What a World. What a World.

Today two patients died in the Cholera Treatment Center where John is working. With the number of patients they have had coming to the center, and the severity of the disease, it was inevitable. But still very hard and very sad.

Sometimes I feel a little inane when I send John emails about what I am doing in the States: today Luke had swimming lessons and then we went to the park; the weather has been rainy and cool; we had two deliveries from Amazon; while he is trying to keep death at bay for dozens of patients. At best, I hope my emails will provide a little needed distraction to John from the difficulties of the day.

It is a mind boggling concept to reflect upon: while many of us in the developed world go about our relatively cushy lives, people all over the world are dying in wars, from starvation, from preventable diseases. Children are abused and even sold as slaves. People are rotting and tortured, unjustly held in unknown prisons. All of this is going on at this moment.

We may shrug and give the winner's response, "That's life. It's always been that way." But why does it have to be that way? Of course, there is no avoiding suffering for any of us, but why does life have to be so horribly miserable for so many? I don't think there are satisfactory answers to this question. We've managed to construct fairer societies for hundreds of millions of people; we can create a world where everyone receives the basics.

If we want to badly enough.

Pictured above, a boy and his mother at the Cholera Treatment Center where John is working.

He Should Be Mad: "Haitian Government, Release Those Containers!"

After watching the weak 60 Minutes report on Haiti this evening, I feel validated in my opinion that Haiti's government doesn't know what it's doing and also an awful sense of deja vu. Part of the story focused on a man from South Africa with the 7th Adventist Church who is building housing in Haiti. His organization had shipped containers filled with building supplies to Haiti for 1,200 temporary houses. However, the 24 containers were sitting at the Haitian port where they had been for months, despite the South African having all the necessary documentation and a $6,000 check to pay the Haitian government for storage costs.

When the 60 Minutes correspondant Byron Pitts described this situation to the Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, he agreed with the Pitts leading statement that obviously something had not been done properly or the containers would have been released. (Nice hard hitting reporting)

Shortly after the interview, the containers were released. The South African was told the containers had been missing a Haitian government seal. Yes, for months the containers filled with materials to build houses for people living in tarps were held up because they lacked a government seal. Why did Pitts not press Bellerive on what was either a lie or gross incompetence?

The old, missing seal story is a familiar one to us. After our son Luke's adoption was completed by the Haitian court, the papers had to make the rounds of many Haitian ministries for their seal. In one case, we were told the stamp was broken and they had to send to Germany for another stamp. I kid you not.

For Those Who Would Like To Become Haitian: Dual Citizenship

If you didn't have time to read the lengthy and thought-provoking article by Rene Bruemmer of the Montreal Gazette that I posted last week, here are some of the points that drew my attention.

"Political instability and poor governance [are] the most important drivers of failure from which all other negative consequences follow."

Building roads, school, and hospitals is relatively easy compared to maintaining and running them. The latter takes an educated bureaucracy to manage the never ending tasks associated with governing and running institutions.

Sixteen thousand civil servants were killed in the earthquake, more than 20% of the country's public administration workforce. There is joke in Haiti that those killed were the most dedicated employees as they not only bothered to show up for work, but were still there late in the afternoon when the earthquake hit.

Powerful elites limit institutions because the institutions usurp the elite's power. Instead the elites create patronage networks, based on loyalty to the elites.

Eighty percent of Haiti's college graduates flee their homeland "for the brighter future of elsewhere."

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) provide 75% of the health care in Haiti.

One of Bruemmer theses is that Haiti needs educated bureaucrats who can help run the state. He believes that some of the money pledged to help Haiti should go for this purpose. He acknowledges that the process of building institutions takes years or even decades.

Haiti needs an influx of educated people to help build these institutions. One could argue that Haiti has that in the many NGO's and the UN which have a presence in Haiti, but given their huge presence, the successes seem minimal. As well meaning as all these outsiders are, they remain, to some extent outsiders. A lack of experienced, educated, committed Haitians exists. What to do?

