Stories about relief and reconstruction in Haiti after the earthquake have been overwhelmingly dominated by a simple narrative: "Haiti is failing and it is the fault of ___." Oxfam, for example, tell us that it is Bill Clinton who has "failed Haiti." But while many have been quick to point fingers and assign blame for the slow speed of recovery in Haiti, this can dangerously lead to a poorly-informed public and a skewed set of incentives for donors and NGOs.
Recently, a favorite version of the Haiti blame-game points out that much of the money donated to recovery efforts has not been spent. While at first glance this claim may seem to offer reasonable grounds for outrage, there is a central problem in how such accounts fail to clearly distinguish between emergency rescue, relief, and long term recovery with a standard time frame of seven days, three months and five years respectively.
Emergency rescue and relief provides immediate support in the aftermath of a disaster. This can include giving out food, water, medical supplies, setting up mobile clinics, rescuing people from rubble, and setting up make-shift shelters for the displaced. Recovery, on the other hand, looks to rebuilding, cleaning up, returning people to their homes, providing clean water sources, supporting business and so on. Relief and aid can appear to be the same thing, but they are not and organizations are often set up to deal with one or the other. The Red Cross, for example, would fall under short-term relief, while Partners in Health would fall under long-term aid.
This means that not every dollar donated to Haiti was meant to be spent immediately. Just because Medicins sans Frontiers spent $100 million out of a total $138 million does not mean that they have failed to meet their obligations. Using such logic would be the same as saying that a trip to the grocery store is only successful when every dollar allocated for the trip has been spent. At the store, changes in the price or availability of goods can dictate how you spend your money. The same applies to Haiti . Accessibility of roads can slow down the clearing of rubble and thereby delay reconstruction.
The US State Department has taken an explicitly long-term view on Haiti since the earthquake. This week, the US special coordinator for Haiti, Thomas Adams, emphasized: "as you try to develop Haiti to turn around its economic problems - that's going to take a decade or more. Now, that's not to say you're not going to see progress soon. I think in the next two or three years you are. But it's not the kind of thing that happens overnight, unfortunately."
If the goal is to provide support for over a decade, it makes sense not to spend all your money at once. So while the U.S. did promise slightly over $1 billion, this money was never meant to be spent quickly in the first place -- it was meant to support the long-term recovery in Haiti, to build infrastructure and revive the Haitian economy.
A second danger with the claim that failures in Haiti can be explained by the slow spending is that it creates dangerous incentives for organizations to burn through their money. This shifts the focus off the quality of assistance and onto the speed with which money is spent.
Haiti is still a long way from full recovery. The earthquake brought a spotlight to a nation which had serious problems in need of attention long before January 12, 2010. It is all too easy to scream that things are not going well while providing half-truths, and it is always in the interest of an individual or NGO to shift the blame onto another without accepting personal failures.
The one group who has yet to shoulder any blame in all of this is the media. Quality reports on Haiti seem to have fallen through the cracks while big headlines and features with someone to blame have remained. Finger-pointing, after all, is a great way to grab headlines and get attention.
Simple answers are always desirable, and we like a culprit when things go wrong. It is easy to put the fault upon a single person, group, or project. However, the truth is somewhere in between and it is far too early to come to final conclusions in Haiti a year later when so much time and energy is assessing external rather than internal blame. The open acceptance of failure would be far more beneficial to the recovery effort.
Pointing long fingers at each other can only make things worse. By reporting Haiti in a way that assumes major problems could have been solved in a year is misleading and harmful to the recovery effort.
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Haiti is a money pit. I am asking all readers to consider this question: Is America so rich, so unencumbered with debt, so wonderfully equal in its distribution of wealth, that we can afford to throw endless sums of money and manpower into a country that has clearly shown itself to be a failure?
This is from straight the USGS regarding the 1899 earthquakes at Yakutat Bay, Alaska.
They lasted 27 days. September 3 to 29, 1899 and included four or five world-shaking disturbances and hundreds of minor shocks. During four weeks there was almost constant palpitation of this part of the earth's crust. The shocks were most severe on September 3, 10, and 23, and were great on the 15th, 17th, 26th, and 29th. On the 10th there were over 50 small shocks and two world-shaking disturbances. The greatest faulting took place on September 10. The greatest uplift that had ever been recorded in the history of the world took place on September 10, 1899.
"All repeated acts or operations I performed had to be divisible by three
and if I missed I felt impelled to do it again,
even if it took hours." Tesla
Who is the one in charge of any kind of six month future program? We know there are hundreds of groups doing individual work, but where is our Leader in charge? No blaming, just help. Keep talking, writing, and don't worry about blaming anyone. When I saw Sean Penn, crying for help, I knew there was a big problem.
If you had any first hand experience of the pain and suffering that is happening in Haiti, you would not tolerate the inaction of NGO's and the CBHF.
So no, I am not at all tolerating the inaction in the least bit, but pointing out that assessments of the situation in Haiti need to be better explained than they have been by both NGOs and the media.
1 Typical recovery scenario is that different NGOs take responsibility for different areas.
2 Different areas recover at different rates. Therefore some will be ready for permanent housing while others are still struggling for basic health. If the latter are in an area under the responsibility of Red Cross, then RC would be right in helping them undertake the next stage.
I think it is problematic to have the Red Cross do housing. NGOs should stick to what they know. But this then would require a shift from geographic to functional responsibilities: with its own set of problems.
I was curious to hear about the blood bank problem. Here's an on the ground view:
http://sebringphotography.wordpress.com/2010/08/08/complacency-of-haitian-red-cross-blood-bank-is-out-of-control-mmrc-haiti-update-08072010/
Key points here:
There is no "Red Cross". There are many national Red Crosses. Always specify WHICH Red Cross you're talking about when criticising. This looks like a problem with all institutions Haitian.
I'd like to see critiques accompanied by the NGO view. I don't believe NGOs are venal or run by fools, as many crits imply.