all photos from The Boston Globe Big Picture
In the 48 hours after the earthquake in Haiti hit, I watched my Facebook and Twitter newsfeed go wild. People were posting all sorts of personal convictions: they wanted to cry after seeing the pictures, they wanted everyone to text to donate money, they wanted to airlift into the country to help out and adopt Haitian babies and pull people out of the rubble and…. Wait, what? You’re telling me that you 1) have no workable skills (ie you aren’t a doctor, social worker, or something equally useful in this situation), 2) have no training or experience in disaster relief, and 3) want to rescue these poor people from their poor country? Other than the distastefully racist, naïve, and condescending overtones in your charitable endeavor, the plan seems to be utterly fantastic.
Thankfully, a slew of online articles and blog posts have been steadily refuting these ideas with well-thought and concrete reasons for why throwing yourself into Haiti may not be the best idea after all. Below are some of my favorites—really, if people were so intent on going, they should be reading these articles anyways in the fastidious research that they did before they hopped on the plane. That is, if they did any research at all…
"LEARNING LESSONS FROM PAST DISASTERS"
CNN contributor David Frum posted a great summary of the lessons we (should) have learned from past disasters (specifically the 2004 tsunami that hit Indonesia/Sri Lanka), and how we should be approaching the situation in Haiti right now. Some of the most striking points:
Disaster relief is first and foremost a military operation. Nobody else has the reach and the lift. The prevention of looting and rioting, the digging out of survivors, and the airlifting of emergency supplies -- those are jobs for government agencies. If all you ever do for Haiti is pay your taxes -- then you have already done a great deal.
What is needed after a disaster is more help. What often arrives are many helpers. These excess helpers bid up the price of some local services.
So when you do give, concentrate your giving on big organizations with an established presence in the disaster zone. Be suspicious of any group that will first need to build an infrastructure in the area.
And if you are at all tempted to travel yourself to help? Unless you possess unique skills that have been specifically requested by a reputable aid organization -- do everybody a favor, and stay home. The room you'll occupy, the water and electricity you'll consume, are needed by the local people.
Disaster survivors need work, not welfare. The distribution of free food, water, tents, etc. must end rapidly, within at most a few weeks. Otherwise a disaster population ends up as a permanent mendicant upon the international community. For all its horror, a disaster can be a demand-side stimulus to a local economy. Give survivors the means to supply their own wants, and then get out of the way.
"THE MYTHS OF DISASTER RELIEF"
World Vision also posted up a great article about the most common misconceptions surrounding disaster relief, with a focus on how people are responding to the Haitian earthquake. It’s brief and tactful, but very to-the-point.
The five myths that they list:
- Collecting blankets, shoes and clothing is a cost-effective way to help.
- If I send cash, my help won’t get there.
- Volunteers are desperately needed in emergency situations.
- Unaccompanied children should be adopted as quickly as possible to get them out of dangerous conditions.
- People are helpless in the face of natural disasters
The paragraph that specifically addresses volunteers sums it up quite well:
While hands-on service may feel like a better way to help in a crisis, disaster response is a highly technical and sensitive effort. Professionals with specialized skills and overseas disaster experience should deployed to disaster sites. Volunteers without those skills can do more harm than good, and siphon off critical logistics and translations services. Qualified disaster professionals ensure that help is delivered effectively, safely, and efficiently.
So yes, in fact, your complete lack of training (and no, high school missions trips or spring break community service projects most likely don’t count as training) is in fact detrimental to Haitian relief! In fact, you qualify as a resource sponge, if anything, as you take up whatever’s left of the usable living space, clean water and food supply, and whatever other essentials that could be going to someone… who actually lives in Haiti.
"THE DANGEROUS DESIRE TO ADOPT HAITIAN BABIES"
Finally, the babies. Oh, the babies. It’s normal, even noble, to care for the helpless, particularly those who are as cute as these babies, but the implications to adopting, both for yourself and for the baby, are at least a couple hundred times more complicated than this mere desire to “fend for those who can’t fend for themselves.” Racialicious posted up an article from guest contributor Atlasien, a foster care adoptive parent herself (or himself), which contains tons of startling reality checks, specifically for people who are buying into the “savior” mentality that calls for mass baby-air-lifting from Haiti.
[Comments on adoption blogs] are full of demands that we have to get the kids out now, now, now, before they die, die, die. The practical reality is that after a horrific disaster of the magnitude of the Haiti quake, it’s completely impossible to determine whether any abandoned child is a “true orphan”. It’s a process that is going to take months and even years.
Adoptee bloggers who also study adoption academically — among them Harlow’s Monkey and A Birth Project — are deeply concerned about the parallels to massive child extraction events like Operation Babylift. These were not shining humanitarian moments. Many of the adopted children found out later that they had parents and siblings left behind who wanted them, or even relatives in the United States who were searching for them.
To adopt from Haiti, answer all the above [see her post!] questions, add the effects of malnutrition, add a language barrier, and multiply the child’s trauma by a factor of ten. And subtract a lot of money. Unlike foster care adoptions, which are basically free, you’re going to have to pay legal fees. Maybe even $30,000. And children from foster care will have permanent Medicaid, no matter your income level, but if you adopt internationally, it’s up to you to find a way to pay for all those psychiatrist visits you’ll almost certainly be needing later on.
My religion talks a lot about the impossibility of individual purity and makes the acknowledgment of imperfection absolutely necessary. I think many other belief systems address the same issue in different ways. For example, in Christianity, Jesus Christ represents a pure kind of love, and other kinds of love exist in relation to that standard. The answer is not to stop loving, or to stop trying to understand, but to realize that our love is always endangered by selfishness. If we ever think our love is pure, we need to stop thinking along that track, take a step back and think again. Don’t stop loving, just stop thinking that your love is infallible and all-knowing.
So there it is. It’s not the most fun message, or the most “comforting” one—but donating money rather than time, in the case of disaster relief such as Haiti’s current situation, is perhaps the best way to approach this after all. Just something to think about before you ship yourself there.
