Haiti, Two Years Later

January 17, 2012 By Elizabeth Scalia

Currents, the daily Catholic news program produced by the Diocese of Brooklyn, observes the second anniversary of Haiti’s devastating earthquake by interviewing Father Jean Moise Delva who, sadly, reports that not much has changed.

“It was very sad to see the atmosphere, and the way people are living,” Father Delva says. Noting that 2.38 billion dollars have been spent he notes the difficulty in distributing aid. Haitians have seen almost no building connected to that expenditure. More than half a million people are still living in the tarp camps we were looking at two years ago:

It’s frustrating. One wants to help, one wants to send a check to Catholic Relief Services or Food for the Poor, or slip a donation to Passionist Father Rick Frechette’s established hospitals, and yet it seems like money is not the answer; it’s not getting where it needs to be. Something else is needed.

I wonder if what is needed is the adoption of Haiti by the private sector? Governments are not helping, but why aren’t corporations over there building plants and businesses and hotels? If government aid is not helping, why can’t markets? Is it because the Haitian government is so out-of-sorts that it cannot even function with business? It always strikes me as odd that the Dominican Republic can be what it is, while Haiti — sharing the same island — cannot. How do we help the people of Haiti to become what they want to be — how do we know when to help and when to get out of their ways?

Anyway, you can watch the whole interview here. There are, surprisingly, no photos accompanying the discussion, but if you check my Haiti category, there are lots of pictures. It doesn’t sound like pictures in 2012 will be much different than in 2010. What a shame.

These two videos bring you up to date on Haiti — some people who have really dedicated themselves to helping Haiti, including Father Fretchette and filmmaker Paul Haggis, and they’re interviewed, here. The 9 billion dollars pledged has been reduced to about 4 billion and even that seems not to be forthcoming (did you know that Harvard University has a $35 billion dollar endowment? Are our priorities screwed up, or what?)

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RELATED:
Love Among the Ruins

Filed Under: Haiti Tagged With: ,

"Americans Know Nothing of Suffering"

January 13, 2011 By Elizabeth Scalia

I think we all get our turns in the crucible and suffer in different ways, but G. Dalrymple, writing of his experiences in Haiti, puts the complaints of day-to-day living into context:

* I was approached by an elderly woman on our first day at Petionville, asking for some food. I had none to give her, so I approached a US soldier who was there and asked him about where there might be a food distribution so the woman could get food. He said he had no idea…the UN used to do that, but the Haitian government stopped them, telling them that they wanted the UN to give the food to the local food distribution organizations to distribute. The UN complied. As it turns out, the local aid organizations took the free food that came in from all over the world and were not selling it; they were hoarding it in order to sell it. But the people, for the most part, had no money to buy it with. The Haitian government is so corrupt and I’m sure they’re in cahoots with the local distribution organizations. Someone will get rich off the backs of the poor, and many will die for someone else’s greed.

The stories could go on and on forever. Sadly, it isn’t only the Haitian government and food distribution organizations that aren’t getting the job done in Haiti. We saw very few organizations that were effectively doing anything. It is the NGOs (non-governmental organizations) that are caring for the people.

Suffice it to say: I hope never again to complain about anything in my life. The huddled masses, living 6-8 people in a “tent” that is about 6×6, the smell of the tent cities, the disease (malaria, dengue fever, tuberculosis, typhoid, diarrhea, HIV/AIDS) is beyond belief. I foresee no end to the misery in Haiti short of the return of the Lord. [...] Americans know nothing of suffering. If that devastation had happened in America, we would at least have a government with the means to provide equipment to move rubble, dig out bodies, provide food and water and shelter, but there is no such government in Haiti. I struggled with my parishioners who complained about the value of their stocks going down in the midst of the economic crisis. I wanted to literally grab them by the collar, slap them, and say, “Wake up! You have nothing to complain about! Nothing at all!” Not very compassionate for a pastor, but that is how I honestly felt.

