Fritz Armand, a native Haitian, received donations for earthquake relief on Jan. 24 at Notre Dame d'Haiti church in Miami.
His efforts to build a desalination facility and a portable power plant in Haiti failed in part, he says, because of antipathy toward expatriates. He has been called “diaspore,” an insulting term. Under Haitian law, when he became an American citizen, he automatically “renounced” his birthplace.
For years, educated émigrés like Mr. Armand, from Miami to Montreal, have tried hard to play a more vital role in Haiti’s development, with little success.
But the earthquake has suddenly changed all that, reducing old hostilities to rubble. Depleted of leadership and talent, the Haitian government — once known for ejecting elected officials who held a United States passport — is begging its own for aid, and the Haitian-born have responded en masse.
“The diaspora must organize to help us,” Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said last week at a conference in Montreal. “I have no alternative. They have to be involved in Haiti; they have to be engaged.”
He need not have asked. Groups like the Haitian American Nurses Association, based in Miami, and the Haitian League in New Jersey have sent dozens of Creole-speaking doctors and nurses to help. In Canada, hundreds of Haitians who work for the government are pushing for a furlough program to allow them to help back home. At the request of diaspora leaders, the Organization of American States will convene an international gathering of Haitian groups next month to map out plans for reconstruction and to ensure that the Haitian diaspora is included, not only by the government but also by contractors and nongovernmental organizations.
For his part, Mr. Armand, 53, the former director of public works for Opa-Locka, Fla., has spent contented days poring over uniform business codes and inspecting new types of construction materials, preparing to go with others in the Haitian-American Association of Engineers and Scientists to help inspect bridges and build sanitation systems for camps. This time, he will be in Haiti at the invitation of the minister of public works.
“Now that they have no choice but to let us in, that will allow them to see: They’re not all that bad,” Mr. Armand said. “They’re not coming to take my job. They’re coming to help.”
Still, the Haitian government’s new attitude has not erased all skepticism. Some in the diaspora say they have been kept at bay by fears that they would usurp jobs or expose corruption, while others say the negative sentiment has been a political tool, fanned for cynical ends. Whatever the reason, it did not ease the hurt when Haiti welcomed the billions of dollars that émigrés sent home but rebuffed their expertise.
To prove Haiti wants more than just money from its diaspora, said Chalmers Larose, a Haitian-born political science professor at the University of Quebec in Montreal, the government must follow up with policy changes.
“If I want to go to Haiti, I can go, but I would have to be a tourist,” Professor Larose said. “There is no agency to channel my expertise.”
The Haitian diaspora is estimated to be at least two million strong, with more than half a million Haitian-born people in the United States alone, heavily concentrated in South Florida and Brooklyn. In 2008, Haitians around the world sent at least $1.3 billion to Haiti, far more than the amount of foreign aid the country received, according to the World Bank.
While many Haitian expatriates, especially the illegal immigrants, remain poor, there is a robust elite of businessmen and professionals who view themselves as a recovering Haiti’s best hope.
“There are more Haitian doctors here than there are in Haiti,” said Jean-Robert Lafortune, the executive director of the Haitian-American Grassroots Coalition in Miami, who said the earthquake was a chance for new cooperative spirit to take hold.
Gerard Alphonse Ferere, a retired professor living in Boca Raton, Fla., said antipathy toward Haitians who left was limited to a small segment of the political and economic elite. Still, Mr. Ferere said, that small group can be pernicious.
Mr. Ferere was forced into exile with his wife in 1963, under threat of execution by the Duvaliers, who brutally ruled the country from the 1950s to the ’80s. When he returned after Jean-Claude Duvalier was ousted in 1986, he found that some questioned his loyalty.
“They said: ‘You are not Haitian anymore. We don’t want you. Where were you?’ ” Mr. Ferere recalled. “So I have been victimized twice.”Mr. Ferere said the questioners were connected with the Duvalier government and wanted to discredit its opponents.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/us/04diaspora.html?scp=7&sq=&st=nyt
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