53, water expert/driver/law student/translator
Lamothe Lormier has lived in Port-au-Prince for decades and has held a number of positions, including literacy teacher and medical translator. His passion is the environment, and his special expertise is water. He identifies the major problems facing Haiti in the future as 1) scarity of water, and 2) lack of clean water. Lamothe is a former board member of an organization called the Gift of Water, headquartered in the U.S. He has traveled throughout Port-au-Prince and the Haitian countryside talking to local communities about water and providing instruction on practical solutions.
Lamothe describes himself as a kind of Renaissance man and is a constant reader of literature, history, and philosophy. Tall and soft-spoken, Lamothe loves to converse on an incredibly wide range of subjects. His love of his country is tempered only by his occasional bouts of despair over the future. We spoke for many hours on the porch of the Matthew 25 House in Port-au-Prince, a guest house in Delmas. We also spoke to Lamothe as we drove to various spots around Port-au-Prince. He pointed out garbage-chocked ravines, kids swimming in a polluted river, and other places of extreme environmental degradation. Following up on a lifelong interest in law, in 2015, Lamothe enrolled in law school in Port-au-Prince and is currently studying ideas of forgiveness in criminal legal theory.
I moved to Port-au-Prince when I was twenty. For me, coming from the countryside to Port-au-Prince was overwhelming. It’s wild, it’s big. I mean—the cars, the TVs, the everything. Here we have the Internet, here we have iPhones. But in the meantime, you see someone naked at Delmas 23.1 There’s a small natural spring there. People come and bathe, right in the street. You see a cow wander by. And the traffic? Sometimes on Lalue it can take two and a half hours to go two miles.2 So there’s contradictions everywhere you look in this city. And now with my computer I can communicate with anybody in the world on Facebook. But I look out the window and there’s a child in the mud, a donkey. Two centuries in one spot.
They call it the Republic of Port-au-Prince. Everything flows from Port-au-Prince. If you need a driver’s license, you need to come to Port-au-Prince. If you need a passport, you’ve got to stand in line in Port-au-Prince. If you need to change the title of your car, you need to come to Port-au-Prince. For a long time there used to be only one airport, that’s Port-au-Prince. So much of the infrastructure of our society—the government, the universities, everything—is in the Republic of Port-au-Prince. And so naturally everybody wants to be in Port-au-Prince.
The city has the tendency to attract people from the villages because the city is perceived as a sign of civilization. If you are in the city, you are inside civilization, and if you are outside of the city, you are outside of civilization. In order to feel important, you need to claim that you are from the city. And I think that must be true not only for Haitians. Say you live in San Francisco or New York or L.A. You feel one way. You feel you live someplace important, no? I wonder if someone from Kansas feels the same way.
Port-au-Prince was built to house 500,000 people. Now the city has about 3 million souls. You could say that in some ways it began with Duvalier, the first one, the father.3 Duvalier wanted to show that he was very popular, that his regime was strong, so he would send big trucks to the countryside and load them up with peasants. They’d come for celebrations in the city. And many of these peasants simply never returned home. That’s one part of the big flow of migration. The other side of it is that agriculture is no longer enough to sustain the country, and so thousands of people in the countryside, because they cannot grow enough crops to survive, move to the city to find a job. People stay in Port-au-Prince because at least they can find something. I mean, you see people living in trash, but they still think they’re living a better life than in the mountains. They chose this city despite the violence—despite everything.
Myself? I moved to Port-au-Prince because this is the only place where there’s access to a higher education. At that time, there was nowhere else. In the whole country. I’m fifty-three. Things have changed a little bit now, but when I was twenty, options were very limited. And so I came here, to the Republic of Port-au-Prince, a place with a foot in two centuries.
AS A CHILD I WOULD DRINK THE WATER FROM THE RIVER
I was born in the Artibonite Valley, which is in the center of Haiti.4 The Artibonite is the big river that crosses the area. The river is polluted, and that is the river water that I used to drink as a child. I didn’t know any better. So as a child I would drink the water from the river and, then, like all normal kids, I’d have worms.
My village is called Liancourt. I would say there are maybe 2,000 to 3,000 people in the village. It’s a pretty rural area. Mostly we grew rice, but it was never enough. I grew up in deep poverty. Many, many children in my village lived the same life. Some days I would go to school. Other days I wouldn’t.
