*Editors Sylvie Barak and Marc Speir were in Haiti last week, filming a documentary about the rebuilding of the impoverished country’s telecom infrastructure over a year after the quake. Barak and Speir are exploring how mobile helped those in the wake of the disaster and how NGOs and non profits on the ground are continuing to work relentlessly to train, maintain and rebuild. The following thoughts are not necessarily telecom based, but give our readers a glimpse into a day in the life of our reporters*
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti –4.30am is an ungodly hour to wake up. My eyes still crusted over with sleep, I stumbled out of my bunk, gave myself a quick baby wipe shower, splashed water on my face, brushed my teeth trying not to swallow the cholera water and lurched upstairs.
Marc and Nixon, also looking the worse for wear, were already in the jeep, trying to out-awake each other, yawning like lions.
I can’t really complain, because it was actually my fault we were setting off before the sun had even risen.
The previous night I’d met Inveneo protégé, Jerry Joseph at the AFH house, glasses perched on his nose, brow furrowed, as he typed away on a battered looking old Mac trying to solve some connectivity issue or other, remotely.
A run-in with a motorcycle earlier in the week had left him with an injured knee, but for Jerry -trained by Inveneo to run his own company, Gigabit Plus – it was just another day’s work bringing broadband Internet to those who needed it.
He’d told me that the following morning he needed to travel to Léogâne to fix a couple of broken connections in a hospital, a school and the German Red Cross.
“Can we come?” I asked.
“Sure, you have a car?”
“Yep, we’ll give you a lift…what time should we pick you up?”
“5am”
“ahhh….um….yeah, ok.”
And so it was set. We were schlepping to Léogâne at the crack of dawn.
For those unfamiliar with Inveneo, let me start by giving you a bit of background on the company, a San Francisco based social enterprise whose stated mission is to “connect and empower rural and underserved communities with information and communications technologies.” They don’t just do this in Haiti, but Sub Saharan Africa too.
Unlike a plethora of the NGOs we met in Haiti, Inveneo has a specific goal to train up the local talent, so that when the firm pulls out of the country, it won’t be taking its expertise and know-how away with it. It’s something other aid organizations could do well to learn from, and which could easily alleviate the issues caused by “Aid fads” – where organizations chase headlines to keep up with what’s cool in terms of causes, rather than what still needs to be done. The ambulance chasers of charity, I’ve come to call them.
Anyway, Inveneo is most certainly not one of those, which greatly bolsters my opinion of the organization.
The firm had come across Jerry quite by accident. After the earthquake, homeless and jobless, he had taken on a role as driver for Save the Children, and quickly came to Inveneo’s attention as a graduate of the prestigious Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. Not that his ICT training had helped him much at that stage.
“I wanted to be focused on technology. I don’t want to be doing something that doesn’t improve my ICT skills. Yet, it’s hard to find a job in Haiti – I worked where I could but I was not challenged. I wasn’t using my skills,” he explained.
“We started by giving him small projects to work on, and things to read, gradually increasing the difficulty level until he was really working on some complex stuff,” Rohan Mahy of Inveneo, our housemate, told us.
The firm also introduced Jerry to Haitian ISP Multilink where he now works as an independent contractor in Léogâne managing bandwidth and tech support. He’s also become a bit of an expert at deploying long-distance WiFi thanks to his Inveneo training.
You might wonder, with food and shelter being number one priorities in Haiti, why I’d even bother to plug WiFi as being important at all, why I believe it’s a useful form of aid. Surely it’s better to invest the money in housing and food support first? I think that’s a naïve way of looking at things. Why? For several reasons.
Firstly because ICT creates jobs, job opportunities and enables education. That’s how Haitians are going to pull themselves up and stand on their own two feet instead of relying on handouts forever. Communications is the first major step towards an organized society, and that organization is something Haiti sorely needs.
Secondly, as we’ve all seen over the past few months in the Middle East, communication and a link to the outside world gives people a voice, a means of expression and lets them get their own message out, without having to rely on the world to do it for them. It creates a sort of political “checks and balances” that wasn’t previously available.
Thirdly, it allows aid organizations to function a lot better and get things done more efficiently. Take for instance the doctors at St. Damien’s Children’s Hospital on the outskirts of Port Au Prince who used Telemedicine to send Xrays back and forth between US hospitals and the severely overloaded Haitian clinic. That kind of cooperation is only possible with an Internet connection.
