Well that title is a bit mis­lead­ing as I will have many thoughts on Haiti in the days to come but just a cou­ple of things.…

Am hop­ing the Domini­can Repub­lic and Haiti can set aside their dif­fer­ences long enough to see this thing through. They are not the best of neigh­bors so we can only hope.

My hus­band and I were lis­ten­ing to a talk show the other night and although I dis­agreed with some of the things the com­men­ta­tor said about Haiti, he did give me pause. He started his con­ver­sa­tion with the fact that what he had to say wasn’t prob­a­bly polit­i­cally cor­rect given what is hap­pen­ing in Haiti. He then went on to make a few obser­va­tions. The first being, and he did not deny that Haiti needs imme­di­ate human­i­tar­ian help and money as this is an unqual­i­fied dis­as­ter, but that he hopes, in the years to come, that we exam­ine our desire as a nation to keep giv­ing money to a coun­try as poor as Haiti when it is obvi­ous it is not going where it needs to go. The fig­ure he threw out, which I am sorry to say I don’t remem­ber except that it was huge, regard­ing the amount of money we have sent to Haiti in non-disaster times , stag­gered me. See­ing the des­o­late homes, and the obvi­ous poverty backed up against a pres­i­den­tial palace to suit the fussi­est of lead­ers, it strikes me that the money did not go to the peo­ple. There are only a cou­ple hos­pi­tals and 2 doc­tors for every thou­sand peo­ple. There is no obvi­ous emer­gency per­son­nel, no great amounts of police/security, so where did the money go? The sec­ond point he made, and he was really try­ing to be respect­ful of what is going on over there, is that every time they showed some­one being dug out of a home, it was usu­ally the rel­a­tives and then the cam­era spanned to show thou­sands of able-bodied peo­ple sim­ply walk­ing around. His ques­tion was, “why aren’t they help­ing? Why isn’t every able-bodied per­son any­where near a col­lapsed build­ing, doing every­thing they can to try to see if there are peo­ple there?” Instead they are milling around wait­ing for help to arrive. He says he thinks we have taught them this apa­thy by giv­ing them money time after time and not expect­ing some sort of result from it…kind of like you give a man a fish story.….

It is cer­tainly a point to pon­der. And what he observed is true. I’d think there was a bit of shock going on but after 911 every­one, and I mean every­one pitched in here.

A cou­ple other things to pon­der. He also said that when San Fran­cisco had their last quake it was the same mag­ni­tude. 63 peo­ple died com­pared to the hun­dred thou­sand they are pre­dict­ing for Haiti. If the money sent to them had gone to make struc­tures that would with­stand as best they could, an earth­quake, if they had laws that said their build­ings HAD to be built that way, the events that are tak­ing place may have been averted.

Haiti has had 96 coup attempts over the course of its his­tory accord­ing to this man. I had no idea.  How does one go about see­ing that human­i­tar­ian aid against awful poverty such as they have goes where it should, when the gov­ern­ment doesn’t even know what it wants or how to exist.

There will be so many orphans from this dis­as­ter that it makes my heart hurt. Of course we will con­tinue to give. Of course we will con­tinue to help. And there are cer­tainly things worth pondering.