Ashley King Professor Campbell English 1103 6 November 2012

Haiti: Why the Worlds Disaster Relief Was a Failure and Why Were Choosing to Ignore It

On the afternoon of January 12, 2010, a massive 7.0 magnitude earthquake rattled Haiti. The forty second long quake, which was later described by the Inter-American Development bank as, the most destructive natural disaster in modern times," killed more than 250,000 people and injured around 300,000 (qtd. in Quigley and Ramachandran). Several days after the quake journalist Liz Hazelton from the Daily Mail UK described the situation in Haiti, saying it was comparable to a scene from hell as the streets had been littered with rotting corpses and the sounds of screams could still be heard coming from collapsed buildings. As a result of the tragedy, Haiti, an already destitute country, now had millions of homeless survivors. The small country was now also littered with around 11 million cubic meters of rubble (Haiti Earthquake Facts and Figures). Despite what seemed to be a grim situation, there was a glimmer of hope for Haiti, as international communities and governments immediately responded to their cries for help. For the first time, Haiti found itself in the spotlight. Numerous countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Japan, Germany, the United States and more, pledged billions of dollars to help Haiti. It seemed the entire world wanted to fix this already broken country, as many agreed with former president Bill Clinton, who was optimistic in regards to Haitis future, as he explained that the disaster gave the world a chance to build [Haiti] back better (Clinton).

Now, almost three years after the disaster, there is still much improvement to be made. In Curtis Wongs article, "Haiti Earthquake Anniversary: Global Relief Efforts Yield Little Progress. Wong shed light on the slow progress in Haiti, stating that a year after the earthquake over 1 million people were still living in temporary tent camps and over half of the 11 million cubic meters of rubble was still untouched. Wong also explains that disease had now stricken Haiti, as an outbreak of Cholera had claimed thousands of lives and would continue to kill more. Now, almost three years later, Haiti is still suffering. 370,000 people still call a tent home and a large amount of rubble has yet to be removed (Llana). The slow recovery has left those who believed in the prospect of Haiti being built back better scratching their heads wondering what went wrong. The country of Haiti has never been a stranger to poverty and corruption. The CIA World Fact Book states that Haiti is, and was prior to the earthquake, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. In Terry Busss striking report, Why Foreign Aid to Haiti Failed, the countrys destitution before the quake is revealed. About three-fourths of the population is impoverishedliving on less than $2/day. Half of the population has no access to potable water. One-third have no sanitary facilities. Only 10% have electrical service. Today, six years and an earthquake later, little has changed as, 80% of the population lives under the poverty line and 54% live in abject poverty (CIA World Fact Book) Along with an astonishing amount of poverty, Haiti has also been afflicted with many natural disasters. The location of the country is not ideal, as it sits on two seismic fault lines and is located 600 miles off the coast of Florida in the warm waters of the Caribbean, making it prone to earthquakes and hurricanes (Buss). Since the January quake, several hurricanes and

tropical storms have struck Haiti, the most recent one being hurricane Sandy, which is said to have destroyed more than 70% of the countrys crops (Watts). Along with poverty and natural disasters, the Haitian government has been a large contributor to the hardships of Haiti. In the report, Why Foreign Aid to Haiti failed, Terry Buss explains that Haitis history has been marked by a continuous strain of dictators and an unstable government. In history, Haitis government has been overthrown numerous times by the Haitians. The United States has also interfered twice with the Haitian government in 1986 when the Reagan administration forced the repressive dictator Jean Claude Duvalier to leave and in 1994 when the Clinton Administration put the president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was overthrown by the military, back into power (Buss). Now, despite Haiti finally having a democratic system in place, the Haitian government is still deemed as highly corrupt and unstable, as it recently received the rating of a 1.8 out of 10 by the Transparency International Corruption Index (qtd. in Valbrun). After the tragic earthquake, The United Nations Special Envoy to Haiti estimated that over $3.6 billion had been given by international donors alone (qtd. inValbrun). Now, amidst the still tragically slow recovery, people have attempted the arduous task of locating where this large sum was spent. Immediately following the earthquake the U.S. government designated $379 million to Haiti. Soon after it was discovered that this money was not all going to Haiti, in fact, from every dollar spent 33 cents was actually given back to the U.S. government to reimburse it. Less than 1 percent of the aid was given to the Haitian government while the majority of the funds went to NGOs. Following the U.S.s immediate response, Congress allocated even more money, about 1.14 billion, to reconstruct Haiti. Despite desperate conditions, by May 2011,