I have four sisters and three brothers. It’s a big family. My father was Catholic, and my mother was practicing Vodou, but she didn’t want my father to know.5 Sometimes she’d spend money going to the Vodou priest, for whatever reason—I don’t know. So, I witnessed that. But early on my perception of not only Vodou but religion in general kind of shifted because we didn’t have any food. My concern was survival. My mother would take me to these ceremonies where people would leave money on the ground. Without them knowing, I’d take some of that money and use it to buy food. If they had known that at the time, I would have been in major trouble. We were told that if you took money from a ceremony, after a year, you would go crazy. I kept taking money and, well, I’m not crazy yet. But these are the experiences that shape your thinking.
Education wasn’t that important to my family. If it was a choice between me going to school and going to harvest, they would send me to the farm. It hurt me at that point—all I wanted was to go to school. Not necessarily because of the education itself, but because of the life in my house. I felt a kind of togetherness at school that I didn’t feel at home.
You see, school boosted my confidence. I was perceived as smarter than the rest. I was able to memorize facts very well, and I’ve always been very good at solving problems. I’m very careful when I say this because I don’t believe that some people are blessed with more intelligence than others. When you read all the theories about intelligence, you know that there are so many different types of intelligence. Emotional intelligence, social intelligence, et cetera, but it might have been that my brain was better equipped to adapt to the system that I was in, so I made it. Therefore my self-esteem was kind of higher than the rest of the kids, because they kept saying, “Lamothe is smarter.” It makes you feel like you can explain the world, the universe. It gives you the fuel to continue. Of course, this can be a trap. Because you start to love the attention.
But the truth is that I have always valued education because of the color of my skin. As you can see, I’m very dark. This played a big role against me when I was little. I was bullied a lot. But education was a kind of therapy for me. I felt, Here is a field where I can win and color doesn’t matter as much.
I left my village to go to high school. I went to live with my aunt in a small city on the coast. This was my first escape. Unfortunately there are so many people who get stuck because they didn’t get the chance of an education. I was lucky enough that I had that opportunity.
When I went to my aunt’s city, I didn’t even know that there was this other language, English. This other language, Spanish. In the village there is no way of knowing something like that. My life began to change, to open up. I saw the ocean for the very first time.
Looking back, the education that I was exposed to was also very dangerous. You begin to think that education gives you power over the rest of the people. And you begin to believe that you have privilege over the rest of the people, that you deserve the wealth, because you have an education, and that other people—poor people—don’t deserve anything because they’re not educated.
After high school, I went to the state university in Port-au-Prince to study social service. This was under the dictatorship of Baby Doc in 1982.6 It was a very scary time. It was like something out of Orwell’s book 1984, only two years earlier than he predicted. Vodou was being used to brainwash people, and to reinforce the fear. We all knew that Big Brother was out there watching us, so we had to be careful. There was no freedom of expression at all.
For instance, at the university there were certain topics you couldn’t ask the professors. How could we talk about political parties when there’s only one party of the government? The man was president for life. So there we were reading about the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, our own revolution! But we couldn’t talk deeply about any of these events. You see what I’m saying? It was like living in nonsense.
But things began to change. I was still at the university in 1986 during the fall of Baby Doc. I participated in the student protests. Like any normal twenty-five or twenty-six-year-old does anywhere in the world. I went out in the streets. Now I can see that I was naïve. You don’t see things the same way when you are fifty than when you are twenty-six. Like so many others I envisioned a better Haiti. A Haiti where there would be a lot of trees. Where everyone had access to education. Where we actually had elections for president, for parliament. I dreamed all those things. But now I realize, Wow, the system is bigger than I thought. There’s been so much frustration since 1986. It wasn’t a revolution. It was only a first, small step.
EDUCATION IS NOT ENOUGH
After university I began working in a literacy program. Wasn’t being paid. I just did it because I wanted to contribute. I was teaching reading in high schools, as well as math and social sciences. At that time there were some Americans working in our schools. Some doors opened for me. I began making a good living as an interpreter.
So yes, I was teaching people how to read, how to write, how to count, but here’s the reality. When you live in an environment with 98.5 percent deforestation, providing an education is not enough.7 An education won’t feed a population. That’s when I heard about an environmental program in California. How on one small farm you can grow a lot of food. I decided I wanted to learn some of these agricultural techniques and incorporate them into the curriculum of the literacy program. I went to Willits, three hours north of San Francisco.8 This was in ’95. It was such an experience. I studied intensive agriculture. And I came back to Haiti hoping that I would have a demonstration garden, where I could teach people about agriculture and everything, but it didn’t work out.
