A dam for the people, and a people damned
Jennifer Wells Feature Writer 2010/11/21
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CANGE, HAITI
Lovely Avelus is toting a wooden stool.
It’s a rudimentary affair, but small and therefore a portable and perfect means to keep her small bottom off the wet slick that constitutes the grounds around her home.
It is late afternoon. A storm is moving in and, as the various family members scurry into their impossibly cramped, wholly inadequate, one-room shelter, Lovely determinedly hauls that stool up the three concrete steps and she plants that stool on the bare concrete floor and she sits.
In the gloom.
Barely visible under the darkening sky is the wire that runs from the home that fronts Lovely’s present dwelling to the rough, corrugated tin shed into which she first moved after the earthquake. Inside the shed, occupied now by her aunt Rosita and Rosita’s family, the wire is fed to a single light bulb.
The wire, it should be noted, has been jacked from the main house by Lovely’s uncle, Delius Elistin. The wire in the main house, in turn, threads through the trees and down dale to where it has been jacked into the source of the stolen electricity supply: the home of a government official.
That there is electricity by stealth in Lovely’s quarters is not to suggest that there is light.
Perhaps by 8 p.m. the lone bulb in the shed will switch on, offering at best five hours of illumination. Or perhaps not. Notoriously scant and famously inconsistent electricity delivery is Haiti’s common state of affairs. A week can pass with no electricity at all, the family says.
Lately, an especially persistent bout of blackouts has fuelled a dry, dark humour in the capital. “The dam,” it is grimly joked, “has cholera.”
Nathelie Joseph can remember when the dam came, or more precisely when the flooding waters of the dam rose over her father’s wattle and daub hut and sent the family heading for the hills.
She was 4 at the time. Now she is 60 and her face is worn and her belly and breasts hang heavily and she is missing most of her teeth. The river was so beautiful “passing by the fields,” she says, before it swallowed her father’s farm.
Joseph has seated herself in the cool courtyard of the Partners in Health clinic at Cange, where she shells the skins from grilled peanuts for a modest wage. The world started to focus attention here in the early ’80s, though we tend to forget that Père Fritz Lafontant came to work in Cange 20 years before that, obsessed by the peasants displaced by the dam, generational farmers who had been turned to squatters.
Lafontant slept in his car in those days, furiously wondering how on earth he could help these people.
Two decades later Paul Farmer arrived, launched the clinic — Zanmi Lasante they call it in Creole — and adopted a leitmotif in his own writings that the dam had damned the people he called water settlers.
If a country’s sweepingly, sprawlingly, persistently intractable economic traumas are most effectively told in microcosm, then the Peligre Dam does the job for Haiti’s tortured relationship with electricity.
The great concrete buttress rises 70 metres above the Artibonite River, a waterway that springs from the Dominican Republic and flows all the way west to Haiti’s coast. That the Artibonite has served as carrier host to the country’s cholera epidemic explains the black humour in these tragic times.
When the dam was conceived more than a half-century ago, the Artibonite was seen as a great artery and the dam a means to not only rehabilitate the agricultural lands of the Central Plateau but power a mighty supply of hydroelectricity that would fuel Haiti’s industrial expansion. “Duvalier alone is able to harness the energy of Peligre and give it to his people,” went the promotional literature of the day, as if Papa Doc had superhuman powers.
The project was dubbed “Little TVA” after the Tennessee Valley Authority. The big TVA was created via congressional charter by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933, a New Deal master plan aimed at irrigating the lands of Dust Bowl farmers — the “forgotten Americans” — and spawning new industry on the back of hydroelectric power.
Nathelie Joseph offers a simple recounting of the Haitian version. “The government decided to spread the water,” she says. There were immediate benefactors, especially Brown & Root of Texas, the company that built the dam in 1956. Agricultural benefits were to be reaped downriver by Haitian farmers. Controlled irrigation was meant to boost crop yields for export, especially rice, thus raising the income of the rural poor. And a reliable electricity supply was meant to be a recipe at last for self-sustaining economic growth and a means to address the country’s unconscionable social disparity.
Rice yields did increase, though, in a particularly bitter irony, the later flooding of the Haitian rice market by cheap U.S. imports forced farmers to abandon their land and head to the cities for work.
As for electricity: the power plant didn’t go online until 1971, after the ascension of Baby Doc. The diversion of financial resources from the megaproject to the Duvalier regime was much remarked in the interim. As it was ultimately conceived, the power plant would deliver electricity to the urban elites in Port-au-Prince and its management fell to the newly created, government-owned Electricité d’Haiti, which swiftly deteriorated into a dysfunctional, money-sucking bureaucracy reporting to the Ministry of Public Works, Transport and Communications. There is no ministry of energy.
