National Museums Liverpool Blog - Haiti

Here are Clare Wolfarth's thoughts on returning home from her six week sabbatical in Haiti, where she has been helping her former employers Oxfam in their relief operation following the devastating earthquake in January.

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"Two missed connections, fourteen hours later than scheduled and I still haven’t been reunited with my luggage but am home. As I sit here in my house in Crosby, it’s difficult to know where to begin to answer the first question asked by friends and family: "How was Haiti?" I usually settle for "amazing" as my response as I struggle to articulate my experience of the place.

‘Rebati Lavi sou lòt fondasyon’ is Haitian Creole for ‘Renewing Life on new foundations’ and is the name given to Oxfam’s strategy for supporting the recovery of the Haitian people affected by the earthquake. Almost $10 billion has now been pledged by the international community to support the recovery of Haiti; an enormous sum and an opportunity that cannot be squandered. The emergency response to the earthquake is a short term intervention to meet acute need but I realised during my time in Haiti that there has been a chronic emergency of overwhelming proportions in this country for a long time.

I leave with many, many memories which will stay with me for a lifetime. Memories of the randomness of the destruction of the January earthquake that has left some houses unscathed and others reduced to piles of rubble whilst still others have been left like strange, life size dolls houses with the sides ripped off so passersby can see the rooms and furniture left inside. Memories of the squalor and the smells in the camps; the children and the elderly who were finding ways to live there; the art and the music and the spectacular scenery; the heat and the rain. But above all, memories of the pride and resilience of an embattled people who have found the strength to carry on living as they walk over the ruins of their neighbourhoods, their businesses and their homes. They have taught me that the will to live and carry on living is inextinguishable against all the odds.

I believe we all have a responsibility to these people and above all, whatever we can or can’t do in practical terms to help, our responsibility is to not forget them or their suffering when the media does; to take a moment to pause and be grateful for what we have got in our own lives."

Here's Clare Wolfarth's last report from Haiti, where she has been working on a sabbatical from her usual job at National Museums Liverpool to help with the earthquake relief operation with her former employers Oxfam.

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"It’s the end of my last weekend here in Haiti and then there’s four working days left of my deployment here. The primary reason that Oxfam asked me to do this deployment was to provide cover whilst the longer term staff took some leave and R&R and the senior HR person is now away meaning my workload has really ramped up. Working hours included one sixteen hour day and one fourteen day last week. We’re working so hard to scale the programme up, both in terms of the senior posts whom we recruit globally and in terms of our recruitment of local staff.
 
I am providing the HR support for eleven international recruitments at the moment which means longlisting CVs, developing, sending out and marking written tests, and then scheduling interviews with panel members and candidates from all over the world. In order to save money, most of the interviews are carried out over the telephone; not an easy process with intermittent network coverage and wildly varying time zones. There is a big food security emergency response in Niger at the moment (an estimated 10 million people are currently facing food insecurity), which means that experienced French speaking aid workers are in demand at the moment, and it would appear in short supply.

There are equally significant challenges in recruiting skilled local staff. I have learned that educational institutions here are not regulated which means that standards vary enormously and the qualifications that people have can be worthless in terms of accurately reflecting their level of skills or knowledge. To gain work experience in any formal sense has always been difficult and with nepotism rife, the limited opportunities that are available have rarely been offered on the basis of merit alone. To compound matters, the earthquake struck at the end of the working day at 4.45pm so many of the people who were skilled and experienced were killed when the offices they were working in collapsed. Not surprisingly, many of the survivors who had the means to do so have left the country.

In between interviews I’ve been out this week to look at a camp on a golf course where thousands of people spontaneously settled in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake. ‘Terrain de golf’ as the camp is known was home to 60,000 people until 15,000 of them were moved and resettled into another camp in a bid to ease the overcrowding. It is also temporary home to the actor, Sean Penn, who has been living in a tent since January and co-ordinating the activities of the NGO he has set up there – an example of celebrity involvement in a humanitarian disaster that does not appear self serving.

The conditions in the camp are squalid and the pigs are thriving and enormous. I was told that the clean water and sanitation, education programmes, and healthcare that the NGOs and international organisations are providing in the camps are better than the access to services many of the camp residents had before the disaster. This may be the reality but it is a pretty depressing one when you see it – it’s hard to imagine more difficult circumstances. At one point, a little girl with multiple disabilities came and took my hand and wouldn’t let it go and leaving her there with no carer in sight was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do."

