Kelsey Rideout

It has now been one year since a catastrophic earthquake tore apart the capital of Haiti on Jan. 12, 2010, causing the deaths of nearly 230,000 Haitians and leaving approximately one million people homeless.  The grief that has followed throughout the past year could be best described as relentless.

Reconstruction efforts have been slow and plagued with corruption and false promises. It is reported that only five per cent of all proposed aid to rebuild Haiti has been effectively received. Many camps set up just after the earthquake have not yet transitioned into safe housing developments. According to the United Nations, 810,000 Haitians continue to live in 1150 camps, some of which are reported to be insecure and violent. Towards the end of 2010, a cholera epidemic began to take shape in Haiti, which has since claimed 3,600 lives and infected approximately 171,000 people.  Most recently, a federal election was conducted in Haiti, but has been viewed by many as fraudulent and a political failure.

How is it that Haiti continues to endure so much trauma? To begin sorting through the answer to this question, it is necessary to first take a look at a different kind of disaster.

A political debacle

Dr. Michael Keefer, Professor of English at the University of Guelph and author of a recent article entitled “The Dignity of the Haitian Women (and Canada’s Shame),” explained how historically rooted political upheaval has led to an inevitably contorted recovery process in Haiti.

“Haiti has suffered appalling natural disasters – the hurricanes of two years ago, last year’s catastrophic earthquake.  But the overwhelming disaster there has been political and foreign-imposed.  Canada has been a key player in implementing policies that have the goal of one, destroying Haitian democracy, and replacing it with the false appearance of something resembling democracy…and two, integrating Haiti more completely into a model of sweat-shop industrial production, at the very bottom end of the global cheap-labour scale,” said Keefer.

With regards to Canada “destroying Haitian democracy,” Keefer is referring to the forcible removal of Haiti’s first democratically elected president Jean-Betrand Aristede, orchestrated with the support of the United States and Canada. Since the coup d’état, the Haitian government has been unstable, and politically related violence has been ongoing.  Thousands of Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs) have flooded Haiti and taken on political responsibilities, causing even more political fragmentation.

“The Haitian government has been deliberately fragmented and largely destroyed and basic responsibilities have passed into the hands of a chaotic swarm of NGOs with predictably chaotic results such as the collapse – even prior to the hurricanes of 2008 – of water supply and sewage disposal systems in major cities,” explained Keefer.

Dr. Joubert Satrye, a Haitian-born professor in the U of G’s School of Languages and Literature, further emphasized how political obstacles have debilitated reconstruction efforts. Without a stable government in place, Satrye finds it hard to remain hopeful about Haiti’s future.

“We must remember that Haiti was a very impoverished country before the earthquake that destroyed nearly 120 per cent of gross domestic product,” said Joubert. “In my view, the reconstruction will be possible only with a legitimate government that can negotiate with international donors. Moreover, it is important to find internal solutions and not import ready-made solutions that can be valid in other countries but ineffective in Haiti.”

Starving soils

Dr. Manish Raizada of the Department of Plant Agriculture focused on another set of preexisting problems related to environmental degradation and food insecurity.

“Haiti is very mountainous. And combined is that a lot of the hillsides have been deforested…What happens then when it rains, you get soil erosion, and once you get that soil erosion, once there’s that lack of nutrients, you can’t really grow anything very well on it. So these are hillside farmers many of them, and they can’t grow anything on these hillsides anymore, so that’s a big problem,” said Raizada.

Raizada has spearheaded an initiative to disperse Sustainable Agriculture Kits (SAKs) to Haiti. SAKs are $10 dollar commercial toolkits that help impoverished farmers gain access to scientific and indigenous technologies. Raizada sees a great need for these kits, especially since the earthquake has only exacerbated Haiti’s agricultural ailments.

“Since the earthquake, a lot of people from the city such as Port-au-Prince have gone into the countryside, and that’s put a burden on those rural families in terms of their capacity to grow enough food, and in fact a very major problem after the earthquake this past year, in the next growing season, was that, these farmers will typically reuse their seeds,” said Raizada. “When there was an influx of people from Port-au-Prince into the countryside, they consumed those seeds, or that planting material. And so there just wasn’t enough to plant.”

If internal and external forces can cooperate and strive for the goal of Haiti’s self-sufficiency, Raizada believes the situation can change for the better.

“I think the right approach is to rely on people on the ground, at an individual level, and as much as possible to empower them so that they can produce and sell things without having to rely on anybody else…I trust local entrepreneurs to do this and the idea is just to get them started with a little bit of capital and access to some of these technologies, and then let them take over really quickly. They know their people best, they know their community best.”

Standing alongside Haitians

When turning to the media this week, waves of criticism over Haiti’s recovery will be broadcasted. And rightly so. The situation is dire, and although a year has passed, lasting, substantial changes have yet to be witnessed on the ground. But as students in Guelph, we can at least keep aware and support Haitians from afar. Nicholas Miniaci, a second year History student, is involved with Haiti Action Guelph, a local organization that is part of the Canadian Haitian Action Network. He is responsible with providing media updates and sharing articles with group members. Miniaci sometimes feels overwhelmed by Haiti’s situation himself, but believes that the one thing that students and community members can do in solidarity with the people of Haiti is to simply inform themselves.

“The situation isn’t very pleasant,” said Miniaci. “I think it’s really important for students to be involved, at least with information in knowing what’s happening and having a critical opinion with what’s happening abroad…If you dwell too much on it, it is very depressing and one of the things…is that more and more people are becoming interested, that should give you more hope. While things may be difficult now, they’re not hopefully always going to be that way because more and more people want to work towards the greater good and more people care about this country.”

Poem Creole and English:

Suze Baron

YO DI

Yo di
san kretyen
enrichi
late

Si sete vre
Si sete vret
mezanmi

ala diri
pitmi
ak mayi

ki ta genyen
la peyi
D’Ayiti

They say
human blood
enriches
soil

If that were true
If that were true
my friends

how rice
millet
and corn

would thrive
in
Haiti

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