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The Book of the Week is “Haiti After the Earthquake” by Paul Farmer, published in 2011. In this hodgepodge of a volume, the author (a medical doctor and cofounder of the organizations, Partners in Health and Zanmi Lasante) and some of his contacts, described the complex set of factors that go into helping people deal with the aftermath of a disaster in a Third World territory.
Haiti’s chaotic political history brings into question whether it has ever been a sovereign territory with sincerely elected Haitian officials (without foreign overseers and funders) for more than a few months since 1804.
There are various major reasons Haiti is still poverty stricken in the twenty-first century. Haiti lacks:
- adequately functioning systems of basic services (healthcare, education, housing and food procurement) that allow self-rule;
- an inspirational leader with ambitious plans to start the said service-systems with a staff who’s sufficiently experienced and competent to do so;
- the money to start the said service-systems, and continue them even after disasters strike;
- a way to break its centuries-long cycle of receiving outside aid; such aid prompts its dependence on countries which have strategic interests in it; such aid is perpetuated because it never learns how to create its own service-systems.
Each system is incestuous with the others: better education leads to better healthcare, housing and agriculture, and the improvements feed on themselves.
Haiti was hit with multiple storms in 2008 which brought mudslides and flooding. In January 2010, it was hit with an extremely strong earthquake. In the wake of the latter, a huge percentage of: its buildings were destroyed (including government buildings due to shoddy construction) and its population died (most of which was in poor health in the first place).
Within days, the international community sent a deluge of humanitarian aid workers to sift through the wreckage and treat the numerous injured and ill survivors. The author and his colleagues were immensely frustrated at the way administering of aid was very poorly organized, and at the severe shortages of resources, such as medical supplies, drugs and transportation.
One common scenario was that of a ten-year-old girl whose father died in the earthquake. To prevent her family’s starvation, her mother went to work transporting produce to the marketplace to be sold by other women. The girl thus had to take care of her four younger siblings in the family’s hovel made of sticks and debris. The girl was repeatedly raped. There were numerous reports of after-dark sexual assaults of females at squat-toilets which were a long walk from their makeshift housing.
When a disaster hits Haiti, the Haitian people are blamed when they can’t bootstrap themselves into independence. Unluckily, Haiti lacks valuable resources such as oil or minerals, and it has been stripped of its forests (for various reasons). So there are many other regional areas in which aid-providing countries would rather locate their military bases.
Read the book to learn much more about the stakeholders, issues and traumas involved in helping Haiti get back on its feet after so much devastation.