CAN YOU describe what you’re seeing in Haiti?
YESTERDAY, WE drove around downtown Port-au-Prince, and some of the adjoining cities. It’s hard to describe, because there’s just no reference for it in the rest of my life. But the first thing you notice is that everyone’s wearing a mask. People are coming from different cities and different neighborhoods to search for their relatives, and the stench is so bad because there’s so many dead bodies that everyone’s got a mask on.
There are people looking through the rubble, and the rubble is just so expansive. Huge buildings have collapsed, and everything’s made out of concrete, so it’s just concrete slabs and concrete bricks, just littered all over the ground and all over the street, and countless scenes of people digging through them, looking for loved ones.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of bodies that aren’t claimed. We saw a lot of instances of bulldozers coming and picking up bodies, and throwing them into the backs of trucks. They’re trying to clear the streets of dead bodies because it becomes a public health issue. But it’s going to be very challenging for a lot of families who don’t have closure and don’t know what happened to their family members.
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What you can do
Donations and aid are desperately needed in Haiti. Here are some organizations with connections to the grassroots movements in the country.
The Haiti Emergency Relief Fund, organized by the solidarity organization Haiti Action, delivers resources directly to grassroots organizations. It was founded in 2004 after the coup d’etat that forced President Jean-Bertrand Aristide out of office.
For more information, including a telephone contact, go to the Canada Haiti Action Network Web site.
The Zanmi Lasante Medical Center is located in the Central Plateau of Haiti and delivers health care through a network of clinics. The health center survived the earthquake and delivering aid to the disaster zone. You can donate to the center through the U.S. non-profit organization Partners in Health.
SOPUDEP is a pioneering school in Petionville. The resources of the school and its teachers are being mobilized to assist the neighboring population. You can support the school via the Canadian-based Sawatzky Family Foundation.
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One of the things that you also notice when you go through the streets is that everyone’s out there on their own. There was very little of the government or the UN in the efforts to find these bodies or help the injured. During our drive, we only saw the UN in front of the place where their headquarters used to be. It had collapsed, and we saw lots of soldiers guarding that area. I didn’t see anybody distributing aid.
Half of the hotel that I was staying in collapsed–the half I wasn’t in, thankfully. And the half I was in, there were cracks all over the place, so it was dangerous to remain there. We have our 1-year-old son with us, so we definitely didn’t want to just sleep outside if we could avoid it.
Thankfully, my mom had a friend here, and she had gotten in contact with him right when we got to Haiti, before the earthquake. He came and found us, knowing which hotel we were staying in. That was very lucky, or else we’d be sleeping outside. And he has this phone that we’re talking on now, so without that, we’d have no contact to let our families know what was going on.
I WAS in Gaza last summer, and when I saw the news picture from Haiti, I was struck by how much it looked like Gaza. Like you’ve described–big piles of concrete and twisted rebar and broken bricks everywhere you looked.
THAT’S IT. That’s all they build with. It’s terrible construction in an earthquake because it’s so heavy. It just crushed people. Nothing is reinforced enough to withstand a very strong earthquake, so the devastation is so massive.
If the UN mission here was really about helping the people of Haiti, this would be the best place in the world to have an earthquake–not that you’d want one anywhere, but you’d have a huge peacekeeping force that could help with the injured and rebuild the country.
But instead, in the course of a day or two, so many people died needlessly because they didn’t get a bandage on their head wound. My hotel became a makeshift hospital, and so many people were coming there because we had one nurse. That was all we had–no supplies and no other help. If someone had dropped off a box of bandages, it could have saved more people.
I just read that the new estimate by local officials is 200,000 dead. I had originally read 50,000. If people who are still trapped don’t get water, this number is actually conceivable. I saw so many huge buildings downtown just collapsed, and the quake happened just before 5 p.m. on Tuesday–so many of those buildings had people in them.
If that number of 200,000 is reached, it will be one of the 10 deadliest natural disasters of all time.
Of course, it’s not simply a natural disaster. It’s a natural disaster on top of the disaster that U.S. imperialism has imposed on this country for decades, backing one dictator after another in the interest of maintaining a source of cheap labor for U.S. corporations.
WHAT DO you think of the Obama administration’s response so far?
ON SATURDAY, Hillary Clinton flew into Haiti to oversee the relief effort–supposedly. But I think her trip to Haiti tells you all you need to know: They had to shut down the airport for three hours so she could land, which meant that no actual aid flights could come in.
And this happened at a really critical time, because we’re right at that point where every extra ounce of water matters. At this point, people who have been without water are facing imminent death. But they stopped the aid shipments so Clinton could give a canned speech from Haiti about how much the U.S. is doing to help.
And in any case, the U.S. government is sending more boots on the ground and more guns to help with “law and order.” But this isn’t what the Haitian people need. They need people with shovels, and people to give them water. And of course, “law and order” is threatened by the lack of aid. Emphasizing troops over aid creates a self-fulfilling prophecy that will lead to serious bloodshed.
ON SATURDAY, an article about the Haiti crisis in the New York Times said that the historic “neglect” of the Haitian people has at least made them “resilient.” To quote the Times, “Although protesting is a national custom, so is surviving on little. That national ethos, the Haitians’ ability to scrounge to find enough to fight their hunger pangs, is being tested in full by the current crisis.”
RIGHT. IN other words, we’ve been screwing them for so long, they should be used to it by now.
It’s such racist garbage. It’s a little softer than the Rush Limbaugh statement that we’ve already helped the Haitian people with our taxpayer dollars, or Pat Robertson’s idea that this is retribution for a pact made with the devil. But it’s coming from the same racist attitude that these people are used to these kinds of conditions, so they’ll be fine. But nobody can deal with the horror that I’ve seen here.
When I heard that statement from Pat Robertson, after all the stress I’d been under, that just kind of broke me. I had to yell. That this earthquake was payback for kicking out the French during the Haitian Revolution? I hope that Pat Robertson can be dropped in one of the neighborhoods here, and let the people have at him.
It’s hard to even respond to that kind of idiocy, but I just got finished reading CLR James’ The Black Jacobins, and it’s one of the most inspiring stories I’ve ever read about ordinary people taking up arms, liberating themselves and taking control of their own affairs.
And then there’s people like Pat Robertson, who wish Haiti was still a colony, where they could just directly enslave people and make money off them.
In any case, the U.S. needs to tell its soldiers to drop their machine guns and pick up shovels and start digging people out. I’ve seen a lot of stories predicting that violence and looting could break out, and that’s a real possibility, if they don’t get people food. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The way you impose order isn’t with machine guns, but by giving people food.
On Friday, they gave out only 8,000 packets of daily food rations, and the UN says that some 8 million are needed this week. People are drinking water contaminated by the rotting bodies, so there’s a public health disaster looming that could create another wave of deaths among those who survived the quake.
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Victims of the earthquake in Port-au-Prince