the sidelines, but maybe regretting it later on.

After one more night in Mirebalais, we headed back to Port-au-Prince on Sunday. Since we had a car for the first time in Haiti, we swung by the one Americanized supermarket which is about 30 minutes from our house. Along with the fact that we were visiting the store for the first time, we were also excited as our refrigerator had been broken for the past 4 weeks and was just fixed two days earlier. We stocked up on groceries and returned home only to find that our fridge had decided two days was enough. It was broken again! So thus, we ended up throwing out tons of spoiled food. In the next 24 hours, our backup power generator would break, our oven decided to no longer work, and my computer decided it no longer likes to operate certain programs. I’m not sure if this was the waterfall telling me I should have believed in its healing powers, but if I had to do it again, I think I’d be the naked white guy making a scene in the river!

Alas, though, when I finally stopped tonight to process the last 24 hours and its misfortunes, I think I gained some good perspective. I’m complaining about the power going out, but most people here don’t even have electricity to begin with. I whine because I had to throw away milk and cheese; some people survive by mixing cooking oil with flour and dirt to make small fried cakes. My connection to the world (my computer) stops for a few days, but many Haitians voices will never be heard.

Both of my two best Haitians friends here in Port-au-Prince have no formalized jobs. They try to sell cell phone minutes or get paid to play the drum. They hang out with us just like they were Americans and they dress remarkably nice, as do most Haitians. But then they sometimes ask me for small change and I scoff thinking about how I’m not getting paid to live here. How do they expect me to spot them $2.00 once a week? Does every Haitian literally think I am the source of cash? At the end of the day, however, I am the one who returns to a safe clean house (electricity or not). I am the one who never worries about eating dinner. I am the one who has bed. They, on the other hand, return to their shacks. They scrounge to send their brothers and sisters to school with the money they make. They sleep on floors with 8 people in a room. Just like Paul Farmer’s organization fights each day to aid Haitians, so too do Haitians struggle each day to simply live. They wake up. They work hard. They might succeed, but few ever fully escape the grasps of poverty. When my problems get too big, it just takes a moment of reflection to realize my problems are anthills compared to theirs.

“Dye mon, gen mon” … “Beyond the mountain, there are more mountains”

Such is the ancient proverb here; such is Haiti.