But I also learned that Americans are perhaps far poorer than the Haitian people when it comes to faith. I saw people who had lost everything. At night, as dusk would fall over the Petionville camp, one could hear tens of thousands of voices rising up from the tent city in the valley below, singing songs of praise and thanksgiving to God. It was eerie, beautiful, and otherworldly. They were thankful for the gift of life itself. It wasn’t much of a life, by American standards, but it was the only thing they had left. And they were earnestly grateful for it. They were thanking God that they were spared from death in the quake and that they’d made it through one more day.

This piece is really much too long to excerpt justly, but I urge you to read it and pass it around.

I know some people hate looking at Haiti because of the overwhelming feeling of powerlessness that accompanies all of our sympathies; “my church should do something, maybe we can raise funds…” but even if a parish can raise thousands of dollars–even if they could purchase a boatload of the basic necessities of life, and toys for the children–getting the goods and provender into Haiti is staggeringly difficult, and distribution even more so.

Dalrymple says he cannot see Haiti being helped by anything but the coming of the Lord, and everything I read about Haiti, everyone I speak to of Haiti, expresses similar sentiments.

This makes all the more inspiring the life-commitments made by people like our friend “Missionary Ed” and Fr. Rick Frechette and Kent Annan–people who make their lives a prayer with Haiti

If Haiti can only be saved by the coming of the Lord, in the meantime let us pray for the people who are able and willing to “be” Christ for others in such a way, such a small, limited way, and support them as much as we can. I think of Mother Teresa’s notion of doing “small things with great love” and realize that even if the help and aid they can render is limited, their presence–their willingness to be present to others and to literally “set their tent” among them, as Christ did–is the great love that will last beyond their days, weeks or years of service.

On January 24th, Team Rubicon–that intrepid organization formed by ex-Marines and Jesuits, after the Haiti quake–will be reactivating to Haiti. From their newsletter:

Team Rubicon, in partnership with the International Medical Corps, will be returning to Haiti January 24th to establish and run cholera treatment centers on the periphery of Port au Prince. The IMC recently reached out to Team Rubicon, seeking TR’s assistance in the establishment of clinics following the election and anniversary. Recently, NGOs have been reducing their presence inside of Haiti because of political turmoil and an escalation in violence; this has created a gap in aid that Team Rubicon will help the IMC address.

I donate to Team Rubicon because they are bringing fresh energy and new ideas to this land-of-ongoing-crisis. Perhaps you could talk to your church or your bowling league or quilting club, or your work crew, about doing some fundraising to send their way. Or buy this book to aid Haiti Partners, or consider a small donation to Fr. Frechette’s Medical Aid endeavor.

Small things, we can do. Small things with great love–they make a difference, because real love lasts.

One year later, Letters from Haiti.

Filed Under: Haiti Tagged With: ,

Aftershock; Haiti, Hardship, Help & Hope

January 7, 2011 By Elizabeth Scalia


After Shock

I wrote recently again about the neverending suffering of Haiti, and the remarkable resiliency of the people and the children who live in conditions unimaginable to the rest of us:

The question is always “what can we do?” and the answer always feels a little hopeless; yes, by all means, we can and should send help to relief agencies. We should keep the people of Haiti, especially the children, in our prayers. Reading stories like this, what can we do but keep them humbly in our prayers, when their nightmare simply does not end?

An Amnesty report laid bare horrific accounts of rape in Haiti’s squalid refugee camps a year after a devastating quake left many struggling to rebuild their shattered lives.

They are women like Guerline, who two months after losing her husband when their home crumbled to the ground in the devastating quake, had to watch as her teenage daughter was raped in a makeshift tarpaulin camp in Port-au-Prince. “Four men raped her. She is 13 years old,” Guerline told Amnesty International researchers, who compiled the report, published Wednesday, after interviewing more than 50 women and girls in Haiti’s post-quake camps.

