Haiti at War...We Just Did not Know It Before Now--June 2021

Photo by John Carroll

KABUL, June 17 (Reuters) - The COVID-19 pandemic is spiraling out of control in Afghanistan, with cases rising 2,400% in the past month, hospitals filling up and medical resources quickly running out, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said on Thursday.

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Sounds like Haiti. Lack of hospitals, lack of oxygen. Lack of a health care system. Lack of everything, except people and pain. 

So why does Haiti have a maternal mortality rate, malnutrition, cholera (largest outbreak in the world last decade), and hospitals currently unable to care for the Covid surge?

Because there is a war in Haiti, too. There always has been. Maybe not conventional in the way we view wars with mujahideen with cigarettes falling out of their mouths and strips of bullets on their chest. 

But wait. Haiti does have guerilla warfare going on in the streets of the capital now. And with the chronic structural violence in the background, Haiti has both types of combat now. 

So that explains things. 

John A. Carroll, MD

www.haitianhearts.org