Giving Advice for Employment

One of my favourite ones is being confronted with a machete wielding crowd in Haiti. My job as the engineer responsible for rebuilding the national power company had me in the slums of Haiti quite regularly and one day I came across a crowd of folks who were waving machetes in the air. So I stopped the truck and I got out and I walked over to them to ask them what they were doing and they said, “Well we’re unemployed and we want jobs.” And my response to them was that you’re in the slums there’s nobody here to do anything for you. “Tell you what to do, make up some signs and go two kilometres down the road to where the presidential palace is and have your little demonstration there.” So they thought that’s not a bad idea, we’ll listen to the Canadian. And off they went. I didn’t see them again until I ran into one of the folks about two weeks later and I said, “So how did it go? ” And he said, “Oh it went great, we’ve all got jobs!” The interesting point is at the time that I was in Haiti it didn’t take a lot of cash for a fellow to keep body and soul together. For a single individual it took about five dollars U.S. a week and by the time you made ten dollars a week you were looking to get married and start a family. So, you know, what they didn’t need in Haiti was an awful lot of machinery, what they did need was an awful lot of manual jobs so, you know, things like rebuilding the roads with shovels, picks and wheelbarrows was the way to go for those guys.