Haiti After the Earthquake by Paul Farmer Read Free Book Online

the country has thirty districts.) If the work remained on track, we would soon be serving as large a population in Rwanda as we served in Haiti, where the effort had taken two decades.
    But Haiti exerted a hold over us all, and we felt it more sharply in times of trouble. The country had known plenty of troubles, even compared to Rwanda, and the situation was about to get worse. During these years, I flew between Haiti, Harvard, and Rwanda, and my family moved to Rwanda’s famously spotless capital city of Kigali in 2006. Kigali was in many ways the mirror opposite of Port-au-Prince. Although Haiti’s capital in 2007 was no longer being termed “the kidnapping capital of the world,” as it had the year before, progress there was slow. 11 Haiti was disheveled and disorderly and unsafe. The de facto government had been replaced by one led by René Préval, Aristide’s former prime minister, but his government was unable to find firm footing. In April 2008, a worldwide spike in food prices (which had almost nothing to do with Haitian policies and more to do with biofuels and U.S. and European agricultural subsidies) led to riots throughout Haiti; attacks on UN peacekeepers stationed there resulted in several deaths, most of them Haitian. Yet another government collapsed, and for months the country had no prime minister because the Haitian parliament refused to ratify the proposed successor, Michèle Pierre-Louis, an economist who had worked on education initiatives and headed up George Soros’s foundation in Haiti.
    The riots and political impasse had shaken the eight-thousand-strong UN establishment in Haiti. Leadership in the local UN offices and in New York pushed for a shift of focus, from peacekeeping and policing to what some called “human security”—decent jobs, food security, education, access to clean water, and medical care. From Rwanda, where we’d experienced the effect of that country’s commitment to development and human security, we cheered this shift.
    Late August of 2008 found many of us in Rwanda, when, during a visit from President Clinton for the groundbreaking of a new hospital, we got more bad news from Haiti. Another hurricane (on the
heels of two before it) had struck northwest Haiti and Cuba with great loss of life in Haiti (but almost none in Cuba, which had evacuated more than a million citizens from harm’s way). 12 Haiti’s third largest city, Gonaïves, was under several feet of water. I headed back there and, on September 6, hours after returning from the drowned city, drafted a letter to our supporters. I’ll quote it at length because the sentiment that “Partners In Health is not a relief organization, but we’ll do whatever we can to help” would prove relevant again only fifteen months later. So too would our understanding of the sharp limitations on Haitian officials who lacked the resources to respond to such circumstances. Here is the letter as it was posted:
    I am writing from Mirebalais, the place where our organization was born, having just returned from Gonaïves—perhaps the city hit hardest by Hurricane Hanna, which, hard on the heels of Fay and Gustav, drenched the deforested mountains of Haiti and led to massive flooding and mudslides in northern and central Haiti. A friend of mine said this morning: “I am 61 years old, born and raised in Hinche. I have never seen it under water.” Gonaïves, with 300,000 souls, is in far worse shape, as you’ll see from the other pictures I append. The floodwaters in Hinche are dropping, but as of 5 P.M. last night, when we left Gonaïves, the city was still under water. And hurricanes Ike and Josephine are heading this way as I write.
    Everyone copied on this note has already heard, most probably directly from PIH, about these storms and their impact on Haiti. I apologize for writing again and for asking my own colleagues and friends to consider