Haiti After the Quake

By BILL QUIGLEY and AMBER RAMANAUSKAS

Haiti, a close neighbor of the US with over nine million people, was devastated by earthquake on January 12, 2010. Hundreds of thousands were killed and many more wounded.

The UN estimated international donors gave Haiti over $1.6 billion in relief aid since the earthquake (about $155 per Haitian) and over $2 billion in recovery aid (about $173 per Haitian) over the last two years.

Yet Haiti looks like the earthquake happened two months ago, not two years. Over half a million people remain homeless in hundreds of informal camps, most of the tons of debris from destroyed buildings still lays where it fell, and cholera, a preventable disease, was introduced into the country and is now an epidemic killing thousands and sickening hundreds of thousands more.

It turns out that almost none of the money that the general public thought was going to Haiti actually went directly to Haiti. The international community chose to bypass the Haitian people, Haitian non-governmental organizations and the government of Haiti. Funds were instead diverted to other governments, international NGOs, and private companies.

Despite this near total lack of control of the money by Haitians, if history is an indication, it is quite likely that the failures will ultimately be blamed on the Haitians themselves in a “blame the victim” reaction.

Haitians ask the same question as many around the world “Where did the money go?”

A good group you can trust

UN soldiers brought deadly ‘superbug’ to Americas

ABC News

Compelling new scientific evidence suggests United Nations peacekeepers have carried a virulent strain of cholera — a super bug — into the Western Hemisphere for the first time.

The vicious form of cholera has already killed 7,000 people in Haiti, where it surfaced in a remote village in October 2010. Leading researchers from Harvard Medical School and elsewhere told ABC News that, despite UN denials, there is now a mountain of evidence suggesting the strain originated in Nepal, and was carried to Haiti by Nepalese soldiers who came to Haiti to serve as UN peacekeepers after the earthquake that ravaged the country on Jan. 12, 2010 — two years ago today. Haiti had never seen a case of cholera until the arrival of the peacekeepers, who allegedly failed to maintain sanitary conditions at their base.

“What scares me is that the strain from South Asia has been recognized as more virulent, more capable of causing severe disease, and more transmissible,” said John Mekalanos, who chairs the Department of Microbiology and Immunobiology at Harvard Medical School. “These strains are nasty. So far there has been no secondary outbreak. But Haiti now represents a foothold for a particularly dangerous variety of this deadly disease.”

More than 500,000 Haitians have been infected, and Mekalanos said a handful of victims who contracted cholera in Haiti have now turned up in Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and in Boston, Miami and New York, but only in isolated cases.

“The scientific debate on the origin of cholera in Haiti existed, but it has been resolved by the accumulation of evidence that unfortunately leave no doubt about the implication of the Nepalese contingent of the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti,” said French epidemiologist Renaud Piarroux, whose research on the outbreak was published by a U.S. Centers for Disease Control journal.

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Haiti is the only country in history where an enslaved people threw over their captors and took charge of their country.

And generations later, the global slave masters have never let them forget it.

The poorest country in the western hemisphere and one of the poorest in the world, it’s been run by one band of US-supported criminals after another.

(So much for bringing democracy to the world.)

This year Haiti took direct hits from four major hurricanes.

It’s rare to get news about Haiti in the US. Rarer still for Haitians to be portrayed as human beings.

How you can help

Haitian people are not short of initiative, man-power or courage.

They do need some help from the outside world following the storms. But a little, well-targeted aid to grass roots projects will go far.

Most good-sized, reliable aid organizations have projects in Haiti.

You can donate through those groups and specify that you want your donation to go to projects in Haiti.

Or, I found this one:

Specific suggestions:

The Lambi catalog

More about this group:

http://www.lambifund.org/video.htm

If this group doesn’t resonate with you, you may find one from this list of projects screened by Global Giving:

Check them all out:

www.globalgiving.com/ac/ctry00haiti1.html