How that Haiti is completely wrecked, how does anyone fix it?
With tremors still shaking the island nation that has never recovered from its own birth pains, the world’s nations are sending tons of food and barrels of water to Haiti — which has depended for decades even outside of disasters on tons of food and barrels of water from the world’s nations to feed its people.
As many as 2,000 charitable organizations already had a presence in Haiti’s capital of Port-au-Prince before the Jan. 12 earthquake. The Haitian government depended on these organizations to provide basic food and health services to the population that the government could not or would not provide.
As Christians, it is vitally important — even as we are anxious to rush in with a cup of cold water and a pair of shoes in Jesus’ name — to think carefully about the best ways to help Haiti.
Aid agencies of all kinds are asking that initial aid be limited to money. Cleaning out your closets and medicine cabinets is not appropriate or helpful right now. A Jan. 23 MSNBC story by JoNel Aleccia points out that cartons of household goods quickly gathered and shipped to a disaster site without a specific request often have little value and cost more to ship, sort and haul away than they are worth.
People on site can multiply purchasing power, so the $100 of bottled water you bought to ship to a disaster area could have turned into $700 worth of water if you’d sent the money instead. In fact, Aleccia said, after the Indian Ocean tsunami in late 2004, among the worthless donations aid organizers in Sri Lanka were forced to deal with were “gifts” of stiletto shoes, expired cans of salmon and evening gowns.
Diana Rothe-Smith, executive director of the trade association National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, strongly recommends that no donation drives be conducted unless an existing organization on site in Haiti has asked for specific help.
Already volunteers have shown up in Haiti so ill-prepared they had to seek their own food and shelter from other volunteer organizations operating to help earthquake victims.
“When teams arrive without specific skills and without their own supplies, they drain resources that could better be used for actual victims,” Kristi Koenig, a disaster-response physician at the University of California at Irvine, told Aleccia.
As Baptist Christians, what is the best way to help Haitians? We can imagine they need their homes rebuilt first. They need to get out of the open air, or tarp cities — both bubbling breeding grounds for cholera.
But in Haiti, whose home do you rebuild? What do you build with? If you buy or are given a tract of land and put up 100 cement block houses, who wins the lottery to live there? How do they maintain the house, pay for electricity or get a road to the neighborhood?
A government official in Haiti told a friend of mine the country has supplies neither of lumber nor of steel. He suggested donor nations could help best by building a series of concrete plants to utilize natural resources. Locals can produce their own material to build their own houses, learn a trade and establish an economy in the process.
Erilus St. Sauveur, a Haitian pastor in Raleigh, N.C., said there is little skilled labor in Haiti and suggested that Baptists consider building a training school at which to teach Haitians building trades. Not only would such a school contribute mightily to rebuilding structures, it would help create a desperately needed self-sustaining economic engine.
Ultimately, if Haiti is ever going to be more than a Disneyland for donors (“I’m going to Haiti!”), it must establish an economic system that employs more than the 20 percent of people who had a job before the earthquake.
Baptists can help there if we are willing to invest in a few infrastructure pieces that we can leave behind, in the hands of locals. Tony Campolo, who has been ministering in Haiti for many years, has helped locals establish many small businesses. St. Sauveur says many Haitians are entrepreneurial and can work wonders if they just had $300 to $500 in seed money. That’s less than the price of an airline ticket for one volunteer.
On-the-ground involvement from professional experts and volunteers is needed both now and for the long term. But the question for most of us remains: Will we be willing to do what Haiti most needs from us, even if it means staying home?
Norman Jameson is editor of the Biblical Recorder, newsjournal for North Carolina Baptists. This commentary was distributed by Associated Baptist Press.