Haitian Beatz

When I returned from Haiti on February 8, the first thing I started doing was looking for books that could help make sense of some of the things I had seen that obviously predated the earthquake: the

extreme poverty, regularly being asked for money or things, and nightmarish logistical situations that seemingly prevented needs from being met. What I found was the books on the subject are few, but devastating in their critiques.

I decided to purchase Travesty in Haiti: A true account of Christian missions, orphanages, fraud, food aid and drug trafficking, by Timothy T. Schwartz, Ph. D., an anthropologist who graduated from the University of Florida and spent a decade in Haiti doing doctoral research followed by work with non-government organizations (NGOs) dedicated to food aid. The primary NGOs mentioned through the narrative are CARE, PISANO, Agro Acton Aleman (AAA) and the French Initiative Development, whose goal through the 1980s and 1990s was to address the extreme poverty among the peasant farmers living across the country outside Port-au-Prince.

When the book arrived, I was immediately cautious because of it’s appearance. It had all the markings of a self-published book: blurry pictures, fuzzy text, lack of publishing information and, most telling of all, a final page that read, “Made in the USA, Lexington, KY, 09 February 2010,” which happened to be the day I ordered the book. So it was “print-on-demand” I realized. That in itself meant nothing since many books (including mine) are now published this way, but there was no ISBN page, publisher information, thank you’s, or credits.

What I did find online was a long summary/review in Anthropology Review Database by Dr. Robert Lawless of Wichita State University which gave the books high marks. I found another reference to the book in the Journal of International and Global Studies, in another piece Dr. Lawless’, this time reviewing Jared Diamond’s 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Lawless also