Remembering Haiti

By John Dennehy

    In 2007 I visited some villages in India that were destroyed by the Indian Ocean tsunami three years before, and I was saddened by what I saw.  The greatest natural disaster of my lifetime had brought headlines and aid money to the south-eastern coast of India, but the money and the reporters left long before anything sustainable was built, and the disaster dragged on silently. 

    A few months after returning from a visit to Haiti I saw the news headlines about that nations capital reduced to rubble and I expected a similar pattern of immediate but short lived concern.  I was wrong.

    More than half a year on and the world has not forgotten.  Much of the pledged money has not yet come and it seems likely that much of it never will, but no matter.  As much as we like to think that throwing money at a problem will solve it, that is so rarely the case.  Immigration and debt reform, government corruption, environmental policy and the myriad of other issues that made the western third of the island of Hispaniola so vulnerable to disaster do not have price tags, but they can be solved. 

   Haiti´s burden of debt has been erased by many donor nations.  The severe immigration restrictions have been eased by many of Haiti´s neighbors.  The next government will, with little effort, be the least corrupt in generations.  Not only are these real changes but they are long term; and they are because the world continues to care.  Unlike past tragedies that fade from our thoughts as quickly as they appeared, this Caribbean nation has held our attention, and that makes all the difference.  The immigration reform, the debt relief, and everything else is greatly helped by the simple fact that we have not forgotten.  If we had ignored the nation as we did before, I believe that the other governments would happily continue to collect debt interest and the next Haitian government would fill its pockets with as much gold as all the past ones have, but not now, not while we watch. 

    I think it may be hard for many Americans to comprehend how desperate the situation in Haiti was before the earthquake and so this wound will take a very long time to heal, but even from this skeptics perspective, we are making progress.