Over a month has passed since the earthquake in Haiti. People continue to suffer and die from the after-affects, but isn’t this old news? Still, new questions arise: Could the relief effort have gone better and if continued how to sustain it? Do we need the help of Hollywood to keep people glued to the TV?
A couple of comments from Anderson Cooper to Charlie Rose come to mind (from “Update on Haiti” with Robert Maguire, Dean Lorich, Anderson Cooper and Louisdon Pierre
in Current Affairs); What really upset Anderson Cooper, who seems more a part of the entertainment industry than a proper journalist, was when someone in the park in front of the Presidential Palace, which had been destroyed, yelling out, “sunami, sunami,” which caused people to stampede, running for their lives, thinking a huge title wave was coming as a result of the earthquake, dropping all their belongings, so the cowardly person who yelled sunami could steel people’s belongings. In the Charlie Rose interview, Anderson Cooper was giving an eyewitness account—
Cooper was appalled by that behavior. I’m sure he saw, when food and water finally arrived, people fighting for it and pushing others out of the way so they couldn’t get what they desperately needed.
At one point Charlie Rose asked Cooper, “What about electricity?” Cooper responded that, there were certain places like the hotel he was staying in that ran a generator, but could only run it for a limited time. And he also commented on how scary it was when darkness fell, and city fell into total darkness. And one could understand that, what Cooper meant was how vulnerable people were to the thieves who were roaming the streets, dead bodies being piled on top of each other in the streets, the horror of the devastation. The cries of people who were buried under rubble, waiting for help, a woman who had her foot torn off, waiting for eighteen hours for medical attention, and how hard these horrible sights were to the people who had to report on it.
One may speculate that the Haitians did not welcome the arrival of the U.S. Marines to protect them, desperate as they were for help, because they must have been reminded of the years of U.S. occupation of Haiti.
Even when planes with supplies had landed they couldn’t get into Port au Prince with needed water, food and medical supplies because the roads were so covered in rubble.
The most important problem is how to rebuild the country and rebuild the buildings so they’re not vulnerable to earthquakes and to establish an agricultural basis so Haitians are economically self-sufficient, which also includes re-forestation, because they’ve cut down all the trees on the island.
Millions of dollars have been raised and even higher amounts have been pledged around the world and Haiti will need every penny of it. The question is: Once the media attention shifts to other crisis points, which it already has, will the public which responded by giving millions of dollars for aid, will this concern continue, and how to sustain that level of concern, and assure that the money that was raised will be spent in the way it was intended and not end up in the pockets of corrupt Haitian officials.
So what can you do?
