While most coffee shop talk around here has been focused on the Olympics, proroguing Parliament, and how the Minto Mad Dogs are doing, some of it is beginning to turn to how to help a country devastated by one of the strongest earthquakes in its history. The death toll in Haiti is climbing by the hour and some say it may end up exceeding that caused by the tsunami in southeast Asia five years ago.
Haiti covers the eastern third of the island of Hispaniola (Dominican Republic covers the remainder) in the Caribbean and is one of the poorest countries in the world. The vast majority of its approximately nine million people lives far below the poverty line.
If there were a single word to describe Haiti, it would be instability. This is true not only politically, economically and socially, but geologically.
Hispaniola sits on the boundary of the North American tectonic plate and the Caribbean plate, and is crossed by two major fault lines, the Enriquilla-Plantain Garden Fault in the southwest of Haiti, and the Septentrional Fault in the north of the Dominican Republic. The plates are grinding against each other in a way that is similar to the San Andreas Fault; earthquakes are common in both areas but Haiti’s political instability has hampered study of the geologic processes at work on the island.
Political instability and corruption are also largely responsible for the desperate poverty. In the past, much of the aid that was sent to Haiti never reached the people who needed it. Present disaster relief efforts are hampered by the lack of political infrastructure and the desperate need, as well as rubble-strewn roads and downed bridges.
Extreme poverty makes people especially vulnerable to disasters of any kind, be it man made, such as the collapse of a school in November 2008, or natural. An earthquake anywhere that measures 7.0 is going to cause severe damage, but when cinder-block walls and shoddy construction are the rule, a city of a million people can be flattened in seconds. This is exactly what happened in Port-au-Prince, only 25 kilometres from the earthquake’s epicenter. The dead are being piled in the streets, and many survivors suffer horrendous injuries. Medical supplies, and the people who know how to use them, are in desperately short supply.
But so is everything else, including the very basics – drinking water and shelter. The people of Haiti have so very little to start with, there is no resilience. Our own local disaster relief plans call for stockpiling enough food, drinking water and necessary supplies to last the critical 72 hours it takes to mobilize relief efforts. At the best of times, most Haitians are lucky to have enough for their next meal.
Canadians have a special tie to Haiti. We share an official language, and our Governor General is from Haiti. There is a large Haitian population in this country, especially in Montreal. We know Haiti will need to be rebuilt from the ground up; the need for help was desperate even before the earthquake hit. When the poorest country in our hemisphere sits on the doorstep of what is, in essence, the winter playground of a lot of Canadians, we owe it to the people of that beleaguered nation to share what we can.
People who know Haiti well are suggesting the best way to ensure aid gets to where it is needed most, is to make a cash donation through a major organization like the Red Cross, Salvation Army, Oxfam, World Vision, Save the Children, or the Mennonite Central Committee, one that already has people in the country.
And we can thank our lucky stars we live in a country where government, however annoying, is effective, infrastructure (physical and political) is stable, food and water are plentiful, and the ground rarely shakes.