Natural Disasters and Social Disasters/Oppression

The damage from a hurricane is dramatically visual, physical and impressive.  The damage from systems of oppression are not as dramatically visible and obvious; it is more long term, not immediate.

I have talked with a number of Christians who have been to Haiti; they have been shocked and appalled by the poverty, bad roads, corruption, the voodoo.  But none of them have ever mentioned the 500 years of oppression that has caused most of the poverty, lack of education, etc.,  People instantly grasp the seriousness of physical devastation, but they are slow to understand the seriousness of social oppression.

To hurricane Katrina.

My wife and I have been volunteers in Mississippi for most of each year since our retirement in 1994.  We have made a number of trips into the Delta region that stretches from Vicksburg to Memphis.  We were not in Mississippi when Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, but we returned shortly thereafter.

The American church's response to the Katrina catastrophe was impressive.  An example: A group of California churches built prefabricated house in panels, put the panels in railroad cars, and shipped them to Mississippi where locals assembled the houses.  Dozens of similar stories could be recounted.    This, in my opinion, was the American church's finest hour.

Ironically, some of the mission teams from the North would have driven down I-55, passing along the east side of the Mississippi Delta on their way down to the Gulf Coast.  Some studies say that the Delta is the poorest, most oppressed region in the country.  Decades of slavery, segregation and sharecropping have done enormous damage to poor blacks.  There has been little church response to this social disaster which has done more human damage than Katrina.  The weak response by the church represents the church's worst hour.

Back to Haiti and hurricane Matthew.

Hait is the poorest nation in the western hemisphere primarily because for 500 years Haiti has been the most oppressed nation in the western hemisphere.  How does social oppression impact the severity of hurricane damage?  An example:  For over a 100 years, Haiti was a debt slave to France.  In 1800, Haitian slaves revolted and expelled their French masters.  France threatened to invade and reinslave.  To prevent reinslavement, Haiti reluctantly agreed to make yearly massive extortion debt payments---debt slave payments that amounted to as much as 80 percent of their national budget.  The U.S. supported this financial extortion.

During this time period, the U.S. was investing large sums on railroads, schools, hospitals and land grant colleges.  Haiti due to excessive debt payments had little to spend on roads, schools, housing etc.,  Houses were poorly constructed, roads were not built properly and were not maintained.  So when a hurricane hits, the damage is much greater.  Natural disasters and social disasters/oppression are intertwined.

Application to the Haiti Christian Development Fund

The 30 plus year ministry of Haiti Christian Development Fund in rural Fond-des-Blancs Haiti has been responding to crisis after crisis.  In the midst of the 500 years of various systems of socioeconomic oppression which makes every other type of crisis worse, HCDF has responded to:

1. The lack of clean water by capping a spring and piping the water to an accessible
'road'.
 2. The deforestation crisis by planting millions of trees.
3.  The pig disease crisis by creating a pig nursery that repopulated the pigs in the area.
4.  The education crisis by establishing a school system that educates around 1500 students.
5.  The food crisis by establishing a farming project that has enough corn stored in Sukup donated grain bins to feed 1500 school children lunch for most of the coming year.  This is an absolute blessing in light of the crop and garden destruction by hurricane Matthew.