As I pondered this question, a thought popped into my mind: What about dual citizenship? What if the United States, Canada, and France, with Haiti's permission, allowed their citizens to have dual citizenship with Haiti? These three countries come to mind because of their historical relationships with Haiti and also because of the large numbers of Haitians who live in these countries, particularly the U.S. and Canada. People of Haitian descent or others who have a connection to Haiti--perhaps those who have adopted children--might be interested in becoming citizens of Haiti and more fully participating in the building of the country if they could retain their current citizenship.

I realize this idea is a little half baked, and I will explore its pros and cons in further posts. But things must change in Haiti, or as Bruemmer says, the tragedies of the present will join the tragedies of the past that are"waiting in the wings to hobble the future."

How Do You Have a Country Without a Functioning Government?

The title of my post is a questions that has perplexed me for sometime. In my opinion, one of Haiti's main problems is that it doesn't have a competent, functioning government. This was true before the earthquake and it is even more painfully true now.

I read the article below from the Montreal Gazette on the Corbett listserv. It articulates this problem in much detail. The article is lengthy, but worth the read. In my next post, I'll offer some thoughts on Haiti's lack of governance.

Haiti civil service in ruins
Montreal Gazette By Rene Bruemmer, October 27, 2010


How do you fix a failed state? How can the world help a nation in wretched disrepair, unable to feed, educate, employ or heal the majority of its people, become self-sufficient and capable of giving its citizens decent lives?

The short answer, according to one school of thought gaining currency in international development circles, is bureaucrats. Train and hire lots and lots of bureaucrats. And use them to bolster and maintain the institutions that manage the endless day-to-day needs of providing potable water, health care, schooling, land titles, policing and justice.

Foreign governments and NGOs can build all the roads, hospitals and schools they want in Haiti, Andrew S. Natsios, the former administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Aid, said in an interview with The Gazette. But without a functioning public service in place to manage them, those roads, hospitals and schools are doomed to fail.

"Clearly, port facilities, roads, bridges, schools, health clinics and water systems (which were already crumbling before the earthquake) must be rebuilt," Natsios said in his testimony before the U.S. Senate's Foreign Relations Committee Hearing on Haiti last May. "But, if that is the extent of our reconstruction efforts, then Haiti will simply revert to its failed state status and whatever is reconstructed will begin to crumble over time without institutions to ensure maintenance."

The magnitude of the tragedy surrounding January's earthquake, which killed more than 230,000 people and left 1.3 million homeless, is in many ways due to Haiti's lack of institutions -a man-made tragedy. Buildings were poorly constructed with shoddy materials on unstable land, with no government system to inspect them, no legal system to punish builders, no insurance system to allow citizens to bury and rebuild. A similar magnitude quake in Chile that occurred six weeks after Haiti's resulted in just 500 deaths, due in large part to Chile's push to build earthquake resistant buildings. Chile is considered among Latin America's best-governed countries.

The problem, Natsios said, is that while rebuilding roads and schools is relatively easy, creating institutions -a functioning ministry of health, for example -is complex, costly and can take decades. It is also risky, as Haiti's political instability could destroy much of the work done, as it has in the past. Humanitarian food aid and health care make up the majority of
foreign assistance to Haiti. Compared with handing out bags of rice to the starving or building a hospital, the work that goes into building institutions -educating workers, bettering management systems, improving transparency to limit corruption, developing clear hiring and promotion practices based on merit -is not very visible. The benefits can also be hard
to quantify. All of these elements make it difficult for the political leaders of foreign nations, who have to justify their expenses to their taxpayers and voters, to invest heavily in institution building.