Anyway, back to Jerry and the work he’s doing in areas like Léogâne, far from the hub of Port Au Prince.
“I believe children in rural communities want to be ICT experts too, but they don’t find anyone to inspire them,” Jerry told us, noting that he felt he was showing those kids an imitable example to follow.
The trip to Léogâne took us through some of the worst areas I’ve seen in Haiti thus far. Pigs, goats and chickens grazed through the garbage which was piled high and spewing onto the street. Waist high in waste, we watched people filling their water bottles from murky toxic looking puddles leaking from the refuse. Some were lighting little fires by the side of the road, heating pots or trying to cook corn, as the husks got quickly trampled into the mud and sludge. Behind them, Haiti’s coastline and glimpses of the sea and sunrise over the water, obliviously beautiful over the decay and horrors of the street.
We passed a mortuary which seemed somewhat redundant. The cracks in the already awful Haitian roads gave way to gaping holes that Nixon had to navigate expertly around. If there’s a hell, it probably looks similar to what we passed that morning.
At around 6.30am, we finally pulled up at Hopital St Croix in Léogâne. Jerry jumped out of the car and unwrapped his tools carefully. The hospital looked quiet, and inside, the surfaces were caked in dust.
“It’s a dusty place, a very dusty place,” said Jerry, wiping the surface of a desk in the upstairs office with his hand, leaving it caked with dirt. He gently set his Mac down on the table and set to work with his cables.
10 minutes later, the problem had been fixed and we were back in the car on the way to Jerry’s next port of call.
The German Red Cross had appropriated themselves a large house on a sizeable plot of land surrounded by palms and mango trees. Like their colleagues at the IRC, the German contingent also had several spacious, new Jeeps on their property, tucked away under the shade of the trees.
The walls around the house were high and covered in barbed wire. Armed guards stood ready at the iron doors of the gate. When we approached, they creaked it open to a slit, letting us in and closing it behind us.
We approached the house and Jerry knocked on the door. A man wearing a Red Cross T-Shirt and army pants answered and gave us all a dirty look.
“Vat do you Vant?” he asked curtly.
“I’m here because you reported a problem with your Internet connection, I’ve come to see if I can fix it,” said Jerry.
“Ja, Vee have no Internet for days now,” scowled the man, nodding his head in our direction and asking “and who are they?”
“They’re filming a documentary about me, about my work,” said Jerry quietly.
“Vell, they cannot just come here. They need a permit. Do you think it’s possible to bring them here without permission and expect us to let them in? It doesn’t work like that!” he griped.
“We were at the International Red Cross yesterday, and they didn’t ask us for a permit, sir,” I piped up from behind Jerry’s shoulder.
“THIS IS NOT AN ARGUMENT, YOUNG LADY! I am telling you you need a permit to film in here and that is all. It is a fact.”
“Fine, I guess we’ll be leaving then,” I retorted, puffing out my chest and glaring at him.
“No. You will come in. After all, I need my Internet fixed…” he barked, bitterly.
I snorted and shook my head as he ushered us into the room. “What was the point of him berating us? Is it a German thing?” Marc asked, “just to make us feel bad?”
German Red Cross guy ignored us after that, allowing us to get on with our filming, instead, perching himself behind Jerry so he could scowl at the computer screen instead.
The place smelled of antiseptic. And iodine. Haitian staff milled in and out between the sandal wearing, flak jacketed Germans coming up and down the steps.
Jerry tapped away at the Mac, trying to figure out the source of the problem. Eventually, he cracked it.
“I vill go upstairs to test it on my own,” declared the German, skeptically. He came back down a few minutes later, after Jerry had finished showing us CNN and RCR Wireless render just fine on his Mac.
“Ja, vell, it more or less vorks I suppose, but it’s far too slow,” grumbled the grump as he stomped back downstairs.
I gave Jerry the Borat double thumbs up and mouthed “Great Success” at him. He smiled.
Next, Jerry took us to a local school to show us the computer lab generously donated by Microsoft for the children to learn on. Jerry is training the teachers at the school so that, in turn, they can teach the students. “I do a lot of these types of projects,” he told us proudly.
And proud he should be. Haiti needs a lot more Jerry Josephs. And maybe it needs a lot more Inveneo style organizations to show the world how aid is done. Properly.