thats 17 months later, the U.S. had only spent 20% of this money. Today, some of this money has still not been spent. (Quigley and Ramachandran). The negligent and unreliable funding from major governments is believed by many to be the cause of slow development since the earthquake. This is for the most part untrue. While it is frustrating to see the spending of these funds prolonged, what has really hurt Haiti the most is where the money has been given and spent. As stated before, most of the money from international governments was entrusted to NGOs. The Red Cross, which is the largest NGO in Haiti, received over $486 million in donations alone, not including the money from the U.S. government. Many people applauded the large amounts of money that NGOs were given and immediately after the disaster but now, several years after, the once appreciative Haitians and the high hoped public stand disappointed. As Majorie Valbrun writes, there is now a long and deep thread of anger towards NGOs especially in the Haitian society. Unlike governments that receive or give money, the money that NGOs receive is untraceable. There are usually few expense reports, as these agencies are anything but transparent. Even if, by some chance, an organization does decide to report on where their money was spent, the report is not guaranteed to be accurate. Now, with companies like the Red Cross CEO earning a $951,957 salary, many people have begun to question where their donations are actually going. (Quigley and Ramanauskas). Many believe that from the beginning some NGOs looked at the disaster in Haiti as a business opportunity. Private groups in the U.S. started lobbying for a share of the governments money and many received just that (Muhammad). Like the government, many NGOs are accused

of being corrupt and even competitive with one another. Often times it seems that certain NGOs are only in it for the money, and dont actually care about the people. Marjorie Valbrun talks about this in her article "After Quake Praise Becomes Resentment Haiti." She explains that the finest and most expensive restaurants in Haiti are found across from the biggest tent city in Port au Prince, and that after a long, hard day of work many volunteers can be seen dining there, right across from the poverty that they are supposedly doing their best to eliminate. In a scholarly article written by several doctors, a story is told about a medical team that arrived immediately after the quake occurred. They were seeing and treating many injured patients in an organized and successful manner, until another team with a camera crew arrived. With no plans and no organization the new teams most important goal seemed to be to catch good video footage. Soon, a doctor who hadnt performed surgery in twenty years began operating on an elderly man. This man passed away at the hands of the inexperienced doctor. The authors of this article classified this doctor as a disaster tourist, which is a person who heads to the site of a disaster to see destruction, take pictures and obtain bragging rights and get a shoulder badge( Docrat, Hoving, and Vries). Today, many Haitians have seen these disaster tourists time and time again, and now view the presence of the thousands of NGOs as a curse. As a result of Haitis governments limited capacity and weak national institutions the NGOs have risen to the occasion and as a result established what is known as a privatized parallel state. Robert Paxton first described a parallel state as a collection of organizations or institutions that are state-like in their organization, management and structure. Currently, it is estimated that Haiti has the highest number of NGOs per capita in the world. Even before the earthquake an estimated 70% of healthcare and 85% of education in Haiti was ran by NGOs (qtd.

in Ramachandran). While this may sound like a good thing, its actually considered to be one of the attributing factors to the slow and insufficient progress in Haiti. However, not all NGOs are created equal. Some are effective, most arent. Even the NGOs with the best intentions can have the worst results. Bringing real relief is not a quick fix; it takes time and a plan. Many NGOs lack this plan and as one Haitian put it the NGOs go from project to project without taking the time to develop a strategy, at the end of the projects everything vanishes and were back to where we started.(Valbrun). Rather than staying and developing one place at a time, NGOs mostly hop around from place to place, giving handouts that dont actually make a difference. It all goes back to the well-known saying if you give a man a fish youll feed him for a day and if you teach him how to fish youll feed him for his life. Haitians themselves havent been involved in their own recovery. One of the biggest mistakes made by nonprofit organizations as whole is what the authors of the well-known book, When Helping Hurts: Alleviating Poverty Without Hurting the Poor and Yourself, call paternalism. This is when volunteers with good intentions do things for others that they could have done for themselves (Corbett, Fikkert, and Perkins 156). Bob Lupton, the author of Toxic Charity, elaborates on paternalism, saying that, Giving to those in needs what they could be gaining from their own initiative may well be the kindest way to destroy people (36). Sure its true that many Haitians could not help themselves after the earthquake and emergency assistance was required. However, Haiti is no longer in the emergency phase, they are in the recovery phase, and completely voiding the Haitians and their government from the recovery process was where these organizations went wrong, and is where they are continuing to go wrong today.

Not only have many NGOs stopped the Haitians from helping themselves; they have flat out hurt businesses in Haiti. For example, many NGOs bring free goods, such as water bottles and rice, from the U.S. This puts the seller of those same goods in Haiti out of businesses because their usual customers can get them for free. The U.S. government is guilty of indirectly excluding Haitians by giving money to NGOs and directly by giving less than one percent of aid to Haitis government. Along with that, when the U.S. gave 1490 construction firms contracts to aid in the reconstruction of Haiti, only 23 were construction firms were given to actual Haitian companies, the rest were American (Quigley and Ramanauskas). Following the earthquake, Haitis government prepared and presented a post-disaster action plan for national recovery and development of Haiti. Despite their efforts, the government was unable to reach every single one of the thousands of NGOs and was ignored by those it did reach. As a result these organizations began walking on a different path towards recovery. Because of the lack of team work and collaboration with one other NGOs have limited their ability to help the suffering Haitians. Mostly, by completely avoiding the governments recovery plan, NGOs have hurt the already unstable Haitian government. They have done this by keeping the Haitian government from building its own capacity by fostering long term dependency (Valbrun). The government is unable to take back control from powerful NGOs and Haiti is stuck relying on these organizations ineffective handouts. The UN, despite their good intentions, is also guilty of hurting the Haitians. A few months after the earthquake there was a massive outbreak of the water borne illness cholera. The outbreak was traced back to the Nepalese troops in the UN dumping waste in one of the main rivers in Haiti. Over 7,000 people died and 500,000 people were infected (Haiti Earthquake Facts and Figures). The UN made no apology for causing this outbreak and continued to deny that they