EVERYTHING IS A CHALLENGE
I ended up working as an interpreter with medical teams and that’s when I became involved in water. Because while I was working with all those medical teams, the issues that they were addressing, to me, were like putting on Band-Aids. They were trying to provide people with medicine for gastrointestinal diseases and other health problems related to bad water. I thought, What a waste of time and money, when the real problem is water.
Everything is a challenge here. I don’t blame anybody who lives here and dreams about leaving. Many Haitians feel that in order to have a better life, they have to leave, to be outside Haiti. No, you can’t blame them. And it’s true that I could have stayed in the U.S. Many times I’ve thought about this. But I came back to Haiti. I felt that I could make a difference. I have the education. This chaos must be addressed, and if someone with my knowledge doesn’t address it, who is going to? So, it’s in my blood now. If I could unlearn what I’ve learned, or unknow what I know now, that would be different.
It kind of reminds me of the movie The Matrix. I took the red pills, and I can’t go back again. I can’t just be silent. If I were silent now, I would carry so much guilt inside of me. There are so many battles to fight. You find one. I chose water. I saw people that are sick, and 80 percent of the diseases were the result of lack of clean water. That’s how I got involved. I’ve been in charge of the Gift of Water program for over fifteen years now. I teach people about the importance of clean water, and demonstrate methods of purification. I also advocate for cleaning up our rivers, ravines, and water sources. The job is endless.
In a normal city there should be running water in every faucet. That’s the bottom line. There’s an area north of Port-au-Prince where there’s a water source, underground wells. There’s an eight-inch pipe tapping out water. Tanker trucks drive by, fill up, go, fill up, go. And then they take the water into the city and drive by people’s homes and sell it. I’m talking about people with homes with water systems. They pipe it into the water system and it comes out of the faucet. But it’s not drinkable. The well water is contaminated. There’s a lot of E. coli in the water. The water is only for domestic use, like showers and washing, but you can’t—or you shouldn’t—drink it.
Our drinking water comes from the same aquifer north of the city, but it’s treated through reverse osmosis. It goes to the UN and is converted. It makes safe drinking water. This began after the cholera.9 Before, people would just get the water from everywhere and drink it. They got sick sometimes, but it was a very slow process. When you get sick from cholera, that’s a different ball game. If you don’t get rehydrated right away, you are gone. You’re dead. Seven thousand people got sick in the cholera epidemic.10
THERE’S ALSO LACK OF WATER
So, now, on every corner you are seeing these stands selling small plastic bags of water. That is the primary source of drinking water for the majority of people in this city. It’s very heavy on their budgets. Every day they pay for water. It adds up. People here, as poor as they are, they pay so much for water. But let me tell you this—I won’t drink the water from the bag. The BPA—bisphenol A—level in bags is too high.
And there’s another problem that is even worse. They’ve been pumping water out of the aquifer for forty, fifty years now. At one point, the water they will get will be too salty to convert. I don’t know how soon that will happen. I haven’t seen any studies yet. But it is just a matter of time. It isn’t an “if”; it’s a “when.” You can use pasteurization for salty water. For that, though, you need heat—and money. It might be possible to use solar energy to get the water from the ocean. But for how much? And it means that the money that you need for health care, for education, you must invest it in water. How can we take this option?
I often feel like a prophet with bad news. I’m trying to work to provide clean water, but if nothing is done, soon there won’t be enough water at all. Haiti is 98.5 percent deforested. All the trees have been cut and used for timber. It creates drought. For years, we’ve been living in drought. Without trees, all the rainwater flows into the ocean instead of remaining in the soil. So, I’m addressing clean water, but there’s also a lack of water. These are two different things.
Whenever I do my trainings, I always give the bad news. The next conflict between Haiti and the Dominican Republic won’t be over immigration. It will be over water, unfortunately. We’re going to run out. So we’ll have to go there—the Dominican Republic—and find it. So that will be the conflict, like India and Pakistan, Palestine and Israel. I won’t be around to see that, but this is where we are moving. I wish I were wrong.
PLASTIC IS A HUMAN PROBLEM
This river here—Bois Chene—this was a natural riverbed many years ago.11 We used to have water in it. Where’s the water? It’s been dry many years. Only a little water in the rainy season or in the spring. This is the river of plastic, now—along with so much else. Laundry baskets, cans, shirts, egg boxes, bags, detergent bottles, everything. Pigs. You name it, you can find it in the river. And what you see right here is a microscopic look at a bigger thing.
Fifty years ago, it wasn’t like this. It wasn’t because people were more educated, but because Port-au-Prince didn’t have so many people. And they hadn’t yet introduced plastic into the environment.
