Disaster and Development

It's funny, when I wrote The Tale of the Creole Pig last week I had no intention of writing about Haiti again. My plan was (and I'll return to that tomorrow) to illustrate links between problems in Sustainable Development to other topics and issues.

And then Port-au-Prince imploded and my inbox started filling up and my cell phone started to blow up with questions and kind words of condolences. So I thought that I'd take some time to give my perspective/insights although to be 100% honest I haven't set foot in Haiti in 19 years.

It's a little weird to see Haiti on the news, to have to hear news anchors explain that the Dominican Republic and Haiti share one island. Most people who have loved ones in Haiti know as much as you know. The phone lines are iffy in the best of circumstances and right now lines just aren't getting through. The word is that the internet is ironically more usable than phone service but many Haitians, I'd even say most Haitians have limited to no computer/internet access. None of my family does. We know what MSNBC and CNN show, but rumors abound. So and so heard that someone saw his mother's house and it's collapsed and two people are dead inside. People cling to the rumors that say loved ones are alive; reject the ones that preemptively kill their dearest. There is a lot of obsessive dialing.

It's really hard to put the level of destruction into context. People keep talking about how bad the level of destruction is because of how poor the people are, but the National Palace which was built in 1918 collapsed, Red Cross headquarters collapsed, the national Cathedral collapsed killing the nation's Archbishop. The part of town filled with fancy diplomats and ex-patriots, where the houses were well bit, was hit just as hard as the slums. In other words this is not a Katrina situation. Like most things affecting Haiti, it's more complex.

Prior to Tuesday the last big earthquake was in 1842. The epicenter of Tuesday's quake was 9 miles from the capital, essentially in a suburb of Port-au-Prince. It was shallow, sending energy out in horizontal waves across the city, causing tremors felt as far away as Cuba some 200 miles away and causing far more damage had the earthquake run deep sending waves of energy back to the center of the earth.

It was a nightmare of a quake.

The city was not designed with earthquakes in mind, since the only earthquakes for over 100 years have been gentle tremors. In Haiti anyone with any resources builds buildings with thick concrete walls designed to withstand the constant threat of hurricanes, not the swaying action of the ground beneath them trembling. Concrete crumbles and kills in an earthquake, ironically the tin and straw huts I remember from the countryside as a child would have been better suited to the quake. Not that they would have withstood the force, but rather they would have caused less damage. Less loss of life.

Poverty did not cause the destruction, it's just making recovery that much worse. When people talk about taking 8 hours to travel 100 miles, wellit wouldn't have been that much faster pre-earth quake. And that is the real problem.

An acquaintance who has done development work in Mozambique said that one of the problems with her work was that each time they made any sort of progress a natural disaster would come to wash their work away. Her org in essence became a relief organization instead of a development one, and the people in that part of Mozambique were quickly becoming relief dependent. Locked in a vicious cycle of disaster-relief there was no real space for development.

In 2008 I was in Managua, Nicaragua and saw before me a city that still bore the remarkable scars of an earthquake that had struck it some 35 years prior. To this day you can still see piles of earthquake rubble and the city's streets bear no names - locations are referenced by landmarks of what currently stands there or what once stood there.

Disaster relief while important is not enough.

So what can you do to help?

Bill Clinton said, and I tend to agree that barring first responder skills the best thing that you can do is to send money. I'm going to go a step further and say that the best thing you can do is send money to Haiti specific organizations who will not merely provide disaster relief but also help the nation rebuild long term. My three favorites are Yele Haiti, Partners-in-Health, and Architecture of Humanity (which isn't Haiti specific but has amazing rebuilding services).

While this has been a time of unspeakable tragedy, it is also one of unspeakable opportunity. Haiti will have to be rebuilt and it can be rebuilt better, so giving money to organizations that aren't merely first responder organizations but are more deeply entrenched in creating a sustainable Haiti goes a long way to making sure this level of devastation will never happen again.