But as Haiti slowly rebuilds after the earthquake, development experts warn that reconstructing infrastructure without addressing the country's governance issues could be akin to throwing the money into a bottomless pit. In Haiti in the Balance: Why Foreign Aid Has Failed and What We Can Do About It, author Terry Buss notes that unlike many failed states, Haiti has received billions of dollars in foreign support, along with the aid of
thousands of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the presence of UN security troops. International governments and organizations gave more than $5 billion in foreign aid between 1990 and 2005, yet the standard of living in Haiti dropped in that period.

"Aid shortcomings likely originated because donors collectively fail to deal with political instability and poor governance as the most important drivers of failure, from which all other negative consequences would follow," Buss wrote.

Businesses, Buss noted, do not invest in failed states, buy their exports, or start companies there. Without investment and jobs, there is little tax revenue with which to pay for civil servants to run the state. It is a vicious circle.

In the absence of institutions, NGOs have moved in to fill the void -well-intentioned, for the most part, but also a crutch the Haitian government has come to rely on, at the expense of creating its own civil service networks that could oversee the needs of the whole populace. NGOs provide 75 per cent of health care in Haiti.

The problem has become even more dire today. The earthquake killed 16,000 civil servants, more than 20 per cent of the country's total public administration workforce. (A cynical Haitian joke grounded in truth notes that those who were killed were the good civil servants -the ones who actually showed up to work, or bothered to stay until 4:53 p.m., when the
earthquake struck).

Most of the ministry buildings, with their tax receipts and property titles and legal records, were destroyed in the quake. Most of the government ministers were killed.

Ten months after the earthquake, Philippe Mathieu, the country's former agriculture minister and now the Haiti director for the Quebec branch of international aid organization Oxfam, is still living in a tent beside his home. Repairs are needed to secure his house, but repairs are slow in coming, even for a former agriculture minister.

Asked how a lack of public service institutions has affected his country, he offers this example: In his district of upper Delmas in Port-au-Prince, there are now about 60 tent camps for the homeless. Some house as many as 600 people, yet many camps have not reported any cases of diarrhea for months. Camp residents have organized themselves to ensure water delivered
to the cisterns is treated regularly with chlorine, and tested to make sure it is free of bacteria and hasn't been over chlorinated.

"People realize this, that the water is better than before the earthquake," Mathieu said. He is part of a group trying to get clean water to the entire district. Except they can't because many of the pipes are broken, leaking water out and letting filth in, and the pumping capacity isn't strong enough to get the water up to the higher regions in hilly Port-au-Prince. The
organizing committee can't find the plans for the aqueduct system to tell them where the pipes are located -either because the records were destroyed in the quake, or because they never existed in the first place.

"Before the earthquake, water was purchased -people had to pay for it. . . . All countries get treated water. Why can we not do this in Haiti? You see the government has no global idea of how to manage the country.

"As a Haitian, this is what bothers me -there are no real plans. It's like all Haitians have the capacity to think, but they think only for themselves.

"We will never get the people out of the camps and back to their homes because they won't have water -the conditions will be worse than in the camps."

The hardships of the average Haitian's life are difficult to fathom for residents of comfortable nations like Canada. Three-quarters of the population lives on less than $2 a day, and more than half live in extreme poverty on less than $1 a day, Buss notes. Half the population of 9 million has no access to potable water, and 90 per cent don't have electricity. Half the population can't read, and less than one quarter of rural children go to school.

Two examples of the impact of the lack of public administration on the lives of Haitians: Eighty per cent of the schools are private so many Haitians can't afford to go, and they're of "dismal quality anyway," Buss writes. And only 24 per cent of pregnancies are attended by a trained health professional -most Haitian women give birth outside of a hospital or clinic,
without medical help, reports the International Monetary Fund.

According to the UN Development Program, Haiti ranks at 154th out of 177 countries on its Human Development Index, which measures life expectancy, education and standard of living. Every country below Haiti is in sub-Saharan Africa, and "Haiti ranks at the average of all sub-Saharan African countries," Buss notes. The nations of the Caribbean and Latin America, Haiti's geographical cousins, rank much higher.

