"Today Is a Day To Remember"

— By Mac McClelland

| Wed Jan. 12, 2011 1:20 PM PST

"Today is a day to remember," said a mid-fifties man outside the Ministry of Health in Port-au-Prince this morning. "Not a day for protest."

But not everyone agreed with him on how to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands of Haitians. A group whose name roughly translates to Interceptive Resistance Against Forces That Expel gathered outside the government building to protest displaced people being thrown forcibly, and sometimes violently, out of their tent camps by police or landowners.

Photos by Mark Murrmann

After a prayer ceremony in the middle of the street, they took to marching and chanting slogans against MINUSTAH, theunpopular United Nations force supposed to keep the peace. They yelled that all they'd gotten from foreigners is cholera(repeating a common conspiracy theory) when what they really need is houses, that Haitians need to take their own country back. They spray painted the sidewalks and a Red Cross car with "Down With NGOs," covered a UN ambulance with graffiti, and threw rocks at a passing truck full of heavily armed MINUSTAH soldiers.

Though they were intense, these protesters numbered less than a hundred. As the man outside the ministry pointed out, most people spent the day remembering. Throughout town, groups, many religious, organized walks and tributes. Thousands packed a "celebration of life" of songs and prayers near the national palace. The marches and impromptu dance parties were upbeat, with a lot of singing and shouting and, in some cases, moonshine.

Even yesterday, at the ceremony held at the mass graves on the edge of the city, only one woman was prominently crying. (So many photographers crowded to take pictures of her that her friends eventually covered her face.) And today's protest at the ministry started off on a weirdly celebratory note. As the demonstrators amassed and prepared to start hollering for reform, a police brass marching band struck up a happy tune.

Clinton, Ninjas, and Protests: Snapshots Of Haiti
— By Mac McClelland| Wed Jan. 12, 2011 12:21 PM PST
Today's the one-year anniversary of the Haitian earthquake. Here are some scenes from my first few days back in the country reporting on its post-quake progress—and lack of it. (For more pix as they happen, follow me on Twitter.)

Photos by Mac McClelland

Big Bill Clinton fans at a Port-au-Prince demonstration today.



Protesters just spray painted the shit out of this Red Cross car.



Nobody knows how many thousands of bodies were dumped in these mass graves, but these dusty gravel lots are massive. They've set up crosses here so officials can hang wreaths on them.



And hello, former president Clinton!



There's a lot of people remembering the dead outside the busted cathedral. They're praying. The chant is, "I have no job. I can't pay the rent. I need some money."



There's a porn theater in this Port-au-Prince tent city. The 20-year old who runs it charges 25 cents per person to watch movies on a wooden bench in the tent.



Actually, they also sometimes show movies about ninjas.





































Rebuilding Haiti for the Rich
— By Mac McClelland| Tue Jan. 11, 2011 3:00 AM PST
— Photos by Mark Murrmann

"My buddy who's in town with Fox wants to know why Haiti looks exactly the same as after the quake," my Haitian friend texted me the other day. My driver, Sam, has expressed a similar assessment about the lack of progress. But driving around Port-au-Prince today, there was all sorts of rebuilding under way.

Take, for example, Fort National, an area that's a little ways up a hill and is covered with destroyed structures: crumbling cement-block frames, exposed rebar. The government announced on TV the other day that they're launching a giant rebuilding project, lots of apartments you can move into and rent to own. The pictures of what it will all look like when it's done are very impressive. But they haven't started yet.


Okay. A better example is the First National City Bank, a giant ruined structure that used to take up a corner of a busy intersection but is now an almost entirely cleared lot. A Caterpillar bulldozer breaks up the remaining large pieces, with about half a dozen construction workers and 10 scrappers to every one of them. The workers destroy another chunk; the scrappers swarm quickly with saws and little sledgehammers to pull out sellable bits in a chaos of dust and sharp edges. Makelo, a 29-year-old with an armful of rebar, says he makes way more money—several hundred dollars a week—than he did before the quake, when he sold charcoal.
Our conversation halts when a fight breaks out among some scrappers, who are pushing and shoving over a newly smashed, potentially lucrative block of building, and the workers start pushing and shoving them away from the lot. "We shoo them away because this equipment is dangerous and sometimes people get hurt or killed," says Etienne, the 28-year-old site manager. "They shoo them away because they want to keep the good scraps to themselves," Sam says. There is fresh blood on the ground near my left foot.


