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I could say that this post is me jumping on the Haiti Bandwagon and if you do nothing else than scratch the surface of what I wrote then you would be justified in believing that to be so. However there is so much more to this rant than what is there at first glance. For example I will not be rehashing facts for you to read. You already know what happened and there is nothing else that I could say that would shed new light on what happened. Also there are unspoken realities that have happened and continue to happen in Haiti that are not being discussed. Then there is the geological phenomenon that is this Haitian earthquake. So what I plan on writing about is not the facts related to the earthquake but the underlying issues that have been ignored by the western world in the Americas about Haiti, these issues that are barely known let alone talked about. It is my hope that by writing about them now in view of a natural disaster that seems to attract empathy, that people will become, if not concerned about these other matters but at least aware. Pay attention now I will cover them in quick succession.
Haiti practices modern day slavery! That is right! Poor Families are often approached by brokers to purchase their children who are promised a “better life”. The parents are given a monetary compensation for the sale of their offspring never if ever to see them again, the child is then sold to either rich or better off Haitians who will use the child as domestic help with no equal rights as their own children. The children are beat and mistreated and forced to labor for them from sun up to sundown. They are also sold abroad to wealthy Haitians abroad or foreign contacts who sell them to Europeans and Americans as illegal domestic help (read here slave). This practice is extremely common. Remember that Haitians were the first people to free themselves from colonial slavery. How sad that this is what has become of Haiti.
Haiti is arid and deforested and cannot sustain its own people! Haiti which occupies the Western half of the Island of Hispaniola sits in barren and stark contrast with its Eastern neighbor the Dominican Republic which from Arial views is lush and green and produces enough food for all its citizens. Haiti during the colonial period in the Americas made the mistake of selling all its forests for timber. The deforested land which was used for agriculture soon wasted away and could no longer yield for its farmers. The result is a land which can barely grow crops without a lot of help from chemicals and fertilizers and a people who depend on foreign aid for basic necessities such as rice ( a Haitian staple.) The irony is the foreign aid that came in the form of rice from the USA flooded their rice market, (One of their few exports.) and brought down the value of Haitian rice. The result being that Haitians no longer can sell their rice and now have to import most of it.
Haiti is divided into sectarian militias and gangs who control sectors of the Island nation. In Cities like Port-au-Prince the problem is so bad that the UN Peace keeping forces that the government has requested help from and allowed to patrol the country refuse to go in there. Drugs and rivalries seem to be at the heart of the disputes. Haiti is practically under martial law because of these problems that have been going on for decades now. Government corruption from without and from within keep this condition in its status quo.
Haiti lacks an efficient way of disposing of and processing its waste and sewage. Vast open areas of trash piled hill high sit near beaches and open waterways bringing filth and disease. Access to clean water is another huge problem in the nation of Haiti. Haiti also has potentially the highest unemployment rate in the Americas, with a 2/3 of its citizens without jobs. This obviously also contributes to the escalating crime rates. These and other problems that Haiti faces and has been facing for a long time place it in the condition of being a failed state, many of these problems, if not all of them exist under the noses and the radar of the many nations that are around it. Little if anything has been done to help Haiti. Humanitarian Aid is not what is needed. What is needed is the kind of nation building that we are doing in Iraq. One final point worth mentioning is the geological phenomenon that was the Haitian earthquake. The earth quake did not even register in the Dominican Republic despite the fact that they share an Island and that it happened within such a close proximity.
Thank you for reading!