How Haiti came to this miserable state of governance is the stuff of tragic history, foreign interventionism and chronic political instability. The only slave colony to win its independence from its colonial rulers through armed revolt, Haiti became an international pariah after becoming a free nation in 1804. It was forced to pay the equivalent of $22 billion in reparations to France for that country's "losses" in revenue from its slave-operated coffee
and sugar plantations, a debt that was only cleared in 1947 after more than a century of payments and hobbles the country's development to this day. It was the victim of numerous economic blockades by foreign powers trying to control its lucrative export trade, especially by the United States, which did not want Haiti's example inciting slave revolutions on its own
territories.

Meanwhile, the Haitian revolution gave rise to two distinct populations: a small urban elite and a Creole-speaking majority of subsistence farmers. "The mercantile elite and thus the state derived their income from taxing the export of the peasant surplus, via custom houses," says the CDA Collaborative Learning Projects, a Massachusetts-based non-profit research centre. "The structure of this economic division . . . gave shape to the extractive, predatory nature of the state that has lasted into the present."

The state itself was volatile, with its leaders more intent on preserving power and fighting with parliament than ensuring the well-being of its citizens, especially those living in rural regions. Of its 55 elected presidents since 1806, Buss writes, only nine completed their full term -the rest were overthrown, killed or died in office. Such instability does not
lend itself to the creation of a stable, well-functioning public administration.

What was created, as is the case in most developing nations, was a patrimonial state -"a state in which the power of the government and even the private sector is in the hands of an elite that uses the levers of economic and political power to retain control," said Natsios, the former administrator of USAID, the United States government's main agency for providing international assistance, and now a professor of foreign policy at Georgetown University in Washington. "I don't mean necessarily repressive control. Through patronage jobs, contracts, monopolistic control of the economy -they develop patronage networks."

Government ministries, Natsios said, don't necessarily do ministry work. "The government hires people who are part of networks, sort of like tribal chiefs, and they have followers and you basically give the followers paid jobs. They don't necessarily show up or have

qualifications, but they remain loyal to the regime.

"That is characteristic of a lot of poor countries, but Haiti is the most thoroughly patrimonial state in Latin America."

A World Bank study found that 30 per cent of civil service workers were phantom employees. One ministry had 10,000 employees, only about half of whom were ever at work.

"People think it's corruption," Natsios said. "It's not corruption ‹ people are using the system as a glue that holds the society together."

That being said, corruption is endemic -Transparency International ranked Haiti as among the fifth most corrupt countries in the world in 2004, 2005 and 2006.

Natsios refers to the recent book Violence and Social Orders, written by Nobel-prize winning economist Douglass North as well as John Wallis and Barry Weingast, in which the authors say it is the density of institutions that distinguishes rich from poor nations. Countries like America and Canada have groups that administer public service, keep public order, ensure the
rule of law and build a market economy. Organizations, the authors note, keep governments and societies in check by controlling conflicting interests of various groups in an impersonal manner, maintaining public accountability and transparency, and on the economic side "ensure open entry and competition in many markets, free movements of goods and individuals," and use the creation of institutions to promote opportunities, protect property
rights and control violence. Free markets spur the economy and aid political stability, the authors write, which in turn allows governments to provide services.

More traditional societies, like Haiti, have powerful elites that limit these types of institutions because they impede their power -instead, they create patronage networks through the government to restrict economy to their own class and hand out public service jobs to their own supporters to keep them loyal. In these societies, it is who you know that counts, whereas
in institutionalized societies, it is largely impartial bureaucracies that make decisions based on impersonal regulations, equal to all.