Here's Clare Wolfarth's 4th weekly update from Haiti, where she has been helping out Oxfam on a sabbatical from her usual job at National Museums Liverpool:

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"The main thing to report from Haiti this week is the rain. We are now well and truly into the rainy season which means that for three or four hours every day, and occasionally the whole day, it absolutely buckets down, often accompanied by thunder and lightening. For Oxfam and for many of the other agencies operating here, this change in the weather represents the second phase of the emergency response. Even though the tents and the plastic sheeting provide some shelter, the ground is saturated and each time it rains there are floods or landslides to contend with. Port au Prince is built in a valley surrounded by hills and many of the roads become impassable during these storms, even in our four by fours.

Oxfam’s engineers and public health teams are currently working around the clock to ensure that adequate sanitation is maintained and to create drainage in the large camps where people are living. The mosquitoes are thriving but for the 1.2 million people left homeless here after the earthquake, life is pretty grim at the moment and is set to continue this way as hurricane season officially starts in June.

On a brighter note, I have continued to be able to make the most of my time off here. Last Sunday I went to the Oloffson hotel (pictured below) for lunch which is the hotel that Graham Green’s novel, The Comedians, is set. It’s an incredible decaying old colonial building full of character and wonderful art. Each room is named after a famous occupant including Mick Jagger, the Haitian Voudou art collector Virgil Young and Graham Green himself.

There are also many signs of people returning to some sort of normality here. Thursday was a public holiday to mark the feast of Corpus Christi and there was an enormous book fair held in a park where the Sugar Cane Museum is found. There were literally thousands of people there, most of whom had dressed up for the occasion and who mingled and drank juice and held hands in the heat of the midday sun. It was inspiring and quite humbling to see local people enjoying themselves and using culture as a way to come together after all they have been through.

Here's an update from Clare Wolfarth's third week of her sabattical in Haiti, where she has been helping Oxfam's earthquake relief operation:

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"Today represents the half way point of my six weeks here in Haiti. As someone here has observed, the days seem long but the weeks fly by.

This last week has been one of contrasts. On Sunday I took the day off and a few of us went to a beach that is a couple of hours drive from the capital, Port au Prince, where I’m based. It was my first time getting out of the city and it felt really good to be in the fresh air and have a change of scene. The beach was beautiful – white sand, palm trees and Caribbean turquoise sea - and I had fresh grilled lobster for lunch followed by a coconut cut off the tree above my head for dessert.

It was a strange day as we had to drive through some really poor parts of the city to get to the beach and I saw some of the worst shanty town living conditions I have ever seen. There was mile after mile of extremely poor shelter (I don’t think it could be accurately classed as ‘housing’) – basically just corrugated iron and plastic sheeting. The shanty areas have no clean water or sanitation and rubbish and rubble piled is high everywhere with goats and pigs - and occasionally people - picking through it.

By and large you would not be able to gauge by their appearance that the people you see on the streets here are living in such extreme poverty. Religion is very important to most Haitian people and we saw lots of people on their way to or from church in their Sunday best and looking immaculate. I don’t know how people manage to do it.

Even before the earthquake, 80% of the population of Haiti was living on less than $2 per day and nearly 60% of the population was deemed under-nourished with one in four children stunted as a result. It seems so unfair that in a country where life is already so hard and the poverty is already so overwhelming, there should be a natural disaster as huge as the recent earthquake. I know life isn’t fair and disasters are indiscriminate but it does make me appreciate all that we have at home and the relative wealth and safety that we live in.

So the day was a little strange because of the juxtaposition between the luxurious beach resort where we relaxed and recuperated and the ordinary life for so many people here but it was good to get some time off and to get away from the city.

In general, there is a curious mix of hope and despair here. For every good news story we hear that demonstrates the courage and resilience of the Haitian people there seems to be an equally depressing one of violence or corruption. The colonial history and the legacy of the slave trade continue to be felt here in very real ways and make it both an extraordinarily interesting and an extremely challenging context to work in.

One of the good news stories recently was that on May 24 the Ministry of Culture and Communication signed a memorandum of understanding with the Smithsonian Museum to restore Haitian cultural property damaged by the earthquake and to train local people in restoration techniques. Countless works of precious art have been buried here and lost forever but it is comforting to know that there is some concrete international support to help the country salvage and restore what it can. We have also just sent a suggestion to the Oxfam Head Office that the Oxfam Unwrapped catalogue also includes the opportunity for people to pledge direct support to the musicians and artists who create such a vibrant cultural scene here.

The other good news to report from Haiti this week is that the chickens who live in the yard where we work have had babies so there are 3 little fluffy chicklets running around during our meetings now. Definitely not like meetings in National Museums Liverpool!"

Here's an update from Clare Wolfarth's second week of her sabbatical helping out Oxfam in Haiti on how she found settling into the new role:

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"There is always a lot to get used to in a new job and it’s not too surprising to find that there are significant challenges in working in a developing country whose fragile infrastructure has recently been all but destroyed.

