Mark Curnutte

The well-digging machine remained locked in a shed Monday at the Catholic diocese in Gonaives, Haiti.

In the rural villages of Bassin, Magnan and Brunette that ring Gonaives, work has stalled on projects to irrigate arid fields and pump safe drinking water to peasant farmers.

Throughout the largely rural diocese in north-central Haiti - now under scattered control of anti-government rebels - some Catholic schools are still closed, preventing children and their families from receiving what is often their only significant meal each day.

In the Diocese of Gonaives, which covers roughly one-sixth of the nation and serves many of the region's 1.3 million residents, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, funds have been diverted from development projects to the most vital food and medicine distribution efforts.

Lives already lived in crisis have been raised to even a higher state of emergency by Haiti's armed uprising and resignation of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The suffering is immense, even when the international focus is not on Haiti, and by no means is confined to the capital city of Port-au-Prince.

The rebels first took control of Gonaives, a city of 200,000, on Feb. 5. They achieved their goal of ousting Aristide in less than a month. But violence is still the law of the land. Aristide's supporters are now on the offensive, and U.S. and international troops again have been deployed to Haiti.

While Gonaives might be difficult to find on a map - it is about 75 miles northwest of Port-au-Prince - its location at the bottom of the social order is clear. In the mid-1980s, the Haitian government allowed 4,000 tons of toxic municipal incinerator ash from Philadelphia to be dumped from a barge onto beaches at Gonaives.

Under the guise that it was fertilizer, the toxic waste sat near the water and salt flats for almost a decade before being moved to an open-air depot nearby. Pressure from U.S. and Haitian groups led to the ash's removal 13 years after its arrival.

Poorest of the poor

Gonaives and its twin waterside slums of Jubilee and Raboteau - tin huts arranged on a grid of dirt streets - are no strangers to social unrest. Residents of Haiti's central region are considered the poorest of the nation's poor. (The per capita income is about $400; half of all Haitian children die before age 5; the illiteracy rate is 65 percent.)

Often regarded with the least to lose, people of Gonaives have been among the most committed to change. It is the home base of current rebel leader Guy Philippe.

A similar uprising also started in Gonaives in 1985 and brought down the 28-year Duvalier family dictatorship. In April 1994, 21 people fiercely loyal to the then-exiled Aristide, most of them fishermen coming in after a day on the water, were killed by forces commanded by military dictator Gen. Raoul Cedras.

During a visit to Haiti in 1996, I stood beside the crude concrete monument to the deceased at Gonaives Bay and met a widowed mother who lost her husband in the gunfire.

It was a time of uneasy peace, really the only kind Haiti knows. U.S. and U.N. troops that had arrived in 1994 were just departing. There was a sense of fragile hope in the air.

Aristide's support soured

Rene Preval, an Aristide protege, had been elected president in December 1995; term limits prohibited Aristide from running again until 2000. Major opposition parties boycotted his re-election, claiming fraud in the earlier legislative elections. Tensions built until boiling in February. Some of Aristide's former supporters are now his most violent opposition.

But beyond the armed conflict and related chaos - looting, fires, roadblocks and another coup, believed to be the 32nd in 200 years of Haitian independence - it is difficult to imagine daily life being harder now than it was in period of relative peace and prosperity in the late 1990s.

It was then that Hands Together, a Springfield, Mass.,-based relief organization, entered full partnership with the Diocese of Gonaives and the young Haitian priest, the Rev. Gerard Dormevil, who runs its social outreach programs. He also was my guide for several days.

Acting on Dormevil's suggestion, Hands Together bought a used well digger that has since constructed dozens of deep, safe-water wells throughout the diocese. In Haiti, only 1 in 10 people have access to clean water, and the most common cause of death - besides malnutrition - is untreated diarrhea contracted by drinking filthy water. Many existing wells are contaminated with human feces, and in the countryside it is common to see people washing clothes, bathing and filling water jugs in the same tiny, polluted stream.

On the outskirts of villages and in rural valleys, where unchecked deforestation provided fuel but left the land barren, clean-water wells are at the center of ambitious development projects. Storage cisterns and concrete canals have been built to irrigate up to 500 farms. Peasant farmers, many of whom had left to unsuccessfully find work in the cities, have returned to the land.

But these programs have been idled by the uprising and don't appear to be starting up any time soon.

"They will be there when this calms down," said Doug Campbell, Hands Together director who will return to Port-au-Prince this week.

"Peasants are not leaving their huts, they are not going to market to sell their crops, the price of food has tripled," Dormevil told Campbell last week. "Each town has a different level of occupation."

One of those towns is Pilate, a spread-out mountain village inland from Gonaives.

It was there a widow named Maude fed us. Hers is a face I see when I think of Haiti. She was the mother of a young man who had worked for the bishop in Gonaives.

Up close and wrenching

I was one of three Americans invited to her home for Sunday dinner. After driving for more than an hour, we walked another 30 minutes along a water pipe through some woods. Every few minutes, Haitian children, saying "blanc, blanc" - the Creole for "white" - would emerge from the cover to hold our hands or rub our arms, as if touching our skin were a good luck charm.

Maude's home, four small rooms without electricity, stood on a small plateau. The kitchen, an open-flame grill that burned charcoal, was behind the house. In the front, bananas hung from trees.

We were introduced. Then Maude, a tall, lean woman with an elderly face, handed her son a live chicken and large knife. With little refrigeration, game and fowl are kept alive until prepared.

Five of us - Maude's two oldest children, Campbell, an American priest and I - were asked to sit on chairs in front of the house. About an hour after we arrived, Maude served us chicken, rice and bananas. The meal, sparse by American standards, represented almost a week's worth of food for her and her four younger children.

Before leaving, we walked around the back of the house to say goodbye. Her small children were eating the chicken bones and scraps from our plates.

---

Mark Curnutte has toured Haiti and been a volunteer mission appeal speaker for the Diocese of Gonaives since 1999. He covers the Bengals for the Enquirer.