In Haiti, public service is not a popular profession, due mainly to low wages, especially compared with what could be earned in the private sector. There's a lack of skilled people to fill the jobs, anyway -80 per cent of Haiti's college graduates flee their homelands for the brighter future of elsewhere. Less than one per cent of Haiti's population is employed in the public sector, as compared with two per cent in Africa and more than seven per cent in many developed nations. The lack translates into gridlock in all areas, including economic -a World Bank study found that the average time to start a new business was 25 days in the most developed countries, 75 days in Latin America, and more than a year in Haiti. It was also relatively much more expensive.

"Without formal institutions capable of providing the enforcement mechanisms necessary to decrease risk and uncertainty, businesses will not pursue economic opportunities," Natsios said. "Thus any effort to build new institutions must incorporate private sector development; it cannot solely target the Haitian state in a vacuum."

Without a proper public sector, the IMF notes, Haiti is even unable to properly manage the money that is flowing in from donors.

How then, do you fix a broken public sector? One way is to ensure a good portion of the $11 billion in aid promised to Haiti is earmarked for civil service reform, creating jobs and helping to institute an incentive and accountability program that would reward and motivate its employees. Natsios urges incentives for Haiti's vast educated diaspora, numbering more than 2 million in the United States and Canada alone, to be allowed to return, if only temporarily, to help its country rebuild. He also called on the U.S. government to reinstate a university scholarship program that used to bring 18,000 students a year to American schools to be trained, with the proviso that they had to return to their homelands to work and rebuild.

There are signs of hope. In the decade before the earthquake, Haiti made efforts to improve its governance issues, saw a decrease in gang violence and lawlessness and experienced five straight years of economic growth. After the earthquake, Haiti's government presented its Action Plan for National Recovery and Development of Haiti, which focused heavily on
improving governance and decentralizing services, giving powers to smaller, provincial governments spread throughout the country, instead of concentrating them all in the capital, Port-au-Prince.

Haiti and the international community have set up the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) to oversee allocation and spending of all donations over $500,000 and deal with administrative issues like issuing permits to build hospitals and schools, as well as carry out economic development projects. Included among more than $1.7 billion in projects approved by the IHRC in August for new roads, housing and agriculture, was $25 million to go toward
a project to help the government provide services and increase transparency and reduce corruption.

In Montreal earlier this month for a conference to promote business ties between her countryand Quebec, Haitian Commerce and Industry Minister Josseline Colimon Fethiere said the government is aware of its shortcomings, and trying to address them. The government has created lists of its remaining employees, those who were not killed or fled the country, and
continues to employ and pay them as long as they show up to work. Training programs are planned, as are improved computer systems. And the time to start a new business in Haiti has been reduced to six weeks, she pledged.

"What we're doing is trying to rebuild the structure," she said. "We're making steps in the right direction."

Now all Haiti needs, in theory, is the political stability to maintain the progress. But the ability of the country to host fair presidential elections Nov. 28 is already being put in doubt. Haiti's electoral commission has excluded 15 candidates without giving a reason, and blocked the Lavalas Party, popular with rural voters, from running. In addition, the names of at
least 230,000 dead have to be purged from the voter roles and 1.3 million homeless need to be re-registered, Newsweek reported.

In Haiti, the tragedies of the past are ever present, waiting in the wings to hobble its future.

Bob Corbett

Bob Corbett is a retired professor from Webster University, who has a long time interest and involvement in Haiti. He has a very comprehensive website on all things Haitian and also moderates a list serve about Haiti, to which I subscribe.

People from all over the world and with all kinds of ideas about Haiti post to this list. I have posted twice, most recently about Father Gerry Jean-Juste.

Quite often, spirited debates break out on the list. Recently, people have been debating how best to help Haiti. Once inawhile, Bob posts on the list, and I thought what he had to say was worth thinking about. It follows below.

I agree fully that there are innumerable decent Haitian people.
That's not what's at issue. The issue is: How do people change the
reality of THEIR Haiti?