The HR team here has spent the past four months responding to the enormous demands that an emergency scale up generates. In a country where the official unemployment rate is between 70 to 80 %, the chance to work for an international NGO (non governmental organisation) such as Oxfam represents a potentially life changing opportunity for many Haitians. In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, the office was inundated with people dropping off their CVs for consideration to a point where full crowd control measures needed to be taken to ensure public safety. The team received over 3,000 CVs in the first few days after the office reopened and stopped counting at 20,000 at the end of the first week, although the total received is estimated to be double to triple that.

We now have about 400 local staff and many more employed on a daily basis to support the programme in positions such as community mobilisers. Oxfam’s main programmes here are water and sanitation, public health, emergency food security and livelihoods, and shelter. The priority is to support the earthquake survivors to stay well and healthy and to rebuild their lives after the disaster, and particularly to assist the most vulnerable such as the elderly, those with disabilities or orphans. Many people who lost their homes have congregated in makeshift camps where conditions can quickly deteriorate into squalor without proper sanitation and clean water supplies; particularly now it is the rainy season. So far, Oxfam has already helped over 300,000 people and has plans to reach more than 600,000 over the next three to five years of its recovery programme here.

From a HR perspective, ensuring that all the systems are set up, trying to recruit staff into the remaining positions when skilled workers are in short supply and in great demand and ensuring Oxfam remains fully compliant with local employment law is challenging. Although I do my written work in English, I still have to speak French with the local staff and even then I sometimes need a translator as some of them only speak Creole. All the contracts and legal documents are in French so I have the pocket dictionary my Gran bought me before I came out on my desk at all times!

We are currently working in a building that used to be a school (see photo below) but there isn’t enough space so lots of people sit at desks outside with laptops in what used to be the playground. Even the climbing frame is used as storage place for some of the HR files. The internet connection is slow and unreliable and can go down for up to an hour at a time which can be really frustrating.

There’s no air conditioning but we do have electric fans and a generator to keep them going when the power supply fails. My day at the office starts at 7am and finishes around 5.30pm and we’re currently still working six days a week so it’s tiring work but immensely rewarding on so many levels. I love working with the local staff and the expatriate staff here are from all over the world so I’m part of a rich and diverse team.

I feel a long way from National Museums Liverpool but am very grateful for all the support from friends, family and colleagues back home - and am still very glad to be here."

Our thoughts have been with the people of Haiti since the earthquake earlier this year shattered so many lives there. As you will know from Richard Benjamin's previous blog posts, the International Slavery Museum in particular has close links with the country.

Wanting to do her part to help, Clare Wolfarth, our Human Resources and Organisational Development Manager, has taken a six week sabbatical to go to Haiti and provide on the ground support for Oxfam, her former employers. Here's her first report back giving her first impressions on arrival back in May:

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"On arrival in Haiti I went to see some of the work that Oxfam is doing here and to meet some of the beneficiaries of the livelihoods and food security programme. Even by comparison to some of the other disaster areas I have worked, the situation here is mind blowing. 1.5 million people lost their homes and the UN has estimated that 3 million were directly affected by the earthquake and need assistance in one form or another. Even when you're here and you can see the extent of the devastation with your own eyes it is still a humanitarian crisis on an incomprehensible scale. I met a woman today who lost her husband and all 7 of her children. Two of Oxfam's staff died in the earthquake when one of the office buildings collapsed. Everyone you meet has lost someone. It's just staggering and most of the local people are sleeping in cars or tents at night as they're too scared to sleep in their homes at night, even if they were left standing.
 
I went to some of the parts of the city that have been the most affected by the earthquake where up to two thirds of home have been destroyed and another sizeable proportion are no longer fit for habitation because of structural damage caused by the quake. There were schools, hospitals, universities, blocks of flats all reduced to nothing more than rubble.
 
But Oxfam is doing some amazing work here. I met several women who'd been given a cash grant to restart the business they lost. When I say business, it's basically a barrow by the side of the road but the idea is that it helps to regenerate the local market again and therefore makes the recovery more sustainable than just doling out food. I also saw canteens (areas under sheets of tarpaulin) where local women have been employed by Oxfam to cook food for the most vulnerable in the community. One meal costs 20p to make and thousands are being fed every week in this way.

I was absolutely blown away by the resilience of the people here after what they've been through. They get on with their lives because they have to but with so much strength and dignity, it's so humbling. I feel so privileged to be here in a capacity where I can do somethingin a very small way to contribute to supporting the people here.
 
Anyway, I need to sign off and go to bed now. We get collected for work at 6.45am every morning which you will all appreciate is a bit of a shock to the system for me, especially after a long journey and a day in the field today."

