This broken, desperate country needs our help

IT was seven years ago almost to the day that I arrived in Haiti, on what proved to be the most thought-provoking trip of my life.

It was after reviewing a performance by the Haitian band RAM at the Roses Theatre in Tewkesbury for the Evesham Journal, sister paper of your Worcester News, that I decided to visit.

I had long been fascinated by Haiti’s unique culture and history, and wanted to discover more.

The world’s first slave republic – defying Napoleon to win independence in 1804 – it had impressed itself on my imagination as a place that should never have existed, but somehow survived in the shadow of the impossible.

The Haitians have condensed their view of the world into an unofficial national motto: ‘Beyond the mountains, there are more mountains’.

Occupying the western fringe of the island of Hispañola, most Haitians live on the coastal plain, beneath the looming heights of mountains made perilously unstable by deforestation.

From the top of this crumbling escarpment can be seen yet higher mountains, purple in the distance, and, from them, more mountains are visible.

But there is more to their motto than the lie of the land. It expresses a belief that mankind can reach the divine in small human steps.

Every day, Haitians will pray to the Loa – the spirits of voodoo – and perhaps take part in a ceremony. However, come Sunday, without fail, they will raise their voices to communicate with a more distant and lofty god, before a Catholic altar.

It also explains their absurd optimism. No matter how poor, they see every day as a mountain to be climbed, in search of a new vantage point to a better tomorrow – Loa and Jesus permitting, of course.

Every house or shack in Port-au-Prince is brightly painted with the offer of some service or other. Maybe hairdressing, car maintenance, fortune telling, shoe repair or translation. Nobody is ever idle.

This belief that – with the right supernatural support – everyone can hope for the view of a new horizon starts early in life. Education is an obsession.

Once, I found myself in a neighbourhood of corrugated tin sheds seemingly floating in a morass of brown goo.

My shoes sank into indescribable filth at every step.

I found a small hole-in-the-wall shop, fronted by a wood-slatted platform, inches above the mud, and stopped to plot the least unpleasant route back to the potholed city centre.

As I drank a warm beer, I saw a party of schoolchildren, boys and girls, all wearing the whitest, most pristine and pressed uniforms I had ever seen.

With incredible grace, they seemed to dance over the corruption beneath their feet.

They made their way to school without a single fleck of dirt on their impossibly perfect clothes. I can’t begin to imagine the super-human effort their parents – most likely living in squalid conditions – made to send them out like that.

However, I saw a lot in Haiti that filled me with despair: An old man lying face down, drinking the milky fluid that dribbled along an open sewer as people walked by, indifferent; policemen, in plump middle age, sitting on a cafe terrace, collecting bribes from all who had something to give. It is easy to conclude that emergency aid sent to Haiti will be diverted to the coffers of the rich and corrupt. Some of it will. Some will simply be lost amid the chaos. Some may be burned as offerings to the Loa. But this isn’t a reason to not give.

Seven years ago, I went to a broken and desperate country that had nothing apart from a strange sort of superstitious optimism and a 200-year history of endurance against seemingly insurmountable odds. I’ll never really understand the place and I’ll never have the words to properly describe it. In Greek mythology, when Pandora’s box was opened, all the ills of the world poured out, with ‘hope’ the only consolation.

This is all the Haitians seemed to have, and somehow it sustained them.

I fear that now these wonderful, infuriating and improbable people may not be able to see beyond the heap of despair and destruction that has recently overwhelmed them. We needn’t give much – they are used to surviving with nothing – but we must give them hope there is something beyond the next mountain.

Haiti: The shocking truth

Population: 10,033,000.

Capital: Port-au-Prince.

Location: Haiti is in the Caribbean and shares the island of Hispañola with the Dominican Republic.

Languages: French Creole.

History: Achieved independence from France in 1804.

Healthcare: Only 40 per cent of the population have access to basic health care.

Disease: About half of the deaths in the country are caused by HIV/Aids and diseases such as meninigitis, cholera and typhoid.

Economy: Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and one of the poorest in the world.