Plastic is invading our lives. The stuff satisfies our needs for maybe an hour or two hours, but it causes problems for 500 years. When it’s raining, all this trash will end up deep in the ocean. Some of it will make it to Cuba. Some of it will make it to Jamaica. We can solve this. Let me quote a French environmentalist, Albert Jacquard, who said that we need to live together as brothers and sisters, otherwise we are going to die together as idiots.
Of course plastic isn’t a Haitian problem; it is a human problem. So this is a riverbed, but it is also a representation of human failure. It’s impossible for me to imagine that with all the technology that allows us to recycle things, with the organic matters here that can be used for composting, and we still just let it all sit here before it goes out to sea. There are easy answers. Why not tax this plastic? Why not give more incentives for recycling?
Haiti is a leader. Ours was the first slave revolution in human history that succeeded. To me, that’s a lot to share with the world. But, let’s be honest, what came after that? After 200 years of independence, what? Albert Camus commented, I believe it was in The Stranger, that if you put someone in a box for all his life, always in this box, finally he’ll be used to it. He will be used to that box, and then he will stay in that box until he dies.
This is what puzzles me about Port-au-Prince. You see people smiling, you see people laughing. And then you see, for instance, someone sitting near a garbage pile and eating. There is a certain sense of order in this chaos. Things have their place. Otherwise, we’d all go crazy, but, do you notice something? You don’t see that many crazy people here. We’ve begun to accept our situation as normal.
And then we have an earthquake that kills 200,000 or 300,000 people, who even knows? And I saw people with one arm, with one foot, and they weren’t complaining. The courage of the survivors teaches us a lot about the complexity of a human being. I’ve got two arms, two legs, and I still complain? It’s hard for me to comprehend. We all have a lot to learn.
I was hoping that the earthquake would allow us to make a new plan. To say, this is a time, this is an opportunity to rethink Port-au-Prince. Look at Brazil. At one point they moved the capital to another place! The earthquake was horrific, but it was also a possibility to rethink the country in a different way—to change our education system, our environment. The whole world was focusing on Haiti. Even Hollywood had Haiti fever!
All that foreign interest, all that foreign money. Have the levels of poverty and misery changed? And even right now, today, we have a foreign army—the UN—in Haiti.12 This is another occupation. The people call the UN tourista. It means that they are here like tourists who have little interest in what goes on here. They are supposed to be keeping the peace, but the United Nations, the United States, or any other foreign country can’t come here and fix our problems. The solutions are going to be Haitian or there won’t be any solutions.
I don’t want to call what happened after the earthquake a failure. I mean, what would you expect? But I did have hope. You lose hope when you die. Hope will follow you to your grave, but at a certain point, too, you’ve got to be realistic. What are the conditions that need to change for change to happen? It makes me feel very sad to see countries, for instance, in Africa that have only been independent since the 1960s. Compare them to Haiti, and you see a big difference. Look at some countries in Asia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan. Seventy years ago you could compare them to Haiti. There was a writer, Gunnar Myrdal, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in Economics, who predicted in his book Asian Drama that those countries from Asia would never break the cycle of poverty. History proved him wrong. They broke the cycle and now you see they’re very different countries.
WHY AM I SO LUCKY?
So I believe change is possible. And yet sometimes I feel like this life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to live with. I tend not to take things for granted anymore. When I go back to my village it’s a kind of metaphysical trip, a trip inside of myself, too, and I can see, Wow, this is where I would be stuck if I didn’t have an education. I look at my friends and relatives and I see how they are trapped in misery, and they have no power to overcome.
And then I wish that everybody who has been raised in the Western world should make a trip to Haiti. And a trip to Haiti won’t be a trip to Haiti; it would be a trip inside of themselves. And it might lead them to question God, and ask, Why am I so lucky? I will appreciate the water that I’m drinking. I will appreciate the road that is so nice that I’m driving. I will appreciate the peace.
I have to believe that beneath every tragedy there’s room for triumph, there’s redemption. I’ve recently gone through a divorce and I miss my two children in the U.S. I miss them so much. I have all this negative energy inside of me now. I’m trying to put it into something positive. I’ve been focusing on law school and the environment. I’ve got some time left. Maybe I can contribute something. Maybe not. Who knows where the adventure will take me? All I know for certain is that when I go to bed in the middle of all this chaos, there’s still a chance I can contribute something.
In Kreyol, we only say what we wish to say, nothing more.
—Overheard at the bus terminal at Portail-Léogâne, Port-au-Prince