Blog:Out Of The Rubble
From Bolton Interweb
Will Power, Development Correspondent, 26th January 2010
Out of the rubble of Haiti's tragic earthquake can come a new beginning. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, wracked by years of brutal dictatorship, corruption, gang warfare, and chronic deforestation. Before the earthquake, there were hundreds of thousands of orphans and reports of similar numbers of children in effective modern-day slavery. The economy was in ruins, the infrastructure decaying and disintegrating, and what little wealth that existed was vested in a tiny elite. In 2008, the GDP per capita was a mere US$790. Contrast this to the Dominican Republic, that shares the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean, with US$4950, free and fair democratic elections, and high economic growth led by a vibrant budget tourism industry.
Apart from the occasional news item about Haiti, the last I saw concentrating on environmental devastation brought about by the loss of 98% of the forests for use as fuel, Haiti had been more or less been ignored and forgotten by the rest of the world.
The sheer scale of the earthquake that hit the capital, Port au Prince, on 12th January 2010, changed all that. Up to 20% of the population of the city died in the quake, and very few buildings remain unscathed. The attention of the entire world has focused on the country. Debt has been cancelled, aid is flooding the country, and Haiti will be rebuilt. Haitians have paid an incredibly high price but over the coming months and years they will have an opportunity to reconstruct, providing much needed employment. A phoenix can rise from the ashes. With the attention and expertise from across the globe, perhaps they can start to develop a tourist industry, replant the forests, turn their lives around. If this does not happen, if the aid is syphoned off by the corrupt and by corporate exploiters, if the political and gang violence is not contained, then the lives lost by hundreds of thousands of Haitians will have been in vain. This cannot be allowed to happen.
There is another good thing to come out of this tragedy, and that is that the images beamed around the world of the plight of the victims seem to have triggered an incredible amount of goodwill and generosity of record proportions. Over £40 million has been raised in the UK alone, which has no tradition to speak of with this French-speaking backwater. In the US, France, and Norway, in Germany, Canada, and Iceland, despite the recession people have dug deep into their pockets and donated. For myself I made a decision to sponsor an orphan via SOS Children. 100% of the sponsorship goes direct to the child without deductions for administration, and it is to the child not to their community. I can't make a jot of difference to the overall situation, I'll leave that to governments, but I can make a big difference to one orphaned child, and so can you. So please click on the banner at the foot of this article, read all about this special charity, and consider if you can help. In some ways I feel guilty that it took this tragic calamity to tip me into becoming a sponsor but better late than never. Man's inhumanity to man is often quoted in a world that sometimes seems full of brutality and hardship but in this case it is man's humanity towards fellow man that is evident and that must be a good thing.
© Evrose, 2010
