October 12, 2010

Haiti: The Price of Nothing

Mac McClelland

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“I think this trip is going to be expensive,” I told my editors when I was getting ready to go to Haiti. Well, now I’m back and going through my notes—and a few receipts. Even though I’d had a hunch, I’d really had no idea.

Hotel room in Port-au-Prince: $125 a night, with no hot water, no generator (read: power only about 80 percent of the time). Gas: $5 a gallon. Thirty dollars for two weeks’ worth of phone service, local calls only. Avocado on white bread at a restaurant: $10. Fried chicken with rice and beans at a grubby roadside joint: same. Ditto a lunch dish with a bottle of water from a stand I’m pretty sure gave me a parasite.

The standard car-rental rate is $150 a day. If you need someone to drive it for you—and believe me, everyone does; Port-au-Prince traffic/navigation/rubble-dodging is not for the uninitiated, and even one of the UN soldiers chilling at my hotel crashed a truck after months of driving in-country—the price can be as high as $350. A day.

Once when we were walking through a hot, dusty displacement camp, my local driver/translator/partner in crime went to go buy a Coke. When he realized he didn’t have his wallet, he came back to me.

“I need a dollar.”

“U.S.? Are you kidding me?” There are stores in San Francisco that sell cheaper sodas.

People blame the prices on the fact that much of Haiti’s goods are imported, or that Haiti got screwed in free trade deals, or that there’ve been aid workers and UN soldiers and other interlopers with lots of needs and lots of dollars driving prices up for years or that Haitian poor people are so poor that they can’t buy stuff anyway so prices are aimed at the upper classes. Whatever the reason, I cut a lot of corners and wrangled a lot of free rides and cheap rates, but spent close to half as much in Haiti as I did in the Gulf covering the oil spill this summer. I was in Louisiana for four months. I was in Haiti for two weeks.

“This is a good place to be poor,” one of my new Haitian buddies (who happens to be rich) told me. As the prices were taxing even my American budget, I made a skeptical face. “Here, if you have nothing, you really have nothing,” he explained. “You really can’t afford to buy anything. But at least almost everyone else has nothing, too.”

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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