Heart to Haiti

By now probably everyone has heard about and seen the devastation caused by the recent earthquake in Haiti. The images of bodies trapped in rubble, people bloodied and dazed walking down the street and the unbelievable destruction in this already fragile nation are everywhere. It’s an absolutely disastrous and gut-wrenching situation.

Thankfully, nearly everyone seems ready to respond and help. The UN, US government and countless NGOs are mobilizing people and resources to help; friends are donating their Facebook status and texting specific numbers to contribute to relief efforts; no doubt generous people everywhere are donating money, water, medicine and other supplies.

The outpouring of assistance and aid is encouraging, but it’s also daunting. Huge relief operations, like the one after the tsunami in 2004, have a tendency to grab the world’s attention, create a huge influx of money and supplies, but also random crap that is not actually needed (like neckties for fisherman who lost their homes in the tsunami. How many fishermen do you know that wear a tie to work?).

Living in Tanzania, I’ve had a chance to see first hand the positive and negative sides of foreign aid. Clearly money (lots of money) is needed to address poverty and injustice. But you also see how assistance creates entire initiatives that are completely determined by (and thus change with) the whims of donors and how aid dependency begins to develop.

Like many other developing nations, Haiti is a small country that’s struggled with big problems for nearly all of its existence. From its proud beginnings as the only nation to be founded by a successful slave revolt, its fallen into poverty and distress at the hands of disastrous dictators and its more powerful neighbors (read: the US). Today Haiti is the poorest country in the western Hemisphere and many of the few resources it had are now probably buried under a pile of concrete and rebar.

I am certainly not trying to suggest that mobilizing every available resource to respond to this tragedy is anything but the only appropriate response right now, but I do think the current situation in Haiti is a good opportunity to look at some of the challenges that the influx of aid from huge disasters creates. Right now every person and organization wants to help Haiti, and that’s wonderful, but how can all of that money and energy and attention be turned into something more than just a stop-gap measure for the current disaster?

Maybe it’s an overly optimistic perspective, but I think that perhaps the only silver-lining to this horrible disaster is that it might provide an opportunity for a sustained and long-term investment in Haiti. If the country’s poor healthcare, road or utilities infrastructures have been decimated, then now is an opportunity to rebuild them, or build them where they never existed in the first place.

I’ve never been to Haiti, but I’ve worked with an organization called Partners In Health that has worked there for years providing free healthcare and helping people transition out of poverty. From my time at PIH I learned nothing changes without a long-term investment, of not just your money, but yourself.

Haiti needs help right now; they need medical personnel, water, food and shelter. But after the last of the wreckage from the earthquake is cleared away and all of the foreign workers have gone home, Haiti will still need help. All of the incredible resources that are being flooding into Haiti right now need to be used to first address the current disaster, but there is also a chance to translate this influx of assistance into a long-term investment in Haiti. To make that happen will take coordination, and above all it will take commitment.

As much as the situation in Haiti represents an incredibly daunting challenge, it also represents an opportunity…to learn from past mistakes; to get it right; to actually help.

My heart goes out to the people of Haiti…in sorrow for their losses; in hope for their future. If you are interested in learning more about relief efforts in Haiti or donating to the cause, please visit www.pih.org.