current affairs
beyond the earthquake

What Haiti Needs
After the earthquake, coverage of the soldiers, bulldozers, and food parcels being distributed from airplanes has put a spotlight on the island, but the emergency here has been going on for fifty years. For years, AVSI has based its efforts on “a dignity to rediscover” and a Presence capable of giving hope. Here’s how we can share it.

by Stefano Zurlo

The press discovered Haiti with the earthquake. In an instant, they became aware of this unfortunate country, and of those who have been sharing its drama for years, like the volunteers of AVSI, the Association for International Service, which has been present on the island since 1999.  Since the day of the earthquake, through Fiammetta Cappellini, the presence of AVSI in Haiti has been a daily witness to what has been happening, as well as a help for the entire people and the relief workers. This is because Fiammetta and her collaborators know the territory and the needs of the people, details unknown to the rest of the world. “And yet Haiti has been in an emergency for 50 years,” explains the General Secretary of AVSI, Alberto Piatti. “Between 1962 and 1963, U.S. President Kennedy created an agency to help this unfortunate country, which was in the grip of a terrible alimentary crisis.” From then on, unfortunately, it has been a series of disasters: dictators, hurricanes, and now a devastating earthquake. There is a race to land on the island, but then what will happen? Piatti continues, “The earthquake is the emergency of emergencies, but this moment must become a watershed, an occasion for change.”
Certainly, the situation is dramatic: 150,000 dead, and orphaned children wandering the ruins. The catastrophic situation in Haiti has no need for adjectives. But precisely for this reason, a lucid analysis free of rhetoric is needed. Maria Teresa Gatti, AVSI Director for Latin America and the Caribbean, expresses the same concern as Piatti does. “The moment has come to choose.” Choose what? “Haiti is flooded with assistance, marines, and soldiers from all over the world. Good, very good. But we must reflect on the errors committed in the past.”
In other words, this type of aid cannot be the total answer to Haiti’s need. “The soldiers are very useful, but they are not everything,” Gatti resumes. “The humanitarian mercenaries are doing outstanding work. They help the suffering population, distribute resources and food, but reconstruction won’t take off with this alone.”

Rice three times a year. Here is the fundamental point, according to Piatti and Gatti: helping the Haitians take Haiti’s destiny into their own hands. It might seem like a slogan. It is the key theme for 2010, which is also year 0 for the unfortunate republic. “We’ll give the Haitians assistance, food and drinks, and coal right away so they can work it out.” Yes, Haitians can hope if they learn to roll up their shirtsleeves and get to work, thinking about a tomorrow and finally dreaming about a future. “The Haitians,” insists Gatti, “have been at the mercy of events for too many decades. Now this horrific earthquake has happened to them; the calamity is too big to be metabolized like the others, and this might even be a benefit.” But how to pick themselves up after hitting the bottom? “Certainly not with packages of food or aircraft carriers off the coast,” responds Piatti.
Piatti and Gatti take a step back. “We’ve been in Haiti for 11 years. Our volunteers work in two bindonvilles [shantytowns] of Port-Au-Prince, teaching, educating, and assisting the kids, and we’re also active in the experimental farm of Les Cayes, in the southwest of the country, where farmers receive formation and an aqueduct has been built. The point is to accompany these people to develop their own capacities, skills, and abilities.” Financially speaking, what this means is more jobs, more schools, and more professional institutes. “Here’s an example,” Gatti and Piatti continue, “In Les Cayes, we’ve demonstrated that rice can be harvested three times a year. It could be revolutionary. But today Haiti imports 60% of its agricultural need, a large part of it being rice.” The earthquake has struck a great blow to an already dysfunctional system. Now, however, AVSI’s extraordinary humanitarian effort could help restore this system. “In every person, there is an innate dignity, a dignity that must be unearthed, forming the new generations and building stronger human and social relationships.”

“We’ll be here tomorrow, too.” Today in the infinite bidonvilles of the capital, the rate of violence is sky high, as are the infant mortality rate and malnutrition. “There’s no use filling Haitians with food – don’t get me wrong, of course, feeding them is necessary–but it won’t resolve their problems. What we most need to fill them with is awareness, hope, and desire to change. We have to direct them on the good road of education, work, and the battle against unemployment.” The example of rice can be instructive. It can be repeated for coffee, cocoa, even in the future for tourism.
Otherwise, the same failures will be repeated: the coalition of the willing who have rushed here from all over the world, not without the inevitable dose of confusion and disorganization, will crowd the island for a while, run the bulldozers, build some infrastructures–very useful, don’t get me wrong, for a country lacking everything–but then, according to the same old script, they will withdraw, discouraged, and will hand the island back to its usual lords: hunger, violence, and the darkest misery, exaggerated even by African standards. The crowning irony is that Port-Au-Prince is only an hour and a quarter by plane from Miami and ultra-civilized America.
“We were here before the disaster,” resumes Gatti, “we had our volunteers in Haiti the day of the earthquake, and we’ll still be here tomorrow and will go forward with our method of work, without false expectations, on the basis of the experience we have gained.”
They will be there, a presence among the poorest of the poor in the capital, working to improve agriculture, with a hand outstretched to the children, who are an emergency within the emergency. Piatti concludes, “A child told our Fiammetta: ‘Tomorrow, if you can, come back to see me again, because I understand that you love me.’” Everyone naturally loves the children of Haiti, but once again, emotion cannot take the place of respect and realism. “It’s important that the children parked for months or years in orphanages finally find a family,” says Gatti, “in France, the States, but also in Italy. But then there are the others, the majority who will not be adopted. A calm approach is needed because the situation evolves from day to day, and many children who seemed to have been orphaned have already found their parents or a relative. We have more than 1,000 long-distance adoptions and can accept many more. With 312 euros a year, a euro a day, you can ensure the future for one of those little ones. We want to develop our projects over time, side by side with the population, with the adults and the children. Those who can, who value our commitment and our desire to share with the Haitians, please help us, and help all those realities which operate in the same way. Sending food and money blindly is not useful, except for creating roaring illusions. Let’s draw close to the Haitians, help them to help themselves. This is the road, the only one for giving a chance to a nation that wants to begin to exist.”