“The project was costly and, ultimately a failure, and it caused untold suffering in the now-inundated valleys behind the dam,” Farmer wrote in The Uses of Haiti. Farmer listened to the villagers’ stories, the older inhabitants bitterly noting that the dam “brought them neither electricity nor water.”
The projected life of the dam was estimated at 50 years, which, one would think, would render this discussion moot.
Not so.
In mid-August, the Inter-American Development Bank hosted a tour of the facility inviting potential bidders to kick the tires, as it were, on an estimated $40-million (U.S.) rehabilitation project. The 54-megawatt dam, the largest in the country, is currently operating at half capacity, which largely explains how the country’s electricity generation has fallen by more than 30 per cent in the past six years.
The IADB hopes to extend the life of the facility by another two decades.
Major international players showed up for the tour. Alstom from France. Symbion from the U.S. “It’s the end of life normally for this kind of plant,” commented Jacques Gilouin, an Alstom turbines expert. “The whole plant is old, old.”
Everyone poked about the belly of the beast, especially intrigued by the plant’s three turbines, one of which appears to be simply dead, despite on-the-ground denials from some workers. Another has a distinct flutter. Only one to the naked eye is working at full tilt.
It’s an incongruous setting. In the adjacent reservoir women attend to their washing. Schoolchildren bathe. The reservoir is far from the fishing and boating tourist attraction that was originally envisioned. There’s more cruel news: the reservoir is clogged with 600 million cubic metres of silt. It’s a joke to recall 1940s discussions of reforestation and erosion control as part of the grand plan. The adjacent mountains have been stripped of trees, deforestation aided, in yet another irony, by the new road access to the dam. There’s a massive transfer of soil in the rainy season.
Canada’s SNC-Lavalin Inc. has studied the prospect of raising the dam, which, if approved, would lead to more spreading of the waters of Lake Peligre, likely crossing the border to the Dominican Republic. “We don’t have an exact measurement of where the lake would extend to,” says Bernard Chancy, SNC’s vice-president in Haiti, adding, “It would have to be a bi-national project.”
What about more immediate environmental solutions: “Put trees on the mountains?” asks one international player when queried about possible givebacks in exchange for being awarded the contract. “That’s the government’s job.”
Sigh.
The boldest feature on the horizon is the string of transmission towers that march up the mountainside and extend off into infinity.
The most energetic presence on the dam itself is Lumas Kendrick, the IADB’s ceaselessly enthusiastic energy specialist and point person for the rehabilitation. “It’s the biggest project in the country,” crows Kendrick as he gathers the potential bidders for a group photo. “This is a historic moment.”
Not quite as historic as the flooding of the fields, when some of the farmers clambered up to a flat spot called the Savanne, where there was no water, and erected the village of Ti Kay — the most precarious little shacks.
“What’s my view?” asks Paul Farmer when I found an opportunity in Port-au-Prince to ask him about the dam. “I live there. You know who built the dam? Brown & Root, and it became Halliburton,” the energy services company with controversial ties to former U.S. president Dick Cheney.
Farmer is now the UN’s deputy special envoy to Haiti. He ultimately offers what seems a sweetly idealistic response. “At this point you could have a Utopian vision of having the dam disappear. Or you could say, ‘Couldn’t you make it a better dam?’ and make sure that more of the things it could offer, which are water and electricity, go to poor people who lost their land. That’s what I would say.”
There’s a restaurant in Petionville called The View, and from this perch diners are offered an exceptional perspective of how electricity “works” in Haiti.
Conducting a meeting here is Lumas Kendrick’s idea.
If one gazes to the top of the adjacent hillside, the handsome — even grand — homes of Petionville are on full display. Tumbling down the hillside is Jalousie, a vast Port-au-Prince slum. At night, the entire vista is lit up like Manhattan island: the handsome homes, tied to the electricity grid, and the shanty dwellings below which, as with Lovely’s family, have illegally jacked into the wires. Half of the country’s electricity users are illegally tapped into the grid.
Understand, the purloining of electricity is deemed a national right, a situation against which the comically inept EDH, an organization that is neither economically nor technically viable, clearly has no line of defence.
Kendrick has 24 years working in transmission, distribution and generation under his belt. Not to mention extensive experience in Africa. But he’s never seen anything like Haiti.
“My first perspective when I got here was that this did not seem much different from what I saw in Africa: No investment. Very difficult coverage. Low level of expertise among the staff.. . . Later I came to find out that this is much worse . . . in infrastructure the coverage here is just bad. Less than 12 per cent of the country has electrical wires. The other 88 per cent is just dark.”