“They told me that if I talked about it, they would kill me. They said that if I went to the police, they would shoot me dead. . . .Guerline was raped on the same night as her daughter by hooded men in the tent city. She can’t get the events of that terrible night out of her head.

I read this and look at the beautiful faces of the people, and think, only prayer and fasting can help, and what sacrifices we can make.

Mother Teresa famously said that we are not always called to do great things, but everyday we are called to do small things with great love.

Here is a small thing that can be done. Over at Patheos, the Book Club is looking at and discussing Kent Annan’s After Shock: Searching for Honest Faith When Your World Is Shaken. Jamie Arpin-Ricci writes:

Kent Annan, co-director of Haiti Partners, a nonprofit focused on education in Haiti, has worked in Haiti since 2003, living there some of the time before moving back to the U.S., now traveling there regularly from Florida. Less than two weeks after the publication of his first book about his work in Haiti, Following Jesus through the Eye of the Needle: Living Fully, Loving Dangerously (IVPress, 2009), that already impoverished nation experienced the historic earthquake that left more than 200,000 dead and millions homeless. After Shock invites us to experience the aftermath of those events on the lives and faith of those left behind:

Faith can seem certain. A sense of peace or clarity, the mysterious beauty of life, or the transformations seen in yourself, in someone else, in a community—it couldn’t be other than God. But there are also shocks to the system when God seems either absent or negligent. Do we ignore these shocks and their aftershocks? Sometimes a crisis of faith happens in an instant; other times it’s a drift into uncertainty. Welcome confirmations of faith. And just as important, pay attention to the crises of doubt or unanswered questions. Honest faith doesn’t deny God, but it doesn’t deny the uncertain and painful reality of life either. (from After Shock)

Buy After Shock; it is an inexpensive book that will both inform the heart and mind, and feed the spirit, and 100% of the proceeds from its sale will go to Haiti Partners.

It is a small way to help the suffering people of Haiti; if we do these small things with great love, things will change. I believe that.

Related:
You can read an interview with Annan, here.

We’re looking at videos too.

New Beginnings are Hard to Come By

Filed Under: Bookchat, Catholicism, Haiti, Heroes

O Come, O Come

December 22, 2010 By Elizabeth Scalia

Emmanuel, God-With-Us…


Emmanuel, born in Haiti the day after quake in which father died. He did not survive/Photo, “Missionary Ed”

Stricken with some sort of bug, over here, and it has me under the weather and working at half-speed. But while I try to pull myself together, here is one of the best versions of this haunting call I have ever heard:

Video via Matt Labash, who is looking at this Christmas with a perspective permanently changed thanks to his post-earthquake trip to Haiti, his encounter there with the remarkable Fr. Rich Frenchette and an impoverished and hopeful translator named Ridore.

Labash’s piece on Frechette and the horrific day-to-day realities of life in Haiti was one of the best pieces of writing of the year. Here we are at year’s end, worrying about our 401K’s while within our hemisphere the people of Haiti look upon a dish of rice and beans and a corrugated tin roof as blessings not to be lightly dismissed.


Rice and Beans by the hundreds of platesful, by Ed

Labash, revisiting Haiti via an email from the translator Ridore–who is without work now without work–writes:

I hadn’t heard from Ridore since I left eleven months ago, and had indeed forgotten that I’d ever given him my contact information in the first place. But an e-mail arrived from him the other day, with the subject line “Hi Mr. Matt,” reminding me of who he was and inquiring about my well-being. I greeted him warmly, asking how he was doing. He wrote back:

“As the same when you left Haiti, still living in the street, without anything, and I lead a difficult moment in my life, so I have not any hope. How is your Christmas?”

When I probed further, he told me his translating work at the hospital dried up after all the foreigners left. Now, he said, “I just stay in the street without nothing to do.” Just as when he worked with me in person, he asked for nothing . . . What do you give to someone who lives in a hellhole at the end of the earth, and who is fresh out of hope, the only meager commodity he ever possessed?