Nearby, workers are filling in the concrete frame of a big building their boss says will be done later this month. Three apartments on top, several storefronts on the bottom. What stood here before has been completely demolished, and they've been working on this for a couple of months. It's supposed to be done at the end of the month, at a total cost of about $70,000. A little further up some winding roads beyond the heaviest bustle of the city, in Vivy Mitchell, there are crews everywhere, too. Fixing stone walls around recently fixed houses, building a house where a broken house was just torn down.
"People have started reconstructing themselves lately," Sam allows once when I keep commenting that many are definitely hard at work on rebuilding, though usually he responds, "There are many more to be rebuilt," or "This is only a few." "Everyone was waiting for the government to do something, and now it's been so long they know the government isn't going to help them, so they are doing it themselves," he says, although he adds, "Only people who have the money."

The prevalence of rich people's development versus the total lack of it for the poor is pointed out to me again later. In response to my description of what I saw, even a wealthy person at my hotel gives me the kind of look that one might level at a particularly disappointing child. "That's all private-sector rebuilding," he says. "That's to be expected." And you cannot, and would not ever, deny that the work needs to be bigger and harder and faster. There are still a million people in tent camps.

"Still, it looks better than it did in September," I say.

"Of course it's better!" Sam says. "There's hope. Every day, the more time that passes after the earthquake, the people have a little bit more hope."


In Search of Progress in Haiti
— By Mac McClelland| Mon Jan. 10, 2011 3:00 AM PST
— Mark Murrmann

This week (or Wednesday, to be specific) is the one-year anniversary of the Haitian earthquake. As it turns out, there's less media in Port-au-Prince than everyone had been expecting. There were indeed CNN cameramen on our flight, and there's more press than on maybe any given Sunday, but it's not exactly a circus. Our popular hotel seems half-deserted. As in, my photographer (MoJo photo editor Mark Murrmann) and I met with our new driver today, and he said many of the fixers are looking for work, calling each other, saying, Where are the reporters? Where's the work at? Does anyone know any reporters who need drivers?

And there's all sorts of events for us, like a soccer match played between two teams of amputees tomorrow, and the launching, finally, of some government housing projects, and junkets coordinated by what the long-embedded press agrees is a veritable army of PR consultants hired for the anniversary.

So what am I doing in Haiti? We'll see, but possibly some follow-up on whatever happened to the aid dollars Americans pledged last year. (A lot of those dollars went to organizations spearheaded by Bill Clinton, who is also the cochair of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission. But he was appointed under outgoing President René Preval, and there's a new election soon, and Clinton isn't a Haitian, so Haitians could see to his forced uninvolvement if they see fit. "We could fuck him so good..." says a wealthy Haitian drinking at the hotel bar.) Possibly some check-in with the underresourced rape survivors mightily battling the stupendous prevalence of sexual violence, which has actually gotten worse since the quake, but has long been a staple of Haitian society. (We had not even left the airport when I ran into a shady guy who threatened me last time I was here. And had only just been delivered our dinner at the hotel restaurant when a patron sat down with us to explain to my photographer that if you lost your erection while trying to rape a woman, you'd have to resort to violating her with a bottle, or a piece of wood, or maybe even a pen—which he helpfully pulled out of his pocket for demonstrative purposes—at which point Mark promptly slid his tumbler full of white rum under my face, which had surely gone tight with horror.) Probably we'll spend a little time with some construction crews picking up the pieces of the destruction that are still everywhere. And definitely we'll be on top of the results of the election commission, which is supposed to announce its investigation into fraud during November's race, which may result in widespread riots.

Bottom line is, we'll be looking into some of the aspects of progress over the last year. Though as we found out today, the usage of that noun is, incidentally, completely hilarious in post-quake Haiti. As in:

Photographer [to Haitian-born driver who wants to know why we're here]: You know, we're looking at various kinds of progress since the earthquake—

Driver: Progress! Ha ha ha ha ha ha...

Photographer and I: Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Sorry. Well, you know...

Yeah.