Free Haiti After the Earthquake by Paul Farmer Page A

critics—they were too numerous to count in all Haiti endeavors—could always dismiss any one project as either irrelevant or unsustainable.
    Sometimes the small picture augured well for the bigger one, which invariably included, in development jargon, both implementation and integration of efforts across diverse sectors: social services, energy policy, governance, economic growth. It wasn’t hard to point to regions needing improvement in all sectors—across Haiti but especially in isolated, rural areas. Part of my role as Deputy Special Envoy was to focus attention outside the “Republic of Port-au-Prince,” where all development meetings took place. Again, this idea was hardly innovative—integrated rural development is one of the great clichés in such circles—but implementation itself was innovation. “GSD,” as Clinton liked to say: get stuff done.
    Some of the UN leadership in Haiti, along with a few friends of Clinton, visited central Haiti together in the fall of 2009. On one excursion to the town of Boucan Carré, isolated by a river that often flooded, we visited a rehabilitated public hospital covered with solar panels placed by locals working with Walt Ratterman. (He, along with the Solar Electric Light Fund, had solarized clinical facilities with us in Rwanda, Burundi, and Lesotho.) There was nowhere Ratterman wouldn’t go to promote clean, renewable energy, and how he got those panels across the river was something I planned to ask him. He was all about GSD.
    In Boucan Carré, one obstacle to getting stuff done was the challenge of getting there during the rainy season. We’d been talking about building a bridge there for years, but Partners In Health didn’t have the expertise or resources to do so; the Haitian Ministry of Public Works was chronically starved of funds and expertise, too. In my UN role, I learned that the Brazilians had both military engineers and a robust bridge in a warehouse somewhere, and started importuning Mr. Annabi and the Brazilian force commander to help span the river at a place locals called fonlanfè —“hell’s deep.” Several people had
died trying to ford the river, including two pregnant women the previous year, and we’d recently lost an ambulance there to a flash flood. With this coalition, I thought, we could surely build a proper bridge before the next rainy season. The Ministry of Public Works liked the idea, and so did the Brazilians, and so did Clinton. Denis OʹBrien, an Irish cell phone magnate with deep affection for Haiti, said he’d pay for the labor and the little stretch of land necessary.
    The people of Boucan Carré were also thrilled with the idea, as were the doctors and nurses there, including one of our protégés, Dr. Mario Pagenel, who had helped launch our efforts in Boucan Carré. Also pleased were all those who’d been stranded on the wrong side of the river when they needed the care we could offer in other, larger facilities. But getting the bridge up required a lot of paperwork, many meetings and calls, and then more paperwork. (One UN formality required that the Haitian government promise that no one involved in the project be harmed. The Brazilian general, as impatient with paperwork as anyone, scoffed at that stipulation, adding, with sarcasm, “I think we can take care of ourselves with the dangerous Haitians out there.”) I pestered Mr. Annabi by phone and e-mail, begging him to make it happen; I begged the Haitian government, too. Each party (excepting OʹBrien and the inhabitants of Boucan Carré) referred to certain forms that needed to be signed and approved. Just when we were starting to get discouraged about this fetishization of process, the Prime Minister (who also believed in the project) signed the last forms, Annabi gave the go-ahead, and a team of Brazilian engineers, a few Irish and American volunteers, and hundreds of