The Water of Life
by Jean-Bertrand Aristide
This material was originally prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.
On weekends the kids from Lafanmi Selavi, our center for
street children, come to our house to spend time, to share food, talk,
play and swim in the swimming pool. It is a small pool, too small for
400 kids, but for them it is a piece of paradise. Sometimes we invite
children from other parishes in Port-au-Prince. Sometimes a Lafanmi
Selavi bus goes to Cité Soleil, to La Saline, to Carrefour to pick up
children who want to swim.
This experience, which may appear at first as merely symbolic, has
tremendous ramifications. In a country where only 20 percent of the
population have access to clean drinking water, swimming pools are
exclusively for the rich. There is not a single public swimming pool in
Haiti. The pool itself is a symbol of the elite.
We know the kids need food, we know they need school, but we cannot
give all of them these things in a day. So while we are working to
change the society, we can give them a day in a swimming pool. We say no
child is so poor she does not deserve to swim in a pool. And if you
imagine this has no impact on the society, think again.
The kids swim with us, with their teachers, with a group of
agronomists who work with them on Saturdays, and with American friends
and volunteers working at Lafanmi Selavi. A mix of races and social
classes in the same water. Sometimes these images have appeared on
television. Shortly after we began this experience we started hearing
reports from friends among the upper classes of rumors that I was
preparing these
vagabon, these street children, to invade their
swimming pools. Were it not tragic it would be comic. Perhaps the real
root of the fear is this: If a maid in a wealthy home sees children from
Cité Soleil swimming in a swimming pool on television, she may begin to
ask why her child cannot swim in the pool of her boss.
So it is a system of social apartheid that we are questioning. We saw
the same phenomena during the civil rights movement in the United
States where attempts to integrate beaches and swimming pools met with
some of the worst violence of the period. The same was true in South
Africa. What we are facing in Haiti is a form of apartheid. There are no
laws on the books enforcing segregation, but the social and economic
forces at play are so powerful they create a de facto apartheid.
The polarizations are many: literate/illiterate, rich/poor,
black/white, male/female, those who have clean water to drink/those who
don’t. In Haiti, where these polarities remain so strong, swimming in
the same water has both psychological and social repercussions. You swim
with people you are close to. If you are a family, if you are a
community, swimming together may improve the quality of the
relationship. Our experience has shown that the water can help to melt
the barriers between us, and wash away the dirt of prejudice.
Officially, slavery no longer exists in Haiti. But through the lives of children in Haiti who live as
restaveks we see the remnants of slavery.
Restaveks are
children, usually girls, sometimes as young as three and four years
old, who live in the majority of Haitian families as unpaid domestic
workers. They are the first to get up in the morning and the last to go
to bed at night.
They carry water, clean house, do errands and receive no salary.
Often they are from the countryside; their parents send them to the city
in the hope that the family they live with will give them food and send
them to school. The family that takes in the
restavek is more
often than not just one rung up on the economic ladder. Most families
struggle to send their own children to school -- let alone the
restavek. So most often
restavek children
are not in school; they eat what is left when the others are finished,
and they are extremely vulnerable to verbal, physical and sexual abuse.
Officially, Haiti is a free country. But through the economic life of
the country we see the remnants of colonialism. Ours is an economy of
dependence, a
restavek economy. Because of foreign food imports
our agricultural production has fallen to historic lows. Because we
export little our currency is weak. Haitian workers earn the lowest
wages in the hemisphere. We are encouraged to exploit and maintain this
so-called advantage to attract foreign companies to come. Because our
economy is weak we depend on loans and aid from foreign countries to
support our national budget. This makes us extremely vulnerable to
pressure from international institutions that control the money.
Bertony was a
restavek when we met him. He came to the house
with a group of children from our neighborhood to spend the day. He was
five years old. That day Bertony played, swam and ate all he wanted.
When he went home he bragged to the children of the family with whom he
lived about this rare day. When the parents heard, they were angry. They
would not stand to have this little
restavek teasing their own
children who had not enjoyed such privilege. They threw Bertony out,
saying that if he was such a big man he should go back to Aristide’s
house. Bertony had broken the first rule of the
restavek. The
restavek has
no right to speak. Fortunately, Bertony, being a very clever boy, found
his way to Lafanmi Selavi, where he quickly became integrated into the
life of the house, going to school and working at the kids’ radio
station. Today seven-year-old Bertony is a journalist at Radyo Timoun.
He not only speaks; the whole country hears him.
Another story came to us after the visit of the famous
Haitian-American rap group the Fugees. They played a concert for the
rich at Haiti’s Club Med. The lead singer was once himself a very poor
child growing up in Port-au-Prince. And he continually reminded the
crowd of this. One of the concert-goers was heard to say that the singer
did not need to keep talking as this would just make the kids in the
street
plis sou moun. The closest translation is, "they will
think they are somebody." Another person, talking about the kids
swimming in the pool I will clean it. But if one of Aristide’s dogs
falls in my pool they will be swimming in their own blood."
In 1991, on the first day of my presidency, I invited the poor to
breakfast. The palace doors, forever closed to them, were opened. To
this day many among the elite feel that the palace has been dirtied by
the presence of the of the poor. At the time the response was the coup
d’état which did indeed bathe the country in blood.
How do we wash away the dirt of prejudice? Little by little? With a cleansing flood?
