Where are the leaders? Struggling Haitians ponder their future and question the leadership in the land of opportunity, by Macollvie Jean-François, Haitian Times, 22 April 2003. English language.

A walk along Flatbush in Brooklyn shows a neighborhood in action, as do jaunts through Little Haiti in Miami, to name just two of the most populous Haitian neighborhoods.

In Brooklyn, Haitian women on the sidewalk, doing more catching up than selling the “pèpè,” Creole for second-hand clothes, laid out in front of them.

Some loudly, others quietly, talk about how “so-and-so” has to find a room; how a man is bed-bound and can’t afford to visit a doctor; or how a boy will bring shame to hi mother after she risked her life bringing him to New York from Haiti.

These Haitian neighborhoods are bustling, driven by hard-working immigrants trying to keep their families together. But these residents, shopkeepers, and factor workers who turn its wheel daily say the life is “getting so hard,” especially without cohesive guidance.

“In my view, the community has nothing in it, no leadership,” said Eddy “Ed B” Baudin, a carpet-store owner who has lived in Brooklyn for 22 years. “It’s a dead community. We’re a lot, but we don’t’ exploit it.”

The Haitian community is about 1 million strong nationwide, according to unofficial estimates. The U. S. Census puts the number closer to 500,000. About 210,000 live in the New York metropolitan area and 182,000 in South Florida.

Baudin said the community has enough members to have its own banks, libraries, nursing homes for the elderly and handicapped, or at least one school, but nothing gets done.

“The Jews have their own school,” Baudin said. “We should have our own.”

Others share that sentiment: the Haitian community needs to organize itself and begin building stronger, longer-lasting establishments.

Community activists and sociologists use the words “strategy” and “capacity-building” to refer to ways that an immigrant community can gain political clout and provide more to its populace.

Just as other ethnic communities have experience, so must the Haitians, they say, though it will take time, strategic efforts and sacrifice.

A conference organized last year in Miami by the New York-based National Coalition for Haitian Rights was designed to determine long-term strategies, but no meaningful progress has occurred, attendees said.

“It was a good start, but I think there should’ve been some follow-up,” said Alix Cantave, a Boston-based economic developer who presented at the conference. “When you have something like that, someone has to own it, someone has to take the leadership. Follow-up is the key.”

The Haitian community lacks programs to educate people at various levels, said Garry Blass, a former math teacher in Haiti who arrived in the United States two years ago.

The school curriculum lacks Haitian history as a subject, which would help Haitian students identify with the culture, he said.

Some older Haitians are worse off because they aren’t literate in English or Creole, so they often need others to accompany them to places where they might need to sign their names.

There are no programs for immigrants such as Blass, who either are not proficient in English or lack papers. One-time professionals in Haiti, they wind up driving taxis or working in factories. Blass said this creates a brain drain because these intelligent people can’t afford college.

“That’s the failure of the community,” Blass said of the lack of education. “It doesn’t function as a collective. There’s a complex among us where every one is defending their own.”

A few doors down from Baudin’s store, vendor Lorinette Vincent whips out documents and tells how U.S. Customs agents at John F. Kennedy International Airport seized her five bags on a trip from Paris last year.

Vincent is convinced that if she could find someone who spoke English to help her, the matter would have been resolved by now.

“They turned me this way, then that way,” Vincent said, when she tried to reclaim her belongings. “In this country, if it wasn’t for my family, I’d be walking around naked. It’s not only my family who should help me.”

Hugo Edmé, 59, arrived in Brooklyn in 1978. When the construction worker and carpenter was suffering from a chronic colic, friends ignored his complaints.

He said a white man finally brought him to the hospital and stayed through the medical examination.

“The Haitian society does not stand to help any Haitian,” Edmé said. “If you don’t pay them, they don’t’ help you. The community is dead.”

Where are the leaders?

Haitians often wonder, “Where are the leaders?”

The listing of community organizations in the Haitian community goes on for pages in the directories that track them. There are numerous storefronts in these neighborhoods. Some of the more prominent ones have awnings that imply some affiliation to Haitians, yet when one is in crisis, he or she still wonders where to turn.