Hello

I am sure most people like myself and the staff at International Slavery Museum have been keeping up-to-date with the unfolding humanitarian tragedy in Haiti, a result of the catastrophic earthquake on 12 January. Out of this disaster we received some welcome good news recently that one of the Haitian artists involved with the Freedom! sculpture on display in the museum, Guyodo (Frantz Jacques), along with his family, are fine, as well as several colleagues from the Grand Rue artists collective, but sadly his home was destroyed. We are currently looking to develop a long-term sustainable partnership with Haiti, possibly with an artists collective. Due to the imagination and creativity of Haitian artists this is a real possibility. Interestingly the Ghetto Biennale was held in Grand Rue in December which is a fascinating project and a good starting point for any future collaboration.

Remember that there are also a number of organisations and agencies who are still accepting donations such as Christian Aid (our partners in commissioning the Freedom! sculpture), UNICEF, the British Red Cross  and the Disasters Emergency Committee.

The International Slavery Museum has had another very good month in terms of visitor figures. We have now had upwards of 900,000 visitors since we opened in 2007 and our statisticians (scientists in white coats scratching their chins) think our millionth visitor will walk through the doors in March. It could be you! If it is, then you will be given an invitation to the private view of our forthcoming exhibition Beyond the Boundary.  I think our varied exhibition programme is a large part of International Slavery Museum's success. Black Britannia has received some fantastic reviews and Trafficked, difficult subject that it is, continues to be a very poignant aspect of the museum which highlights the fact we are a campaigning museum.  

Leading on from this, part of the job remit of our collections development officer - Stephen Carl-Lokko, was to develop a new collecting strand around the subject of contemporary slavery. A very difficult task but one we felt essential. As part of this policy the International Slavery Museum curatorial team has recently acquired two very powerful and indeed unsettling pieces for the museum's collections.
Missing (2007) is a series of photographs of urban and suburban Britain by the artist Rachel Wilberforce which depict sex-trafficking and prostitution through the interiors and exteriors of brothels and so-called massage parlours. They are devoid of people, yet at the same time reveal human activity. The photographs show scenes of a slave trade which still thrives, and illustrates how much slavery is still very much a contemporary issue. Rachel Wilberforce works with photography, film, video, installation and live art intervention.

The museum also acquired an ankle bracelet which had been collected by Anti-Slavery International. It was 'worn' by a modern-day domestic slave girl in Niger. It represents the importance of the International Slavery Museum's work in developing its collections in this area and campaigning on the issue of contemporary forms of slavery.

Finally I wanted to flag up the inaugural conference of the Federation of International Human Rights Museums (FIHRM) which will take place in Liverpool on 15-16 September 2010.  The Federation was established by National Museums Liverpool and will enable museums who deal with sensitive and thought-provoking subjects such as transatlantic slavery, the holocaust and human rights to work together and share new thinking and initiatives in a supportive environment. It will initially be led by the International Slavery Museum. The FIHRM website will be available soon, or for details on the conference you can email Françoise McClafferty using this contact form.

If you are indeed the millionth visitor then see you soon!

Bye for now

Hello

Well it is with great shock and sadness that I write this blog in light of the devastating earthquake in Haiti. Nobody could not have been shocked at the images shown in the media this past week but it was particularly difficult for those of us associated with the museum as Haiti is central to the museum's history and ethos for several reasons.

On 23 August 2007 the International Slavery Museum was opened. This is a significant date as it commemorates an uprising of enslaved Africans on the island of Saint Domingue (modern Haiti) in 1791. The date has been designated by UNESCO as Slavery Remembrance Day, a reminder that enslaved Africans were the main agents of their own liberation. Resistance to injustices and discrimination is a central theme of the International Slavery Museum.

An even more tangible link is the Freedom! scupture. The sculpture was commissioned by international development charity Christian Aid and National Museums Liverpool to mark 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007. The Freedom! sculpture is made out of recycled objects such as metal car parts and raw junk found in the streets of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and was created by young Haitians and sculptors Eugène, Céleur and Guyodo from Atis Rezistans in collaboration with Mario Benjamin, an internationally renowned Haitian artist who has represented his country at Biennials in Venice, São Paulo and Johannesburg.

Sadly one of the other artists (not one of the people pictured above) from the Grand Rue artists collective has died, along with thousands upon thousands of his fellow Haitians in the disaster. Our heartfelt wishes go out to all those who have lost family and friends in the disaster. Haiti has a strong and proud people and I am sure that with a sustained amount of aid the country will recover and grow after this horrific disaster. Please go to the following Unicef and Foundry TV sites for further information or to make a donation.

Update 10/02/10: We received some welcome good news recently that the Haitian artist Guyodo (Frantz Jacques), along with his family, are fine, as well as several colleagues from the Grand Rue artists collective, but sadly his home was destroyed.