Haiti's long, long haul out of the bottleneck
They call it the bottleneck. The strangled connection (or is it disconnection?) between the world’s outpouring of support for Haiti, and the delivery of aid to the three million people on the ground here who need it.
On any previous disaster where generosity has failed to deliver, we have found people to blame. In Haiti, it is different. Technically, America is doing what America does: heavy lifting, boots on the ground, choppers in the air, heavy lift at the airport. Technically, many other countries have muscled in behind.
Haiti was already a UN administered entity – if not de jure, certainly de facto. And this was yet another of the world’s NGO-dominated economies.
Last night the full force of the problem came home to me when I interviewed Yolande Etienne, Oxfam’s manger of operations in Haiti. An able, resourceful woman, she has fulfilled this demanding and difficult role for 14 years.
She was doing so a week ago today, at 4.53pm, when her world fell apart. Her office survived. But when she went home to check what had happened, she found her mother – with whom she lived – dead, and her home completely flattened.
I didn’t know this as I probed her about the “bottleneck” in the aid crisis here. Tears welled in her eyes as she recounted coming into work to start Oxfam’s response to the enormity of what had happened to Haiti and then going home to “bury my Mum in the garden”.
What happened to Yolande Etienne is what has happened to Haiti. In 45 shattering seconds the world here has been blown apart. Every family, every aspect of infrastructure, every shop, every military unit, every thing, has been more than touched by it, it has been disabled by it.
So that there are no trucks, no buses, no means of going to work, if you are still alive, and often no work when you get there. The Americans send to a barracks for a Haitian army unit and find it destroyed and most of the men dead or missing.
Nothing exists completely here. Every aspect of life has its own bottleneck – be it loss, malfunction, or destruction.
And in the absence of holistic action, there is anger, despair, and activity from people so close to abject nothing, that to injure, or kill to live, is a small decision.
I cannot think of a human dislocation so total anywhere in the world. Many more people are bound to die, of injury, disease, starvation, before this thing is through.
Haiti will be a very, very long haul, and when she needs our help even more than she does now – to start again after this phase of “rescue and survival” – we shall have forgotten. Or shall we?