The 12 per cent that is wired is focused around urban areas in a patchwork of isolated grids managed by the aforementioned EDH. “It’s the only country I’ve ever known that doesn’t have a ministry of energy. I just assumed that they had one.”
The electricity that is supplied is intermittent, unstable and unpredictable. When the power goes out here at The View — which it does — everyone patiently waits for the backup generators to kick in.
Kendrick talks excitedly about the rehabilitation of Peligre. With a qualifier. “We recognize that the ability to generate energy doesn’t help much if all the energy is lost. We have a huge problem with losses.. . . Fifty-seven per cent of all energy is lost, either technically through poor power lines and defective transformers, or through an inability to bill and collect on the billing.”
Existing distribution lines have to be retransformed, new lines have to be added along with new transformers and new circuitry. The IADB, teaming with the World Bank, will be working on a billing system, with what Kendrick says will feature state-of-the-art data collection, which, should that come to pass, truly would be transformative. “We’re talking about $40 million in that as well.”
Kendrick is unstoppably optimistic. Peligre is a “showpiece,” he says. “That’s going to go the furthest in helping the country. That’s the best bang for the buck.”
The deadline for contract tenders is now set for Dec. 8.
In August, Kendrick and I met for dinner at The View, eager to see Jalousie lit up at night.
The power went out.
The strains of Ode to Joy drift across the back veranda of the Kinam Hotel, the music suiting the hotel’s pretty white gingerbread filigree.
René Jean-Jumeau cocks an ear. The amateur jazz trombonist played long ago with the Saint Trinity Church orchestra, which, displaced by the earthquake, is practising next door.
Soft spoken, Jean-Jumeau speaks in long delicate sentences, composed in their own filigree and drifting off into philosophical ponderings. Needless to say, this makes him an unconventional voice on the energy front.
But there you have it. Hired as a consultant five years ago to the minister of public works, he was, shall we say, made wide-eyed by the absence of an energy ministry. “I realized it was impossible to actually do any kind of durable work for matters having to do with energy,” he recalls. “So I went on a campaign to try to at least get an energy unit within the ministry.. . . So the unit was created finally in August of 2009 and it had one employee. Me.”
Jean-Jumeau was born in Port-au-Prince 49 years ago. “By the time I was in college you could go anywhere, any time by taptap, day or night. There were people in the street all the time. It was a different atmosphere back then.” Through scholarships and fellowships and the occasional mentor taking him under wing, he earned a PhD in electrical engineering from Cornell, and came home.
Over the course of a two-hour conversation, Jean-Jumeau reflects on the international community, the project-driven mentality that underpins all plans to “fix” Haiti pre- and post-earthquake. Or even to “save” Haiti, which in Jean-Jumeau’s mind is a start-and-stop effort “to make Haiti look like some other country.”
“Everyone has a project that they think is a really important project,” he says. “But that doesn’t give us a real chance of making a difference, of doing something durable. Unfortunately, the whole process that was initiated after the earthquake is just a bigger, faster version of everything that we’ve been doing for the past 15, 20 years.”
Energy is a case in point: “Everyone continues to finance the same things: more production generation, more networks, more grid. But nobody’s financing the development of a new framework to be able to essentially modernize the Haitian energy sector.. . . To put the sector into a more sustainable situation, a more sustainable state.”
Electricity? “It’s tiny, it’s badly managed and it’s draining a huge amount of money.” True. The country’s ministry of finance transfers in excess of $100 million to EDH annually — or more than 12 per cent of the national budget — to cover losses at the public utility.
It’s tempting to view the situation as hopeless.
But if Jean-Jumeau doesn’t view it as such, then why should I? He could have gone anywhere. Teaching at Berkeley was an option. “I had an emotional commitment,” he says of returning to Haiti. “All of a sudden I felt whole.”
He has a simply stated proposition, which is really the grandest proposition of all. “What I want to do is say okay, someone has to decide that they are going to launch an electricity-for-all program in Haiti. Somebody has to make that commitment. Then we’ll worry about how difficult it’s going to be.”
Anyone who discounts such thinking on the grounds of simplicity is forgetting history. The ultimate promise of big TVA was electricity for all, or Electricity for All!, a branded mission without which there would have been no post-war consumption boom, no industrial growth, no flurry of refrigerator purchases, no creation of a middle class, for that matter.
Perhaps that’s what it takes to free Haiti of what Jean-Jumeau calls “career aid developers,” under whose aegis, unless history tells us nothing, the light may never be brought to Lovely and all the Lovelys of his much-loved country.
Monday, 22 November 2010
A dam for the people, and a people damned
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