Day Minus 2: Through no mans land
I landed in Haiti on Monday, April 10th 2023 to bring food to the starving individuals and families of Haiti. My non-profit StimPack, had received a $300k donation from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints intended to purchase food for distribution. We had lined up about 500k lbs of rice to be distributed in the cities of Jacmel and Cite Soleil. Jacmel is a beautiful small city on the southern coast of Haiti. Cite Soleil is a ghetto just east of the Port au Prince Airport. These areas were selected in coordination with The World Food Programme as they were areas that were in dire need and they had yet to be able to sufficiently serve them. Jacmel was in trouble because all routes to reach them with goods and services from the port were blocked by gangs. The goods that were in fact able to cross the gang check points were required to pay a “toll” fee to the gangs in order to pass through. This had driven up the price of just about everything in Jacmel. Food and fuel could be as much as triple the price one might have paid only a year previous. With prices so high, those people of Jacmel that might have been at risk of starvation a year prior, were now dying of hunger.
When my driver picked me up from the Airport that morning, we first spent a couple hours trying to find cash and fuel - both errands were complicated by what have become fairly typical obstacles in Haiti such as road blocks, long lines, and currency hoarding. Once we had what we needed we started driving to Jacmel. In order to avoid gang territory, we would normally hire a pilot and rent a small plane in order to fly to Jacmel. However, a few months before this trip, one of the key airlines within Haiti ceased operations citing security concerns. That meant that the pilot and plane I needed was already booked out for months ahead. We were going to have to drive to Jacmel.
A week prior, I had asked my security guy, DJ to see if he could get us to Jacmel safely over ground. The three main routes were each controlled by a different gang and each presented its own challenges. When DJ informed me that he had found a close friend of his that could guide us through the Martissant route safely, I trusted him. I had been to that area several times in the past. It was always a dangerous place but I also knew that since my last visit the police station had been destroyed and the gangs had completely taken over. I had heard that the gangs were even formalizing their toll process by creating an actual form that they expected you to fill out. I had seen the PDF of the form being passed around on WhatsApp. Most laughed at the notion that the gangs seemed to be attempting be appear like some sort of legitimate government.
DJ and I rented a fairly new white Toyota Hillux truck (in DJ’s name to avoid scams) for the road trip. DJ said he didn’t trust his own SUV to make the drive. In retrospect I’m not sure his concerns were not more fully centered on the possibility of losing his SUV to the gangs.
Martissant Haiti 2021. Photo Credit: Dominican Today
We drove the truck to the Sylvio Cator Stadium to meet DJ’s friend Reggie. Reggie is an off duty bus driver. His normal route is from the PaP airport to Léogâne which goes right through Martissant. Because he crosses the exact gang check point we will need to cross, he has assured us that we will have no problem crossing. He has contacted the gang member he pays his normal toll to and gotten clearance for us to pass. And with that, we start driving from the Stadium, toward Jacmel, through Martissant. As we enter Martissant, DJ and Reggie each roll their windows down, open a bottle of rum and seem to flip a switch to take on a thug like persona. They are trying to blend in and not appear as a threat or a target to the gang we are about to encounter. I am sitting in the back seat with the tinted windows rolled up.
Within minutes I am taken aback by the destruction that has taken place since my previous trip through this city just 2.5 years earlier. Most businesses along the road are gone. The homes in sight are empty. The road is now flooded with water and thick mud. Bullet holes abound. Much of the rest of PaP is a wreck, slums and trash are piled high, terrible smells are at times oppressive, poverty is heavily visible and seemingly everywhere. Over time you get used to it. However, as we pull into Martissant, it is different. This is dystopian desolation. This is what it looks like when an area has become uncivilized. The people seem to have scattered some time ago. We went by a large police station that was void of police. We eventually got deep enough into Martissant that we began to see people again. It was as if there was some sort of no-mans-land separating them from the rest of PaP by a few blocks. I began to see gang soldiers along the side of the road with their signature assault rifles on display. I’ve become used to this site as our food distributions are often done within gang territory. Sometimes the gangs are heavily involved and even taking credit for the public service we provide in order to boost their standing with the locals. Other times the gangs are simply allowing us entrance and watching from afar. So to see them around is normal to me and they don’t seem to care about us either as we drive by. We pull up to a very official looking gang check point/toll booth. There are several gang members sitting on chairs under a blue sun umbrella, not unlike the one I’d set up for my family at the beach in South Florida days earlier. I expect us to pull up and chat with them and perhaps even see the now famous ‘toll forms’ I’d seen and heard about. We did none of that. We just drove right by it with a head nod. They were expecting us. Reggie was a familiar face. No problem. Breathe easy.
We continued on a few miles and then dropped Reggie off along the road side. He would take a moto taxi back home. We continued our road trip to Jacmel through a rough but not gang controlled Carrefour and then on through Léogâne, a beautiful and relatively safe farming city known for their Dous Makos, a favorite treat among Haitians. We bought a bag of Mangos to bring to the hotel (it’s important to note that I am addicted to mangos - it’s kind of a problem). We arrived in Jacmel around 5pm. A trip that might take about ninety minutes in the US had taken us about 3.5 hours.
We began to arrange for our planned food distributions the following day by connecting with our team of volunteers in Jacmel, getting a sit rep from them, and addressing any issues for the next day. The plan was to rent several trucks, load them up with 1000 27.5lbs bags of rice, deliver those bags to approximately 25 separate organizations.
Feeding starving people is joyous work. However, it has a few significant challenges that make it a bit of a struggle. One of those challenges is that nearly everyone in Haiti is hungry. Unfortunately, we don’t have the resources to feed everyone. That means that I must draw a difficult distinction between hungry people and starving people. Starving people are dying from their hunger. We do our best to find the most desperate people in Haiti and feed them. However, it is extremely difficult to feed starving people without also feeding people who are simply hungry because hungry people don’t typically see any distinction between starving and hungry. So when we chose the 25 organizations to receive our 1000 sacks of rice, we did so with the hope that a few of them would be able to help us identify individuals with the most critical need, as well as the ability to distribute the food safely and effectively. Those organizations with the greatest potential would receive a significantly larger quantity of food from us the following day when we expected to distribute an additional 2000 sacks of rice.