A little rusty on the scriptures that I was forced to memorize during Vacation Bible School as a child, I feebly tried to cobble some together that might bring him a little. I relayed the story of Daniel, another translator, who fearful that he would be executed for being unable to translate King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, cried out to God for mercy. God revealed what the king’s dream meant, leaving Daniel to praise God, saying, “He changes times and seasons; he deposes kings and raises up others. He gives wisdom to the wise, and knowledge to the discerning. He reveals deep and hidden things; he knows what lies in darkness, and light dwells with him.”

I gave it a go, fumbling as awkwardly as I did during those afternoons in the wards filled with child amputees, and hit ’send.’ A few days later, Ridore responded with this:

“Thank you a lot Mr. Matt for those passages in the bible and sincerely they comfort me so much and I always read them. I’m sure God will open a door and show me what to do and I will not lose hope because I trust God and he is my shepherd. May peace the lord be with you and God bless and protect you. Ridore.”

Ridore will not now, nor maybe ever, have a Christmas that resembles ours. There will be no Beltway Bamboo fly rods or Christmas Dewars or even a Renuzit Winter Berry air freshener. But I suspect he already possesses something most of us never will – the capacity to write a letter like that, under the circumstances in which he finds himself.

You ask what I want for Christmas? It’s to send a few prayers up for Ridore. And though the Haitian postal system is shoddy to nonexistent, if you feel moved to send him anything else, write in to askmatt@dailycaller.com, and I’ll try to find a secure way to get it to him.


Doing Laundry, Salvaging Dignity, Photo by Missionary Ed

Yesterday morning someone asked me what I thought the “biggest story” of 2010 was, and I answered “Haiti” and then–inexplicably–I began to cry. Possibly that was the effect of this bug coming on, but we at this blog also talked a lot about Haiti, assisted by the pictures and emailed messages of “Missionary Ed,”, a friend of reader DeLynn who lives with the people of Petit Goave, about 30 miles from Port au Prince.

Ed’s communique’s and other coverage only seemed to emphasize for many the helplessness we feel when we want to “do something, send something; food, money, toys” only to learn that “sending” things is useless because the intended recipients will “never see it.” The only way to help Haiti is to do it in person, as Team Rubicon effectively did in the short term after the quake, through donations to reputable agencies, and with prayer.

Writing “the only way to help Haiti is to do it in person” struck me; that’s how God did it. Emmanu-el. God-With-Us. God did not “send” anything, but himself, and perhaps in the end our whole selves, present, is all we can ever give anyone, and at our culminations God may ask us where we were:

I can’t imagine that on the Day of Judgment I’ll hear, “Well done, good and faithful servant—you have faithfully fought to keep the Ten Commandments in the courthouse.” It’s more likely we’ll all be asked why we didn’t spend more time concerned about our neighbors in Darfur or fighting the global AIDS pandemic. Perhaps we should rethink our priorities and put first things first.

I wrote this while my brother S was leaving us:

It’s what we’re called to, not merely as Christians, but as human beings. To be willing to ENTER INTO the pain, or the fear, or the tumult and whirlwind of another person’s life and say, “ssssshhhh, it’s alright, I’ll keep you company for a little while…” It is humanity at its finest.

And while it is, as I say, neither the exclusive calling or the exclusive virtue of the Christian (in fact in too many Christians it is all-too-lacking), I cannot help – in these final days of Advent – to think about what God did, in a lonely cave on the outskirts of Bethlehem, when He condescended to enter into the pain and fear, the tumult and whirlwind of the world…when he “set his tent among us,” not merely “dwelling” among us as lofty king, but literally “with” us, with hunger, the capacity for injury and doubt…

God entered in, not with a cacophany of noise and a display of raw power, but as the humblest and most dependent of creatures: a baby, lying in a manger, a place for the feeding of animals. He, who became Food for the World, entered with silence, as though he had put his finger to the quivering mouth of a troubled, sobbing world and said…”ssshhhh…it is alright, I’ll keep you company…”

It’s a lesson I need to keep relearning.

