Within less than a year I was deployed to Haiti
on forty seven hours notice which is interesting
because the anti-malaria prescriptions don’t
kick in for two weeks so we were taking a
little bit of a risk there. But by being careful
I was one of the lucky few who never became
sick at all during my tour in Haiti.
My job there was to rebuild the national power
company and for that I had a collection
of contractors from the Netherlands and
France and Switzerland and just all sorts of
places that folks would come from to try and
give a hand to try and repair the power utility.
Most of the power in Haiti is generated by
large marine diesels which had fallen into
disrepair because when Baby Doc fled the
country he took with him all of the knowledgeable
people so it was pretty much rebuilding from
scratch and interestingly the power companies,
the power plants are all down in the slums
which made for some interesting security issues.
The aristocracy of the country wanted to shut
down the national utility which was selling
electricity at a decent cost to the local people.
What they wanted to do was bring in power
from offshore and sell it at four times the
normal price and get their money.
So what they would be doing would to be to
try to foment sabotage by the local street gangs.
The Americans had an interesting solution to that.
They built high concrete walls, topped them with
barbed wire and actually established
World War II style machine gun towers.
I had a slightly different approach.
I hired the local gang leaders as security guards,
paid them quite well and I told them that if
anything went wrong they would lose their jobs.
This assured an awful lot of peace because
they now had some money to spread around
to improve the lot of the people who were
part and parcel of their little portion of the slums.
So it worked out quite well for everyone.