Mark Handelman, executive vice president of the New York Association for New Americans, a 53-year-old service and refugee settlement group, said even though there are organizations in different ethnic communities, they are not always in touch with those they say they serve.

“They infer that they represent particular ethnic communities, but the person on the street often doesn’t know who they are,” said Handelman, also an NCHR board member. “Often, the people don’t know the organizations that claim to be their voice.”

When a couple Haitian men were arrested on drug possession charges, they called various outlets looking for legal representation and support from community leaders; but could find none.

Street merchants envy other nationalities. One said, “When the Latino needs somebody to speak for them in court, they have someone who comes for them. But the Haitian has no one. There isn’t one Haitian who can help you.”

As recently as two weeks ago in Brooklyn, a fire killed four Haitians and left about a dozen tenants penniless and homeless. No rallying cry was heard on their behalf nor was there any acknowledgement of their pain by those who usually call for protests and marches.

The National Coalition for Haitian Rights conference was supposed to develop a blueprint to deal with such crises. Enitled “Developing a National Haitian-American Agenda: Moving Forward Together,” it was planned to help people such as Edmé, Blass Vincent and Baudin. But these supposed benefactors have not heard of it.

A year a later, the report of the three-day convention is in the draft stage, said Dina Paul-Parks, NCHR’s executive director.

Paul-Parks said the goal of the conference was to be a “launching pad to develop discussions among organizations.”

Haitian organizations seem to be all talk and no action, some observers say. Activists agree that the Haitian community lacks the leadership it needs to gain better health care, housing and education. They say it has yet to begin building assets as a collective, both economically and politically, as it needs to do.

Why not? Other immigrant communities have done it, but there is no set answer or prefect model. Some people say they simply do not know and have exhausted all possible explanations. A classic reason, given for anything from an art exhibit’s failure to a lost election, is that Haitians cannot work together, given their history in Haiti.

A few say the leadership, and masses, are too caught up in Haiti’s politics—Lavalas versus the Opposition—to concentrate on achieving unity here. Still, there are sociologists and advocates who say that community’s current state is part of the assimilation process.

Many agree that news conferences and protest marches are one way to get attention, but there are those, such as Cantave, who say it is time to move beyond those advocacy positions and to start building and empowering the community for the long run.

“The refugee stuff is nice, it’s good,” said Cantave, one of the Haitian activists who hit airwaves to protest the indefinite detention of Haitian refugees who arrived Oct. 29. “But you have to think of how to build the community.”

Mac Villain, a financial consultant based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., was a panelist on the asset building and wealth transfer plenary session, which four people attended.

Villain said maybe because the organizations do not have the human resources, it is difficult for them to devote much time to the topics discussed. “They don’t have the capacity to translate that into action,” he said.

“As far as follow-up, it’s the responsibility of the people who were there to stay in touch with presenters, the people with the information, and evaluate how that information could benefit them in the future,” Villain said.

Paul-Parks said the challenge for NCHR lies in figuring out a balance between being a catalyst and actually taking leadership. “This is a conversation that was starting and now we can work on these issues,” Paul-Parks said. “The question is, who is going to do all the work to implement whatever the objective is?”

Other immigrant communities have done or are doing it. As some prominent Haitian-Americans like to point out, it took the Irish more than 100 years to gain political power. Corporations woke up to the flavors of Latino and Asian cultures during the 1990s and began tailoring their marketing campaigns to draw those consumers.

Cantave, a program officer at Local Initiates Support Network, a national non-profit organization that funds community development projects, and who recently joined NCHR’s board, gave the example of a Portuguese community in Boston that set up its own credit union, though it is small in number compared with other nationalities.

Politicians have noticed that the vast number of Latinos, particularly the Cubans in South Florida, vote as a bloc and have courted them during the election season. A few even used Spanish, as New York Gov. George Pataki did last year, to mobilize the Hispanic vote.

Moving forward together

Political empowerment is the sign that cannot be missed on the road to a strong community, many said. Dr. Michel Laguerre, a professor of African-American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, said naturalization and voting in the fundamental.

