The proverbs of Haiti, like whispered hymns of the ancestors, find their way into moments when truth must be spoken plainly, when the weight of history demands reckoning. They do not come in grand declarations or lofty rhetoric but in sharp, compact wisdom—words tempered by generations who have known struggle and survival in equal measure.
“Ou konn prepare yon bon tè pou’w al plante djondjon, epi, djondjon wan al leve dèyè latrinn.”
“You prepared good soil to plant the mushrooms, but the mushrooms grew behind the latrine.”
It is the kind of lesson that arrives not with a shout but with the quiet, cutting precision of irony. It speaks of misplaced efforts, of grand designs built on crumbling foundations, of how good intentions so often wander astray.
Consider America in the throes of COVID. A pandemic unlike any other, a crisis demanding urgency—and with it came a flood of money, a river of resources meant to uplift, meant to close the gap. Billions rained down, and the school districts—forgotten for decades—were suddenly crowned with the trappings of modernity. Laptops by the millions, gleaming and new, symbols of progress in the digital age.
Yet, beneath this gilded promise, another truth emerged: the broadband deserts, the failing infrastructure, the rusting school buildings where technology became an afterthought to the more pressing reality of neglect. The tools of modernity arrived, but the foundation to support them was never laid. And so, the students—those most in need—were left staring at screens they could not use, trapped in a digital divide deepened by the very efforts meant to bridge it.
But perhaps nowhere is this truth more painfully evident than in Haiti itself, in the story of an earthquake that was more than just an act of God.
The temblor of 2010 did not merely shake the ground—it exposed the fractures of an entire system. In the cities, where foreign architects and planners imposed their logic, concrete buildings stood as testaments to development, to progress. They were meant to be sturdy, meant to be strong. Yet when the earth convulsed, they shattered, brittle and unyielding, collapsing into dust.
And then there were the shotgun houses, those humble dwellings of wood and wisdom, built not by foreign hands but by the people who knew the land. They were not grand. They did not tower. But they swayed when the earth moved, they flexed where rigid structures fell. They endured.
What crumbled in that quake was not just infrastructure but the illusion of imposed neoliberal expertise. It was a reckoning—a reminder that progress, when detached from history, from the voices of those who have lived and built through hardship, becomes its own kind of failure.
So, the proverb holds. The good soil was tilled. The seeds were sown. But the harvest? It sprouted where no one intended, in the blind spots of greed, ambition, in the corners where the wisdom of the Haitian people had been ignored.
This is the lesson, written not just in the dust of Port-au-Prince but in the classrooms of rural America, in the hollow promises of disaster capitalism, in the ever-repeating cycle where those who claim to uplift refuse to listen.