A day of waiting.

Today is Haiti's elections. We have stayed inside the house since Thanksgiving. This weekend has been significantly quieter than usual, due to the temporary ban on motorcycles. Campaigning ended on Friday, so the trucks blaring campaign songs and slogans are no longer strolling down on the road below our neighborhood. We have been getting our news from snippets of radio translated for us, embassy warden emails, and Twitter. Which is not much!

I am waiting to hear about an internship opportunity that would bring me much closer to the street-life and people of Haiti. It is easy to become isolated in the republic of NGOs, in the mansion on the hill. Should learn this week! I will also be finishing up my graduate applications this week so I will be able to devote my energy to the present.

Sophinia sees a photograph of her adoptive parents for the first time. She's a little suspicious, I think! She carried it around and refused to share the whole rest of our visit there!

An Orphanage

Today I visited a small orphanage in Port-au-Prince to meet Sophna and Sophinia, sisters who are being adopted by Donna and Jim Varda in the United States. The orphanage is currently full but even with the sped up adoption process (from 2 years down to ~1 year) it will be a while before they can accept more children. As you can imagine, it is hard on the staff to have to turn away babies. Here, the children are taught in English to prepare them for adoption into American homes. We washed our hands with a bleach solution before meeting any children as to not bring in sickness.

I don't know the names of most of these babies. Samy is peering at us through his crib. Sophna and Sophinia are standing and smiling in the last picture. They are 18 month old twins. Sophna is the taller one with a big belly.

Political Parade

I could not tell who the parade was in support of though!

Visual Campaign of Jude Celestin

One presidential candidate in particular has a small army of people slapping up his posters on every available surface. We had some volunteers return from a trip to Leogane and they reported political rallies in every small village between there and Port-au-Prince. The village squares were packed with green and yellow, as these rallies were all for presidential candidate Jude Celestin. As well, his campaign is paying many dozens of women to wear his image, hold large posters on the side of the road, and don bright yellow and white construction hats. I will not be surprised if he wins on sheer visibility alone.

From May to November

I arrived on Friday at the Toussaint Louverture International Airport. On my flight there were two women returning for their father's funeral that had not been back to Haiti for 3 and 9 years respectively. They were glad that they were not to spend much time in Port-au-Prince before their secondary flight to the north coast city Cap Haitien, near their destination of Limbe. Right before the plane lands on the runway, you have a very good view of the acres of tarps that constitute shelter for thousands of Haitians. There is silence while people peer out their windows, but as we touch ground, the plane erupts in cheers and applause.

When I first saw this sight in May, I remember feeling a sharp spike of fear and incredulity. At that point it had been 4 months since the earthquake and only a small percentage of people had been relocated to less concentrated camps on the outskirts of town. These new "settlements" were lauded by aid agencies as model camps, but their isolation is one of their greatest flaws. They provide shelter, but not access to jobs or food aid. This month, I see the vast sea of plastic, now and then supplemented with tin sheeting or 2x4s, with a better understanding of why people might "choose" to stay in a crowded tent settlement instead of moving out to the rural, empty countryside.

Another difference since May is the temperature. It is cool, a phrase I joked I did not need to know. In May, I was hot, so much my pants sagged with the weight of my sweat. Then, the fact that the water comes out of the shower in only a cold trickle was just dandy. Now, I think on special occasions I will heat up some water in the teapot and give myself a nice, warm wash-cloth bath out of a bucket.

In a few weeks the elections will take place and the walls, poles, and abandoned cars lining the streets are plastered with campaign posters. There are 18 or 19 presidential candidates, but if you measure popularity by their number of posters, Jude Celestin (#10) and Martelly (#8) are the leading candidates, at least in the streets of Petionville. These posters contain little more information than the smiling visage of the presidential hopeful, their name, and their candidacy number. Their graphic impact primarily relies on color. Celestin's posters are green and yellow, while Martelly's are a bright fuschia. These posters are slapped up in multiples, creating walls where the candidates fight for dominance with wordless optimism. There is also new graffiti by the artist Jerry Rosembert Moise, commemorating Michael Jackson and depicting an old man soliciting a young woman with a wad of cash.

I am still settling in so my posts may be sporadic for the first few weeks. Wish me luck on my first week in Haiti!

The Goal of The Invisible Architecture

I had written a more complicated introduction, full of my theories and poetics. But let me be honest.

I am moving to Haiti and I know almost no one. This blog will be my way of cataloging who I meet and what they do. With some people, I will be able to follow them and see how they do what they do and how well they are able to do it.

Who am I? I am a 24 year old with a degree in architecture. My professional experiences lie at the nexus of urban planning, social work, public health, and documentary film in St. Louis, Missouri. I have made films comparing redevelopment strategies of communities within St. Louis and affordable housing strategies of design-build studios in rural Alabama, Biloxi, and New Orleans, with special focus on community engagement. I hesitate to call myself a documentary film-maker but since I have gotten paid for my work, I cautiously accept the title. I really see film as the most egalitarian way to share knowledge and to record history.

Can you see where I am going with this? I am especially interested in how organizations seek to rebuild communities. Haiti has probably the highest concentration of such organizations in the world today. If one of them had THE answer, there probably would not be so many. What I want to learn is the difference between their strategies and the challenges they face. While their organizations will gleefully report the tangible results of their work by the number of buildings they construct or people they house, I am more interested in the intangible, the invisible hands that shape their work.

The usual suspects from what I know so far? Politics. Resources. Politics within organizations, between organizations, and acting upon them. Resources are monetary, natural, and human. The struggles for funding, the machinations of political candidates, the results by which organizations measure their success. I'm sure I will find many more.

I arrive November 12 and will rejoin my family of 2: my partner, Eric Cesal (Regional Manager of Architecture for Humanity-Haiti) and my beautiful chow-labrador mutt, Lady Dulcinea.