Inconvenient Needs
Here is Haiti, a pitiably impoverished country which has suffered more than its share of natural catastrophes - a country traditionally used and abused by wealthy countries of the world, ruled time and again by dictatorial tormentors of its people whose religious beliefs, both Christian and pre-Christian, brought from Africa by a peoples' need to survive - stumbling into its sere future.The world looks on in pity, and feels a compassionate responsibility to continue aiding this severely socially backward, politically dysfunctional country whose children are as sweetly beautiful as any on this Earth, and who deserve at least some opportunities to realize themselves. Haiti's existence is a case in point, a proof, if one needed pointing out, that we are our brother's and our sister's keeper.
It's more than a little troubling that as much as the wealthy countries of the world have attempted to aid and assist Haiti and its inept governments, nothing concrete as far as civic development laying the groundwork for responsible and meaningful administration has ever resulted. The people of Haiti have always been exploited by their own leaders. Is there no other way?
The billions of international aid funding has trickled through the bank accounts of those who avail themselves of it under the fiction of governmental administration, doling out dollops to their kith and kin, and their supporters has resulted in nothing of value for the country and its people. So like many other failed countries of the world, most of which appear to exist in Africa.
Not that Africa has a dead-locked monopoly on state corruption and tribal and clannish national dysfunctionality. But yes, it is there, in Africa, where the great preponderance of failed states thrive and butcher one another. And, in Haiti, there are, like anywhere else in the world, the haves and the have-nots.
The have-nots are those whose meagre worldly possessions have been nullified by disaster. They represent the million 'refugees' living in displaced-persons camps in tents and tarps in encampments wherever areas exist capable of holding hundreds of thousands of despairing families, aided, fed and medically treated by international humanitarian organizations.
Life is returning to what might be conceived of as 'normal' for the well-off in Haiti, those whose houses in very nice neighbourhoods were untouched by disaster, where well-stocked supermarkets thrive on the business of those who live in those neighbourhoods. Whose children may attend school, while hundreds of thousands of refugee-children cannot.
"People here would like for the kids to go back to school. It's normal". Tensions are rising because schoolyards have been used to house the homeless. The once immaculate school surroundings of middle-class children are now seas of trash-strewn mud. The schools cannot re-open until the hordes of refugees camping there are moved elsewhere.
"There's a tension between the right (of displaced quake victims) to be in a safe and secure place and the right of private property and the need to get the country back to normalcy", according to the acting chief of the human rights office of the UN authority in Haiti. And Haiti's soccer federation wants its new season to get under way; its stadium has housed thousands of families.
In its parking lot a teeming camp of thousands of displaced Haitians living under tarps, are an inconvenience to the sport fans who would otherwise come out to cheer their soccer games.
An intolerable situation, to be sure.
Labels: Poverty, Security, Social-Cultural Deviations, Societal Failures
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, May 15, 2010
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