More from Haiti: after the earthquake

Some additional nuggets from Paul Farmer's book Haiti: after the earthquake:  mostly from the footnotes.

"A little more than two hundred years ago, Haiti produced three-quarters of the world's sugar.  Yet despite this wealth . . .  the island nation is now the poorest in the Western hemisphere.  This is due largely to its [tragic] history, . . . Promises were broken, debt [slavery]was imposed, dictatorships were supported, and natural resources were depleted."  In other words, a history of 500 years of oppression.

How might we 'build back better'?  I suggest three keys:

1.  Focus on rebuilding rural communities.
2.  Follow Christian Community Development principles and practices; see HCDF for a model.
3.  Create a new Christian University at Fond-des-Blancs in order to train a new core of leaders.

From Farmer footnotes:

Farmer disagrees with Par Robertson's theodicy on Haiti but makes these positive comments about Operation Blessing:  "this organization was one of the very finest, and best led, we worked with in the year after the quake."

Farmer quotes Jeffery Sachs, the economist who wrote The End of Poverty:  "When a country is too poor to provide its people with the basic necessities such as health care, and when the underlying ecology makes agriculture difficult without fertilizer and irrigation, any change can push society off the edge and into outright desperation. . . . Something as simple  as bad rains can trigger internal conflicts when a society is living on the edge of survival."

Mildred Aristide:  "It is clear that Haiti's [failed] rural development and the faltering road to a national public education system have been and remain at the center of the propagation of child domestic service in the country.  This explains why the prototypical image of a child in domestic service [a form of slavery] is one of a child from the impoverished countryside seeking an education, working in the city."

"In 2002, Haiti, was ranked 147 out of 147 countries on the Water Poverty Index, and 101 out of 122 countries for water quality."

"Few years in Haiti's history are unmarked by foreign intervention or meddling of some kind" to extract some of Haiti's wealth.  "the Haitian state has been starved of resources."

"Increasing evidence points toward the value of cash transfers [Haitian Americans sending monies back to their families in Haiti], especially those targeted at women, at strengthening families and spurring grassroots development."

"Partners in Health efforts to manufacture vitamin-enriched peanut butter as a ready-to-use therapeutic food."

"There is the disgruntled former Haitian army (an institution with a violent and unpalatable recent history), which has been wielded many times in the service of coups d'etat, often subsidized by its masters, the elite of Haiti.  . . .  they must be called the entrenched class enemies of the Haitian people."

"Paul Collier has argued the combination of high population and unemployment in Haiti has created a large and volatile group of unemployed young people---a youth tsunami.  Haiti has exceptionally rapid population growth which adds to an already acute pressure on the land. . . .  Seventy percent of its people do not have jobs."

Haiti needs a "national civic service corps, . . . . akin to President Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration. . . .  Not only would such an initiative grease the wheels of economic growth, but it could also combat the cycles of deforestation and erosion that---along with dumping subsidized American produce in Haitian markets---fuel rural poverty and urban crowding."

"most of the fruits of the peasantry's toil were seized by the alliance of rulers and merchants and transferred abroad."  The Haitian elites and U.S. elites often conspire against the poor peasant of Haiti.