Rolling Stone Magazine--Janet Reitman, August 2011

Rolling Stone Magazine--Janet Reitman, August 2011

Beyond Relief: How the World Failed Haiti

A year and a half after the island was reduced to rubble by an earthquake, the world's unprecedented effort to rebuild it ha turned into a disaster of good intentions

But despite all that has been promised, almost nothing has been built back in Haiti, better or otherwise. Within Port-au-Prince, some 3 million people languish in permanent misery, subject to myriad experiments at “fixing” a nation that, to those who are attempting it, stubbornly refuses to be fixed. Mountains of rubble remain in the streets, hundreds of thousands of people continue to live in weather-beaten tents, and cholera, a disease that hadn’t been seen in Haiti for 60 years, has swept over the land, infecting more than a quarter-million people.

In the midst of such suffering, only a fraction of the money devoted to Haitian relief has actually been spent. This May, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that of the $1.14 billion allocated by Congress for Haiti last year, only $184 million has been “obligated.” In a letter to the Obama administration this spring, 53 Democratic members of Congress blasted the “appalling” conditions in the refugee camps. “The unprecedented relief effort has given way to a sluggish, at best, reconstruction effort,” said Rep. Barbara Lee, who is demanding an accounting of how the relief money is being spent. There is, she said, a “lack of urgency on the part of the international community.”

As the relief effort has dragged on for well over a year, virtually every actor involved has blamed the others: U.S. aid officials pitted against Washington bureaucrats, U.N. agencies against private aid groups. Some veteran insiders blame a new breed of technocrats who, with little to no experience in development, have descended on Port-au-Prince armed with bold theories and PowerPoint presentations, as if the entire country were a case study from Harvard Business School. Others say the goals were too lofty, the plans unrealistic; maybe Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, was simply too damaged to be fixed. Or perhaps the very idea of fixing Haiti at all is a flawed concept, revealing not only the limits of Western humanitarianism but the folly of believing that any country and its problems are ours to set right.

Amid all the finger-pointing, however, nearly everyone taking part in the relief effort is quick to place at least some of the blame on the Haitians themselves. “Corruption is the reason those reconstruction funds haven’t broken loose,” says one U.S. business consultant, who describes most Haitian politicians as “pathological narcissists” with little interest in helping their own country. Such accusations have been made by outsiders for as long as outsiders have tried to help Haiti — which itself may be the biggest problem. “Haitian people have always found a way to get rid of those who’ve tried to control them,” says Raoul Peck, Haiti’s former minister of culture. “It’s very easy to point at the Haitians for being corrupt or weak. What’s much harder is looking at what’s wrong with those who say they are just trying to help.”

----

My Comments in 2021--

In August 2011, Rolling Stone's Magazine's Janet Reitman wrote an article on Haiti entitled with the paragraphs above.

Actor Sean Penn took much umbrage with the content of Reitman's article and he wrote his objections in a long article also published in Rolling Stone in September 2011 here. 

A central tenet of Reitman's article is that thousands of people were moved from Penn's camp on the Petionville golf course to an arid piece of land north of the capital called Canaan which had many downsides. But as Penn countered, as the rains were to come soon, his camp on the golf course was going to be very dangerous for these people. There was not a great solution to the problem and so the less problematic solution was chosen by the people who moved. 

The entire post-earthquake Haiti was just terrible. You can read the articles above and see what you think. However, I am glad that someone hasn't checked every Haitian medical decision I have made during the last forty years. I have often chosen the better of two very bad treatments for the patient. And I may have had a hard time explaining why I chose what I did if the results were not optimal for the patient. 

I think Penn was doing the best he could under very extremely tough conditions in Haiti. 

Maria and I walked around Penn's camp in Petionville. We saw his medical clinic on the site and I was used to seeing medical clinics in Haiti set up in very austere environments. His clinic was one of the best I have ever seen replete with point-of-care ultrasound for the patients. And the doctor I spoke with seemed very good and tuned in to the needs of the people of the camp and what the clinic had to offer.