I was indeed in Haiti for about a week, late January/early February on behalf of my employer the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW)- my role was to help document and bring voice to IFAW’s efforts for animals in Port-au-Prince. While I had worked in this capacity during our disaster efforts before, notably in Iowa during their floods two summers ago…as everyone knows, this response was vastly more dire for the human population on the ground…
Haiti has one hell of a history of getting the short end of the stick from the international community…here’s a good and brief background from Christiane Amanpour:
I’m no foreign policy expert, but if I were Haitian, I’m sure I’d have trouble mustering faith in my country’s ability to pull itself up by its own boot straps. I’d also be busting my hump to provide for my wife and kids…One of the most tangible thoughts running through my head during my week in Port-au-Prince was how amazingly lucky I and my family are…and how distressing it is to realize that w/all we have and our country has that we still have to hear the partisan crap spew out of politician’s mouths day in and day out…blah…
Haiti occupies about 1/3 of the island of Hispaniola:
Comparing the Haitian population’s per capita income (2008 estimates) to their neighbors, the Dominican Republic (DR), you see the DR doing something right, as a resident of the DR makes about $8,000 USD as the average Haitian who makes about $1300. My family and I spend roughly that amount each year on our Verizon bill…
One person I was speaking with, after I had spouted off about the dire state of the Haitian economy/recovery and how lucky I am/we are and such…(see above) said to me, “Ok, yah…but viscerally, what was the thing that struck you most…” and at the time, I think I pointed to a moment when we were driving through an intersection on the lower end of stretch of Delmas below the airport when the van slowed…and a crowd had formed around a semi w/trailer attached just to our left…turned out it was a food truck…and it was trying hard to pull away…and within about 30 seconds the entire crowd had swarmed the truck…literally climbing up on the back and sides while the driver was trying to move off…it turned out the truck had come to the wrong location to distribute its food.
I certainly remember thinking to myself…”Ok, you’re not in Cape Cod anymore Bouv…” and as the furious crowd pounded our van a bit and we continued on…you realize these people are frustrated by decades of inefficiency, by a huge lack of understanding with regard to their poverty level, by the insanity of western bureaucracy…and without much by way of recourse, on the ground it becomes Darwinian in the most basic sense in a Haitian hurry.
I was reading an article yesterday in this Magazine I’m enthralled with…called Monocle. An aside; I am a periodical/short print format whore…I love magazines/event catalogs/institutional publications…I love the photography, I love the design, I love the paper, I love the writing, I love the formats…IMHO, some of the best work done in print media happens in periodical/short form.
I’ve long since canceled all of my subscriptions, but used to voraciously read Wired, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Details, W, MacWorld and anything else I could get my hands on…now a while back I’ve traded in some miles for subscriptions…which I won’t do again…but I was able to get the long sought after Economist, which was always simply too much cash to justify my infrequent reads…when I do get to read a whole issue, I feel like I’ve had a top flight global policy briefing coupled w/some interesting discussions with a recruiter for aid organizations.
Anyway, this article which is unfortunately available online to subscribers only, was talking about the best teams in the world for disaster recovery…and of course, they all are based in locations where extreme people blow themselves up or where wars are currently raging…the team cited as best in the world is Israeli, permanently based at that country’s main airport…they were on the ground in Haiti inside of 12 hours after the earthquake. Survival rates for those who survive the initial quake are best inside the first 24 hours…so they don’t wait for official sign off, they just find the best aircraft and go…they worry about where the team will sleep later…Made up of elite Israeli forces, there are interdisciplinary members who break out into functions…Medical, logistics, operations, supplies, and they set up in Port-au-Prince what the article referred to as the “Roles Royce of field hospitals.” Apparently they had ER, maternity, radiology, pediatric…they could handle 500 patients at any one time…
You read something like that, and working for a non-profit, you think…”yes, for sure…we could make some improvements…” but in the bigger picture section of the massive pin-up homasote wall that my brain has become, you find that dusty note where all the good human qualities are listed, and photographed and memorialized and say…”Why can’t we get there?”
I’ve had a lot of questions about “scary moments” on the ground in Haiti, and for sure, there were a couple…as I mentioned above…what may be scarier still is the idea that a cherubic caucasian guy like me gets a chance to work in a place like post-disaster Haiti, only to come home, fall back into business as usual consumption and partisan Sarah Palin bashing armchair fluffernutters…oops! I forgot, I have to go to Wal-Mart this afternoon…
