ON JANUARY 11 2010 Haiti was the poorest country in the western hemisphere, with 80 per cent of the population living below the poverty line and 54 per cent in “abject poverty”.
Haitians living abroad and sending money home made up around one-fifth of the tiny island’s GDP - five times more than the total value of exports.
The country fought and won independence from France in 1804 – the first slave country to do so – but two centuries of poverty, cycles of coups and dictators and ever-present natural disasters led Haitians to believe the Voodoo legend that they were now a cursed people, the pact with the spirits that gave them their freedom exacted at a terrible price for the generations that followed.
Life couldn’t get much worse.
The next day a massive earthquake struck, killing up to 316,000 lives, displacing more than 1.5 million people, leaving 3.3 million facing food shortages.
More than 80 per cent of rural housing was severely affected, hundreds of thousands of people, suddenly homeless, were forced to live in tent cities.
In parts of the country – including the capital Port-au-Prince - schools, hospitals and government buildings no longer existed. Airports, ports and roads were damaged. Crops were destroyed, along with irrigation canals – in a country where half of all citizens work on the land.
It was to this desolation that Roland van Hauwermeiren and his Oxfam team were supposed to be injecting hope. Their `mission’ was to alleviate the worst of the suffering, providing clean water, shelter and basic sanitation, as well as by helping community canteens provide daily hot meals.
And the charity did make a material change on the ground, reaching 300,000 people with aid in the first three, horror-filled months following the earthquake.
But, we now also know that it was into this desolation that van Hauwermeiren inflicted more misery. The 68-year-old admitted that prostitutes had visited his Oxfam-funded villa in Haiti.
Yesterday on its website the charity was still proudly declaring during its Haiti mission it had “provided paid employment to the people in the camps; to keep the camps clean, build latrines and clear up their destroyed neighbourhoods, we put money in the pockets of those who needed it most and helped them improve their living conditions”.
The phrase ‘sex worker’ is a hotly contested one. Critics argue it endorses the notion of sex as labour for women and leisure for men, and that women's bodies are commodities to be used by other people.
I would argue that even those who were comfortable with the term would balk at the notion that women in Haiti, struggling to survive amid the devastation, were freely making a choice to trade their bodies for sex, were doing so from a position of power.
Even before the earthquake, Haitian women were among the world’s most vulnerable human beings. There is no way the men that chose to use them could dress up the encounter as a `Belle du Jour’ escort scenario where glamorous, sexually liberated women capitalise on their existing pastime to pay their way through university or upgrade their car.
Make no mistake, we are talking about desperate women, prepared to grit their teeth and endure untold degradation to feed themselves and their families.
That is what is so despicable about the Oxfam scandal – like so many institutions before them, the people that abused Haiti’s trust, and that of so many millions of donors, were dressed up as the good guys, saviours, selfless heroes dedicated to making the world better.
People believed in them. They gave money to Oxfam because they trusted the name.
One bad apple does not inevitably destroy an entire harvest. It only does that if it is not rooted out, before the rot can spread, if there are procedures in place to find any cankered fruit at the earliest stage of decay and ensure it does not re-enter the food chain.
The tragedy of the Haiti scandal is that the governance at one of the most famous charities in the world was so weak.
In a move reminiscent of the worst betrayals in the global clerical sex abuse scandal, van Hauwermeiren was allowed to resign from Oxfam without financial penalty and went on to become the head of a mission for Action Against Hunger in Bangladesh.
No loss of reputation, no warning to the new ‘parish’.
Maybe one day Haiti will rise again. But it can only do so without false friends simply there to seek fresh plunder.
