[xmca] Haiti: Pass it on

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

What follows is an op-ed essay in the NY Times from today about Haiti. Using
cell phone numbers, the red cross has raised almost 5 million dollars at 10$
a person
in the last couple of days. We have donated to Doctors Without Borders. But
Tracy
Kidder's advocacy of Paul Farmer's clinic, which is closer to Port au Prince
than Dominican
Republic or the US, deserves support for sure. Judge for yourselves.
mike
----------

THOSE who know a little of Haiti’s history might have watched the news last
night and thought, as I did for a moment: “An earthquake? What next? Poor
Haiti is cursed.”
 Skip to next paragraph<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/opinion/14kidder.html?scp=1&sq=kidder&st=cse#secondParagraph>
Related Op-Ed Contributor: Haiti’s Angry
God<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/opinion/14bhatia.html?ref=opinion>(January
14, 2010)  Room
for Debate: The Help That Haiti
Needs<http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/the-help-that-haiti-needs/index.html?ref=opinion>(January
14, 2010) Times
Topics: Haiti<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/haiti/index.html>

But while earthquakes are acts of nature, extreme vulnerability to
earthquakes is manmade. And the history of Haiti’s vulnerability to natural
disasters — to floods and famine and disease as well as to this terrible
earthquake — is long and complex, but the essence of it seems clear enough.

Haiti is a country created by former slaves, kidnapped West Africans, who,
in 1804, when slavery still flourished in the United States and the
Caribbean, threw off their cruel French masters and created their own
republic. Haitians have been punished ever since for claiming their freedom:
by the French who, in the 1820s, demanded and received payment from the
Haitians for the slave colony, impoverishing the country for years to come;
by an often brutal American occupation from 1915 to 1934; by indigenous
misrule that the American government aided and abetted. (In more recent
years American administrations fell into a pattern of promoting and then
undermining Haitian constitutional democracy.)

Hence the current state of affairs: at least 10,000 private organizations
perform supposedly humanitarian missions in Haiti, yet it remains one of the
world’s poorest countries. Some of the money that private aid organizations
rely on comes from the United States government, which has insisted that a
great deal of the aid return to American pockets — a larger percentage than
that of any other industrialized country.

But that is only part of the problem. In the arena of international aid, a
great many efforts, past and present, appear to have been doomed from the
start. There are the many projects that seem designed to serve not
impoverished Haitians but the interests of the people administering the
projects. Most important, a lot of organizations seem to be unable — and
some appear to be unwilling — to create partnerships with each other or, and
this is crucial, with the public sector of the society they’re supposed to
serve.

The usual excuse, that a government like Haiti’s is weak and suffers from
corruption, doesn’t hold — all the more reason, indeed, to work with the
government. The ultimate goal of all aid to Haiti ought to be the
strengthening of Haitian institutions, infrastructure and expertise.

This week, the list of things that Haiti needs, things like jobs and food
and reforestation, has suddenly grown a great deal longer. The earthquake
struck mainly the capital and its environs, the most densely populated part
of the country, where organizations like the Red Cross and the United
Nations have their headquarters. A lot of the places that could have been
used for disaster relief — including the central hospital, such as it was —
are now themselves disaster areas.

But there are effective aid organizations working in Haiti. At least one has
not been crippled by the earthquake. Partners in Health, or in Haitian
Creole Zanmi Lasante, has been the largest health care provider in rural
Haiti. (I serve on this organization’s development committee.) It operates,
in partnership with the Haitian Ministry of Health, some 10 hospitals and
clinics, all far from the capital and all still intact. As a result of this
calamity, Partners in Health probably just became the largest health care
provider still standing in all Haiti.

Fortunately, it also offers a solid model for independence — a model where
only a handful of Americans are involved in day-to-day operations, and
Haitians run the show. Efforts like this could provide one way for Haiti, as
it rebuilds, to renew the promise of its revolution.

Tracy Kidder is the author of “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” about Haiti, and
“Strength in What Remains.”


Donate here:
http://www.pih.org/youcando/donate.html

or turn off the TV.
mike
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