I recall a very imporant learning experience for me. I
won't identify the person or place for fear I would jeapordize things in that
area. But, it was way back in Duvalier days. I was deeply impressed
with the work in one area and offered to provide some financial aid. The
Haitian leader of that group told me, "No thank you." I was quite
astonished. Every other place people just wanted anything I might be able
to offer. This leader told me:

1. If I take money from you and it gets out, then the "gwo neg"
in the area will wonder what we are up to, want their share, and we will be in
trouble.

2. Soon, YOU will be suggesting we do this or that....

Thanks, Bob, but no thanks.

Eventually I got this leader to agree to allow me to give his group
anenvelop each month with cash, no questions ever asked, and no mention of
it. That ended up helping what is today a rather successful group, but
part of that success is DEFINITELY related to this leader's understanding of the
need to protect such information.

The problems in Haiti are not a lack of decent and hard working and
ambitious PEOPLE. It's leadership. There is a political class which
is a complete sycophant upon the people. There is an economic class which
is a complete sycophant upon the masses. There is a force -- it used to be
army, now it is police or thugs, who enforce the will of the powerful and keep
the masses in conditions of shocking poverty and powerless over their own
lives.

Okay, there may be a period of history here or there that I've over
exaggerated the disgustingness of leadership, but not by much.

Again, given the hard reality of the PRESENT, I think the best bet that
people of good will have in helping Haiti and Haitians is to forget "Haiti" as a
nation, and go to the villages, the more remote the better, and go SMALL.

Help the market women who need some funds for an initial investment,
help the farmer who needs a hoe or gwo bef or seed. Help the community
that needs water, help the community organization that needs a local store
ordispensary of medicines. Help the local community that needs a school
building or a teacher.

Those are things that many of us in the outside world can DO. We
can either do it alone, or we can bond with a small group of others and get
things moving.

At the same time, go small. Try NOT to be noticed. Try not
to attract the sychophants who will use power and force to steal the
benefits.

THAT HAITI, the Haiti of the real people, the non powerful, the
politically insignificant, they are the hope of the future, be they in the slums
of the city or the more rural areas of tiny villages.

And pardon me if I step on toes here, but get the hell out of the
SPIRITUAL lives of the Haitian people. They can do that quite well
themselves. They need material help and medical help and educational help,
they don't need outside help with their spiritual lives.

Bob Corbett

When the Government Makes Problems Worse

John wrote a great post at his blog, Dying in Haiti, an interview with Bob Moliere, an activist in Haiti.

Moliere says, "I ask you to tell the international community not to donate money and goods to government of Haiti. What goes in the right hand of the government quickly goes in the left hand and eventually makes its way back to the United States. . . . Haiti really has no government. There is no one to defend the poor. . . . When we (poor Haitians) need help, the Haitian government won't help. The people in Goniaves know this. International money did not reach the people in Gonaives after the flooding."

This reminds me of the argument that economist Dambisa Moyo made in her book Dead Aid that I wrote about here. Bob Moliere is making the same argument from the perspective of someone who is working with poor people.

Whenever we've talked with poor people in Haiti, they've outright laughed at the idea of the government helping them.

Haiti reminds me of a line in Bruce Springsteen's song, Born in the USA.

"You end up like a dog that's been beat too much 'til you spend half your life just covering up."

The historical and present day horrendously bad treatment that Haiti has received from the international community is part of the country's problem. But now Haiti's internal dysfunction is an equally big problem. Government corruption and incompetence are big parts of this dysfunction.

The Difficulty of Arranging Things in Haiti

Sometimes in Haiti, you can work so hard trying to make something happen, something that shouldn't be that difficult to arrange and then it doesn't happen.

I'll quit being so vague. On John's last trip to Haiti, he identified three new heart patients. He then learned that there was to be a team of medical professionals, including a pediatric heart surgeon, from Florida going to Port-au-Prince the first week of June. He asked the team if they would examine these three new patients, and they said yes.

The good news is that we think two of the children made it to the hospital where the team had set up shop and were seen.

