HAITI :

POST- 2010
EARTHQUAKE
Christian Als

BACKGROUND
Haiti has always been the poorest
nation in the Western hemisphere.
According to the 2009 Human
Development Index, it ranked 149 out of
182 countries with approximately 78% of
its population living on under USD $2 a
day.

Pbworks

CONTINUED
Beset by a history of societal inequalities
and weak governance, all changed on January
12, 2009: the nation crumbled due to a
earthquake of a 7.0 magnitude on the Richter
scale.
Disorientation and pain became the norm
as 1.5 million displaced individuals resorted
to sleeping on streets and pavements
because they had lost their homes, families,
and friends.

CONTINUED
What little they had known in their
realities and lives was no more. Surviving
became a goal. In the midst of heat and
humidity, the acrid smell of the 316,000
casualties and cries rose into the air.
The damages and losses caused by the
earthquake were analogous to more than
120 percent of Haitis GDP in 2009.

WLRN

EARTHQUAKE RESPONSE
The international community has adopted
post-disaster approaches consisting of
reconstruction and recovery programmes,
which allocate funds, fi eld hospitals,
transitional homes, supplies of food,
interagency teams to work on logistics and
coordination, medicine packets and troops.
It is true that these actions are still vitally
important to aid in the challenges these urban
areas face, and that the humanitarian workers
intention is to help, but national and local
governance gaps and the failure of governance
within the Developing World are being

WorldPolicy

American Red Cross

PROBLEM
Strategies and policies adopted
recommend advancing the nations selfdevelopment. However, Haiti has become
the state of NGOs. Haitis future has
been entrusted to foreign agencies and
organizations that not only have a poor
understanding of the nation or its people,
but also have greater loyalty to their own
interests and stakeholders, who remain
miles away.

WHAT MAY HAPPEN?

The future of the republic of the NGOs lies
in a dark uncertainty as international
organizations in the humanitarian fi eld become
more bureaucratized and less concerned with
listening to the peoples voices. As Max Weber
argues, the bureaucracy is extremely powerful
and diffi cult to dismantle because entire
societal structures are outlined under its
pretenses.
The bureaucracy may change hands, but
seldom changes in form. Therefore, survival of
the Haitian society becomes more and more
dependent on the obedience or compliance of