For Vespers, tonight, the O Antiphon is O Rex Gentium:

O King of all the nations, the only joy of every human heart; O Keystone of the mighty arch of man, come and save the creature you fashioned from the dust…


“Happy faces this morning,” says Ed

Like O Come, O Come Emmanuel, like these beautiful children in Haiti, the antiphon haunts.

Filed Under: Catholic Vocations, Catholicism, Crisis & Opportunity, Haiti, Health Care

Morning Plots & Errands

April 29, 2010 By Elizabeth Scalia

Isn’t that great? Reader Brian J (who also made the Nun News Network graphic and the Rush/Bullock/Baseball one) sent that over and I love it. In terms of who is in or out, I have always been “out” and my advice on pretty much anything is worth about a nickle, so it’s right-on in every way.

This morning is going about working at a local hospital, as I mentioned here.

Then, I will be dedicating some serious time toward developing two ideas we have talked about here:

1) Funding scholarships for DC students who have been negatively-impacted by Obama & the Congress, who defunded the charter school scholarships program, in a kowtow to the teacher’s unions.

2) Brainstorming the logistics of both collecting and then delivering some baseball equipment, toys and books to the kids in Petit Goave, Haiti. I look at those two beautiful children every morning and chide myself for not getting it done yet.

I’ve had discouraging news on both fronts, lately; the scholarship idea is surprisingly complicated, and it seems that in Haiti, unless you have trustworthy people personally delivering stuff, packages will never reach their destination; thieves get to it first.

But I have a couple of ideas, and I need to spend a little time plotting them out.

All of this is by way of saying, if your comment does not show up immediately, please don’t post it ten times. That just gets you marked as spam, and then your stuff goes into the spam filter, possibly never to be found again, if I’m not in the mood to go through it. Comments that fell into moderation will be released when I get back!

Filed Under: American Genius, Barack Obama, Christians in Exile, Crisis & Opportunity, Crucible of Faith, Culture of Life/Death, Dumb Democrat moves, Education, Haiti, Medical, Obama Bad?

Haiti: 100 Aftershocks Later (Updated Pictures)

February 26, 2010 By Elizabeth Scalia


Pretty Little Girl Near Blue Tarp all photos by Ed

Six weeks after the horrific earthquake that has shaken Haiti to its knees, our friend Missionary Ed writes:

12:17 AM Just had a hefty, albeit short, tremor. Woke everybody downstairs up. I never knew this about earthquakes. I knew you could have a couple of aftershocks in the first day or so, but not the well over 100 aftershocks that we are still having 6 weeks later…

Those people in his community of Petit Goave whose houses were not reduced to rubble (there are only a few standing) have been sleeping and worshipping outdoors, for fear of being trapped in another quake.


Clean Water for the Thirsty

Last week, Ed wrote:

Thursday 2/25 We all slept in the house last night. We all got up this morning. We have collected our tents and are trying to move on to Jan 13th. The loooooong day of Jan 12 appears to be coming to an end…

It is beyond my own imagining. In the meantime, he and his group are distributing thousands of pounds of rice and beans. Everyday these people eat rice and beans, and they give thanks for it.


A Blessing Before the Meal

The distributions do not always go well. The people of Haiti are needful of many things, including prayers. If during this Lent you are looking to give alms – tomake a charitable donation- please don’t forget them!

