Peter Costellotime forgot
Anne Heffernan
(Buy the Book and other online resources, €15.00 / £13.50)
Anne Heffernan is an Irish journalist with wide local experience, but the year she passed as a volunteer aid worker in a remote area of the Republic of Haiti was quite beyond her expectations.
She flew out from Ireland by way of Atlanta to land in the capital Port-au-Prince, from where she was whisked directly by road to the district of Jean Rabel, in the remote north west of the island.
This was a well populated place, so at first she wondered why it was seen as remote. Slowly she realised that there are grades of remoteness. She was there to teach the local people, or rather local women, about computers and internet connections. Thanks to our very own Denis O’Brien the Island was connected up by digital phones to the wider world; but in daily life this meant little.
Challenges
The people were poor, amongst the poorest in the world, and worked constantly to keep themselves fed and watered, and to maintain a roof on their little homes. They grew bananas, fruit and other things in their little plots and farms, raising as well a few scrawny chickens. Pigs too were reared, but as in Victorian Ireland, they were taken to market to be sold for the cash now essential to survival.
Despite all the hardship around her, and the difficulties she faced, Anne Heffernan came to greatly admire the people she worked with and for. She was initially struck at how well they were turned out for Mass on Sundays and for school and work: clean shirts, shorts and dresses, and above all, well polished shoes. There were none of them in rags. They might be poor and hard pressed but they had great self respect.
She had her tasks to do in co-operation with those aid workers already in place, who quickly became her friends. Indeed this book is devoted to what she saw and did. She leaves little space to the more notorious and well chronicled aspects of Haiti past and present.
There is more to Jean Rabel than Heffernan reports: back in July 1987 it was the scene of a notorious massacre of peasants by other peasants instigated by the landlords, an ugly incident of the post-Duvalier years. Her readers should bear in mind that though she is true to her own experience, what she saw and felt is only a small part of Haiti’s long and complicated history, which has only been told in part as yet.
In this system our own St Patrick even finds a place as protector of people against the ravages of snakes”
She participates in their lives as Catholics. In all the 170 pages of the book there is not a single reference to vaudou (the sensationalised syncretism beliefs of the people), which incorporate traditional beliefs from the Bight of Benin region of Africa with French piety.
In this system our own St Patrick even finds a place as protector of people against the ravages of snakes: many homes have an oleograph of him hanging on the walls. Anne Heffernan, however, sees them as Catholics, and so relates them and their lives directly to her own people at home in Ireland. There is a passing reference to the small churches being set up by evangelical and other Protestant pastors, but it is not seen as an important matter.
She says little about the past history of Haiti since its ‘discovery’ by Columbus in 1492 – which proved to be a disaster for the gentle native Caribs. They were soon wiped out through violence and disease and the Catholic Spanish began the practice of importing slaves from the Bight of Benin.
She glides over the formative period of the occupation of the island by the US Marines from 1915 to 1934. They ‘pacified’ the troubled country in the only way they were trained to do, by shooting the ‘troublemakers’ where they found them.
Restoration
For Anne Heffernan though history begins with the Duvaliers, Papa Doc and his son Baby Doc. This is the grim era described in Graham Greene’s novel The Comedians (1961). Haiti became accustomed to the rule of the Tonton Macoute ruffians in Port-au-Prince.
While trying to sort out a problem with her three month visa, which had to be renewed by leaving Haiti briefly and then returning, she spent a little while in the capital. Though she had a cheap hotel room, she spent most of her time with her laptop in the Marriott Hotel, which was a startling contrast to what she had known before. Here the elites of Haiti and the rich tourists from the First World came under eye, for there are rich leisured people on the island who are well educated and well off.
Her visa sorted she returned to her own people in Jean Rabel, leaving the capital living with the aftermath of the contrived assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021.
Heffernan returned to Jean Rabel and her daily routine. a matter of day trips, new homes and visiting. The book concludes on a sobering note with the death in a road accident of a colleague in the aid group.
Indeed it is the kind of scene unchanged perhaps since Haiti gained its independence”
She returned to Ireland to pray for Haiti, whose people she had come to love and admire, but whose leaders have for over three centuries and more failed them almost completely. Almost, but not fully.
Haiti is a country with a future if peace can be restored. But whether the United Nations and the Kenyan Armed forces aiding them can restore social order and some sort of democratic rule comes again to Haiti remains to be seen. At present there is no national assembly, no real government, and no real justice.
The cover image of a young girl mounted on her donkey carrying her baskets of fresh bananas – a Haitian staple – to the local market invokes both the steaming heat, the rain soaked jungle and impoverished nature of the place. Indeed it is the kind of scene unchanged perhaps since Haiti gained its independence on January 1, 1804.
Though she might have been better served in some ways by the firm who produced her book, Anne Heffernan’s memoir of life in the Third World deserves to be widely read.
And, by the way, she is also the author of Our Boom-time Rats: Who Do They Think They Are?, in which her views on our common island home are trenchantly set out, from Third World to First World with a vengeance.
(Profits from her books will go towards raising much needed funds for the people of Jean Rabel.)
Whether the United Nations and the Kenyan Armed forces aiding them can restore social order and some sort of democratic rule comes again to Haiti remains to be seen”