“The ballot is the route,” Laguerre, author of “Diasporic Citizenship: Haitian Americans in Transnational America.”

He said that to reach the level where a group could elect a national representative, “It takes a little time.”

Laguerre said ethnic groups tend to do well politically when they live in one area and vote as a bloc. He pointed to the Haitian representatives in Florida, who come from a population the U.S. Census estimates at 182,000 though others say the real number is closer to 300,000.

“There is a base there,” Laguerre said. “Any government tends to do well when it has a base.”

Gepsie Metellus, director of Saint La Haitian Neighborhood Center and an NCHR board member, said organizations must continue working together in developing strategies and taking action. She said, “The more we experiment with ideas, we’ll see what works.”

Cantave said Haitians could mobilize to make a strong showing at the polls in the upcoming presidential race next year. He said lawmakers such as Marie St. Fleur of Massachusetts and Phillip Brutus and Yolly Roberson of Florida could be tapped for help.

St. Fleur and Brutus, national committee chairpeople for last year’s conference, did not return repeated calls for comment.

Margie McHugh, executive director at the New York Immigration Coalition, said the Haitian community should join forces with other immigrant communities because they are facing similar obstacles. In New York, service programs are big cuts because of a $3.8 billion budget gap, she said.

“Many immigrant communities, particularly those whose members are in low-wage or working class jobs, are really feeling the squeeze s the economy takes a turn for the worse,” said McHugh. “The impact is really severe.”

“One can hope that at a moment like this, all immigrant communities, especially the Haitian community with its political passion, will choose to jump into this and demand equitable services,” McHugh said. “Every community needs to build leadership and infrastructure and leverage that with other communities. None of us is strong enough on our own.”

Handelman said perhaps if the organizations had members, when they make requests, they could say exactly how many people they represent. He said organizations must educate and mobilize the people, in conjunction with having conferences, and there needs to be more coordination between them.

“You have to get the man on the street involved,” he said. “You have to start from the bottom up as well.”

’We don’t have resources’

The difficulty of the Haitian community to move forward, collectively, is due partly to the organizations serving it, some Haitians in Miami and New York have said. Their mantra is, “We don’t’ have resources.”

Nonprofit organizations’ directors in New York and Miami say the lack of funding is a major setback because they know the needs, people come to them, but they cannot always afford to help. Be it finding a homeless man temporary housing, helping unskilled new arrivals find employment, teaching about HIV and AIDS or continuing an after-school youth program, the money to cover the expenses associated with those basic services has to come from somewhere.

McHugh said the needs endemic in the Haitian community are not unique to it.

“No immigrant community has the level of services it deserves or needs,” McHugh said. “Most of the [community organizations] are facing budget cuts. Most of their staff is working incredibly long hours. It’s very hard to work in a climate like this.”

“We need, honestly, to convince other people that we’re worth investing in,” Paul-Parks said. “Now, it’s a little difficult to do that because people have been burned.”

One thing that NCHR’s draft of the conference report mentioned is that many Haitian organizations acted like “crabs in a basket” trying to get out when it came to funding.

The report said some conference participants felt that Haitians bad-mouthed each other to grants when they applied for the same grant, instead of presenting their requests together to give it more weight and a better chance at acceptance.

Metellus said grantors often do not give the money up-front, but rather, reimburse the organization for spending the amount promised. She said organizations are actually starting to collaborate more since the funding climate encourages that nowadays.

The spirit of collaboration does not apply only to grant seeking. Metellus said as a result of “Setting the Agenda,” some organizations are talking more toe each other and making alliances locally, at least in Miami.

She mentioned Community Voices, a health access project funded by United Way that Sant La and others—Women’s Alliance of Dade and Broward, Little Haiti Housing Association, and FAN-M Haitian Women of Miami, are running.

“It’s smart, it’s strategic, and it makes good sense,” Metullus said, adding that organization officials are more conscious of the need to leverage their variety of skills and talents. “We need to respect each other’s areas of expertise.”