In the barbaric cave for the dead

Known in Creole as simply ‘mog’

My trembling hand blesses them

May the angels lead you far, far from here

And do so in all haste

You and this throng of dead that surround you

—Father Rick Frechette, from Haiti: The God of Tough Places, The Lord of Burnt Men


Fr. Frechette on a Better Day in Haiti, (Source)

Back on February I wrote a little about the Passionist priest, Fr. Rick Frechette, who has worked in Haiti for 22 years and has done marvelous work. Yesterday, Matt Labash wrote a great deal more, and it is very moving:

. . .every Thursday—since long before the earthquake—Frechette and a band of Haitian volunteers trek to the city morgue and claim the nameless dead, who lie naked in bloated heaps on a blood-streaked concrete floor. “You’ve heard of Tuesdays with Morrie,” Frechette smiles, “this is Thursdays with the Krokmo” (a Creole pejorative term for undertaker. It translates as the “death hook,” meaning the show is over). The place is jammed and the dead often piled seven or eight high. The workers there are so inured to the stench and spectacle, that Frechette has seen a morgue attendant slaloming on roller blades around the bodies and workers eating their lunch while sitting on stacks of cadavers as though on breaktime in the office kitchenette.

In Haiti, even before the quake, dead bodies were nothing more than background music—as commonplace as they are unnoticed. If they didn’t end up in the stark death-cave that is the general hospital morgue, they were burned in the streets on the spot where they died (a pragmatic hygiene concern). The decency and sentimentality that a better-developed society affords are luxuries here. Father Rick and his men gather the bodies themselves, packing them into makeshift coffins fashioned from supermarket cardboard boxes. They then truck them outside the city, up a sun-bleached highway that runs alongside the Caribbean Sea, to the rolling wastelands of Titanyen, which translates from Creole as the “fields of less than nothing.” A New Orleans-style Haitian jazz-funeral band—all horns and drums—plays graveside. Father Rick, an irreverent sort, calls them “The Grateful Dead.” Then he and his men plant the cardboard coffins in large holes dug by their own gravediggers, endowing their cargo in death with a tiny modicum of the dignity that eluded them in life
…
Everywhere you turn, it seems, there’s a new horror: the toddler found alive holding the hand of his mother, who lay dead beneath the rubble he was sitting on. The amputee mother I meet in the mini-tent city on the hospital grounds, whose young daughter cleans her wounds as though she is the mother now. The mother smiles and kisses me like I’m an old friend, though she doesn’t have much to smile about. In addition to losing her arm, two of her children were killed.

On the roof of the guesthouse at night, under a starry panorama, the doctors and nurses and humanitarian soldiers of fortune who populate such scenes (aid-organization do-gooders who’ve had their tickets punched in all the dung-heaps of the world) find solace in their cups, trying to make sense of what they’re seeing. They get serious. What’s going to happen when the rainy season comes—and it’s coming soon. Water will swirl all around the tent cities, where people are defecating on the ground. Many of my battled-hardened drinking companions predict that without proper sanitation, immunizations, and shelter, the disease outbreaks could make the earthquake look like child’s play.
…
Haiti might be the only place where death with dignity entails being buried five-to-a-cardboard coffin. But it is moving and beautiful. Yet, I suggest to Frechette, it seems futile. Why do this? However horrible their lives were, this isn’t going to change that. Why spend so much time and energy serving people who’ll never know they’ve been served?

Frechette thinks about it a long while, then says, “If the dead are garbage, then the living are walking garbage.”

Haiti’s latest horror is far from over. It may only be beginning. You really have to read the whole thing. It’s astonishing, harrowing, inspiring, and to say it puts things into perspective is putting it mildly.

It also puts a strong exclamation point to Pope Benedict’s words about the slavery of materialism -how we who live in more prosperous countries have a kinship with these poorest of the poor, who are slaves to poverty. The kinship is in the poverty. Theirs is material. Often, ours is spiritual.


Doing Laundry, Salvaging Dignity

Bl. Teresa of Calcutta would often say that the meanest streets in the poorest cities did not compare with the spiritual poverty and emptiness of the prosperous West.

There is a slideshow here, meant to accompany Labash’s must-read article. (H/T)

Confounding and humbling. God help us all.

Filed Under: Haiti

Will soft bigotry hurt Haiti?

