Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

Terry said, “What’s the color of my skin? Basically pink and rosy? I’m not Haitian. I can’t vote. If I were from around here, and thank fucking Christ I’m not, you’d have my vote. But could you give it a rest?”

The judge looked forlorn. I regret now that I didn’t tell him that I found his conversation interesting.

The airport flashed by on the seaward side of the road.

“Slow down, brother,” the judge said. “We’ll get there when we get there.”

“I got to take a shit,” Terry said.

“Be that as it may, son, you hit a donkey or a kid, I’ll be the Haitian judge who puts you in a prison cell.”

I couldn’t figure out if this was banter or something rawer: two men, too many hours alone in a car together.

I said, “Johel, I thought UN personnel had immunity here in Haiti.”

He looked over his shoulder at me. “Well, they do, technically speaking. But it can be a long while before the court orders his release.”

Whatever internal censor deployed in response to Terry’s reproach was lifted, and the judge began to discourse on the history of United Nations Peacekeeping in Haiti, and the Status of Forces Agreement under which the government of Haiti accepted the presence of ten thousand foreign troops.

Terry said, “These aren’t billable hours, are they?”

The judge chuckled good-naturedly. “Alas, no. Those were beautiful, bountiful days.”

“You miss it?” I asked.

Now he was serious, and I liked him for his earnest face. He said, “Just look at it, how beautiful it is out there. This is some kind of beautiful country.”

The peasants had burned the hillside the year before, and it had grown back in tender shades of green and lilac. Bright flowers, as red as poppies but broader-leafed, broke through the new foliage. The sky was a blue just a shade darker than any sky I had ever seen. In the gap between hills, there was the sea.

* * *

(All that keen, nerdish enthusiasm on the subject of the vegetables of the Grand’Anse — this was Johel Célestin at his very best. If anyone ever asks me one day to tell them all about Johel Célestin, that’s where I’d start — with the vegetables.

(By no vegetables, the judge meant no tomatoes, no eggplant, no zucchini, no cucumbers, no lettuce, no spinach, no broccoli, no chard, no snap peas, no green peas, no snow peas, no green beans, no corn, no arugula, no endive, and certainly no radicchio. Cabbage, carrots, potatoes, and garlic were imported on the weekly boat from Port-au-Prince, usually arriving bedraggled, mildewed, rotten, and nasty. Otherwise, we had the occasional okra, plantains, sweet potatoes, many varieties of beans, breadfruit, manioc, yam e basta .

(Let me now eliminate the hypothesis that local farmers did not grow vegetables because they were not to the taste of the population. These vegetables were all for sale in the markets of Port-au-Prince and other provincial cities: a cook in Cap-Haïtien would have found an eggplant or a tomato as commonplace as you would. I think it’s fair to say that the absence of vegetables was in the most literal sense a failure of the market, as in: no vegetables in the market, despite demand.

(The effect of the dearth of vegetables was twofold: on the one hand, the diet was impoverished, both from the point of view of taste and nutritional diversity; but it also created greater poverty, because vegetable gardens in other places in Haiti were tended by women as a supplemental source of income. Generally speaking, food in Jérémie was in short supply and incomes limited. Vegetable gardens would have helped to resolve both issues.

(The absence of vegetables from the market was in fact just the last link in a catena of market failures. Begin with seeds — if you can find them. You won’t find vegetable seeds in Jérémie, however. A small farmer who wished to supplement his meager income by growing tomatoes was immediately foiled: no shop or merchant in Jérémie sold seeds. This is so astounding a fact it requires repetition: no shop or merchant in the leading city of a province subsisting exclusively on agriculture sold the sine qua non of life. Not even in Port-au-Prince could one easily find vegetable seeds: nobody was importing seeds on a commercial scale to Haiti. And why was this? Because just about every year I was in Haiti, bureaucrats from the WFP and the FAO and USAID, reproducing the glory that was Soviet agronomics, would launch some new program giving away bushels of seeds to farmers, hoping to stimulate local production of vegetables. Somehow the programs inevitably faltered — either failing to produce marketable goods or failing to produce goods for which there was demand, or by providing the appropriate seeds, but not fertilizer, or by providing seeds for a hardy bean that tasted like cow dung — but succeeded in choking the market for seeds. Who would buy tomato seeds when mung bean seeds were being given away freely? And who would import seeds and invest in a distribution network when in competition with the immense resources of the international aid community?

(Suppose, however, you did find seeds. Then you were faced with the triple problem of fertilizer, insecticide, and water. Fertilizer and insecticide could be found in Jérémie, but both were expensive. The absence of a road from Port-au-Prince meant that everything imported was imported on the boat by small merchants, buying from middlemen in Port-au-Prince who themselves imported from the States or the Dominican Republic. Moreover, fertilizer distribution in Haiti has been as compromised by the interference of central planners, both in the form of Haitian state and foreign aid, as seed distribution. Depending on the whims of foreign bureaucrats (in this case, largely Japanese bureaucrats, offering Japanese fertilizer to Haitian peasants) the government of Haiti has either subsidized or failed to subsidize the price of fertilizer: the price rises and lowers dramatically from year to year. As a result, honest fertilizer importers are driven out of the market in bad years, producing a country of peasant farmers for whom it is frequently impossible to buy fertilizer. Anyone who has ever attempted to grow a tomato will testify that without fertilizer or insecticide, your results are probably going to be sad. The tomato is a heartbreaking plant.

(Then there was the problem of good old H 2O. Basically, water in the Grand’Anse was what fell from the sky or what you carried on your head. A cement cistern to catch rainwater was to the Haitian peasant a luxurious dream. Even if you lived in that rare community serviced by a well, most of the population still needed to lug water in a plastic bucket the last kilometer to the house; lots of people lugged water much, much farther. So agriculture in the Grand’Anse depended exclusively on rainwater. Vegetables, to a far greater extent than coffee, say, or cocoa or plantains, require regular irrigation.

(Even in the city, water was undependable, mercy to the whimsy of one Monsieur Theobald Augustin Darcy, an employee of the municipal water company. If sober, for a bribe of one hundred gourdes, or about three dollars, Monsieur Darcy would unlock a cement cabinet up the hill from us, turn a little knob, and replenish our water tank. This was high luxury: the average folks in Jérémie sent their children out with five-gallon buckets. But left to his own devices, Monsieur Darcy would forget to do his duty and our house would be dry. Our tomatoes, zucchini, and eggplants were promising until Monsieur Darcy went on a monumental bender one late-summer weekend, in the course of which he lost his key ring. I am not exaggerating when I say that a goodly portion of the population of Jérémie was enlisted in the hunt for Monsieur Darcy’s keys, and by the time they were retrieved, the hot sun had killed our tender tomatoes.