But we know for certain that one patient did not. And this was after dozens of e-mails and many phone calls setting up the appointment. When things fail in Haiti, there is usually more than one reason why. It can be a combination of techonological failure, language barriers, transportation problems, illness, human error, and the chaos of life in a developing country. Tasks that we take for granted here or that are simple to perform are far more difficult in a place like Haiti where every day life is hard.

We are disappointed that this patient wasn't able to be seen. But we haven't given up and we will think of new ways to bring her to the attention of those who maybe able to help her.

The Difficulty of Getting a Haitian Passport

A Haitian passport can be very difficult to procure. We have a patient, 16-year-old Ronald, who has been accepted for heart surgery in the United States. Ronald is very sick and getting sicker each day.

Ronald was accepted by the hospital two months ago. His American advocate hears various excuses when she attempts to get his passport in Port-au-Prince. Or she is told to come back another day and the passport will be ready, and then it isn't. We have heard that Haiti is out of the blue books that are used to make the passports.

When we were waiting in Haiti for our son's adoption papers--and at least this wasn't a matter of life and death--one of the things we needed was a particular agency's stamp. For weeks we were told that the stamp was broken and a new one was on order from Germany.

Excuses like "we are out of blue books" or "the stamp is coming from Germany" are hard to believe. It's difficult to know whether we're dealing with bureaucratic incompetence or bureaucratic lying.

In Haiti, we've noticed a lack of urgency about situations that are considered crises in the United States (like children dying). Perhaps this is because it happens too often.

We hope Ronald gets his passport soon.

Upstream and Downstream

Do you know the difference between upstream and downstream work? Sometimes they're called justice and mercy work. Upstream or justice work addresses the root causes of a problem, while downstream or mercy work concerns itself with delivering immediate help to people who need it now. It's prevention versus cure.

For example, Haitian Hearts mainly works in the downstream or mercy arena. We provide medical care to poor Haitians and bring children and young people to the United States for surgery. We respond to these emergency problems, most of which have their root in poverty. We don't more broadly address this poverty.

Some of our patients with heart problems have these problems due to rheumatic fever, a preventable disease. For rheumatic heart disease, upstream work might focus on educating doctors and people on strep throat and its treatment (penicillin) so that rheumatic fever doesn't develop. Work further upstream might be getting funds for more clinics and doctors and nurses in Haiti so that health care is more widely available.

A nun I know frequently talks to me about a friend of hers who runs an orphanage in Ecuador. This orphanage takes in mainly disabled children who have been abandoned. This seems to fall under the category of downstream or mercy work. But then it struck me: any work that benefits children must be considered upstream work, too. Children, we have so often heard, are the future. They will grow up and create the world anew. Helping children contributes to a just future, a future that is downstream for us now.

What could be better than that?

Blessings

Today, Thanksgiving Day, 29-year-old Heureuse, a mother of two young children will be on a plane from Port-au-Prince to the United States, where she will have heart surgery at Cleveland Clinic. As Heureuse has been sick for a couple of years, this is indeed something to be grateful for. We give thanks for her doctors, nurses, host family, helpers in Haiti, medical technology, and most of all for the grace of God, which animates all good things.

Many of Heureuse's fellow Haitians aren't as fortunate today. Below is a letter written by my friend Tonya Sneed. It was published in the Peoria Journal Star on November 21, 2008 and is posted here with her permission. May we all continue to examine our lives, question our government's policies, and work hard to alleviate the awful suffering of many of our brothers and sisters.

On Thanksgiving, while Americans raise their cholesterol feasting on hormone-fed turkeys raised in horrendous conditions, another atrocity is taking place. Children in Baie d'Orange, Haiti, are starving.

It's official that at least 26 children have died from severe malnutrition, a direct result of the four tropical storms and hurricanes that ravaged Haiti in August and September.

