Week 14: Structural Violence and Development: A View from Haiti

        Farmer states in "Suffering and Structural Violence," that "it is one thing to make sense of extreme suffering--a universal activity--and quite another to explain it" (378).  This implies that suffering is easily understandable and that everyone knows what suffering is.  In this universalizing sentiment, it seems odd that we would not be able to explain suffering given that all of us already know what it is.  And why must suffering be explained if it is universally felt?  Nevertheless, organizations have been created in order to cater to, if not explain suffering, then at least make sense of it.  NGOs are particularly at fault for this, although their egalitarian methods do not absolve them of their own problems.  In Killing with Kindness: Haiti, International Aid, and NGOs, Mark Schuller tries to make sense of the suffering Haitians experienced during the 2004 coup and its aftermath in relation to the international aid Haiti received through NGOs and anaylzes the extent to which those NGOs forged a bond with the local Haitian communities.  One issue to contend with, which was brought up in Schuller's introduction, is what does or should democracy look like and how should it interact with others?  The coup in Haiti seriously jeopardized this understanding and provided mixed feeling as to how Haitians received international aid.
        In his study of two NGOs, Fanm Tet Ansanm and Sove Lavai, Schuller exposes the internal hierarchies embedded within these organizations that are meant to help the suffering citizens of Haiti.  Interestingly, the physical space and layout of the buildings invoked there own hierarchies whether it be the middle office, back office, clinic, upstairs or downstairs.  There were physical barriers that emphasized the work and rank of those individual workers.  However, at lunch at Fanm Tet Ansanm, hierarchies are temporarily abandoned.  Indeed, "it is no accident that his liminal space--outside the official 'work' space--was generally the most open, deliberated area, where divisions are temporarily suspended and everyone participates in the brass lide" (85).  But how are we to understand such organizations that, whether consciously or not, develop this hierarchy?  Are their aims and intentions any less pure because they hold to their own systems of oppression through the construction of hierarchies?