Humanitarian Aftershocks In Haiti Summary

Haiti is a prime example of how human needs in one area of the world are interdependent with social conditions elsewhere in the world. Haiti, for most of its history has been overwhelmed with economic

The story of Haiti’s healthcare system is unfortunately tied all too closely to disaster, both man-made and nature-born. This paper will briefly discuss the pre-2010 earthquake healthcare environment in Haiti as the uncertainty that exists provides little opportunity to provide a reasoned understanding of its current national healthcare status.

Haiti was struck with “a magnitude size 7.0 earthquake…outside of the Haitian capital of Port au Prince” (COHA 2) in January 2010. This disaster killed several hundred thousand people and caused many others to no longer have their homes. Billions of dollars in aid have assisted Haiti in their efforts to rebuild the country. But, “three years later, 80 percent of the population still subsists below the poverty line with an unemployment rate of 40 percent” (COHA 3). What is wrong with this picture?

Hurricane Matthew’s after effects tore Haiti apart and made it a horrible place for a human to live in. In The Giver by Lois Lowry there is a Utopian world that gets rid of the world’s most harmful problems. It is a free place, where everyone lives the same and all difficulties are solved by the leaders. But, the article “Haiti in Crisis” by bryan Brown and Patricia Smith is much different.

Haiti is a good example of a nation that suffered from very negative results from compassionate aid and that now has the tools and applies these toward sustainable development. As learned on week 2, Haiti had been able to produce their own rice, but the constant pressure from the International Monetary Fund and the United States to restructure their economy and lower tariffs, collapsed the rice production. The negative results from this collapse were seen after the earthquake, when Haiti’s economy also collapsed, there was not money to buy imported food, and there was no sustainability in the country, since there was no local crop to provide food. After the terrible mistakes from the United States and Haiti, the latter has been able to put

Earthquakes have afflicted the world since its inception. The sudden release of energy from volcanoes or displacing of earth plates can result in disasters of extreme magnitude. These usually naturally occurring phenomenon have been responsible from wiping out entire towns throughout history and until today continue to produce major loss of life and infrastructure. It can take years for a city or country to recover from a major event of this kind and when a third world country is involved, the result is usually exponentially worse than in a developed country. In the past decades Japan, Chile and Haiti have suffered the devastation an earthquake produces. This document will concentrate in Haiti, a small country in the Caribbean. On

The devastating 2010 earthquake left Haiti in ruins. This meant Haiti would mostly rely on foreign aids to stand back to its feet. Most didn’t hesitate to come in to assist mostly the USA and other foreign aids which donated over $5 billion to help Haiti. However, so many questions have been raised on to how well these funds were used. This report includes facts to show how the funds were voluntarily misappropriated by a number of players including the foreign aids (both domestic and foreign), NGOs as well as the administration. This report also gives a summary of the election that happened the same year. This serves to demonstrate how the election was full of malpractices and fraud. The leaders elected especially the president and his government were not good enough in leading the nation to stability.

Constantly under the control of dominant political powers or foreign governments and militaries, the constant dictation of Haitians has allowed very little agency to be expended; more often than not, when making a decision an individual will have to take into account what they have been allowed to do rather than what they want to do. Humanitarian intervention in Haiti was deemed necessary, specifically by the United States of America, in order to free Haitians from the oppression faced daily and attempt to provide a society in which each individual gained back their agency without threat of sexual, physical, or mental violence. Although the intentions behind this intervention may have been pure, without taking the cultural differences of Haitians into account, a fine line could be drawn between intervention and something closer to

The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster is an inside look into the realities behind international aid and intervention. The book answers the question of whether or not international efforts in Haiti really benefited the nation in the long term. The book argues that the international community failed in their efforts to rebuild Haiti due to their mismatched military approaches, failed monetary pledges and how the how billions of dollars were ineffective, having served only short term needs instead of, rebuilding solid foundations and institutions that would serve as the first step toward sustainable development.

After US occupation, the Haitian government was in a state of unrest with political oppression, violence, and several coups. The UN began bringing in peacekeepers to help improve the political situation in 1994 and today the Republic of Haiti has its own functioning government, with President Michel Martelly at the head (Krasnoff 2013). Since the slave revolution that led to the country’s independence over 200 years ago, Haiti has remained deep in debt; it wasn’t until 20 years ago that there was a fully functional government, which to this day still has its fair share of corruption. With all this in mind, it’s no wonder that Haiti has been hit hard by many disasters, including the outbreak of cholera (Krasnoff, 2013). The country does not have the money to help provide treatment for those infected, sanitation, and clean drinking water outside of the main cities where many of its citizens live. The young government has not yet been able to organize a system to help its

Ultimately, developed and developing nations strive to improve their society. Neither are perfect but developed countries are more adjusted than developing. The United States compared to Haiti has shown much more effective qualities when it comes to health care, economic structure and education. Every country should continue to work forward in assisting their civilians in order for them to

In 2010, a gigantic earthquake -reaching a 7.0 range- shook Haiti. Now Haiti may not have been a huge area, but it was “overpopulated... which [as a result] was a factor in the large number of people killed” and left several more left homeless and injured (Wilentz). Of course, this sort of tragedy did not go unknown throughout the world and several different cooperations from different countries fled to Haiti; offering to lend a helping hand. One group, who broadcast themselves to be the main helpers to this case was the Clinton Foundation. At sight of this, the Haitians were initially relieved. They believed that things were finally starting to look up.

A few years ago, an earthquake struck Haiti causing complete destruction. Earlier last month, a hurricane struck Haiti causing another wave of terror. An already hurt country has been knocked back down. In response to this devastation, the United States is working with the United Nations to help Haiti recover. Money, supplies, and teams are being sent to bring Haiti back up to its feet. However, despite these actions, there are arguments as to whether or not the US is helping enough. Contrary to what some may believe, the US is giving enough aid to Haiti for the recovery process.

Humanitarian rush to save the starving children, fleeing refugees, marginalized women, generally, to diminish crisis worldwide is often a straightforward response which can cause bigger dilemmas. Financial aid can alter the self determination in the developing country; food donations are likely to destroy the local economy making aid a permanent matter. It is likely that governments may use humanitarian relief to not intervene military. The unknown level of corruption in certain developing countries may land the aid into the wrong hands. The lack of accurate and visible data available worldwide may cause inconsistency in statistics which could cause issues in preventions later on. Lastly, the self interests of governments may interrupt

Knowing that poverty and disaster risks go hand in hand, it was wise on World Vision to implement objectives that would focus of both DRR and poverty reduction collectively. These objectives could not have been done by just supplying aid and needed resources to the damaged cities. There is a fine line between supplying aid and help. Being in such a traumatic event, it completely broke apart communities into weaker and, even more, vulnerable pieces. In retrospect, simply supplying aid through resources to these broken pieces would have done more harm, as it would deepen the most vulnerable and poorest communities’ dependency on foreign aid. Any sense of upward movement of development and prosperity— gone. World Vision centered its projects on community involvement in order to provide proper help— help to create network systems of support, help to educate people on problem risk awareness, help to make use of available resource found in the populations, help to develop and put back those vulnerable pieces back into well-developed societies, help that would allow Honduras to prosper from.