Haiti relief - Part 1

This has been lookin' pretty on my dress form lately :)

There's a This American Life episode about Haiti (written transcript here) I reference frequently. It's about relief agencies, mission organizations, and NGOs working in Haiti over the last several decades, and how it appears to have affected the nation. In sum, Haiti's economy has gotten worse, significantly worse, as the number of aid organizations in the country has increased exponentially.

The problem is that missionaries, for many years, have given to people what people should be able to provide for themselves. For whatever reason, the served became unable to serve themselves (war, famine, disease, etc.), and very well-meaning people come in to help. But the mere act of helping changes the very human dynamic of day-to-day life, and over time, changes the way people function overall, changing their beliefs about themselves and their own abilities and capacity.

After the 2010 earthquake, billions of dollars from around the world went to Haiti. But relief was slow. It was almost as if the nation itself could not rebuild, because they'd been trained not to. The following excerpt from the TAL episode describes the ideal solution:

...You teach the people of Haiti how to do all these things. You use this rebuilding process to give Haiti the ability to build itself...This option, capacity building, do I even need to say it? It takes a long time and it's really, really hard. You need foreign money and you need Haitians to believe in the projects and to participate fully...

It's a complicated problem with an equally complicated solution. Change is difficult. A doctor is interviewed in the episode. He does the very hard work of allowing Haitians to fail in hopes that they might learn from their mistakes (as many of us do), and that these failures would result in greater systemic strengthening. Worst case scenario for this doctor? People die.

Haitians are not the victims in this situation. We all play a part, and Haiti's situation is cloned around the world. People feel sorry for other people...and so it goes.