I Don’t Care About Haiti
Jan 31st, 2010 by Alex
Until recently, I knew very little about Haiti. I knew that a coworker did mission work down there, supporting an abysmally ad hoc network. I knew that it was an island. As far as I knew, Wyclef Jean was the most notable product from the country (in regard to his origins, not as a source of revenue). Other than that, I would have had to do some research to tell you anything about the country.
I have recently come upon the following tid bits, mostly financial.
- Haiti occupies about the same space as Massachusetts.
- The United States is the largest consumer of Haitian exports, to the tune of $360M in 2008. We’ve since pledged over $100M to Haiti to go towards relief efforts, not including any of the private and institutional donations. That’s substantial.
- Six months ago, “$1.2 billion in external debt owed by the impoverished island nation to bilateral and multilateral lenders including the IMF, World Bank, and US government [was] cancelled.” Poof. Like that.
- The annual revenue of my employer exceeds the entire economic output of Haiti. It’s strange to me that a commercial entity could be doing more business than a country, yet there are much larger companies out there.
I find these things interesting, independent on the state of things. But the more I think about it, the less I care.
It’s not that things aren’t horrible in Haiti. Natural disasters are always tragic. People are suffering and that’s never a good thing. But what can we do? Aside from providing short-term care and support services (which we’re doing, and rightly so), what can we do besides give money? We can ease the pain of a country’s people, but we shouldn’t think we can roll in and cure things with cash; I’m disillusioned that we’re doing that much good with all the donations. We can’t exactly prevent additional earthquakes. Even if every dollar donated went towards rebuilding, things would still be sub-par in Haiti. Even if we bought more of their exports or loosened up our borders to Haitian immigrants, we aren’t going to turn a poverty-stricken country around.
Maybe saying that I don’t care is a bit much; I’ve got enough things to worry about and don’t need to be adopting more. I wouldn’t say that people shouldn’t try to help if they feel they should. Haiti is the newest and flashiest story fit to print, and as horrible and things are down there, I think we’ve got bigger problems. Bigger problems that we are probably tired of hearing about, and as sick as it sounds, problems that we’d rather distract ourselves from even if it means something like this. Compared to various situations in places like Iran, China, and Pakistan, Haiti isn’t even on my radar. Situations that we might have a chance in hell of improving, given some proper attention.
I think you hit a lot of good points; however, there are things I can actually do to help with Haiti efforts. I, as an individual, cannot impact China, Iran, or Pakistan related issues (without joining the military and I’m not doing that again). However, I can give 8-10 hours of my time over a week to help launch a site like Baltimore Acts: http://baltimoreacts.org (which is focusing not just on Haiti, but also on future efforts locally as well). All of their funding goes straight to charities and relief efforts - nobody involved is seeing a single penny (that I can get behind). I can also help out a little bit with projects like Haitian Voices: http://haitianvoices.org. These are things that just require a little bit of my time, can be done remotely at home, and help in some way to those involved. It’s essentially the least I can personally.
I also help out a ton with small business and local crafters by contributing simple solutions for HTML / CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) / code (usually 30 minutes of my time) to help them with their blog, business sites, or general promotion stuff. It’s my way of helping to contribute to the local economy
By the way, I too agree that there are _much_ bigger issues we need to focus on (but as an individual rights supporter I tend to believe the bigger issues are internal related to our rights provided by the Constitution more so than external like other countries).
I have always been leary of giving money to relief efforts, wondering if it actually does any good. I heard an interesting piece on NPR yesterday about Disaster Research and was surprised to learn that donating cash may not be as pointless as I thought.
According to the report, “Over the few decades this academic discipline has been around, it’s helped improve disaster response. All those messages about donating cash instead of food and clothing, that’s backed up by information collected by disaster researchers.”
You can read the transcript here: http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=123028590
I don’t know about that. First of all, cash definitely helps for immediate disaster relief. Second, it’s both a natural disaster and a man-made disaster: many of the buildings were built with poor materials in sketchy places, and the lack of political infrastructure made response weaker. (A 7.0 earthquake in CA a few years ago killed 63 people instead of 200,000, which gives some idea of the importance of physical infrastructure.) Given that it’s largely the past US administration’s fault that their infrastructure is so weak, I think that it’s Americans’ responsibility to care. Lastly, we CAN make a difference: check out this article about how first-world citizens raised enough of a stink about IMF’s strings-attached loan policies that IMF backed down: http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2010/02/theres-real-hope-haiti-and-its-not-what-youd-expect.
here are a few of my thoughts. I understand that Haiti is an impoverished nation and have mass devastation from the earth quake, but why are WE there? Why don’t some other country fund them financially. The united states government is on the verge of economic ruin, but here we are ignoring debts from this country,and sending funds, and so on. Moreover why are we not sending these funds to the people in our country that need the help? We have tons of homeless, hungry children that go without, and low income families that have lost their jobs and cant pay necessary bills. In Louisiana the french quarter still isn’t back . You have to take care of the problems at home before you can help you can help others. The only thing I have left to say is…..
WHAT ABOUT THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA THAT ARE HOMELESS, HUNGRY, ECT.????????