February 1, 2010 By Elizabeth Scalia

Brian J. Stevens, a former reporter with the Haitian Times newspaper writes at America:

. . . As non-governmental organizations and foreign governments flood the country with desperately needed food, water and medical supplies, Haitian voices once again do not appear to be playing a role in helping to direct the aid where it needs to go. Residents of the southern Haitian city of Grand Goave told the Inter Press Service News Agency that there is “a network of seven neighborhood leaders for each section of the city that has not been tapped in the relief effort.” Aid workers are insisting that local leadership play a role. Dolores Rescheleit of the German NGO Arche Nova told IPS, “For us, it was very important to do this without military. Because the people in the camp are very strong. When you give the responsibility to the people in the camp, they will do it better than we will with the military.”

“A committee of Haitians, with sub-committees to handle security, hygiene, and aid distribution, is governing the camp without problems,” Rescheleit added.
…
Without an approach to relief and reconstruction that includes Haitian voices, the international community may meet the immediate need at hand, but the creation of a stable, self-sufficient Haiti will likely remain elusive.

This echos, a little, the messages that come through from Missionary Ed, over in Petit Goave, which I assume is near Grand Goave. Ed has written:

As we continue to give out food and supplies, I realized, we’ve been doing this for the last 14 years. We have a pretty good system. . . . It is a huge task and we are dealing with hundreds and they with thousands. I shared a few of our ideas with them, we’ll see what happens. One thing is to spread out the handouts and do them at the same time in different places. This breaks up the crowds and keeps would be bullies from being first in line at each stop…. They can’t be more than one place at a time.

At church two weeks after earthquake, Photo by Ed

The people in Haiti should certainly know how Haiti “works;” they should be consulted about the handling of communities that are under great stress and will be further challenged by refugees out of Port au Prince. They should also be included in the management of recovering and rebuilding.

The story of one Haitian worker in Port-au-Prince illustrates this potential harm: Delande Jean-Michel is a technician at a private firm contracted by the Haitian electric company to provide power for the capital. . . . Since the quake the plant remains off-line while technicians from three foreign-based companies evaluate the damage and make repairs. The foreign technicians, engineers and specialists are working without accompaniment by Haitian employees, who remain idle.

In a phone interview, Jean-Michel expressed the anxiety of his fellow Haitians who had jobs at the plant before the quake, but now fear they may be in jeopardy. “In this phase, they don’t need Haitians,” Jean-Michel said he was told. “There’s a 50 percent chance I’ll get my job back,” Jean-Michel said, expressing concern that American companies and government institutions would over time effectively take over the country.

“There are many things that Haitians can do,” Jean-Michel said. “If they’re [foreign technicians] doing that work, they should have Haitians by their side. And it would create work.”

I would never stand for anyone denigrating the efforts of the US and other nations in getting aid, relief, medical attention and more to the Haitian people, but as repair and reconstruction begins, it must include the Haitian people, or the message they will be receiving is one that might be translated as part of the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” – a message that they are incapable of taking care of themselves. No one wants to hear that message. No one wants to be told they must live their lives by hand-out.

We Christians are often chided for saying that God’s ways are mysterious, and that sometimes bad things must happen in order for something better to occur. The Crucifix is our daily reminder of this truth; without it, there would have been no resurrection. Lately we have heard that the schools of New Orleans have been improved thanks to the need for ground-up reconfiguring after Hurricane Katrina. Out of the chaos of this earthquake, perhaps Haiti will become a tiny island that – with hands-up rather than hands-out assistance over a long stretch of time – will finally be able to stand on its own.

Crisis and opportunity go hand-in-hand, both for good or for evil. Relief countries and organizations have a chance to help Haiti not just to survive, but to thrive and become self-sufficient. Self-sufficiency cannot happen, however, in the shadow of those “soft bigotries” of low expectations, that often prevent the good hands of help from transforming into hands that can help themselves.

Related:
Handing out food to women helps insure that more get fed. I believe that. Feeding is what women know. It’s in our natures. Not that men can’t…it’s just different. Men and women are different. :-)

Filed Under: Haiti
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