Their deaths are connected to us in ways too numerous to count. As one of many examples, consider that the U.S. government has in recent years "liberalized" Haiti's trade. Just a few decades ago, almost all the rice purchased and sold in Haiti was grown there. Now more than 80 percent of the rice purchased and sold in Haiti was grown in the U.S. Through the dumping of our heavily subsidized rice into their market, we have destroyed Haiti's food security and have run an untold number of peasant farmers out of business.

In short, we have made Haitians more hungry, not less, and have forced them to rely on the whims of the international markets.

Consider global warming. The experts agree that global warming won't necessarily cause more hurricanes, but the hurricanes themselves will come with greater intensity. That seems to be the case. My friends in Jacmel, near Baie d'Orange, have never seen such devastation. It's a cruel irony that the poorest of the poor, who don't eat much meat and who don't drive cars - things that contribute substantially to global warming - are the ones who are suffering the most as a result of the changes in global temperatures.

Consider the elephant in the room: our despicable use of public funds. We spend more than $1 billion every day on the wars and the Pentagon's budget, and yet give Haiti pennies in aid. If we could take one day off from this insanity, no one would need to starve. A billion dollars would make all the difference in the world to the people of Baie d'Orange and to all of Haiti.

But there isn't any profit for Blackwater, KBR and the other war profiteers in feeding Venecia Lonis, a 4-year-old from Baie d'Orange whose tiny body is so miserably emaciated that even our mainstream media could no longer ignore her. Perhaps the only real hope for Venecia is that this Thanksgiving we Americans open our eyes to the harsh and bitter realities of this world, especially those that are of our government's making, and demand change.

Why Are Things So Bad in Haiti and What Can We Do About It?

I received a comment on my last post from Debbie who visits the Missionaries of Charity in the Delmas section of Port-au-Prince a couple of times a year. We are within walking distance from the MC’s and often attend their children’s Mass on Sunday. Debbie reports that they are able to get out less and less with each subsequent trip. For the last couple of years, Port-au-Prince and the entire country have been hit with an epidemic of kidnappings. I’ve written about this phenomenon in other posts. Many of these kidnappings are widely reported, especially if a foreigner is the victim. Whatever their cause, these kidnappings depress the number of visitors who visit Haiti. Who wants to be snatched anywhere much less in a country with at least a partially corrupt police force and judiciary?

The rise in kidnappings begs another question: why do things seem to be getting worse in Haiti? My husband John, who has been coming here for more than 25 years, says in terms the illness, malnutrition, condition of the streets, etc., he has never seen Haiti worse off. “Today is Haiti’s worst day,” he frequently says. Moreover, when we ask Haitians of all economic backgrounds what they think of current conditions, they confirm that it’s never been so bad. An attorney we know told us that none of her five adult children live in Haiti. In the slums, there are fewer people from international organizations to provide relief. hundreds of thousands of people who live in the slums are hungrier, sicker then ever, and now they have to dodge bullets, often unsuccessfully.

So why are things bad? Perhaps more importantly, how can conditions in Haiti improve? Undoubtedly, the answers to the second question have their roots in the first. I am going to spend the next few posts trying to explain why things are so bad and what can be done to improve them. I am a better critic than problem solver, especially when it comes to large-scale questions involving why a country isn’t functioning well. But I’ll give it a crack.

As a side note, this is the longest time that either John or I have been in Haiti, or even away from our hometown of Peoria. We’ve been here almost six months. On this trip, I’ve experienced Haiti mainly vicariously through John, as I’ve spent most of my time in the confines of our hotel caring for our three-year-old son, whose adoption is almost complete. John, as usual, has been working with the sick and poor. The last few weeks he has traveled into Cité Soleil and other slums with a mobile medical clinic. As I proceed with the broader question of how we can improve life for these people, I will post pictures that John has taken during his work. Hopefully, this will “keep it real” as the kids say. The people in these pictures are why the questions so urgently need answers and actions.