In which our hero showers and feels an access of righteous anger
Guys, I have just had two showers in a row. Oh Lord. I'm on my way back and I feel amazing. My films sold really well with clients, apparently - my boss is happy with me and so I'm happy, although I could have stayed for another month and never run out of things to film.
Every day there was extraordinary. Speeding around the city on the back of a very old motorbike, with my camera under my arm, covered in dust, editing films in the corner of a courtyard with my laptop on my knees, filing them back from my hotel garden with a mini satellite transmitter - holy God that is a good day at work. And no electricity, looking down over the city all dark with isolated fires burning everywhere and very bright constellations overhead, people chanting traditional hymns till about three in the morning, then an hour and a half of silence before the cockerels start waking up. My clothes still smell of the place - building dust and smoke and sewage.
I am so scared for Haiti. I've never been anywhere I was less hopeful about. This country was completely dependent on aid before the earthquake; now they are screwed. Port-au-Prince cannot be fixed - it will have to be rebuilt from scratch. That will take ten to fifteen years. We still don't know how many were killed - I mean walking round town it is just all collapsed buildings and there are bodies in all of them - so it's hard to say how many are still out there even within an order of magnitude. But forget about them: consider the people who are left. Now there aren't even enough tents in many cases to shelter them all. Half the patients at the hospital are sleeping outside.
Now what the fuck. Any day now they are expecting heavy rains. Half these camps will just be flushed down the hillsides, it's going to be horrendous. People like the World Food Programme are making sure children have two hot meals a day, which is great and everything, but you can't just keep giving people free food indefinitely, it's not sustainable - there's no paid work here and no money, so what exactly are they planning for the medium and long term? There don't seem to be any answers.
Haiti is the perfect example of "the NGO business". And it is big business for these people, that's why they're all walking around in branded T-shirts. I suppose it doesn't really matter if they are helping, but I find it a bit creepy. And the problem is - who is coordinating this stuff? New NGOs turn up there every day and they're all trying to do the same thing.
Let me give you an example. One day I bumped into this group of guys from Utah who'd flown out with emergency packs to give to the population: little cardboard boxes with some water purification tablets, energy bars, rice, stuff like that. And they were putting all these packs together in a courtyard near one of the survivors' camps. And while they were there getting ready, this huge USAID truck pulls up loaded with gallon tanks of clean water and enormous sacks of rice, and starts giving them out. And the head of this Utah delegation just looked from the big truck down to his tiny little cardboard packs, and he said, "Well...that's great for them!" in a very strained voice, and you could tell he was incredibly gutted.
It was kind of comical - except actually it isn't funny at all because it shows how pathetically disorganised the whole process is. The right hand usually has no idea the left hand even exists, let alone what it's doing.
Whose job is it to coordinate this stuff? Well it should be the UN, but to be honest they don't exactly inspire me with confidence. Driving around in 10-truck air-conditioned convoys, with a completely unnecessary armed escort, does not give them a very good idea of how things are, in my view. Don't get me wrong, I love the UN - I think it's vital for all of us that there exist entities larger than the nation state - but here they now have $2bn worth of aid pledges to manage and I would say the job is looking difficult. Someone really needs to pull their finger out before the rainy season starts properly.
I'm pleased I saw it all first-hand. Now I'm tired and kind of strung-out, and looking forward to getting back to Paris and seeing my wife again.