La Gloire de la Loi

Today, we visited the government, in all its glory and construction.

The Primature sits up on top of a hill in Petionville, with landscaped grounds and a fountain (albeit dry). The building was built by a former police commissioner, M. Prospere, in the 1930s. It's a grandiose blend of Italian villa and American plantation. Inside, you can see some evidence of wear and tear - the chandeliers are missing some of their crystals, not all of the lights turn on. Regardless, the impression is one of opulence (friezes on the walls, statues from Italy, the aforementioned chandeliers). After meeting for about half an hour, we left to go down and visit the Parliament.

We wound our way down the hill (you can look up the hills around Port-au-Prince and watch the wealth gap widen) into the downtown, through the Haitian equivalent of the automile on the wrong side of the tracks, past tiny shops dealing only in secondhand sheet metal and pay-by-the-pound clothes shipped over from the US, staring longingly at the snow-cone carts (we antibacterial Americans affectionately refer to them as "cones of death") roaming up and down the ruts in the street. All the while, it was a tumult of people dodging traffic, traffic dodging dogs, and dogs failing to dodge traffic. We wormed our way over the potholes (cauldron-holes, maybe) and through to the other side, where we finally arrived at Parliament.

On first glance, you could miss it entirely. There is a "Palais Legislatif" that sits facing the American Embassy (ironic, that, for you IRI members reading this), the showpiece of the legislature. Around the back of the block, and across the street is the Senate office building. It's wedged between the Cuban Embassy and a copy shop, and has been gutted for renovations. We walked inside (not a place I should have worn open-toed shoes, but...), and up the stairs, ducking to go through doorways, and sliding over debris. The government of Haiti is valiantly trying to refurbish the building before the parliament sits (probably in late May), but they have a herculean task ahead of them. The Augean Stables have nothing on the Haitian Senate.

The interesting thing? There is really no office space for the legislators. If you're appointed one of the leadership positions, you get an office. Think about it this way - imagine Capitol Hill if it was plonked down in the middle of Southeast DC, and only Dick Cheney and Harry Reid had offices there. They've rented out an old apartment building, and there's only one bathroom. Would you want to go visit your congress? All the other legislators have offices in their districts, but not in the capital. There's only one conference room, and the library is about the size of an elementary school classroom, with an archive off to the back. There is no money for computers, let alone a network. There's one broken microfilm machine. All of the senators will share a pool of adminstrative staff and researchers, who will all sit in three rooms, along with the accountants.

It makes me take a hard look, both at our goals for this project, and at the resources we spend on our government at home. We have invested so much over the years in the resources available to Congress that we have, perhaps, forgotten how to ask our legislators to get their hands dirty (and I don't mean in an Abramoff kind of way). On the other end of the spectrum, the Haitian legislature will sit for the first time in years, and will have a huge mandate with no resources. Instead, they'll have to answer to the people, and to the voices from the mansion up on the hill, and try their damnedest to make a change.

In the day you can see the children playing
On the road that leads to those gates of hardened steel
Steel gates that completely surround sir
The mansion on the hill
- Bruce Springsteen