When my daughter was born in 1996, we asked, Where should we baptize
her? In this country of rigid social delineation, the place that we
chose Lafanmi Selavi. There at the house, among the children of the
streets, and in the presence of many friends of all social classes,
Christine was baptized by her godfather, Bishop Willy Romélus. The water
of life can baptize us all new. One people, God’s children, swimming
together in the water of life.
In Haiti’s countryside the people are crying out or the water of
life, too. The 70 percent of Haiti’s population that lives in the
countryside needs water to grow the food that can feed the country. If
Haiti is to be economically independent, we must be able to feed
ourselves. To do that we must heal the land. We can trace the roots of
our current ecological crisis to Haiti’s heavy debt to France in the
19th century, which encouraged the logging of Haiti’s tropical forests
for export to Europe. Today only 3 percent of our forests remain.
Without the trees to hold the soil, 1 percent of Haiti’s topsoil washes
to sea each year, driving Haiti’s peasant farmers further into poverty
as the land produces less and less each year.
Since our independence in 1804, every Haitian government has governed
on the backs of the peasants, taxing their produce and giving nothing
back in return. A deep chasm between people in the countryside and
people in the capital has always existed. This chasm is inscribed in the
language. Anyone who lives outside of Port-au-Prince is called
moun andeyò -- literally, "outside people," outsiders. And the language was inscribed in the law. Historically,
paysanne ("peasant,"
in French) was listed on the birth certificates of anyone born outside
Port-au-Prince. When I became president in 1991, by presidential decree
we changed the law, so that now all birth certificates are the same. Now
we must keep working to change the language -- and the realities of
life in the countryside.
On our continent, the banking industry has grown from 40 percent of
the economy to 57 percent over the past ten years, while agriculture has
shrunk from 30 percent to 15 percent over the same period. In Haiti,
agriculture was 50 percent of our gross national product ten years ago
-- now it is only 28 percent. The banks in Haiti extend only 2 percent
of their lending to the agricultural sector. How can we ask the poor,
who are mostly peasants, to put their money in these banks?
Article 247 of the Haitian constitution says, "Agriculture is the
principal wealth of the nation and the guarantee of the well-being of
the population." Yes, but where will we find water to irrigate the land?
If only 2 percent of bank lending goes to agriculture, how will the
peasants have money to irrigate, to buy water pumps, to buy seeds, to
invest in the land?
In the world at large we see this same picture: 3.1 billion people
make their living in agriculture. Their lives are on a collision course
with globalization. They cannot compete with industrialized Western
agriculture with its heavy use of pesticides and fertilizers. And yet
the world economy is not creating new jobs for them. What will they do?
Peasants are forced off their land and move to overcrowded cities
where they find neither jobs nor health care, nor schools for their
children, nor even clean water to drink. The people follow the land.
After the trees are cut from the mountains, the soil washes to the
plains and the people follow. When the soil washes away from the plains,
the people once again follow, moving to the slums of cities by the sea.
The economically powerful are not protecting the land, the trees, the
soil or the people who have existed on this land for generations. Can
we expect that aid programs will help our environment or our people who
depend on the land? If 84 cents of every dollar is going back to the
donor country, how much is left for water for the peasants? Or for trees
to hold the water and the soil? The question is dramatic. What will we
do to have water?
We are at the millennium and there is still no water for the people
to drink -- let alone water for the land. Sometimes foreigners think we
are lazy, asking for food, asking for handouts. But in fact we are
asking for water. In our rich country, where the sun shines every day, I
assure you that if we have water, we will grow the food we need to eat.
Some may ask how a strategy of national development based on
agriculture can possibly succeed in this day and age, in the face of the
macroeconomic realities we are facing. In fact, we cannot know for
sure. But what we can be sure of is that as long as Haitian governments
continue to receive instructions from international institutions we will
move from the same to the same, the same program to the same program,
from bad to worse.
On the other side, if we see organizations in Haiti among civil
society looking for strategies that come from the people, this
represents a candle in the night. Hope in a night of despair. We can
offer an alternative -- an alternative that will not make us rich, but
may at least save us from starvation and lead us to poverty with
dignity. If what we propose is not perfect, what they proposed has
already demonstrated how disastrous it is.
This is a strategy for subsistence, for survival. And that is just
what the poor have always done in the face of macroeconomic realities
that have never been favorable.
The neoliberal strategy is to weaken the state in order to have the
private sector replace the state. Through cooperatives we can perhaps
preserve some margin of public services. Without a national mobilization
of human resources, we will never be able to create a balance between
that economic power and that human power. The human power in my country
is the huge majority of the poor. The economic power is that tiny 1
percent that controls 45 percent of the wealth.
The coup d’état of 1991 showed how terribly afraid the 1 percent is
of the mobilization of the poor. They are afraid of those under the
table -- afraid they will see what is on the table. Afraid of those in
Cité Soleil, that they will become impatient with their own misery.
Afraid of the peasants, that they will not be
moun andeyò anymore.
They are afraid that those who cannot read will learn how to read. They
are afraid that those who speak Creole will learn French, and no longer
feel inferior. They are afraid of the poor entering the palace, of the
street children swimming in the pool. They are not afraid of me. They
are afraid that what I say may help the poor to see.
But in the end, on this small planet, we are all swimming in the same water.