were at fault. The UN forces, which have been in Haiti since before the quake, are there with the stabilization mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). Besides causing a cholera outbreak they have been involved in several other scandals, including videos released of UN soldiers raping teenage boys and several other cases involving rape. They are widely disliked by Haitians. In a survey done in Haitis capital in Port Au Prince over half of the Haitians said that the UN does not contribute to security and consider the presence of the troops a bad thing (Schuller). MINUSTAH will be there until the unorganized police force turn into a professional and reliable one, and this is not likely to happen without the growth and stability of their government. Haiti reveals that even substantial amounts of money and thousands of nonprofit organizations cannot fix a country. The earthquake relief failed because the government was and is still broken, causing the NGOs and other countries to be more influential than the government themselves. As Majorie Valbrun put it, The earthquake didnt so much destroy Haitian society as it exposed how deeply broken that society already was. Haiti was not able to be built back better because the things that needed to be changed, such as the weak government and the powerful NGOs, were just furthered with the relief efforts (Valbrun). Despite the slow and unorganized recovery in Haiti, many NGOs, and even the U.S. government, are unwilling to admit that their efforts failed. Now, many involved in the earthquake recovery turn a blind eye, unwilling to own up to their mistakes. Unfortunately, it seems that the countries who still distribute aid to Haiti and the ineffective NGOs in the country will continue to hurt Haiti.

Works Cited Buss, Terry F. "Why Foreign Aid in Haiti Failed." Napawash.org. National Academy of Public Administration, Feb. 2006. Web. 02 Nov. 2012. Clinton, Bill. "What Haiti Needs." Time. Time, 14 Jan. 2010.. Web. 4 Dec. 2012 Corbett Steve, Fikkert Brain, Perkins John. When Helping Hurts: Alleviating Poverty Without Hurting the Poor and Yourself. Moody Publishers: Chicago, 2009. Print Engler, Yves. "Minustah's Filthy Record in Haiti." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 11 Sept. 2011. Web. 02 Nov. 2012. "Haiti Earthquake Facts and Figures." Disasters Emergency Committee. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 Nov. 2012 Hazelton, Liz. "Haiti Earthquake Survivors Blockade Roads with Piles of Corpses in Protest at Lack of Aid." Mail Online. Associated Newspapers Ltd, 15 Jan. 2010. Web. 04 Dec. 2012. Llana, Sarah M. "Haiti Struggles to 'build Back Better' Two Years after Earthquake."The Christian Science Monitor. The Christian Science Monitor, 12 Jan. 2012. Web. 05 Nov. 2012. Lupton, Robert. Toxic Charity. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2011. Print. Muhammad, Starla. "Haiti: Two Years after Deadly Earthquake, Life Largely Unchanged."Finalcall.com. N.p., 19 Jan. 2012. Web. 02 Nov. 2012. Quigley, Bill, and Ramanauskas. "Haiti: Where Is the Money?" News Haiti Action. Web. Ramachandran, Vijaya. "Is Haiti Doomed to Be the Republic of NGOs?" The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 12 Jan. 2012. Web. 02 Nov. 2012. Ratnesar, Romesh. "Who Failed on Haiti's Recovery?" TIME.com. Time Inc., Jan. 2011. Web. 02

Nov. 2012. Schuller, Mark. "Is It Time for MINUSTAH to Leave?" Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti. N.p., 14 Feb. 2012. Web. 05 Nov. 2012. Valbrun, Marjorie. "After Quake Praise Becomes Resentment Haiti." The Center for Public Integrity. N.p., 11 Jan. 2012. Web. 02 Nov. 2012. Wallis LA, Docrat F, Van Hoving DJ, De Vries S: Haiti disaster tourismA Medical Shame. Prehospital and Disaster Medicine. May-June 2010. Web. 14 Oct. Watts, Jonathan. "Hurricane Sandy: Haiti in Emergency Aid Plea as Disaster Piles upon Disaster." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 30 Oct. 2012. Web. 06 Nov. 2012 Wong, Curtis M. "Haiti Earthquake Anniversary: Global Relief Efforts Yield Little Progress. The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 12 Jan. 2011. Web. 02 Nov. 2012 "The World Factbook: Haiti." CIA- The World Factbook. Central Intelligence Agency, 14 Nov. 2012. Web. 04 Dec. 2012.