October 12, 2010

Haiti: The Price of Nothing

Mac McClelland

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“I think this trip is going to be expensive,” I told my editors when I was getting ready to go to Haiti. Well, now I’m back and going through my notes—and a few receipts. Even though I’d had a hunch, I’d really had no idea.

Hotel room in Port-au-Prince: $125 a night, with no hot water, no generator (read: power only about 80 percent of the time). Gas: $5 a gallon. Thirty dollars for two weeks’ worth of phone service, local calls only. Avocado on white bread at a restaurant: $10. Fried chicken with rice and beans at a grubby roadside joint: same. Ditto a lunch dish with a bottle of water from a stand I’m pretty sure gave me a parasite.

The standard car-rental rate is $150 a day. If you need someone to drive it for you—and believe me, everyone does; Port-au-Prince traffic/navigation/rubble-dodging is not for the uninitiated, and even one of the UN soldiers chilling at my hotel crashed a truck after months of driving in-country—the price can be as high as $350. A day.

Once when we were walking through a hot, dusty displacement camp, my local driver/translator/partner in crime went to go buy a Coke. When he realized he didn’t have his wallet, he came back to me.

“I need a dollar.”

“U.S.? Are you kidding me?” There are stores in San Francisco that sell cheaper sodas.

People blame the prices on the fact that much of Haiti’s goods are imported, or that Haiti got screwed in free trade deals, or that there’ve been aid workers and UN soldiers and other interlopers with lots of needs and lots of dollars driving prices up for years or that Haitian poor people are so poor that they can’t buy stuff anyway so prices are aimed at the upper classes. Whatever the reason, I cut a lot of corners and wrangled a lot of free rides and cheap rates, but spent close to half as much in Haiti as I did in the Gulf covering the oil spill this summer. I was in Louisiana for four months. I was in Haiti for two weeks.

“This is a good place to be poor,” one of my new Haitian buddies (who happens to be rich) told me. As the prices were taxing even my American budget, I made a skeptical face. “Here, if you have nothing, you really have nothing,” he explained. “You really can’t afford to buy anything. But at least almost everyone else has nothing, too.”

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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